Panel | Crypto payments, adoption, and privacy | ETHDam III - 2025

Welcome to East to E to E to E to E. So coming up next is a is a topic about crypto payments adoption and privacy. Now crypto payments and stable coins has been a very exciting topic I guess that's come up. So I'm really looking forward to this. So I'm going to introduce Tyler onto the stage and then we're just going to go from there.

Please give a round of applause to [Applause] Tyler. Good luck. Go for it. Go for it. Just introduce your panelists.

All right. I was going to I was going to have them introduce themselves as they can do a better job. Invite them onto the stage. Okay. Well, let's invite everyone on the stage, please, guys.

Good to see you. Hey, how you doing? Good to see you. Way to make it awkward for poor Tyler. No, no, no.

We're at a privacy conference. There's no such thing as being awkward here. So, um, so yeah, I guess to start off, um, obviously payments is one of the biggest topics. Um, and then kind of it subsidiary topics. Um, uh, let's just start real quick backgrounds on you guys kind of why you're here, how you got into crypto, why payments, what you're working on, you know, and a quick little sound bite.

Yeah, I guess I'll start. We'll go this way. Uh, my name is Joel and I run business development and marketing for Dash, which is a cryptocurrency focused on being the best payments and money system in the world. Personally, um, I was always a sound money advocate and kind of was trying to see how I could use gold and silver as my money and it's apparently not very easy. That's kind of how I got into Bitcoin around 2013.

2015, I started only earning crypto cuz I didn't want anything to do with fiat. 2016, I closed my bank account. So, I've been living off of crypto almost 10 years now. So, clearly, I kind of had to get into I was never into payments before that, but it was just you have to figure it out to not use fi currency. So, it's kind of like, you know, here I am because I kind of had to be.

Amazing. Great intro. Um, my name is Rick Thomas. I'm I'm here on behalf of Onramper and we're actually a company from Amsterdam, so quite close to home. Uh, my background is uh a long time ago a lot of e-commerce uh web 2 software.

Uh, I've been in crypto since 2016, but I haven't been living off of crypto fully. We'll get you. I I should Thank you. Let's chat. Um at on-ramp we provide a uh an on-ramp infrastructure to wallets uh exchanges deps you name it.

Uh where we basically aggregate uh currently 28 different on and off ramps uh providing a single infrastructure that any of these parties can integrate to uh easily allow their end users to buy uh crypto using fiat and a large variety of different payment methods. Thank you guys. Um I'm Gee. I'm uh co-founder of Bleep. Um just a bit of background uh I I studied engineering and I did a master thesis on blockchain applied to logistics uh which I I'm not sure blockchain is really being applied to logistics today like successfully at least.

So that was kind of a flop. But it really got me this was like eight or nine years ago. It really got me into thinking about the technology and all the applications. Um, I've always worked at startups and before starting Bleep, I worked at Revolute. Some of you probably know it.

It's a big fintech and it solves a lot of problems and I've always been a user of Revolute, but there were a bunch of things that I thought, holy like oh sorry I don't know if we can swear on this thing but um blockchain would solve this so much more efficiently especially when it comes to like remittances or just going from one place to another place uh financially speaking and not being tied to one like provider let's say like you can just take everything you have and just go somewhere else. