On July 29, the 2nd meetup of the Zcash Barcelona Club took place. This time we prepared more, invited more people, spread the word more on social media, and even sent invitations via newsletters. We expected 30 people and managed to bring together 20.
We were very happy with the turnout, but also to confirm that what we have been doing in recent weeks has been effective: networking.
We have been attending various events (crypto, technology, and entrepreneurship communities) in the city. Little by little, we are growing our network of contacts and connecting these new friends to what we do: Zcash.
That is why we consider it very important not only to constantly attend events to establish interesting and valuable contacts who could in one way or another be linked to Zcash and our technology. Little by little, we are starting to see familiar faces at events and we are becoming known as well. When they see us arrive, they say, "The guys from Zcash are here", and that's a good thing.
The event
As is customary in the Spanish summer, every event here goes hand in hand with a refreshing drink. Our guests enjoyed two free drinks per person, including soft drinks, water, beer, or wine, while they set out to discover Zcash and learn how to use Zashi. We managed to capture the attention of the attendees! (Aura and I now know that this is how it is here, very different from events in Latin America, where sometimes people are not even offered water). “When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” as the old saying goes.
We noticed that some people had never had any exposure to cryptocurrencies, either due to ignorance or fear of scams. But fear or not, they left with a wallet installed. We achieved our goal.
About Zashi
I love Zashi. I think it's a wallet with an impeccable interface, without a doubt. But there are a couple of details that we can improve, which some attendees at the meetup mentioned to me. These were:
When sending funds, Zashi only has one field for entering ZEC, but how many euros are those ZEC equivalent to? No, not dollars, euros! Europeans, and Spaniards in general, only use the euro and configure their fintech tools in that currency. This was a real problem when members sent funds and didn't know how much that was equivalent to.
When sending funds, if we activate the currency conversion option, we see how many dollars what we are sending is equivalent to, but we cannot enter the amount in fiat money, only in ZEC.
The transactions took a long time to send. I assume it was because the WiFi signal was very weak, but some users told me that they found the wallet slow. And when I say slow, I mean that each transaction took more than 15 minutes, and when trying to make a second transaction (and having funds), the wallet displayed a message saying: “insufficient funds.” Shouldn't I be able to spend without syncing?
These small details made some users doubtful.
On the other hand, they loved the option of being able to link a cold wallet to Zashi, as well as to Coinbase. They were also interested in the Flexa option (which I explained to them). Several attendees told me that if there were an equivalent to Flexa here in Europe available for private purchases, they would definitely use it.
Despite the minor technical details and slowness, attendees felt good about what they discovered about Zcash and Zashi. Ultimately, 95% of attendees showed real interest and concern for preserving their financial privacy.
I didn't want to delve too deeply into the technical aspects of Zk Proof, but some of them showed interest in learning more.
Little by little, a new community of Spanish users (and residents in Spain, because there were people of various nationalities) is beginning to grow and become active, and they are starting to adopt Zcash.
In addition, we gave out a nice POAP as a souvenir, and some attendees have already asked us about another activity. We are already preparing it! We want to teach people how to use all Zcash wallets and connect them to our ecosystem. There is much to do and teach!
A pleasant surprise! Thanks to your donations, we were able to make T-shirts, stickers, and a banner to stay in line with the identity of Club Zcash Barcelona and Zcash in general. Thank you very much for this!
General summary of the event
The outcome was positive. Attendance was as expected, and we achieved what we set out to do: new Zcash users and new Zashi downloads. In fact, we have been asked if we can replicate these meetups in other cities in Spain, such as Madrid, Valencia, Galicia, Malaga, etc. Of course, we are open to this, but I think it would require us to plan a route or tour of Zcash events in major cities and establish a budget to cover logistics. Please leave us any comments or suggestions on this, so we can see how we can make this a reality.
Thank you for your support!
Some attendees shared tweets about their new Zashi wallet:
Here are some photos of the activity. See you at the next event!