Apps: Taking Self-Custody Mainstream and Global

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us. I'm Antonio. I will moderate this panel that has one big topic, and it's self-custody. Before we enter into the panel, I think the goal about this panel is, said in other words, is explaining how we can have our grandmother using self-custody.

That's for me what it means going global. Let me see. But again, before entering the topic, 20 seconds introduction from each of us. I will start. I'm Antonio, co-founder at FluidKey, and FluidKey is a self-custodian wallet with embedded privacy and state-of-the-art UX.

I'm Steven, co-founder at Rebind. We are building a mobile-first DeFi app, so very consumer-grade stuff that hopefully everyone here in the room can share with their neighbors and family. I'm Joan, co-founder at OpenSort, an open-source wallet as a service solution. Hey, hey. My name is Hannes, a gradient, and I'm a builder at Zeal, which is turning faith into a Revolut-like experience.

I'm João, co-founder and CEO of Technic. We are building DeFi for non-crypto-natives, super-focused in Brazil right now, and recently launched Gnosis Beta, which is cool. Talk about it. Amazing. Thank you.

So how we want to structure this panel, I think that the best way to approach a huge argument like it is a self-custody is really through a little bit of a story. There are a lot of topics. When I was thinking about what we can discuss about, I had a lot of questions on aspects completely different one to each other. So I want everyone, each of us, to imagine we have in front of us a user, an imaginary user. We will call him Bob the Boomer, and as the name might suggest to you, he is not a crypto-friendly user at all.

Okay. So I want to start with the first question, and the first question you need to answer him, that he has never used crypto at all, is why self-custody? I don't know who wants to pick this first. I can start. I think for Western countries, it's a very debated topic, because usually when you look at developed countries, it's the ability to basically bank people.

But I think for Western countries, the biggest argument is the ability not to get the bank. And so for me, if I were to pitch this normie, this boomer, would be that whenever you want to have a controversial opinion in our society, that might be not on the current thing of your group of friends, like the services that you use, et cetera, et cetera, they could always eject you from the system. And so self-custody gives you the opportunity to have access to the same features that you have in your day-to-day life without the risk of being ejected from the community. Maybe I can play a bit of the devil's advocate here. So first of all, I think it's a very hard question to answer, and I think there's also not the answer.

So I think what you just said is absolutely right. I think it totally depends on the audience. If Bob the Boomer is, let's say, a German guy or a Brazilian guy, it matters a lot on how you pitch probably. And I think the question is really hitting the mark because probably for the German guy, for the Western people, as you just said, we can probably question if the need of having this ideological part of self-custody, full control, ownership, blah, blah, blah, is really solving a pain. And that's why I personally prefer to rather take the approach of pitching the value maximization because, I mean, the one part is the ideological part about it, but the other part is of the disintermediation of everything.

So you can push more value to the boundaries of the entire stack, which is at the end the end user. So when it comes to this, I mean, I would always pitch it via this and maybe not even using the word self-custody at this point. Makes sense. Hans or Joao, you want to add something at different angles to answer this question? Bob sounds like someone who came not from the global South and someone who probably has access to dollars.

For the global South, I would say access to digital dollars is a strong value proposition. Great point. From Germany or the U.S. or some country in the North, you probably have to either appeal to the libertarian freedom crowd with something like permission-free finance, but that's probably minority of the population.

And so for the larger part of the population, value optimization. So no custodians or middlemen means you get to keep all your money. Practically higher yield on your deposits. And Joao comes from Brazil, so you might have more insight on what Hans just said. But even in Brazil, I think it is not as easy of a sell there.

It's not the most stable country in the world, but there's no big crisis going on. So you see some organic demand of people wanting to hedge political risk, country risk, and that's the path I usually take when I'm on board in France. It starts with 2% of your net worth put in there. If something weird happens with Brazil, you have some money that's uncorrelated with that. So I really like that kind of argument.

I try to do a lot of the FTIX thing. So it's like, oh, look at what happened on FTIX. It could happen elsewhere. That's surprisingly not as efficient as I expected it would be. In a certain sense, keeping money with a counterparty, you're taking an additional layer of risk.

