Ways of adoption: how different crypto products are pushing for mass ad - Paulina Joskow | ETHWarsaw

and I think actually Diana gave us a really good intro to that panel as in what would it take to on board my grandma my mom to to web free and whenever I think about that question um it resonates with me that there is so much to unpack there there is how to in um how to un board them on the technical level there is building up The Right Use cases so that it makes sense to onboard them like we're not going to onboard my mom to AA just for fun um and then there is building that whole level of understanding so that this is normal for them this is understandable for them something that is familiar to them and when I think about that it resonates with me how far we are from uh from Mass adoption and I want to tackle that topic today with you but before we go on I want to um um I want to start with giving guys some floor to to make your make your intros you know um I know you but I would love to for the audience to to know you as well so um let's start from uh let's start with from Shimon of course we know each other very well uh for those of you who don't don't know we used to work together for a long long long time um Mass adoption was always on the front lines for for ramp tell us about a bit about yourself and about ramp and how ramp pushes mass mass adoption be brief because then I have more questions about that all right um so yeah uh seven years ago uh we ventured to start building uh Best in Class onboarding experience into web 3 we knew that the entire stack of Fiat to crypto is built for Traders and that the trading use case uh for crypto turned out to be uh foundational but this is not what we are here to do uh in in the long term so I decided to build something that would allow people to actually on board to uh products that provide um more um of mainstream kind of use cases and we were very early because 7 years ago there were basically Ally no crypto products but we knew that this is coming um and fast forward to today with 6 million um registered users and hundreds of um apps integrated um we are one of the um biggest providers uh of the service we work with um so many companies uh represented here uh which always makes me smile when I see a familiar logo here um but um we still think that uh there is a big challenge ahead and there is still much to do uh because um getting onboarded into crypto is still not as easy as um buying something uh online and uh this is the goal for us and this is what we are working on right now at ramp amazing you mentioned that early on that um early adoption of crypto was driven by um very uh speculative use case and that is the first thing that comes to mind when we say that is the exchanges which leads me nicely to Michela who's representing institutional s um sales at at binance Michela would you like to introduce yourselves absolutely thank you so much a pleasure to be here um I don't think I need to introduce binance that much um no you don't have to um my name is Michaela cover binance Vian institutional for for Europe um what we do with with bance v institutional is scatter to high work individual corporations on the corporate side we work with a wide range of of clients hedge funds market makers family offices uh prop Des trading platforms and more um we do have quite a quite a big crew in waro this week um if you catch us around we have uh David Prince president of bance France we have Natalia Ivan and our CMO is also here Rachel Colin um happy to tell you more about what do after the panel let me let me let me uh um do my segue there so um early in the day when um I think a few years ago we're organizing a hackaton um that was one of the first hackaton actually participated in that and it was a long time ago very early in the crypto space and back in that hackaton almost half of the ideas were things that kind of work in web 2 but then on top of web 3 and Brandon here is working on bringing web free to travel industry so kind of going the other way um around taking like very traditionally web to sector and um turning it um and and using the rails from from crypto into making it more efficient more more streamlined and of course more decentralized yeah thanks so much for for having me I'm Brandon from sleep. and we're the first hotel booking platform built on chain currently we have roughly about 750,00 hotels globally live we accept over 300 cryptocurrencies as well as traditional payment methods but obviously being a a native web3 company we do push more crypto transactions than traditional meth payment methods so what we really saw within the travel sector is how hotels and hotel groups are losing their power to booking platforms I doubt anyone knows but your traditional booking is actually getting charged up to 20 5% within fees and that's due to the middleman in between the user to the hotel so we saw the Gap within the industry my team has over 25 years experience within travel Tech that all these hotels and groups are complaining how they've lost their power and we saw with decentralization we are able to cut out all the middlemen and we are able to be the direct linkage between the user and the hotel we also realized that there was no I would say traditional booking platform that was targeting web3 communities and crypto-based conferences and that's where we saw we were able to fit in to bring back the benefits to attendees to the communities and allow users to travel more freely with their cryptocurrencies as well to get these conferences attendees and community members closer together allow them to move freely with their crypto and I feel being within the industry for so many years within the nft side of things I feel community narrative is so important for that Community to be closer together as well to be able to use their crypto freely as one should be within Services nice you mentioned communities and and when mentioning communities one cannot admit C so C is as one of the the early teams pioneering um adoption through through Community empowerment and we have Kate with us here and I think like half of the all our almost entire C team so there's a lot of you guys there yes we do have a lot on the ground today thank you so much for having me I'm so happy to be here um as you said I work actually on the cabs team we are working on cell and for those that don't know cell actually launched on Earth Day of 2020 as a layer one blockchain um we really focus on lows transaction fees one block finality carbon uh we're carbon negative as a chain and really um addressing real world use cases and real world assets and last year we actually announced that we would be transitioning to a layer two on ethereum So we are currently in the process