From Dapp to Super Dapp

So, good evening everybody, last talk on this stage, I think. I'm from Yodel, I'm Sebastian, the founder of Yodel, and we're basically building an Apple Pay, but cardless. And what I'm going to talk about is sort of the journey that we went from just a simple debt into a super debt. Now, about the name Yodel, the way we got that name is we thought, what's coming after hodling? We've been hodling all our coins all the time, we're great little savers.

It's time to spend them, yodel some, live a little, spend that token for something real. So that's how, yeah, inspiration for my name, Yodelmeister, is my handle, it's from the Yodelmeister, Takeo Ishii, straight from Japan, redefined Yodel languages, Chicken Yodel. And now, the key question is, what is a super app? Some people don't really know. It kind of started back in the mobile payment times in China with Alipay and WeChat Pay.

What they basically did, they gave a container within their payment app and gave it to third party developers. Like a little iFrame web view that they can build the app and use the underlying payment system of Alipay. WeChat copied it, I don't know who copied, both copied each other, but basically a super app is an app that has a user base and a specific feature that you can use as a third party developer. In Alipay, it's Chinese people who can pay, we have now in the crypto space, a lot of projects trying to be super-depth, such as WorldCoin. They basically bring, I think, like 10 million users who have their eyeballs scanned so you know that they're for real.

Main usage these days is anti-feeble protection, I guess, for people who want to drop a token. You've got Forecast having a mini-app framework, and they basically have social media features and bring a lot of socially active people into the game. Now, what we are trying to offer to the people is a user base that pays in real life. We are a payment app to pay in real life, in the shop, for coffee, in the supermarket, also online for e-commerce stuff. You can tap into this user base, you can tap into communities such as network meetings, meetups, side events, who build upon our mini-base to give their people their customized super depth experience in their community.

At the core, it's payments in real life. Let's look at how that looks like. You've got a video, you go into the shop, you use basically your phone where you have a wallet, and with the click of a button, on the action button or on shortcut, you open the Yodel Pay tab within the wallet. You pick a token to pay, you scan a QR code on the payment terminal. You pay, and within seconds, the payment is done, payment terminal updates, you're done, you can go.

The merchant eventually will receive the money through fiat trails from the payment network that you have signed up. They do not have to do anything, it's the standard QR code that shows up on the terminal anyway. Now, that works on quite a few countries nationwide, like Switzerland, Sweden, Asia have these QR codes, Brazil, Argentina, it's quite a common thing. We're tapping into these systems, and I'll show exactly how. To summarize, you can now pay for anything with any token, TetherGold, Shiba, Pepe, Trump, coins, whatever you want, with a token that you already have.

Now, once upon a time, Satoshi had a dream of peer-to-peer payments, where your crypto is money, and you sign with your private keys. The status quo these days is you've got an Apple Pay wallet, where you can load a credit card inside, and then you can pay in the respective network of that credit card. All these card networks are multi-billion-dollar mega-companies, who all sort of have the same sort of merchant acceptance network of about 100 million merchants. Now, next, you can already pay, most people say, with crypto credit cards. So let's just have a quick look at how these guys work.

For instance, GnosisPay, you sign up with KYC, you deposit a specific token on a specific chain, you tap your credit card, and then GnosisPay will pull the money out of your deposits and pay. It's not really peer-to-peer, I'd argue it's also not your keys, and it's usually not a token that you actually want to hold. But it works fine, I'm not against it, it's nice. Now the way we work, the old pay, it's different. We don't pull money out, we let the user push money into the payment network.

So you go with your wallet, you scan a QR code, we resolve the QR code at the payment network that you have the contract with, we know how much to pay, we let the user choose the token he wants to pay with, typically they just keep the default that they usually pay. They sign with the wallet that they have, onChainTransaction goes live to our YodelPay smart contract that swaps and pays the money into the token that the recipient wants. In this case, the recipient is a middleman, it's a so-called blue-code issuer, they will receive a stablecoin, pull it over the day, and send it over into the payment network at night in a batch off-ramp and SEPA transfer process. Now this payment network, I know it very well, I've been first engineer and CTO over eight years, and they basically have become a payment aggregator. They aggregate lots of other payment networks that all the users can pay into, including all the Yodel users.

So together we can reach a total merchant acceptance network of about 160 million merchants. But we keep aggregating, we keep adding more, either through blue-code or directly through a similar system, you mentioned ProceedalPix, and we also try to understand every crypto QR code or payment protocol. So whenever you want to pay, you can do it with your YodelPay wallet. Now that's all cool, but typically everybody has the same question on their head, and that is, can I tap? And I say, yes, you will be able to tap the same way you can do with your ApplePay wallet.