But on the other hand, the UX is so good and they take care of so many things for you. Like if your house catches on fire, you probably recover your funds even if you lose your phone and everything you can KYC. So they have that really mature experience, drawing from FinTech. So it can be a tough argument there. And now I'm really focused on cost.

So that's the way I'm really nailing the balance. It's cheaper. And that message is much stronger, I would say. Makes sense. Maybe I have one more thought that just came up.

I think it's also a kind of regulatory arbitrage, right? From our perspective as a business, of course, but also for user perspective. So I think what also works great, at least what I learned as someone offering an easy DeFi product, is if you can pitch it as a way to access something you can't access in the, let's say, non-crypto custodial world. Like, I don't know, collateralizing your assets to borrow something, right? I mean, I can't go to my Deutsche Bank and say, like, here, this is my ETF portfolio.

Just give me something, right? It doesn't work. So I think besides what John just said, I think that's also a great approach. Okay, makes sense. That was a question I did on purpose because it was very open.

And you can see we had literally a lot of reasons why. And not all applies to everyone. Like someone said, if I have access to US dollars, maybe the stablecoin is not the number one, but I might want something where I can borrow easier without needing to provide my DNA to the bank to be able to borrow and access some resources. Now that makes that resonate. But there are things that we can try to convince as much as possible.

Bob probably at this time downloaded a wallet and tried it out. But there are still missing pieces to facilitate this bank-to-wallet transfer. Because, again, we are competing not with an abstract concept. We are competing with banks. People are used to go to the bank, access their bank account, being able to move funds easily with clicking a button and probably receiving an SMS with a confirmation number and whatsoever.

So according to you, if you want to look at this bank-to-wallet transfer, what is a piece of infrastructure that's completely missing and that Bob will look for or will benefit a lot into moving into self-custody? Yeah, if you want to start again. Yeah, sure. So I think when you refer to banks, to me, I wouldn't look at the traditional banks, but I would probably directly look at what Revolut, Y, etc. are doing.

Because those to me are like they have the perfect experience, which is like you don't need to go to the office. You just scan your passport, etc., etc. I think the logic to make the bank to account or to make the onboarding, it's basically defined for what you want to accomplish with this Revolut or this crypto account that you want to have. So if the user, they actually want to spend money, it means that they want to have access to a credit card.

That means that whatever happy path you design in your app needs to completely nail the experience to get the credit card that's up. If in the other end what you're actually aiming for is for people to optimize on the returns that they can have on their idle money, then you need to optimize for that happy path as well. So I think there's just so much you can do with a small team and just small money. So initially, whatever the user application, the user interface aims to do, you should aim at that happy path and to get there as well. I think like any burden when it comes to, oh, yeah, you actually need to spend whatever money you already have to this E-bank or you already need to save like this seed rate or whatever friction we can think of, it's already something that you're fighting against, the new banks, etc.

So I would frame it into what is the user trying to accomplish and then from there just positioning of like the fastest, cheapest way to get there. Makes sense? Yeah. Go ahead. I have a start-up here that will make someone a lot of money one day, so I'll end with that.

That's a cliffhanger. First off, money needs to be able to flow easily on and off because in order to make your on-chain wallet a parity account with your real world financial account, it needs to be able to flow back and forth. It's not like a casino where you have to buy chips at a 4% cost. It should just flow easily back and forth. And so in Zeal now you can do that.

We work with Unblock and with Monerium, and so you can move money at the interbank rate between dollars and euros and pounds. So you don't have to pay anything to move your money into your wallet or off. And usually with faster payment cycle in the UK and in some SEPA, it goes very quickly. So that's kind of a table stakes thing. Now, if you look at how fintechs are doing it, cutting edge fintechs, our alma mater and the big guys over in the U.

S., not only do you easily or cheaply or quickly and for free move the money, but you also do it without moving a lot of details back and forth. So if you're, for example, creating an account with Robert Hood in the U.S., you say, I want to move money from a bank account, and it opens up via Plaid, and it sends over the account instructions to your bank who then queues up the transaction.