of doing that and we'll be launching our alpah hores L2 test net at the end of the month and all of those things will continue to stay true as we become an L2 and our mission from the very beginning has been to really create the conditions for prosperity for everyone and I think that um yeah Community is a huge Focus for us and um yeah thank you so guys um guys and girls folks it's going to be going let's go with that um I mentioned at the beginning that mass adoption is a complex issue and it's difficult Define um what we actually mean when we say Mass adoption so I want to ask you what do you define as mass adoption what would you identify as this we've made it moment I know that Shimon likes to call it the iPhone moment so um we can also call it the iPhone moment so the moment where it becomes it's obvious that um a um um given area solution is going to be used is going to get that massive traction something that you see okay it's okay we made it what do you think it's um what do you think Mass adoption actually means for crypto and do you have this perfect definition of that perfect moment where you're sitting here you're looking at you know what's being built it's like okay we good now we just we just have not to break it too much um maybe let's start with with with with you Kate I have a lot of thoughts on this um I think Mass adoption is definitely acceptance and usage um it's accepted it's used but I think that there are different categories of mass adoption as well and there's different communities that will adopt quicker than others um cello really focuses on the Africa Market we actually launched a app with Opera Mini last year called mini pay and in the last year we've onboarded 3.5 million users to this wallet um and we are seeing 550k plus daily active users um so to me that is that is a piece of adoption now mini pay right now is in Nigeria Kenya South Africa and Ghana and I think that we'll expand those regions but I think in Africa we're seeing a lot of mass adoption there in the US I think that mass adoption looks very differently and in Europe I think Mass adoption looks very differently so I think I tend to look at Mass adoption in these different communities um but I think at the end of the day the key is really this like acceptance and this usage of this technology yeah Mass adoption and and um developing regions and mass adoption um uh and the more developed ones it's very very different we have different patterns of um of use we are motivated by different things in there so it's really interesting to see how that concept is very geographically um uh associated with that Simon what's your definition of this iPhone moment we're going to have to share with the mics but I think we should have one more oh one extra thanks Di um so I I thought about it a little bit this morning and um I realized quite L that um there's more crypto users in the world than uh PayPal accounts and I don't think anyone would say that uh PayPal is Niche um so I think on one hand one could say oh wow it's like almost 600 million people um having had some sort of interaction with crypto in the past seems massive that's a lot of people um it was hard uh for me to believe but that was um a data point released by um bance's research team actually so I find it trustworthy and then I I I started to sort of like digging into um what I would consider to be um Mass adoption and I I think for me it's less quantitative and more qualitative um so I rebranded this in my own head from Mass adoption to the oh moment and um I'm I started thinking about okay like what would be this uh oh uh this is really good uh moment for us in this uh in the web 3 uh space and I realized um we probably all are trying to get to the point where using web 3 um is actually would actually get your mom to say oh that was it so my alternative name for that is that was it uh moment um and uh this is also uh very similar to you know uh this uh iPhone uh sort of parallel right so it has to be so uh simple and delightful uh that it's almost unbelievable we are not quite there yet for web 3 but if you zoom out and sort of think about um the use case of just buying some crypto to own it regardless of whether this is decentralized on custodio um Etc if you just go to coinbase and buy some Bitcoin uh you can say oh like that was it and I think we are there uh already in this um sort of investment um Buy and Hold use case and now the question should be how do we scale that to real web 3 so how do we scale this oh moment to um uh actually putting all this crypto to work and so I I dug a little bit deeper and it seems like uh there is like 60 70 million of monthly active users so you know a lot of that is just moving money between exchanges but like let's say let's be generous and say that half of it is like actual usage so let's say 30 million uh maybe 40 um and we can see that less than 10% of crypto users are actually uh we three users um which should make us think uh like pause and think but at the same time it should also uh give us uh a lot of optimism and I hope because uh we've been for this journey like we we we we faced very similar um usability um issues uh in terms of uh the investment use case and uh we basic Bally pushed through this and in just a couple of years um a bunch of great companies got built uh with great products super easy to use um and now we just need to scale this and this is why at ramp uh we are trying to get to this level of like delightfulness ease Simplicity um you know at the level and Stage when uh people are trying to actually uh put crypto to work yeah I think that um that parallel between crypto is not web free is like very important because sometimes we tend to sit in that web free bubble and we forget that you know crypto exists we're like right now we're in uh we're at E4 so ethereum focused conference and when you go you don't really need to step very far you just like step away from the L2 bubble and then it's like oh there are like other chains there other l1s they have users what is that so I guess sometimes we forget about the fact that crypto as a whole is already recognized and it does serve its purpose like its purpose is to is to um store value allow people to to speculate and use them as Financial assets so I think in that sense we can um we can agree that there's some part of mass adoption already reached and it leads me nicely to to Mela because binance is is all about that um initial use case and how did it change for for for binance have you um always had the same what was your definition of of mass adoption for us we we we are highly um focused on the number of users we on board web tree and crypto um and this takes me to the question of why what are we we have made at moments right