Interview│Joël Valenzuela - Dash│ETHDam III - 2025

Hey, my name is Joel and I work with Dash with Business Development and Marketing. And um my key message is better start using crypto before it gets too late. We're at a a unique time where we have the ability to separate money from state and bank and actually take control over our financial sovereignty and our sovereignty as a whole. As a result, we can do it now and we won't get most of the world doing this unless we take the initiative and do it first. So start start using crypto before it's too late.

You said crypto is still fish with legs, right? Yes. What's still missing before it can walk? Well, you kind of can lock a little bit, but basically um there's a few things that are are missing. The biggest thing is basic usability tools where things should be social and intuitive.

Um, if anyone still sees a blockchain address, if that's common practice in crypto, I think that then we're still too early. We need to get past that. Yes, there are things like usernames and then contact lists in the better way that do sort of get out of that, but that tends to be kind of the the limitation. Usually, almost always, you will see people interacting with long ugly addresses. That's one thing.

The second thing is conditional transaction finality or whatever you call where you send a payment and it's not done. It's like, well, let's wait for some confirmations or well, let's see if this and that shouldn't be a thing. You just should press the button and it's over. Um those are and then the final thing I would say is um intuitive recovery systems because right now the seed phrase is the number one backup for everything and it's there's too easy to get that wrong. Too easy to make that not work out.

Um it when people are able to take like a physical device like whether it's you know a security key from somewhere else or whether they're able to get their friends and family to vouch for them to get their keys back and get recovery like that then I think we can completely get rid of custodial solutions for all but like the but very specific use cases. Dutch evolution now lets people use username in store payment context. How is that going to change uh everything? So I think it's it's really going to change something if we get this wide more widely adopted. Of course, anytime you create a new system, there's always the, you know, limitations of who actually uses it, you know, and if it's like, oh, well, I still have this set up over here, then it gets kind of reduced.

But basically by just having a very simple intuitive way of making payments with people where you have a username, you look them up, you add them as a friend or a frequent contact, you send money back and forth and that there's a record of all that and then the purposes of those payments, those are all there and that's built not in some slick app, but that's built into the entire protocol. to where anyone can just have an app that just supports this and then it's just all there. It's kind of a universal standardization. I think that that could really make people not have to learn how to use crypto because right now people have to learn. There's a lot of new things like what is an address?

How do you do this? Does this work with that? How do you back things up? There's a lot of learning that at some point I think that anyone who uses a basic like social media site like say X should be able to figure it out without any act actual training. And I think we're kind of getting we're getting a glimpse of what that looks like.

Now you say 2.8 billion humans are now able to pay bills for crypto. Are we now crossing the line to real adoption? Yes. So it's like 2.

8 ate about um I think those are the people that could con conceivably be able to do this. Now what the next step is obviously you have to start educating people. You have to start onboarding people and then those solutions have to start getting you know more and more efficient. Uh, one thing is when you have a a business that services these kinds of things on and you have very few customers, sometimes the fees have to be higher. And so like if you pay an extra bit of money to be able to use crypto instead of fiat for a bill pay system, at some point some people are just going to say, "Nah, it's not convenient enough for me to to to do this."

But when we start to get the ball rolling, get more people using it, then those margins get smaller. And eventually you have where end companies don't have to have money wired into their bank account when someone pays a bill in crypto, where instead they just take the crypto themselves directly. And we start to remove all those little intermediary steps that you have to take to actually get your money to where it's supposed to go in the end. And then things just get more efficient over time. it just throw more usage and people into the thing and it'll it'll start to solve itself a lot better.

I think you said use it or lose it. What happens if people don't use crypto now? If people don't use crypto now um the I guess roughly blockchain centric technologies that are used in not free ways will just win out and then we'll have the fiat system but more efficient at surveilling and censoring and that's a dystopia I don't really want to live in.