You don't have to copy details back and forth. So it's a much smoother experience to just click a button, and then the money moves with a couple of okays along the way. The current thing in Europe would be like open banking. We can do these same things here as well, and Robert Hood does this, right? That doesn't exist yet on off-ramping.

So if someone builds a solution that uses open banking or Plaid, where you say, move money from a bank account, click a button, it deep links into your banking app and pulls the funds, of course, paying a bunch of funds. That would make it not only fast and free or very cheap, but also extremely convenient for the user to not have to copy details back and forth. So that would be a missing piece of the infrastructure today that exists in Web 2.0 finance, but not yet in Web 3.0 finance.

Yeah, I think that's the exact same thing in mind. I mean, personally, I see the point of the question, right? And we are all working in tech, very product technologically focused. But I think feature parity, something like Hannes just mentioned, is probably one thing. But on the other hand, normally for disruption to happen, you also need other things coming into play, right?

I mean, on the feature parity side, maybe I think you guys probably know better than me because we are not so into the banking road, but rather into brokerage, like investment part. But can you actually do like pull payments, let anyone charge your crypto wallet already, like with the SEPA mandate, how you do it in Europe? Is that working actually already? Or what about insurance? I mean, you know, it's also a big thing, like everyone has an insured bank account.

Can you do that already? Yep. I mean, whoever. Yeah, yeah. You both know probably, I guess.

In Europe, Monerium, I think, is super advanced. They are regulated EMI. And I think you can make euro payments to any third party you want, and you can receive euro payments directly to your virtual account. When you receive, you get euros minted. And I think that's, in a way, like the first seed of like that.

But can I also let someone charge? I mean, I see a Monerium guy over there, so maybe he can answer. You can't do that yet, no. You can't do that, right? I mean, that's so fucking standard, I mean, for so many things.

So that's why, I mean, future parity is probably like these open banking rates transfer fast, pulling payments, insurance. I think there are probably even a few more. I mean, only like third party bank transfers recently started being easily feasible. But that, I think, is the next level for bank transfers. Yeah, the thing I'm still stuck on in Brazil right now is, and I think that's already like a great step compared to two years ago.

You can, on an off-ramp, rise like at no cost. So 100 reais in is 100 real stable coins in your wallet. But you can only do it from yourself to yourself. You cannot receive money from third parties and you cannot pay third parties. So that's something we have been pushing quite a bit to get ready.

Also, like we have some, like if you get utility bills, we have a system just to pay those sort of things. And we cannot support that yet. So the more crypto native users we have, they're usually asking for features to allow them not to move money off-chain to like, I can do everything through Picnic. And now with Gnosis Pay, it's one building block on top of that. But we need to get to future parity.

And even, I mean, I would say probably even if you get there, I mean, the bank account feels like the most stickiest product in life, right? I mean, you were born as a child. Your parents want to save some money for you. You get it from the local bank. And then you almost never leave it again.

I mean, not true fully, but at least for the majority of the society probably. So, yeah, I mean, how do we want to convert the people? I think, of course, a banking crisis or so would be nice. I mean, that would, yeah, let's be honest, right? So, I mean, no one.

COVID was great for crypto volumes. Yeah, I mean, that's probably what you need, right? Imagine, I mean, I can remember when the people in Greece went to their ATMs, right? And they couldn't get any money. So something like that is probably a good boost.

Yeah, yeah, you need, I mean, at the end, it's always, it's not the technology changing the human behavior, right? It's human behavior that has to change and find the technology. So, and I think this is sometimes something we are not thinking about when talking about debt custody. We always think we can push it to the world and everybody loves it. If I can, I'll argue like the future party thing is not enough.

I don't see like people moving to crypto account because it has the same future parity. Like, I don't really care if I can, you know, invoice my account with like utilities and stuff. Like a very clear example for me is like I managed to invoice people through Zil because of the cashback. Like in Europe, you don't have cashback. Yeah.