and for binance one of our highlights was crossing the 200 million users this year uh currently sitting at 290 million users to be exact if we continue that Trend that means that by 2025 2026 we'll be at 300 million users being the exchange that have impacted the most in terms of mass adoption the Dig assets industry um another we have made it moment for us was to secure the 19th license in India um for the ones that are highly uh in tune with this this is one of the most difficult jurisdictions in digital asset space but biners have made it bers have locked it and locking licenses is also a catalyst for this to operate with highest standard um and and lastly just to highlight those those we have made up moments it will be we also Pioneer one of the most disruptive products in institutional space lately which is called trip party banking custody we were the first Exchange in the world in creating a bridge between the traditional world and crypto for asset managers and traditional firms where they will still be able to use their Banks of preference without uh leaving that activity but connecting that with their binance and settle their Ste their tries with us um I just wanted to wrap up my Intervention when saying binance itself is a vehicle of ma Mass adoption and and we our leaders which you all know who they are have made an Splendid work just pioneering that path and just making sure we on board the next billion users to web TR Brandon oh yeah I have a follow-up question do you track separate numbers for like crypto users and like people who you would consider to be uh web 3 users that got into web 3 for binance I know so many people who would pay for that data just like brilliant set of data you mean how we segregate yeah do you segregate yeah certainly I mean there are many ways we segregate the data we segregate it by product we segregate by for instance how many people use our newest web tree wallet so it depends on the product uh for us um overall when when they are on boarding to binance we we would like to think that the moment that they sign up they're already like Crossing that bridge opening that door to web tray okay and then you segregate that data based on the products yeah it it's a nice segue to the metrics point so Brandon also at you what's your uh We've made it moment and especially in context of of um of kind of like adoption through for use cases but also what metrics do you use like what's your how do you measure mass adoption on your on your end because we have different we talked about um very like quantitative um ways of measuring that so like number of users um uh how much we have we have on boarded um but also their qualitative metrics how many people use um uh use the web free wallet versus The Exchange wallet how many people interact with apps and so on so what's that for um for you what's that for Sleep the way we well the way I view it within Mass adoption within the travel sector it actually plays a large role within your Global GDP as of last year travel and tourism made up of 9% of your total Global GDP which actually is an extreme large sum of funds that is actually getting push through the the travel and tourism sector and From sleep's perspective it's obviously to onboard as many web 2 users into web 3 travel just because of how much they can save they don't even know need to know how to create a wall because you're able to sign into our platform with your social media and we'll create a wallet for you that way we're unboarding many web 2 users into web 3 travel without them even knowing it and that way it's getting them more involved within a sector that is completely new to them but I would say the main goal and the bigger Vision what I see for sleep is onboarding uh Hotel groups directly into web 3 because the infrastructure of these groups are extremely outdated within my opinion and will take a lot for this INF structure to completely move into web 3 so for us to being able to build exclusive white labels for hotel groups that way we're able to unboard that entire hotel's group into web 3 without those users again and people coming to this hotel without even knowing it but on the back end there has been a white label created for this hotel group that now accepts cryptocurrency I'll would say the first step for us I can't yet mention the hotel group name but there's going to be a hotel group that's going to accept accept crypto from their normal guests when paying at the hotel which will be accepted through sleep and we hope to grow this through to all your major Hotel groups globally and that way all uh people coming to this hotel have the choice to now pay in a new type of currency that they may be using or it may be new to them but that way it definitely grows uh the use case of mass adoption within the travel sector that is super interesting to see um the growth through um through those very Web Two um uh companies and teams so like imagine like finally getting a a button to add payment with crypto to to booking.com and it's like one one part you need to have that that button thing needs to happen at some point but the other hand is like you're recognized enough to get that opportunity you're being uh recognized as as like a viable method of payment but I want to revert back to um something you said um um a little bit before so right now the setup can be so easy that people don't even know that they're using crypto and that touches up on the infrastructure question and to me infrastructure versus use cases it's kind of like a chicken and neck Pro problem so we need better infrastructure to enable better use cases but then without the use cases the infrastructure seems kind of pointless and we go through that every time we are in a birth cycle we see lots and lots and lots of infrastructure and we see no use cases and everybody's you know like H we wish there would be more U use cases uh driving adoption and so on but then whenever we are in the bull cycle and we have apps and people coming in then we get stuck on infrastructure something doesn't work again we're trying to connect connect multiple wallets trying to go for a payment process and we're frustrated that the infrastructure is not keeping up so I think it's very it's very um like I said to me this is chick in a neck but I I know that um we cannot you know just ignore that the problem we need to start somewhere so how do you feel about that should the infrastructure be The Driver of the ad of adoption can you drive adoption through building infrastructure or should you focus on use cases and then adjust the infrastructure to the use cases you you have and I'm aiming that question at Shan because we've had this conversation multiple times um where to start um first of all um we've got a