Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar

A well-known personality in the blockchain and crypto technology world, Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar has been a pioneer of web and internet technologies in Argentina and Latin America since 1995.

Diego was one of the first persons to foster and develop Bitcoin and blockchain technology in Latin America, which he has been doing since 2012. In addition to having created RSK Labs, the company is responsible for bringing to life the codenamed platform Rootstock, the first open-source peer-to-peer smart-contract platform and payment network with a 2way peg to Bitcoin.

Diego also has co-founded Koibanx, another blockchain company that is aiming to transform the potential of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies into real use cases, which serve as a driver for social and economic change.

His extensive experience includes being part of the founding teams of some of the most well-known digital projects in Argentina and Latin America, including Clarín Digital (Argentina’s largest newspaper’s website), Patagon.com (a financial community sold to Banco Santander for 750M), Internet Argentina (the first Argentine ISP to provide ADSL) and Edunexo (provider of an SaaS platform to administer public and private educational institutions in Latin America and Spain). He also held the position of head of R&D at ElSitio.com, where he led a team of 25 developers.
 

His vision can be found in a recent interview conducted by Dinis Guarda. He said, amongst others subjects:

Childhood; “I started learning tech when I was 11. I learned everything by myself. At 9 years, I started going to the slums in Buenos Aires to do social work with my mother. So for me, the social transformation was another prevalent matter”.

Argentina; “Argentina is a very complex country. It is so diverse, we are always fluctuating between an individualistic mindset to communism, but not in a positive way. As a society, we have a permanent dichotomy. We have one government that looks at individual welfare, but we have the other which focuses solely on the community”.

Blockchain: “Our long-term goal in 5/7 years is the end game of having an ecosystem serving hundreds and millions of people. They have to have a value proposition and scaling restraints. We have the context to test technologies, not on a financial scale. Validating the scaling potential”.