So anything that gives you cashback is a unique selling point. In America, probably these wouldn't care because they probably have like some other issues. So maybe in America, like the real issue is that it's very hard to get a mortgage or that you need to go and talk to like 10 bank officers and like negotiate. And maybe it's something that is bound to be, you know, disrupted with crypto because you have a community that is willing to crowdsource like a mortgage for you with like already pretty fine yield. But I don't know how it would look like.

But to me, like a future part, like a future party is not enough. And you need to have like the unique selling point to onboard the user. I mean, you probably guys have like more data of like why people use your product. But that to me is what makes sense. Interesting.

We talk a lot about that. We are all very happy about, you know, solving with task keys and all these things. But these are just like hiding stuff. The ability to transfer money to your account without paying fees. We're like, yeah, we used to pay 4% phone ramping.

Now we don't pay anything. But if you're like a bad customer, it's like, yeah, CF has been around for a while, you know, free transfers, of course. But hiding. So we made our bathroom not smell like shit. Now the hiding factors are solved.

But for people to step into our hotel, we then need to have killer value propositions, right? Not just say that it doesn't stink. So that's what the challenge for us now. How do we do killer value propositions? Cashback, high yields.

Interesting. Because, for example, for me, it's also a cultural problem of the crypto world, where it started to be an alternative to the bank. So there's this culture where, no, banks are another thing. We don't want to touch banks. And instead, this world has grown a lot, the crypto space.

But it's a point where it can never be one or the other. There should be an easy way to go from one to the other. Almost for the user, he quite doesn't have to see that, that I'm doing a wire transfer, but my money's on chain. Maybe he knows, but he doesn't feel it. And then he has to agree.

If I have two same services, in any aspect, not just crypto, that offer me the same thing, and I'm already on one, I don't have any incentive to go to the other. There should be something stronger than the other. A bank run that scares people. It needs to be 10x, right? Exactly.

If it's better, it should cost insanely high. Exactly. The way we're thinking about it, I think, I'm super bullish with 10x thing, which is a tax arbitrage going on in Brazil right now. So we got a new tax. You mentioned it yesterday.

3.5% gifts on all USD purchases. Okay. So I think that's really compelling. That's the 10x thing that people come over just because of that, right?

Good point. So we're getting pull from people that just want to travel. They want to use the project because it's 4% cheaper than life. Yep. After all.

And once you onboard those people because of that, it's really nice to offer the option to do bank transfers, to pay in euros, to pay in dollars. I don't think we'll be able to bring users because of that, but it helps to keep users who have priority, right? Makes sense. So again, to follow the story, we have just convinced Bob to have a wallet and maybe on-ramp something on this wallet. And start maybe to see how a loan works.

Or maybe he's just earning yield that his bank account is not giving him through stable coins. And that's another option. It's pretty bad. You move a good amount of money there. And now he has his best friend, Frank, Frank Fiat.

And he on-ramps him. Like, George, use this. It's super cool. Okay? You just move your money.

And don't worry. I will give you like $20 worth of it before you can start to do that. The next day, Bob comes to us and he's yelling at us because now Frank knows that he has $20,000 in his bank account. And he can see everything. And he says, but with bank, this doesn't happen.

Okay? I want to revert back to a system where I protect my privacy. And this is a topic, of course, I'm biased for how we tackle that. And I think it's another aspect to consider when it goes to self-custody. And maybe just a little bit from my side to ours, I've always think that we as a human, we like to post a picture on social media, like to say a lot about how we are.

But none of us has ever published his bank account statement publicly on social media because it's something that we, in the nature we have, want to keep it private. And it makes sense. We don't want to, of course, be forced to show everything. And privacy is something that has always been touched but not so touched in the crypto space. It will be like, see, someone will figure it out in the future.

But the future has come and someone has not figured it out yet. So what are your takes around privacy and what can be done also to boost self-custody? I mean, yeah, that's an easy answer. I think you answered it already, right? So it's kind of obvious and common sense that there needs to be some sense of privacy.