great way to deal with chicken and egg problems um in the tech industry and it's called Uh VC money um and it's a very effective way to uh kind of solve these VAR sorts of problems um you've got some products that only work when you uh generate a big Network effect for example and um this is what what VC's uh got uh invented for right and so every time I hear oh there's like again this um Mania on the market and money is pouring in I'm thinking yeah like precisely because the next Bull markets when it's going to start people are going to complain that not enough infrastructure uh with enough bandwidth uh got build and all of it is crappy compared to uh the level of interest um of people trying to uh flu into into the market um so I I I think we're dealing sort of well with it right and um you know an iteration of that are icos right binance got built um uh on that and so people are just speculating that use cases would come and they invest into infrastructure and some of them are ending up um doing very well um and and I actually think that is great that uh we've got we've got all that but you ask me okay like um a lot of people seem to be bothered um that there seems to be a lot of focus on infrastructure while uh apparently there is or seemingly there is not enough um use cases to sort of support a case for all this in infrastructure being built and looking um looking at you here and uh sort of uh putting brand names on your faces because I know many of you here some of you wear t-shirts of your companies I can see that probably 70 or 80% of you here working on infrastructure which proves the point um but at the same same time I feel there is just such a high threshold um to build infrastructure good enough uh to start supporting use cases um that are improving people's lives only you know 20 30 40% over what's available today on the broader market and every time I think about um you know like how we already managed to build infrastructure uh that is enough to support 600 million uh people coming in and investing and how uh long it took and how much money it really took and now that I'm thinking okay investing is one thing but what about payments but you know payments is a piece of infrastructure that evolved over decades and it's used by uh billions of people and so it just makes sense to me logically that is going to take uh a little bit longer and in the meantime we need to take baby steps and I think um a good way to think about it is that um as we progress with building better infrastructure the friction for end users and for developers uh gets reduced and as this friction gets reduced new tiers of potential use cases get unlocked and the way I think about it is okay the bigger the value proposition uh the less of an you know infra like the less infrastructure investment we need because people are really like invested or like driven to uh uh use this use case so if the use case is oh you can get rich tomorrow which is the investment use case people are going to go through all sorts of Hoops and all of us remember how crappy exchanges used to be a couple of year just a couple of years ago binance improved loads uh but still 5 years ago it was a terrible experience arguably and still tens of millions of people were super happy um to uh register go through all of the pain wait for days or weeks um uh to get verified um and then progressively as we are uh making it better uh people are happy to start start using crypto for other things maybe for peer-to-peer payments maybe to buy tickets um or maybe just to play with it and like see what it can do Beyond just appreciating in value and like move some money out of say binance account into binance with free wallet and play with um some defy uh protocols there and I think that um we are going in in a funny way as we are U upgrading our infrastructure based on the use cases of today we are uh Paving the way for use case of tomorrow because the use cases of tomorrow would only make sense if we can uh make uh using them easy enough for people to say okay that's worth my investment that's worth the learning curve I guess now I can start using I don't know stable coins to send money across uh the ocean uh to my friends in other countries Etc um so we're doing well um just to add up on that question infrastructure I will say infrastr infrastru always comes first with the right and solid infrastructure you can focus on more and more use cases shouldn't be the other way around and I will explain why when you have a good use case solid infrastructure you match those two then focus on building that that that infrastructure will give you access to more use cases but with a flaky infrastructure nothing is possible two two very good examples um again if binance wouldn't have a very solid trading engine we wouldn't have been able to develop binance space which focus on the spot trading product on uh the same if you biners wouldn't have one of the strongest matching end joints we we constantly and constantly put work on it we wouldn't be able to develop some of the most complex trading products out there including options and marginated products so always focus on a on infrastructure I see so many startups that Focus onch 10 use cases 12 use cases 15 use cases but with a flake infrastructure then when you see that the infrastructure doesn't provide what you need for use case number one it's like a Domino's effect and they give up focus on building of course you need to have a use case first infrastructure but after that you have those two always put more and more in infrastructure because that's what is going to allow you to keep developing and expanding Even in binance our leadership and what we do every day they do of course encourage us encourage every single member of bance to experiment and to try I mean build new use cases in the future yeah of course but at the end of the day one thing that our leadership has done well in the last few months is focus on one use case from idea to conception made it happen make it happen well and then you focus in another use case and another use case and another use case but made it happen well from idea to conception first I think it's um um when you mentioned that um it's good to always have a point like have an have an objective in mind when building infrastructure don't build it's just I mean sometimes it's good to experiment with things and then you might end up on something that's like pure gold but sometimes actually better to have uh this clear gold um clear objective in mind and a good example of that is the transition that Sello did from L1 to L2 so like the initial setup was U motivated by a high fees on ethereum and that made it virtually impossible to use on mobile and then um with time it actually got a