# Defi Is Easy to Use - Now What?

- Channel: [Dappcon](https://streameth.org/dappcon)
- Date: 2025-06-17
- Duration: 11:15
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/685168f84ac43bf73db2b73e

## Transcript

Hello everyone, it's a pleasure to be here. I think we are at a very exciting time, where DeFi is becoming accessible to a much wider audience. It was not very long ago. The first thing I would like to gauge is how many people here agree with the statement that DeFi is accessible. Your brother that's not on crypto, or your mom, someone like that, can use a DeFi product. Could you give me a show of hands, just so I get a sense? Okay, so like 20-ish percent. I have the very strong opinion now that we have accessible DeFi products, so you can actually on-board people that don't know anything about crypto, don't know anything about that, so you don't understand a wallet, don't understand a single concept, and I'll try to give you the sense on why I have come to believe that and what I have been seeing in the field. For context, I have been working full-time in making DeFi easier and more accessible to use for the past four years. I have been building Picnic, which is the product I'll showcase here. The very basic flow our users see when they use Picnic is you log in, and you can use a wallet, but most of the users, like 90 percent, are using email. You deposit money via Monerium or a stablecoin partner, and you have Euro stablecoins or DIN rail stablecoins, and you can swap that to any token you want. So basically, you don't need to know what is a seed phrase, on and off ramp, and getting the right exchange to support the right network. All those things are pretty abstracted, and the flow is super easy to use, and you don't need to know which chain you are on, like you don't need to know about gas. In this example, you're paying gas with EURY, and you don't need to know that you need to approve a token to swap. So basically, every little complexity of the flow is pretty much solved, I would say. The main reason that makes me believe we got there is because we have some testimonials that I think are quite insane. I would not expect those sorts of testimonials to be happening like two years ago or something like that. So, for context, most of our users are Brazilians. A lot of them are not very sophisticated, and we have been talking with a few users and getting stories like this one, which is a person that his main occupation is being a fisherman. He's not very educated, and in his own words, he can barely use a cell phone, but he can buy tokens on PICNIC. We have another one, which is some 64-year-old lady that is not very tech-savvy and can also use PICNIC, and she was really happy because she bought Bitcoin for the first time. So, the UX is not too unsimilar to what we have been seeing in terms of Web2 products. You can get normal people to use it, and that changed the game quite a bit. Given the context that UX now is pretty good, the main thing I have in my mind now is how do we build use cases that are 10x better? So, if you're just thinking about custody, you have options. If you're more sophisticated, you're probably using Safe, Ledger. There is not a whole lot of reason to use a solution that depends on the email security to custody your funds, and if you're less sophisticated, centralized exchanges might be a good option as well. They have a bunch of layers of security and things like that. So, I understand it's not 10x better than the existing solution, so that's not a super strong driver of growth. Same thing to buy Bitcoin to own an off-ramp and to get yield on DeFi products. You have tools like DeFi Llama for super advanced users that will do a better job. So, the result of this is that just good UX is not enough to grow. I think UX got to a point that you can actually use DeFi products, but why will they use it? What is the super strong benefit you're getting on using it? UX is not enough. The thing that I'm actually very excited about this moment, I think we found a very clear use case that is super appealing to a lot more people. So, I'm Brazilian. We have been super focused in the Brazilian market, and in the past three weeks, we got a recent law that increased taxes on USD purchases by 3.5%. So, now, a picnic is 4.5% or 4% cheaper than life, and that does a rag-arb, so any stable coins allow you to do that. So, for example, a thousand reais are getting you $179 on picnic, and the same amount gets you $172 on life. And the really cool thing about this, still very early, but these are notice-based transactions across all chains. Picnic is the yellow one. It has been... Oh, the orange one, sorry, and it has been growing, like, last week, it grew 50% a week. Prior to that, it grew 70%, and every time we talk with users, the market pool is super strong. So, crypto users are using this a lot, but the thing that's surprising me is friends that are coming to Europe to travel, they are telling me, man, like, how do I get this card? The card's taking too long. I'm getting a lot of inbound interest, and it has been a different thing to watch. In the experience, it is super straightforward, so in Brazil, we have something called PIX, which is a payment QR code, and once you pay that, you get Brazilian real estate coins, and you have USDC in the card that's ready to spend. So it feels a lot like Web3. You don't need to know anything about Web3, which makes me think, like, when I see this product and I look at metrics, it feels a lot like the time I worked at the B2C product, which is basically looking at conversion funnels, so you're looking at every step, what's the user's doing, how conversion is going, and, like, how do you make the card order faster? How do you make the user retain? So we have been thinking a lot about adding mobile app, diminishing flow times, and the market changes a lot. So right now, we have been really focused in getting users out of Binance, getting users out of Metamask, but with this card, which is by far the cheapest way to spend in dollars for Brazilian users, you start competing against TWICE, you start competing against local banks that have USD offerings, and you have a really compelling product for people that just want to travel. So now I think we have the tools and the setup ready. I think Web3 has the UX that is good enough to be useful for non-crypto people, and the big question for me is, like, how do we operationalize that, and how do we optimize those products to actually be useful? So any Brazilian that's traveling now, their best option, financially-wise, is to use a product like this, that is fully built on DeFi, and is saving you 4% or 4.5% of everything you spend internationally. That's it. Thank you. Thank you so much, João. Let's open it for questions. There's one, is it, no? Okay, questions, questions? No? Okay, there's one here. So why do you think it's so hard in crypto to get good UX? I think it's a hard technology to build on. We spent a lot of time just building custom things to make it work, so in fact, we were the first safe ERC-4257 integration I know of, and we needed to build a lot of custom infrastructure just to make it work, and then you get the edge cases and different chains, different things. I think it's just hard, and things are new, so you cannot reuse a lot of strong stuff that has been built, and you also don't have that many references to copy, so you need to think through a lot of things. Thank you for the question. Anyone else? Any other questions? Cool. Thank you for listening. Thank you so much, João. Thank you. Thank you.