But, I mean, I'm not a privacy expert, so I would probably bounce the question back to you. What I would be curious about is, like, is there also something like customizable privacy? Because, of course, you have the fact that you don't want to have it publicly, but maybe you want to share it to this entity or this entity. Like, getting back to the banking part, I think another feature missing is overdrafts, right? I don't know if there's anything out there that offers that.

Sharing data, personal data that shows that you're a reliable, let's say, user customer on-chain might allow for overdrafts at one point. So, I mean, what's the story? Yeah, so what we have found so far, that we think is the best approach, is to use this technology called Stalk Addresses. Basically, we have always thought in this space that one user is one address. And it works, it's a simple way.

It's like if back in the 80s, if I had to connect with you, I was going to phone call you and ask your IP address, and that might kind of make sense, there were just a few users on the internet, the internet was just starting, that was the only way to connect. Now if I ask your IP address, you have no idea what it is, you give me your email, okay, so there's an obstruction. And under the hood, there's this, this is managed by the network. I think the same way here with Stalk Addresses, you don't have any more one address, you have an infinite amount of addresses. Basically, what we do is that we have an ENS that resolves these addresses every time there's a new one return.

In the end, the asset doesn't stay on one, stays on all these addresses. But you control from a centralized UI that shows you, okay, I have $1,000, then I might have 50, 100, 200, this is not perfect privacy, but it's really a way to hide your history every time you receive a payment, because you know your address, and don't disclosure all your funds that you have. And this is also something that I know, for example, Ethereum Foundation is pushing towards that, towards something that Vitalik proposed, this idea of Stalk Addresses, because it's, again, it's something that, it's easy to understand, it's easy to disclose if it's needed. For example, I can have one address with one NFC, and I disclose that address. But all the other addresses are not connected, even if I look on chain to that, okay?

There is also like, then advanced techniques where I can share what's called a viewing key to, for example, tax authority, that can see all the addresses they have, without being able to scan the funds in those addresses, but rotating that key, I can just selectively show some of my addresses and not all of the others, and so on and so forth. So this, I think, it's an interesting approach, without breaking traceability, without shielding funds in one place, but still giving a good sense of privacy. I don't know if you want to add more around the... I think a promising solution is like a compliant tornado cash permutation with proof of inclusion and proof of exclusion. There are several versions out there.

I think that seems like a, it's in production on mainnet now with privacy pools, and there are other players out there that are building something similar, so that seems like something that's pretty nearby. Again, it's one of these hygiene factors that you don't really tell Bob, hey, come use crypto because your friend will not see your transactions, like, yeah, of course. Exactly. Sorry, our bathroom still has a little hint of that smell, we tried to get rid of, but we'll get rid of that smell too soon, and then, yeah, there are solutions happening for that. I'm looking forward to having more of that problem.

Yeah. So I think now that the main problem I'm concerned at is getting people to use it, and privacy has not been like a big user push, not something that you're getting. There's no one, because no one understands the tech, maybe. Bob doesn't know how blockchain works. Venmo made their valuables.

Venmo said, hey, we're going to show your transaction history to everyone, and we're like, okay. So maybe it's not a smell in the bathroom, maybe it's more like a fragrance. So with this adventure Bob had, and you have to tell him one super cool thing that is about to be available, one of the ones that might make the difference for him onboarding, maybe you don't have now, but think about what you do in your companies and products. Like, what is about to come, or that has just been released, or something that you already have and you think might be super appealing to him, what would you tell him? That's a very good question.

I mean, I'm very excited about everything that the on-chain world offers that a retail person in trade trade doesn't get. So like, I mean, the most appealing use cases are not yet there, but what I would love seeing, for example, is being the ability to easily invest in private companies, right? So, I mean, private for longer is kind of the model right now, and no one has a chance to invest in companies like SpaceX and so. I think that's a compelling, very compelling part. And the other part is the borrowing against your portfolio, right?

