Trinidad and Tobago is ready for cryptocurrency

LAST week, Sekani Solomon, the Trinidad-born motion designer who worked on the award-winning film Black Panther, bought two pieces of art at Think Art Studio on Cipriani Boulevard, Port of Spain.

In a tweet to his 10,000 plus followers, Solomon said: “Wow, just bought two beautiful pieces by @tashagill in Trinidad and the beautiful part was that it was all paid for with BITCOIN through @CashApp. Shout out to @markpereir for facilitating. There’s so much talent in this country, I’m inspired.”

The man he tagged was 30-year-old Mark Pereira.

Pereira retweeted Solomon’s post with the caption: “A Trinbagonian doing big things @CashApp and @blocks just bought some local art with Bitcoin, the first piece of art bought with Bitcoin in Trinidad happened at @thinkartworktt. A big day for us all!”

Pereira, a Fatima College alumnus, is the founder and co-owner of Zed Labs. His co-owner is marketing/PR consultant, Arrianne Talma. He is one of three men named Mark Pereira in T&T—one is the curator at 101 Art Gallery and another is a securities investor. He jokes that he’s a hybrid of both of them given the fields he is traversing in his work.

Since 2018, when he established his tech start-up, Zed Labs, Pereira has been banking his business on the future being crypto, that is cryptocurrency.

And while T&T is currently transitioning its economy from fossil fuels, it’s been focused on building digital worlds, the Internet economy.

“Sekani is lead of motion design at Cash App and Block-two products on the bleeding edge of Jack Dorsey’s (former Twitter chief executive who resigned last week) future vision. Sekani was able to use the product of Cash App to bridge the gap between a foreign consumer with a local businessman through crypto in seconds proving the narrative we are pushing for at Zed–that acceptance of innovative technology like blockchain eases friction and allows foreign income to move into Trinidad at a pace never seen before,” Pereira told the Express Business, at the work space he shares with Think Art Studio.

At Zed, he’s developed a Cash App called Wam and a cryptocurrency called Alice. For now, while Alice is sold on the App store, it’s dormant. And he is helping artists and entrepreneurs cash into the next frontier–non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the metaverse.

In T&T, he says, there are tens of thousands of people already in the crypto community. But artists are now waking up to the potential of NFTs.

One project that Zed has developed is for Trinidadian fashion designer Anya Ayoung-Chee.

In September, Ayoung-Chee launched her NFT, called WYLD FLWR.

Pereira noted that NFTs have the ability to propel Caribbean economies into the future and tap into the Metaverse.

He said the technology used will pave the way forward for our industries as standards will be built for digital goods sales, rewards, loyalty programmes, and even event ticketing.

He explained that Zed is essentially helping with navigating this technology and equipping people with the tools to interact with the NFTs and crypto.

“It is not easy money at the moment because it has gotten really competitive. An NFT is really about the community you have online who want to buy your NFT and it is about understanding their interests. Some people have said I want to digitise my art and put it up but at the end of the day it is about who is your market. You will soon find out it is not that easy. There’s a lot of work that has to go into it,” he said.

Pereira explained that he first got into the Internet economy by taking part in hackathons. That’s when a group of computer programmers get together to build or improve a new software system.

By that time, he’d dropped out of his tertiary education, the University of Sydney in Australia, in his final year, and had just finished working as a software developer which was followed by building out mobile applications.

He said in this “in-between” phase he took part in hackathons.

One of those was for blockchains which is basically the foundation of all cryptocurrencies.

“When I went to these hackathons back to back, blockchain was an underlying theme. I was introduced basically in the span of four to five days around the concept of blockchain.

“And then I built a solution at the hackathon. And it was like turning on a light bulb by sending a blockchain transaction, a crypto transaction. When you send money from me to you, it’s kind of like a message. So that transfer information can be used to transfer information like turn on light on the other end. So you can do a whole bunch of things with blockchain and crypto technology, automating processes, smart cities, etc,” he explained.

He said after he made his blockchain presentation at a hackathon, he was given ten Ethereum, which is a form of cryptocurrency.

“At the time, it (the value of Ethereum) was like US$3,000. Then it went up to US$18,000 in the span of like, three months,” he said.

He said after he got the money, he bought a MacBook and started his own digital agency using his software and blockchain skills.

“And that took me on this global crypto route. So I travelled the world to Japan, Israel, Berlin, in that span of time, and lived in each city for a little while interacting with people in the crypto sphere. I spent a lot more time in Berlin; that’s kind of like one of the crypto meccas of the world and met a lot of amazing people. And then a part of my narrative was when I go to Sydney (Australia) and learn how it all can operate functionally. I love Sydney because it’s surrounded by water and it’s very much like an island but it’s just a functioning island. So I wanted to take all that back and come to Trinidad and start looking at the systems that are broken and seeing how I could solve them with technology,” he said.

Pereira came back to Trinidad just before borders were closed in March 2020 for the Covid-19 pandemic.

In that time, he got to creating Zed Lads.

In the tech world he inhabits, his uniform is black T-shirt and jeans.

Zed shares a working space with an art studio.

And the concept he’s embarked on is socially driven.

And the power is in youth.

“I find when you’re youthful, you have this kind of understanding of how the world should work. And then you actually get introduced to how the world actually works and there’s this massive detachment and you just eventually start accepting that this is the way it is. I’m finding that the youths are very much on par or have their finger on the pulse of what’s the next thing because they’re in the Internet age and the Internet age is driving everything forward and disrupting all these systems that are weighed down by bureaucrats,” he said.

Pereira believes in education to bridge the gap of the not so technologically inclined.

As it stands, he believes there is a massive paradigm shift happening in the world.

“Never before in history, have I been able to have a currency that I can trade with you ‘peer to peer’ meaning like ever since bartering, when people were trading apples and oranges, that kind of stuff, there was never a universal currency where you could say okay, I’m going to swap my apples for this currency. And then that currency will allow me to buy anything,” he said, delving into the history of money, and pointing out that was always maintained by some sort of hierarchy or system that is controlling people as well.

“So now, that cryptocurrencies have been invented, it’s a currency that was invented by people. So I can now trade apples for this currency to then go and buy anything I want. Right? That brings out massive benefits because you now have something that’s completely people-owned, not controlled by any system,” he said.

Once you have your cryptowallet, all you have to do is have access to the Internet and a smartphone, sometimes just a computer and you have access to this global financial system. So because crypto is basically native to the Internet, it’s as ubiquitous as an Internet connection. I get access to a global financial system. All I have to have is a computer or a smartphone and Internet that frees up so much for a lot of people,” he said.

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