It's been a week since I have been back to home from my trip to Colombia. Experiencing the Crypto Latinfest was a great way to connect to the latinamerica crypto scene. To update myself on what's new and what is not available to the regular people from our region.
First let me acknowledge the great points from CLF 2025. The city of Medellin is a great place to do events, the way the city is as well as the greenery that surrounds this city is something to take notice. It's chill ambiance and great organization of the city makes it easy to get around. Lot's of great services, food spots and nightlife, makes it one of the best cities in South America to make an event. The flight connectivity is also something important as it's only 1 hour away from the Central America hub in Panama City, which means all flights are easy to get to this city.
The venue although not perfect (I'll say why later on), was quite well connected in the city. The botanical garden it's located in the central part of the city with a quick access to the high ways that go through the middle of the city. The building itself has great places to give talks and was quite easy to move around. The only issue, was that the building wasn't fully sheltered, which made it quite difficult when it rains, which it did for most part of the second day.
This made people concentrate on dried hallways which made it quite hard to move around between venues. Also causing that a lot of people remained wet in a place where evening and nighttime was quite cold. This combo made it easy to fall sick as your wet clothes got chilly at night.
On to the actual topics...
So the first session started at 10 am. It started a bit behind but it was nice to review the history of this events as it started before COVID and it has experience a lot of things through the history of the event. It has been done on different countries outside of Colombia, like Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, etc.
It has also been affected during the lockdowns and as such, has been move to the metaverse. Ayone remember the metaverse? It has also been done on different cities in Colombia such as Bogota and finally this 8th edition has a strong focus on stablecoins and regulations as this year we have seen the adoption of ETF, US Government, and global frameworks.
Like that, the event was divided into sub-categories among 3 different halls. The Satoshi and the Nakamoto hall and the Workshop-Hackathon hall. The Nakamoto hall held mostly topics around trading, while the Satoshi was more on mainstream topics. The event also had a good deal of panels and activities. The expo area had many small booths regarding Exchanges, Wallets, Fintech companies, only one crypto booth and a couple of regular shops that took crypto.
It seemed a bit odd that Worldcoin offices were across the street (on Google Maps) yet, they didn't had a physical booth at the expo. Other coins that I would hope that were there, are the common suspects like BTC, ETH, or even XRP. However none of them showed up. Even with their arguably large communities as Colombia was also the site for DevCon a few years back.
In the end only Hive was the one that was able to have a booth and talk what a social blockchain is to most of the people as well as what are stablecoins, staking, token voting, minting, DAO and other activities you can do in a blockchain.
This was expressed by one of the guys I met on the after party, as he said. The Crypto Latinfest was a fest without crypto, which I most agree full heartily.
Going back to the event, the talks involved a great deal of people coming from different corners of the crypto ecosystem, from traders, to lawyers, consultants, podcasters etc. I did however noticed a lack of representation from coders and engineers. Not to say there were any, but most of the people were not very technical. Their talks rarely showed code and for an ecosystem that at one pointed claimed "code is law", things weren't very legal IMO.
In the end the event was fine, I did have my opinions, but it certainly did had quality content and maybe areas which I have not paid as much attention. At the end, most things are becoming real serious business and money to be made seems to be on the mouth of most of the speakers.
I want to thank the Hive crew which was very active although I didn't push for them to be in this event, it was a welcomed surprised knowing they were there in a very organized manner. And I hope they keep showing up on these type of events around Latinamerica and hopefully get more into the code of it all for the sake of representation of Hispanics on the chain.