lot of critic like cell got a lot of criticism for for being a separate L one so the transition right now to towards L2 um is something that lets you continue building uh your your use cases um but it's also driven and and and um uh it was started by the fact that if you're went to proof of stake model as well so we have that direct connotation between infrastructure enabling more more use cases yeah um you know I was thinking earlier about our prior to announcing that we wanted to transition to an L2 we had this idea and we even posted it to our Forum of becoming a rollup Centric ecosystem and being an L1 that we had other l2s roll up to us and like you said when we had launched um Sol L1 in on Earth Day of 2020 we we it wasn't possible for us to to be a part of ethereum and now coming home to ethereum we can take all of these really strong like infrastructure features that we have such as paying for gas with stable coins like users like if we were talking about our moms and our grandmas they if we said oh but you got to make sure you have enough in there to pay your gas fee they have no idea what you're talking about like do I need I need to put gas in my car I'm not sure what you mean and so we have things like this that are really making it easier for users and I think that on the infrastructure level we need to make improvements so that web 3 appears to be a web 2 app and so that people do have these moments like you said oh that's it and so um also social connect a feature on cell that allows you to instead of this like extremely long complex wallet address you can actually use a different identifier such as a your Twitter handle or your phone number or your email address and then you're able to send a payment to somebody's phone number not to this extremely long you know wallet address that's very complex and these are things that we focus on on the infrastructure level so that we can like you said create these different use cases um yeah around uh use cases and infrastructure I would say we sleep is built around a use case within travel but infrastructure is obviously plays the most important role within the entity if you looked at when the idea of sleep started getting built out most would think these guys are crazy doing a startup within travel just after co uh I mean if you look at Global stats uh the tourism sector only contributed roughly just over 4% and that bounced back to last year to over 9% so we knew that we had a use case already within the travel sector that hasn't been done before so we built this product out within the use case to ensure that we're able to perfect our infrastructure during a bare cycle I mean I'm sure majority of us yeah have had a tough cycle and I'm hoping that we are coming to the end of it or if not out of it but people aren't spending their crypto on services or Goods within a bare cycle and that's why we ensured that we' perfect our product infrastructure within the bad times to ensure when the bull cycle returns people are more freely using their crypto there's more opportunity there's more money to we made and now we've perfected this infrastructure around our use case and now we can have a lot more happy users around our platform what is the most annoying um sort of CH Point uh infrastructurally uh for your use case um infrastructurally especially within coming into from a web to travel service creating a complete new uh web 3 native platform I would say infrastructurally would be users trust um of using users needing to trust this this platform of the infrastructure that we've built out cuz originally when trying to make a booking on our platform you needed to log in with your wallet and reason for that is to obviously Drive users to use web 3 products uh web3 wallets and products to make a booking for their hotel but we realized that was obviously our biggest blockage as people are not going to want to connect their wallets just to search for their hotels especially not knowing us personally or our backgrounds we realize we're pushing lot of users Away by doing that so now we've changed the the infrastructure of our platform that users are now able to search normally as a normal platform but if they want that web3 rate what we soal it then you log in further with your wallet as you would on any other booking platform to get an extra discount and now that web 3 rate uh that web 2 rate is unlocks a web 3 rate with that user signing in because if you use the platform once you trust the platform the next time you may be more comfortable to log in you now trust that platform you're are successful getaway you successfully checked in and now that next moment forward you continuously in that user's head wondering if they should take that step forward and now log in and they will save more on their travels being a web three user I think bringing up trust is um super important in discussion about Mass adoption because the rise of trust in cryto would also uh in crypto would also um signify that we're getting closer to mass adoption and I think a lot of that I think there are like different kinds of trust so you can have trust on a very low level to you you trust the protocol you trust the team you're confident that you know the app that you're interacting with is is legit but you can also have trust on the higher level as how is um Community as a whole perceiving cryptocurrencies and a lot of that I think has to do with the institutional adoption so what we're seeing right now in the in the US around the whole um presidential campaign and they like crypto being used as a um uh as a in a game I would say um it also reflects very much on the fact that crypto has entered that space where institutional adoption is a thing um we're seeing that on a daily basis but what does it contribute to because to me it mostly contribute to trust because you you as an individual you would not see that you would not be the one interacting with that but what you can see is that media are more familiar with with cryptocurrencies the media are the the government are more um um accustomed with that and I wanted to ask about that adoption through um uh institutions that mass adoption uh understood as institutional adoption um and of course binance is leading the way here and always have um so it's good to know how you're perceiving that how you feeling that your collaboration with um institutions is pushing the growth of the entire web free and crypto Community what we need to understand is that institutions are Institution joining the space has never been bigger before this year has been unprecented influx of institution to the to the space and this shows and this is a clear sign that there is more trust not only in exchanges there's more Trust on the assets more Trust