Originally from Chile, now residing in Rome, María Pía Aqueveque is a vibrant token economist, investor and financial innovator with a passion for tokenization. She is a leading voice in the crypto asset space with and has been a pioneer in dissemination of trends and prospective scenarios of technological change on digital economy and their impact on the society of the 21st century. She works with companies in the forefront of the underlying technologies of the Metaverse. María embodies the spirit of the web3 space, her passion for the opportunities that this new world present is front and center.
María is CEO and founder of Maqueveq & Co. which is dedicated to strategic investment and corporate finance advisory for digital asset projects. She is also relaunching DTCODE, a company that focuses on payment and financial cryptographic innovation, improving products and processes through the monetization of data, conducting original investigation and applying research findings for the creation of new or significantly improved products or processes.
María studied economics, public policy, investments, FinTech, financial markets and innovation. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with research departments of financial and academic organizations and consulted on private banks, multilateral investment banking to banks, central banks and governments on crypto monetary systems. Some of these include the World Bank, the Presidency of the Republic of Chile and the Ministry of Finance, Inter-American Development Bank, Central American Bank for Economic Integration, among many others.
In academia, María is regularly invited as a blockchain and crypto assets guest speaker at most of the recognized business schools in Latin America and Europe. She’s also a popular panellist, webinar and seminar guest speaker and hosts a Science and Technology show on digital radio, as well as writes a crypto column for various media.
María became a strong voice in the global blockchain technology space after she set up a meeting with the President of Chile in 2018 when the author, Don Tapscott was on a trip to Santiago de Chile. Two months later, she started advising multinationals in the energy and financial sector worldwide. Since 2004 she foresighted new business models driven by technology that would foster incentives for better provision of regional and global public goods. Blockchain — through tokenization and smart contracts — is the first step, and the next one will be its convergence with AI and IoT for more accurate distribution of benefits and costs, including predicting its externalities. That year she also met the President of Argentina, including authorities and corporations from different countries, in anticipation of the paradigm shift that would come as a result of blockchain technology and the tokenization of assets. This would impact the business models of other disruptive technologies and its convergence such as IoT and AI.
María believes that the mindset of organizations and regulators needs to change for them to truly grasp the multidimensional nature of the technology and the shift in the paradigm that web3 brings.
Two experiences stand out in her mind: “The opportunity to discuss in depth, with former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the challenges in implementing a digital strategy for his country; and second to that, the opportunity to lead a consultancy team in support of the convergence of traditional and crypto monetary systems, which was a dream come true.”
She notes that the last two years have seen the acceleration of technological convergence and the development of solutions that are building web3 and the Metaverse. Today, issues under discussion such as digital sovereignty, cybersecurity associated with digital assets, as well as the regulatory frameworks and ethical principles involved, will constitute the digital renaissance towards which society is evolving.
María’s advice to central banks is that digital currency is here to stay and if they make the right decisions, a first-class financial structure can be achieved. She confidently remarks that if countries want their currencies to be used in the Metaverse, they need to use cryptography.
Commenting on the future and the legacy she would like to create: “Building meaningful futures on the convergence of asset tokenization, data science, IoT and extended reality to create products and services is key. My focus is on contributing to the tokenization of the economy and financial innovation through the creation of complementary crypto monetary ecosystems to address some local or regional scale challenges that will have a global impact. If we extend this into the Metaverse, a whole universe of opportunities and challenges arise, which inspires me to keep contributing in this space.”
MARÍA PÍA AQUEVEQUE’S WEB3 & METAVERSE TIPS
Website: maqueveq.com
