Siglo Dev Team: Marcelo Echeverri
Tags: Blockchain, Decentralized Apps, Developer

Marcelo, born and raised in Medellin, Colombia, a city that, in the past 10 years, has become one of the biggest sources of tech talent in LatAm. Software companies from around the globe are recruiting their technical teams in this city which is colloquially called the eternal spring.

Marcelo has over 10 years of experience as a developer with Java and Android. He’s been working on decentralized projects for almost 3 years. Detail oriented and constantly improving his skills, Marcelo picked up blockchain infrastructure quickly and is becoming an expert in dApps. He spends his time making the on-boarding process with the Siglo protocol easier for any company or app.

He is analytical and has a rich knowledge of design, dev, trial, deployment, optimization, and maintenance of fullstack apps. Marcelo is a problem solver by nature and is constantly optimizing every process to run smoother. He’s a pillar of the Siglo dev team. We asked him a few questions for this post.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in developing optimal, useful and secure platforms?

When developing public applications, user satisfaction goes first. In my experience, this is the greatest challenge. As time goes by and your app “matures”, your user community starts guiding your product: what things people like, what things they don’t; also what features are useful, which are useless.

There’s always room for experiments: surprising users with unexpected features gives you the chance to improve your work. This dynamic creates a challenge of balancing feedback from users and community and your own innovative ideas to improve with each iteration. The orchestration of these can become complex to balance with a live app and community. You must: analyze, classify, qualify, discard, establish priorities, etc, to finally proceed to the release, which must be carried out without compromising the quality and security of your app.

Why is important to integrate users in the Blockchain world?

Personally, I think that Blockchain technology brings significant benefits to the community. I see it as an access door to a new world of goods, services and investment portfolio that are offered to users in a simple way compared to the traditional paper work, number of parties involved and requirements in the current economy. A great example of this is opening a savings account in South America.

The relative “complexity” in theses processes leaves out a significant amount of people. Blockchain on the other hand, is looking to simplify these processes, without making it into a less secure economy. This is the potential of inclusion of communities in different markets to the digital economy.

How immersed is the Colombian population in the digital economy?

The population is not immerse yet. There is still an important number of people without access to a computer/tablet. And the ones that do have access through it, like having a smartphone, are still people who are not fluent users of new technologies. Many people are overwhelmed by apps that are cumbersome in UX and bureaucracy, especially for investment and online banking.

There’s still a taboo when it comes to the digital economy. Specifically talking about cryptocurrencies, there is still a lot of controversy. People refer to it as a bubble, pyramid and say they are used for illicit activities. There is a tendency to demerit this type of economy which makes people reluctant to adopt new technology, but it can all be turned around with good financial education and growth of adoption.

Why should dApps use Siglo protocol?

From its conception, Siglo protocol’s objective is reward people for their time and attention with Siglo Token. This promotes the inclusion of people into the digital economy.

Many apps’ user base is limited by connectivity. How many workforce apps aren’t used because the workforce is offline and limited to prepaid plans? How many banking apps aren’t used because account holders are prepaid and don’t want to spend credit? How many sales forces could benefit from more connectivity? How many online communities would have more frequent engagement if the users were consistently connected?

We are making tools — SDKs and APIs — that make it easy for any app to offer crypto rewards to their users. We also provide the APIs for connecting with the prepaid billing infrastructure of all the operators.