on the market um with the um institutionalization of products such as Bitcoin ETF and ethereum ETF we have seen some of the most conservative asset managers jumping in the space um binance particularly we have seen and hundreds and hundreds of Corporations on boarding to binance uh this year only and and this is a clear statement that they're starting to trust more and more this Market um in terms of what binance is doing with institutional actors for us is all about generating some of the strongest use cases with well managers specifically this year we're launching um a product called wealth Pro which is going to allow wealth managers to um to uh manage and distribute the capital of their clients and their clientele on Exchange it's going to be very simple to use very friendly interface we're already rolling out the the beta phase of this product and with uh products like this we're just going to make it easier and easier for asset managers to jump into digital assets with a product I named before a Tre party banking custody again we were the first Exchange in pioneering uh disolution which is making uh Pension funds wealth managers to still use their Banks of choice but being able to allocate with P binance at the same time be able to trade with us and that's key for binance is just to make sure we keep being that bridge between institutional world and crypto in terms of um how do we foresee this space growing look we still have we still need to unlock one more type of institutional actors and those are sovereignty wealth funds and we're talking about over four trillion to 5 trillion in wealth just locked in sovereignty wealth funds we are seeing many of them already considering crypto Japan was one of the first um and we are there we're just months away from unlocking that last phase um if there is any question open open to it I I want to save that optimism for the um uh for my for my last question but before we go into that I wanted to tap into a bit more into into the again trust but this time from the community point of view so um adoption through Community empowerment is something that I've um always really appreciated and admired and I want to see how I want to ask Kate about how cell is handling handling that so so sell is focus on empowering those communities you're very locally um focus do you have your your targets there um do you onboard people by do you do you increase the the adoption there by development in infrastructure do you build trust do do you how do you try to activate them it's definitely both pieces so like I said earlier we have features on the protocol level that allow the use of the solo platform to be very easy and to look like web too um I think that there also is this trust within the like different Partnerships that we build and the partners that we launch with but there's also trust that's built with our users and with our communities by just understanding users and understanding our their needs and also the different user personas like even in in Africa when I was down in Kenya last year for the Africa Tech Summit it was such an eyeopener to me to see that like most people treat Africa as an entire continent and they don't understand that each country and even within each country each region is so different and the way that we position products and we Market our products to these different user groups have to be different you know in Nigeria web 3 is much more accepted and so with minay it's a you know a stable coin wallet but in Kenya web 3 is not as accepted and so it's a dollar wallet like they wouldn't even know that they're using web 3 they just know that they can hold an asset that keeps the same value as a dollar and be able to pay bills or send it to family or transfer it to pay somebody back for coffee and so I think it's it's all of these different pieces but you can't achieve the adoption the trust any of it without having all of all of them together I think it's important to um that's my train of thought um what I wanted to wanted what I wanted to add is that um when you look at that um Community adoption and that um the infrastructure developments that help you you mentioned and and Simon said that as well and and Brandon as well that you want to make web free invisible and making it invisible is part of achieving that mass adoption that we need to make web free totally transparent um make the users effectively unaware that they're dealing with crypto um to make sure that this is acceptable them acceptable to them and um and something that they use into in in their daily daily life and if we have that perception for crypto what kind of adoption are we actually looking for for do we want to make web free like blend with everything else that we have with with traditional Finance do we want this to be like an amalgamate of of different ways of managing money or do we want to create our own separate community and just get more people in because it's a very different different um approach there you can be uh you can think about everybody from outside of crypto crypto ecosystem as sort of an enemy or you can treat um everybody as every body as um just like they haven't been offered um a good enough infrastructural solution to uh to join in or it's too it's too problematic for them and it's an open question so I I just wanted to add perhaps in terms of saying invisible it needs to be smooth uh it needs to be needs to have no friction if and and a big part of ensuring that mass adoption is just REM removing that friction and you can see it before and after 2024 with with hedge funds um it was so expensive for a hedge fund to on board in the d space two years ago because they need a special integration for a custodian when they need a special integration for a liquidity provider then they need a special integration when they need collocation as per IP services for now and now you have exchanges already doing all of that in once we have companies doing all of that in once which remove the frictions we' remove those operational costs and ensures more hedge funds and prop desk jump into the space doesn't need to be invisible it will never be invisible it needs to be needs to have less friction I mean if you you know you take a you break open a phone you still see the the Insight of that but it doesn't mean you have to understand that doesn't mean you have to care about that you're just using the phone as you you know as your extension of your hand and that's it so I think we're getting what we're looking forward is is is that that crypto is becomes an extension of our life that we are aware of but doesn't mean that we all have to know you know how the um per Dees actually work uh I agree and I think I think when we used to talk about Mass adoption a couple