I mean, that's something accessible to institutionals, it's accessible maybe for high net worth private banking customers. But as I said earlier, I mean, I can't do it that easily. And this composable part of the tokenized finance world on-chain, I think that's the beauty of it. Interesting. I'll say one of the most interesting compelling use cases that we're seeing is that payments and identity are becoming one for good and for worse.

And so if you take that idea and you extend it in like four or five years time, you can actually see people not only earning revenue from traditional jobs, but actually earning revenue for things that they might do on the internet. And so if this happens, this basically means that any action that you can do on internet can be somehow monetized and be completely paid, embedded into a website. And so I'm very excited on the idea that you could do things like microtransactions. You could actually tip people if you want of things that you see on the internet. And you don't necessarily need to add the friction of using a credit card to do that because you could have multiple wallets or multiple accounts with small amounts of money that allow you to do that, whatever environment you're interacting in.

Makes sense. RWA, real world assets. I mean, stable coins were first out. Now we have treasuries in various shapes and forms. Equities are coming.

I think that's very exciting. It's also a huge market out there that is Web 2.0, where like Bob and his friends are very used to those markets, right? So to have very easy and straightforward access to those markets in permission-free pools, I think it's a compelling value proposition. You already have some that are available on those exchanges.

You can buy tokenized S&P 500 on those exchanges, for example. So I think that's very exciting. And that's also moving not just large-cap equities or bonds, treasuries, but also moving into smaller cap, like companies that are issuing tokens that are bound to equity. So we have some recent products that are moving in that direction as well. I think as those markets become vibrant on-chain, like 24-7 markets, with the traditional finance industry as well, moving into that, I think we'll see magnitudes of movements that we haven't even imagined yet.

Nice. And how about Piknik? Everything that was said here, I think, are pretty much the reasons why I'm building this space. So I think composability is amazing, being like a global ledger that connects to many different financial systems. You can put RWAs.

That's also amazing. But personally excited about the 4%. It's arbitrage. I love that. I would like to ask a few questions to the audience.

Answer by just raising your hands. Easy one to start. Who has a self-custodian wallet here? Who has swapped tokens on a centralized exchange? It doesn't count, of course, but on any decentralized exchange.

We've done that at least once. Breached through chains? Perfect. With Riva, there's no breaching anymore. Just saying.

Yeah, you're right. That's a good point. Lending, so earning yield on stablecoins? Yeah. Okay.

Borrowing against tasks that you have, and hence get less and less. Okay, so this, or maybe paid through a debit card or credit card directly connected to your wallet. Okay, nice. Now, this is, if we have to bring back Bob Zhang before the privacy issue we had before, and I'm going to tell you one thing he can do now on the real world, right from his self-custodian wallet, that, again, can be like something that he touches on a daily basis. Okay.

Among these I just shared, or other schemes to your mind, what would be one that you will share? Again, the first person might be one that maybe will focus on specific kind of people. So, can be something we already said, we can skip it, or it's something new? I would say it's probably an easy one. I would probably put the higher yield on his native currency.

That's a really good one, honestly. Yeah, 5-10% on your stablecoins, I mean, that's pretty amazing. Yeah, that's a real one. Do you want to add something else? Hey Bob, did you know that Dapcom has a campaign that allows you to, if you go to zeal.

app slash Dapcom, you can get a €40 sign-up bonus if you sign up to Zeal using that link, that's zeal.app slash Dapcom. That's a valid one. And yeah, €40 is a nice bonus once you spend €50 with your card, and it allows you to recharge your card automatically from your Aave or your Sky Deposits or even Lido Stick ETH, so you can earn while you spend all in one go. How about that, Bob?

You should try it now. Limited to the first 100 people only. That's what I would say, Bob. Very good. Zeal.

app slash Dapcom. Well, now, the last point I want to tackle in this panel, we have a little bit more than five minutes, is around one other aspect. Because Frank, that got onboarded and put aside a bit of money, broke his phone the same day. Okay? So, now we're asking Bob, hey Bob, where is the support team of Ethereum that I need to recover my account?

