DeFi Visions: Camila Ramos

In the new installment of DeFi Visions, a series of video interviews in which 1inch talks to the most prominent projects and personalities in DeFi, check out the main takeaways from an interview with Edge & Node’s Camila Ramos.

Camila Ramos is developer relations engineer at Edge & Node, the initial team behind The Graph, a decentralized indexing protocol used by various blockchains, such as Ethereum.

She was first exposed to crypto back around 2015 when she bought her first coins. But her proper initiation into the Web3/blockchain developer space occurred in 2021.

“I have a background in engineering,” she recalls. “I was doing traditional software engineering and I saw a wave of interest in Web3 and I started developing and building blockchain.”

Camila’s joining the space coincided with the explosive popularity of various parody coins, such as Dogecoin or Shiba.

“This was also around the time when Elon Musk was tweeting about these coins,” she remembers. “It was like a crazy show, a circus.”

On a more serious note, commenting on possible ramifications of the current bear market for the crypto space, Camila says: “Bear markets are actually a really positive thing because projects and communities tend to focus less on financials and other metrics like that. [Instead,] they focus on building good things, on building user adoption and growing the ecosystem in a way that’s more holistic.”

“[Conversely], in a bull market, people are frenzied over market prices and over how everything is seeming to go so well,” she adds.

According to Camila, crypto is capable of playing a special role in a larger environment, as the world’s economy is apparently in bad shape.

“One thing that I’ve seen really unlock with crypto is the ease and the ability to pay contributors from all over the world in a way that hasn’t really been that easily done before,” she observes. “With crypto, we are seeing a way where you can have people in a globalized community all contributing to a project and having this infrastructure to pay everyone and make it super-easy where before you had to rely on other services that had limitations based on what country you’re in etc.”

Moving to the subject of crypto regulation, Camila says that, from a developer’s perspective, good regulation would be that which offers clarity, “so that everyone knows how to operate, is on the same page.”

When it comes to mass adoption of crypto solutions, Camila says there are certain obstacles hampering that process.

“The number one thing inhibiting that right now is user experience,” she explains. “Right now, to use dApps or any blockchain-related technology, you have to be an expert and you have to have deep knowledge of how this technology works, what a wallet is, how to bridge funds between different chains.”

“It’s very complex for someone who just wants to do a task and pay with crypto, for example,” she goes on to say. “That would be amazing — to live in a world where mom and pop shops can take crypto. Hopefully, in 10 years, we’ll be able to see this.”

Watch the full interview with Camila Ramos on The 1inch Network’s YouTube channel.