years ago there was a really big push on like education we need to educate people we need to like get them to understand and know what web 3 is and all of these different aspects of like the infastructure and the and how it's used and I think now we we don't talk about that because it's not needed I agree that like it's still there we can people can know it's still there but they don't need to be fully educated on it and understand every single aspect of it we just really need to make it easy to use yeah I fully agree with that I I do feel like education does play a big role in this as if you try speak to a normal person about cryptocurrency they see it as a scam or they want nothing to do with it but if they just understood how the basics work it'll lead to so much more of a large understanding from your day-to-day people and it needs to happen naturally about the integration from normal traditional people into web 3 cuz I mean look at all of us here sitting in a room at a conference in wara I mean there's no Community like the crypto community and I feel that more and more everyday people when they get to feel actually The Passion of individuals and how many people are actually building within the space I think it's a it's a large eye opener to the the future of crypto and what's to come as I do believe this is just the beginning and as mass adoption has started I do believe it's going to come with haste and yeah this is definitely just the beginning of mass adoption and enjoy the ride so um do we want to blend in or uh Stand Out stand out uh great question I I think that's um I think that's you know we gonna sort of go uh into this pendulum of like you need to generate something that truly stands out to generate enough interest um and uh to build infrastructure that would then later allow us to uh build solutions that uh blend in um it's uh like if you think about for example um about the history of credit cards um as much as I know about like what I know about this industry um is that it started as um a um something marketed uh for a very particular user base um and many credit card schemes started uh specifically to serve uh restaurants and people going to restaurants so that was very very specific use case um it it it stood out um that was uh pretty different to paying by uh say check um and then it started PR proliferating um and and uh then you uh got the uh opportunity to start paying with cards online which was again a very narrow uh particular peculiar uh use case and then it's spread out and now you pay uh for a taxi uh with your card but it's all online you do not you do not even pull it out of your uh pocket so I think we're going to go through similar phases and pendulum um in the crypto World however uh I myself spent most of my days uh working on making crypto blend in so this is uh the particular focus on of my company and um this is why I uh tell people that uh our mission here um hasn't ended uh until we made uh the entire process of onboarding into a crypto product as easy as uh buying something um online and we are even trying to emulate uh the userflow step steps to um sort of look similar to buying something uh uh online in our everyday work and I think that the next stage for us in web 3 not in crypto but in web 3 uh particularly is to uh blend in so to make this entire payment process um look uh super familiar and get to this uh oh wow that's it uh moment uh as fast as we can making it effortless I think we're we're very much agreed on uh we're very much agree on on on how we perceive ad option there what we need there um and I want to wrap up this session with um a fun story from your past so we've all made uh predictions like um I remember myself saying yes gaming will be the big thing taking crypto into into mainstream I was basically stocking up on um on different tokens related to gaming teams um sort of pan out not fully um and I want to hear your prediction like What's um and that's a very difficult construct in English so forgive me what have you thought would be the next big thing to get crypto into that mass adoption adoption phase what was the thing that you've predicted like three five years ago and what's your vision on this right now Brandon maybe let's start with you um I've been in the crypto industry for about 5 years and I realized Global regulation was completely lacking and I always coming from uh originally South Africa uh at the time when I started within the web 3 space it was not even known within Africa and it's so great to hear how you growing the the the African industry and I always just hoped for infrastructure within the world around legalities of cryptocurrency May that have been through governmental institutions hedge funds coming in institutional money and that is coming to play now so I'm really excited for the years ahead um and I do believe that just it's going to be a Snowball Effect and as more join that the rest will follow and yeah that's where I see it you stand by your prediction from before that that this kind of like legal adoption will be the thing that uh will take crypto mainstream uh Michael since you have the Michael already um bold prediction I do think the binance is going to cross the 300 million users by end of the year January next year see um I I do think we have okay we're we're going to invite you here next year and we're going to do a um a checkpoint on that hopefully fingers crossed then and uh the second prediction um is more based on pure research um as I as I mentioned earlier it's going to be we're just about to unlock one of the biggest accumulation in wealth in history which is wealth sovereignty wealth funds is about there we have about six to five trillion just locked in right there um as I said before we already seeing many countries jumping in Japan being one of the first so in a few months we're going to see some of those sovereignty well funds jumping in the space which was at the end of the day the last piece of this puzle right we as slowly saw more and more different different type of institutional clients jump in the space and that was certainly the most conservative one so I would say five to six months we're going to see just last that last B okay so having getting more funds into into into the play unlocking really big money sovereignty will funds to be exact okay which was one of the most conservative types of funds out there yeah that's where all the the oldest wealth in the world is sit um and yeah where I think I strongly believe we're just five to six months away from seeing that door opened completely Shimon what do you think so you ask actually two questions so um my prediction from the past um um and I know that it it's like the the funniest ones are that did not P out so I I I