Okay? And how do you explain to him that his money is lost forever, he doesn't have a car, or what are the solutions that can still be self-custody, but I can support in this process where people are used to, if I have a problem, I maybe waste that one day on the phone, but I can recover access to my money that are in the bank. I mean, isn't recovery solved? Yeah. So, that's what I thought, yeah.

So, it's an old problem, I would say. I mean, thanks to Safe, there's, of course, the chance to recover. I mean, Tasky is regularly easier, right? You can sync it with the cloud or so. I mean, not sure if you guys, do you guys allow adding guardians, like other friends' wallets or so, in order to recover?

I think that's something you can also do. We are thinking about doing that as well. So, I mean, even if you lose your phone, I can just speak for Rebind, but it's not an issue. You can always recover. Yeah.

So, don't worry, Bob. He's into the data part. This is the story. It's okay, Bob. We got you.

Don't worry. So, you just log into the same account with a Google or Apple, depending on what kind of phone you have, and then the Passkey will allow you to recover it in a new device. And if you don't want to trust the cloud, you can also just install the wallet on two phones and keep an extra phone somewhere else, or your computer and keep your computer somewhere else, so you have different ways that you can stay safe. But probably Bob didn't install it on three devices yesterday, so he would have to trust Apple or Google Cloud. Amazing.

Because, yeah, I see that when you touch these aspects, I know there are, you know, things that we give for granted in a web-to-world that are not, and we can't expect everyone to understand, understanding how the base layer works, and it needs to be a little bit constructed and get, you know, use, for example, you know, guards, or do you have any other service that you can think of that you might use in a way that not only protect his recovery, but also the fact that it cannot be fully scanned by someone by handing over his account. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, it really depends on, like, the setup of the private key of, like, the specific application. Like, the most basic setups I've seen is just you have a private key that is stored on the keychain of, like, the specific device, like, the ecosystem, and then it's pretty straightforward. I've seen more complex setups where you shard the private key in different parts, and then you also, like, store those in, like, different services, some are open-source, other are closed-source.

Guardians as well, although I've not seen a lot of people using that part. I think, like, there's upcoming technology that is becoming very interesting as well with ZK emails, which you'll, like, stop relying on third-party clients to send to recover the wallet. It's all about, like, making it as smooth as possible, but I think, like, the current setup is already really, really good for 99% of the people. Makes sense. And, João, like, how do you solve this problem?

I really like to think about this problem and benchmark it against Fintech. I think Revolut is not that familiar with it. We benchmark it a lot against Nubank, which is the 100 million user Fintech in Brazil. Very slick UX, everything just works, but, like, if you get robbed in the streets, it has some sort of protection against that sort of thing. So just not losing your device and losing access to your credentials, but recovering via KYC, I think those features at some point will make sense to have as well.

Nice. And customer support is something that, for the kinds of products we are building, that needs to be baked in the product and be a strong capability as well. Yeah, 100%. We have still a few minutes left. Unless there are questions from the audience specifically to a part of self-custody or more just a curiosity that we didn't deep dive.

Yeah, there's one there. Maybe, like, this is for all of you, so maybe a quick one from all of you. Like, what do you think, what value props specifically in your products are you building next to build people on to self-custody? What do you think is just going to drive the next wave of adoption? And I'd like to hear from each of you.

Inside your very products, what are you building as the kind of vampire attack? You want to start from the bottom? 100% credit card. I love it. I think that's, like, having such a strong pressure point, I think that's amazing.

Yes. But the product needs to evolve, right? That will not last forever. We probably have a few months of RAG-ARB, but it will close. And for that, I think it's built for specific use cases and are super focused in payments.

So even without the RAG-ARB, it's still quite cheaper than WISE. And you have a good product just on a cost basis. And integrating with different banking rails, so, like, Brazilian freelancers can receive $1,000,000 and spending on OasisPay. I think nailing specific use cases where you have some sort of edge. The edge you're looking for is cost.

But getting the use case perfect, I think, is the way to go. Nice. Well, the most next step is the referral program. So Revolute, that was 50% of our mix. That will be hopefully good here as well.

