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On my trip to Consensus two weeks ago, in between the throngs of some 9,000 people crowded together at the Midtown Hilton, I managed to sneak off on the F train closer to Penn Station. There was a kosher restaurant there — Jerusalem (which is the inspiration for half the kosher restaurant names in the U.S. but we’ll get to that another time), where I was meeting a couple people.
These two friends, seniors at the Orthodox Jewish institution Yeshiva University (YU) uptown, didn’t exactly have the budget to go to Consensus. But in my preparation for the conference, I came across their project: LATAM Blockchain (Spanish).
LATAM, i.e. Latin America, will be a major undertaking of co-founders Menajem Benchimol and Jamie Gutt. Benchimol is from Colombia and Gutt from Venezuela. They represent a growing Latin American community at YU, as well as the growing number of students there getting deeply involved in new technologies.
“I’ve been involved in blockchain/crypto for a while, investing and trading a little bit,” Benchimol told me over pizza. “But we both decided we wanted to give back to their countries of origin.”
“We want them in on the blockchain party. We want them to leapfrog.”
Taking Latin America to School
LATAM would be at least a two-pronged operation: a non-profit educational arm on the one hand, a for-profit consulting service on the other. They already have partnerships with Blockchain at Berkeley and Lumit Blockchain in Mexico.