It'll take a little longer, but it will work. Now the reason I personally like the push flow very much is because it's very close to the crypto-native flow where you sign your transactions with your keys, you push the tokens towards another party, and that will enable us to basically then come up with a peer-to-peer solution that is exactly similar for the end user. They can go to a merchant and say, take this QR code, you save some money, and you can have a bunch of extra fun features through something called mini-apps. The way it works for the end user is we distribute a tap, it's like a Uniswap tap, it runs in your browser, in the in-app browser of your wallet. With the tap, you don't need to have any downloads, you simply sign up once, you pay with one of our providers to pay in their respective networks, and once that's done, you click scan QR code and pay.

Done. Works with any tap, any wallet, and so on. If you want to tap and pay, we will provide a native app that's required, but then you can basically load your credit card inside and also tap in all the other places that you can use a QR code, for instance. Now, this is usually the time that people have a lot of questions. If anybody has some burning questions, please go, otherwise I'll go into the flow how we started out developing that idea from the beginning.

When we started about two years ago, the basic problem we tried to solve was that I can't easily send 100 euros in USSD to my parents, or vice versa. It's still not properly solved. CRX addresses are annoying, ENS addresses back then and still are not consistently supported by the wallets. You couldn't send on Polygon like that, so it was a very shaky experience. We were never sure you paid a lot of money for your ENS address, but it wasn't universally supported.

The people who sent, they didn't know what USDC is, or there's like so many versions of them, they didn't know which one you want, which chain, and so on, and also what exchange rate are you going to use if you don't have an underlying stablecoin, which is quite often in most countries the case. So what came up is with a payment link, where you add the recipient in the address bar, and you define the query parameters, exactly what tokens you accept and what chains. You can send it over in a message, in a QR code, whatever, and that's what the person sees. They then go on and pick the token that they want to pay with. So we scan the wallet, we show the tokens, they pick one token, they don't have to think anything, and we simply swap and pay me in the token that I want with the token that the other person wants to send.

You're aggregating all the DEXs, all the DEX aggregators, all the bridges, so you simply pick what you can, and we sort of figure it out by ourselves the best route. Next up, another problem was human-readable receipts. You sent your friend a Block Explorer page, and it was really hard to figure out what actually happened, and it's getting harder and harder with all the tools and bridging that you can do these days. So we simply added a human-readable receipt, and another nice little thing, human-readable preview cards, so if you share it in Telegram, it automatically shows you what you got. Then the second issue is, and that's where everything sort of started to get together, is that these URLs get very long and out of sync.

You send a link, and one week later, you want a different chain. So we had to take it out, and then we thought, okay, where do you actually keep these payment preferences in a decentralized way? Now, we found a solution. There is a place, and that is ENS. That was the beginning of our last story with ENS.

Basically, every ENS address has text records or other data records. That's where we store the avatar image or the avatar URL or URL or your description. These are these text records that come along with your ENS record, and we simply took one and said, if you put a JSON configuration inside the me.yodel record, then you automatically fetch that every time somebody opens your link, and you pre-configure the page. Next up, we said, hey, we now have a lot of space to configure stuff.

Let's just use everything and put it into this JSON, such that you can configure your own preview card designs, and when you send this to somebody, it looks nicer, which is great for little shops to make it more viral. Next up is notifications. How do I know that I'm getting a payment? So we added webhooks. You add a record, attributes webhooks into the record, and then we simply index the payment.

We look who got the payment. We resolve the payment claim, ENS, look, does he have a webhook, and if yes, send him a notification. With that, we basically built Telegram bots, Slack bots, all kind of bots, integrations, and so on. And you can use everything, customize it to your needs in a fully decentralized way. So one party that used that, Paddlebattle.

auction. You can bid on prices. Paddlebattle.auction is a great tool. They're using most of our things, super happy.

So they basically, how do I notify my people that people paid? So they just use the notification and Telegram group, and everybody knows and can start doing their bidding wars. They also use different receipts all the time to make it a bit more fun. Now next problem is, I'm using it more and more. How do I actually keep track of my friends, and how do I save them in my address book in a decentralized way?

