15-year-old Brazilian teenager Victor Garcia has accomplished an important international feat related to cryptocurrencies and won the Colombia-based ETHBogotá competition. According to the NGO Educar+, Victor won the international competition, ahead of more than 900 hackers. However, the most surprising aspect is that Victor, a resident of the East Zone of São Paulo, is a public school student. Furthermore, this is the second hacker marathon linked to the Ethereum ecosystem in which the teenager participates. In other words, the Brazilian is already showing talent in his second participation in a large event. ETHBogotá was the first event of the week of events on the Ethereum network in Colombia, in a total of nine days, followed by ETHLatam and DEVCON. Victor’s team was one of the five teams awarded by Chainlink and received the amount of U$ 1 thousand.
Union between the youth and the NGO
Educar+ is an NGO that offers classes ranging from Literacy to Web3F.avela, which is its web3 education program for young people on the periphery. It was this arm of the NGO that brought Educar+ and Victor together. According to Carol Santos, CEO of the NGO, the paths of Educar+ and Victor crossed during their first Hackathon. Upon learning about the history of the young programmer, self-taught and from public school, the CEO observed that all he needed was an opportunity. “When I learned about Victor’s story, I saw a boy of extreme potential who was being wasted due to lack of opportunities. At the first moment, I activated everyone on my network and mainly on web3, I shared his story, it was enough”, said Santos. In this sense, the project that Victor and his team – made up of five people – developed for ETHBogotá focused on education. Victor’s team took the prize by developing a gamified reading incentive platform that rewards users with tokens. The platform creates a model that, in general, is a kind of read to earn. The user has to read a number of books or pages within the platform. Each time he reads the stipulated books or pages, he is rewarded in tokens.
Rewarding read with tokens
In this way, Victor’s creation encourages the habit of reading, something that is not widespread in Brazil. According to the 4th edition of the survey Portraits of Reading in Brazil developed by Instituto Pró-Livro, Brazilians have an annual average of 4.96 books per inhabitant. By international standards, this average is considered low, but the Brazilian case is even worse: only 2.43 of these books (less than 3, on average) were read from beginning to end, which tends to compromise even more the index of reading in Brazil. Therefore, the platform has the potential to help improve readership rates while at the same time rewarding disadvantaged youth with tokens they can sell. In addition, the initiative of the projects developed by the NGO help to bring Web3 and cryptocurrencies to the community. “We wouldn’t have been able to win an international hacking marathon without the help of the community, it wouldn’t do us any good to get tickets for the Hackathon in Bogotá if he didn’t have a way to maintain himself or get there”, concluded Carol Santos.