Blockchain education and financial literacy gaps in Emerging Markets

Blockchain education in emerging markets is increasingly framed as a pathway to inclusion, but a deeper concern is emerging: advanced technical training is being introduced in environments where foundational literacy and financial understanding remain weak, creating asymmetric comprehension of complex digital and financial systems.

Our Founder and CEO, Paolo Lising, raised this concern to Vince Dioquino for Decrypt, which reports a Sui-backed builder programme in Palawan, Philippines training students in Move, a smart contract language derived from Meta’s Diem project and now used in ecosystems such as Sui and Aptos.

The program combined structured instruction with applied development work and concluded with hackathon outputs including “Campfire,” an on-chain application for certificates and community participation tracking, developed through project-based work in a remote provincial setting.

Lising argues that such initiatives reflect a structural mismatch between system complexity and baseline literacy conditions, where participation in advanced digital systems can begin to outpace the capacity to fully interpret their financial and technical implications.

Uneven blockchain education and financial literacy in emerging market such as the Philippines

This tension sits within broader educational conditions in the Philippines, where OECD benchmarking and World Bank indicators continue to show persistent gaps in literacy, numeracy, and digital skills across both urban and rural contexts.

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that blockchain education in such settings does not simply expand opportunity, but produces uneven absorption of complex systems, where participation advances faster than understanding, and where access to tooling does not necessarily translate into equivalent depth of comprehension.

Lising’s perspective is reflected in his academic work in Reassessing blockchain in global development: Tokenization of infrastructure, social impacts, and the Axie Infinity case in the Philippines, published in Social Sciences & Humanities Open.