In our case, we do embedded wallets. So nailing the onboarding for each one of, like, the different devices and ecosystems where the applications of games lead. It's very key. So things like PASC is on mobile, but then you have, like, Epic Game logging on your Xbox. It's very important.

So for us, I mean, we are more on the, let's say, wealth growth investment part. It's anything related to the programmability part of Unchained Factors. So when it comes to automations, right, DCAing, automated rebalancing of your portfolio, setting up your own portfolio structure that adapts automatically. That's a huge part. And of course, this in combination with hopefully more, and I'm with Hannes there, more real world assets on chains.

I think that's a very, very powerful combination. And for us, we started from privacy, and we think that plays a big role. But as we said before, privacy is something that people take for granted. So we focus more on the user experience in general, like being a Revolute kind of user experience and making sure that with privacy, user never gets pissed off because someone sees what I've made on chain. Okay.

So just to wrap up, maybe one more question. Okay, we have a little bit more time for questions. Rick, go ahead. From what I understood for the questions about the future, you guys, I think the biggest relationship will be very similar to the one that we have today, where the user has an app, the user makes a decision, and everything happens like that. What about artificial intelligence?

How are you guys looking at it? Not on the back end or development side, but on the user side. How do you see that happening in the future, especially with this? Who wants to go first? I think it's a good question.

It's a good question, and it's also a very hard one to answer. I mean, we are thinking about it a lot, especially when it comes to leveraging, let's say, the behavior in order to provide maybe a predictive, let's say, predictive financial management behavior. But it feels, from our standpoint, it feels not close enough to work right now on this. But I absolutely see a point where there might not even be a classic FUI, but just someone I'm talking to. And then, again, what I said earlier, the programmatic part of everything allowing to better manage my wealth, even with a partner as well, let's say.

I think, I mean, I don't see much difference from what it is today for what it could be like AI in the user behavior. Namely, today, I think you can already get robot visors and things like that in your apps. And so the only thing that you are actually worried about is the permissions that they may have to act on your behalf. And so, at least from our end, the thing that we care most about is how you define these policies or permissions and how you enact them, like how you basically validate that they did the right thing and that that right thing is actually shown on chain and in your UI. Like anything else in the financial space, I still don't think it will differ that much from a robot visor.

I think over a long enough time frame, AI will make us irrelevant, either because we're all dead or because we won't need the money anymore because we're living in a world of So AI will make us irrelevant over a long enough time frame. Over a shorter time frame, though, there's an interesting angle for these kind of hybrid DeFi, DeFi, OpenFi solutions, where you have some kind of civil protection through the KYC angle. So you know that there's a human there. And at the same time, then you have the sovereignty of a self-contained wallet where you can somehow, okay, I'm a human. I want to control my information, for example.

There could be some angle there. Not something that we're working on right now, but thinking about like boat maps and potential overlaps, that's an interesting direction. Someone will probably build something there. I think Greece, Eric is probably building something on that, right? I spent some time thinking about that, and it's a tough one.

Chat interfaces, I think they're interesting, but I'm still not convinced that that will go all the way. And how to mix that with UIs, I think we'll need to run a lot of experiments. I think the big question I ended up with that started letting me down a bit was like, would you trust? I mean, it's your finances. Would you trust an agent to manage your financial stuff?

I mean. You trust humans to manage that. I mean, yeah, it's like there is a rational argumentation about it, right? And the other one is more, let's say, mental. I'm not sure.

You just said exactly what I was thinking about. But personally, I would not trust. Maybe it's a cultural problem. I don't know. But personally, it's something that I still wouldn't be confident.

Into that, honestly. You trust a human to do it for you, though? I trust myself. Like trusting an external LM or whatever model, or trusting an external human, both have some trust assumptions that are different from trusting yourself. And that's why there's a rational view, and I think you're asking the absolutely right question and probably have the right view, if I understood you correctly.

But I'm not sure if the 8 billion out there see it the same way. Bob, yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. Thanks for taking part.

Thanks for helping us figuring out all the different angles that we can see the self-custody. And now let's transform a lot of Bob out there into Bob.