have one for you and a new one that I have now for the future so one from the past is that I used to think that a lot of people would move out of centralized exchanges onto web three wallets and that they would do it fast and after FTX happened I was like okay like this is 100% certain there's going to be a huge outflow from centralized exchanges like people saw with their own own eyes what it means when you uh leave your money on a centralized exchange they're going to all move it to metamask trust wallets Etc of the world and then we're going to see um the defy world and like all sorts of apps flourishing uh because people are going to be just so much closer um to the actual use cases um as soon as they would just move their assets from centralized exchanges to um decentralized or non-custodial uh rather uh wallets and uh this did not pan out uh people still trust centralized exchanges um and it seems like uh for for quite some people still this is the entry point uh into web 3 um and I used to be frustrated with that but I'm I'm no longer because uh hear me out I have a new um brilliant hypothesis of how people are going to actually Bridge um into web 3 and I think we are already um seeing this happening um we saw um this trend uh unfolding um already uh before FTX so we saw that a lot of Web 2.0 platforms were sort of trying to explore web 3 and um a funny anecdote from from ramp uh we were um very close to closing some big corporate accounts and um sort of sell them our solution to onboard their user basis uh on to web 3 literally we had a meeting with meta scheduled um and um there was like six people on their side and like some people from our side uh we were meant to uh go and like uh do workshops together to figure out how this could look like in practice U then FTX happened and then you know we sent an email uh a casual email saying hey this is the agenda for the meeting um to the to these six people from meta and like five of these emails returned like you know I I I ped out back email saying I no longer I no longer work here and then one last person the manager of that team uh responded saying oh sorry we're uh winding down and uh I going to be gone in one week from now as well um so that was like pretty sad um but now again we're seeing some signs of that and I have a very part particular hypothesis of um how or like where um big Web 2.

0 companies could um have enough motivation to uh uh get on board with web 3 so I think that there is this very specific category of tech where um these products are we basically run our lives on these products uh these products have hundreds of millions of users and are terribly uh under monetized and I specifically mean uh browsers and messenging apps all of us have probably like two or three different browsers on our phones we run our lives on uh these apps we also have probably like a dozen different um messaging app and the funny thing is that we do not pay a dime to any of these developers so these developers have hundreds of U millions of users um and almost zero opportunities to monetize it and I think that by rolling out uh Financial Services to all of these users they could uh potentially uh start seeing some viable ways to monetize uh this massive scale that they have however the problem is that they are truly Global so to roll something out um that is Financial in nature you need to um Goble like you know dozens of different uh licenses and this is basically not the their core competence so we are uh seeing right now um a like good half dozen uh big companies sort of looking or already venturing into web 3 to try to see if they can monetize uh their massive uh network of users uh by offering Financial uh services and they chose web 3 as a sort of like you know proof of concept to see if they can do that um and one example that is already public is telegram so telegram announced that their intention is to get 20 to 30% of their massive 1 billion uh U user user base um on Chain by the end of 2028 which is like you know uh uh in grand scheme of things this is tomorrow and uh we know about uh uh some more companies um that are sort of venturing or like uh at least playing with uh this concept with this idea and I keep telling my team that uh we are going to succeed when Google Chrome is going to decide to go go into web 3 and they're going to choose ramp to onboard uh uh their billion users onto onto web 3 and this is sort of like the mental model with which we are trying to operate you want to build a product that would be a no-brainer for the product manager at Chrome uh trying to add web 3 and they wait to uh on board uh their hundreds of millions billions of users uh on to web3 definitely start first with Opa and Kate what's what's going to be your prediction what was your prediction from the past and what's yours now so I think from a from a solo perspective the prediction from the past that I shared earlier about you know becoming this rollup Centric ecosystem as an L1 and and essentially competing with ethereum at that at that time with that road map ahead uh was definitely the the naive prediction from the past um I think we're on the right path now coming home to ethereum and being a chain that's going to extend the functionality of ethereum moving forward um and I think uh also I also thought that like wallets and people were really going to catch on to that when I first joined web 3 I really tried to get all of my friends to like stop using venmo just like send it to me in a wallet and they were like why would I do that I can just venmo you it's much easier so um some some naive predictions there but I think in the future um I see us just addressing real world problems and real world um users and you know I think a lot of us are very lucky from where we come from and the kind of Institutions that we had and access that we had to different Financial systems but it's not that way in the rest of the world so I think stable coin adoption is going to continue globally um and I think that we are going to get to mass adoption eventually amazing I'm very happy that we're leaving and that we're finishing this on on a very optimistic note thank you so much for for joining me today uh because we're short on time we're not going to stay on for the questions but I think we can hang around there in the in the Expo Zone and and and talk to anybody who wants to continue that insightful conversation about um Mass adoption and that's it thank you so much for for joining me today and we're meeting here next year and we're verifying the predictions and then we're going like uh you know whoever scores the best prediction um I don't know buy strings or something I mean it's a deal it's a deal perfect awesome thank you so much thank you [Applause]