So last year, I went to ECC, and I saw the presentation of EFT, Ethereum Follow Protocol, and here we are. It's basically a social graph where you can follow other ENS addresses, and it's basically shared across. You can access it anywhere. With that, we had out of the box an address book that you can share, take with you into other apps, and you're not locked in to our system. And eventually, we realized it's not just an address book, but it's actually a trust score.

So when you're sending money to Vitalik, and you made a typo, you will instantly see it's a typo, it's a scammer, it has got no followers, or the followers are all scammy. So for that, we have a payment flow that you now have a trust score that makes it easier, you know, to know, is it the right person? Now next problem, I'm getting thirsty. That's the next integration we did. It's a self-serving beer tab.

So here, you can put it somewhere, you scan a QR code or open a mini app, which is the next thing that I'm going to show, and you make a payment through the Yodel app. And once it's done, the beer tab unlocks, you can tap your beer and pour your beer. Now this uses most of the same system that I showed, it's a webhook, once it's paid, it gets notified, it happens pretty fast, and then it unlocks the beer tab. Yeah, just a quick graph of how it works, basically every time you make a payment, there's an event being emitted, which are indexes, completely analyzes the transaction, puts everything into the back, knows exactly what currency you paid, in what token, and so on, resolves all the ENS records from the sender, from the receiver, from the mini app, from the community, to then trigger the correct webhooks, and so on. Once that index, and there is a webhook defined, we call that up, so they can do whatever they want.

Now how can you open one of those, yet for mini apps, as we call them, you simply configure an ENS address again, set up a URL, that then we open inside our super app, as an iframe, or a webview, or whatever. And with that, all you have to do is then, if you like it, you can follow it again on ENS, as your social graph, and then it's being put on your home screen, so you can easily access. The kind of mini apps, and the apps you're expecting, like beer tabs, or where you don't pay with actual tokens, but with like a beer token, that at a conference, you can airdrop to the people directly, and if they have the token, they pay with the beer token, otherwise they use regular money. A priority inbox, where you charitagate access to your inbox, so you have to pay $10 to a charity, so you sort of have a spam protection for the VIPs. Loyalty stamp cards, reward system for merchants, bill splitting, poker buying, payout, dashboards, all kind of interesting stuff, so if you need ideas, just let me know, I've got plenty.

We like to work together with network cities, pop-up cities, events, meetups, side events, to sort of build these little mini apps together, reuse them. We have launched one in Brazil, called IpeCity, big success, 100 members, and they basically developed 15 apps together, deployed them, made $4,000 in transaction volume, and now I can sort of start taking them out and bring them into different communities and reuse them. So with that, the network city got their own little super app, within our super app, completely white-labeled to their tastes. That's it. If you want to build, we've got a Telegram group, that's the best spot where you can ask everybody, follow me, or ask questions.

Any questions for Sebastian? Hi, so I have two quick questions. The first is, so I'm not a crypto OG, and last year I was considering buying my EMS address, and they're so expensive, and so my first question is, how are you going to deal with, you know, lots of people not being able to afford or wanting to buy an EMS address? And the second question is maybe related. If I understand correctly, in this transaction, only the recipient needs to have set up their preferences and their, you know, text record on EMS.

So, like, in theory, if the shop is willing to invest the money to buy an EMS record, they would be able to receive payments in their favorite tokens, and the customers wouldn't have to actually have an EMS themselves. Is that correct, or is that not correct? Okay, so the sender, they don't need an EMS anyway. They can just connect and pay. The receiver also doesn't need, but then they can't control the way money is flowing, basically.

So it's up to the receiver. Regarding the question of the cost, yeah, that was an actual problem, especially back then when we started. But now there's lots of EMS subnames, such as base.es, uni.es.

Everybody basically can get a free EMS address. Also, there's lots of tools that projects and communities can have their own subname, such as epstd.es. They're using a service called Just-a-Name. It's to basically let the people get their EMS subnames for free.

So I would be sebastian.epstd.es. I can configure it there. So that's sort of solved now.

You won't get your .es, your prestigious one, but typically you just get a cheaper one, yeah. And it's a very nice API sort of abstraction because you can really have EMS subnames the way you like it. Some people don't care that much about decentralization and just want a free one that works, like with Just-a-Name. Or they want to have it registered on a cheaper L2.

There are services for that. Namechain supposedly will make it cheaper. And so that's sort of a thing that will eventually go away, and it's becoming a non-issue, if you ask me. The first question was? The first question.

And the second? The second was about the new feature. Oh, yeah. Yeah, cool. All right.

So I get... Any other questions for Sebastian?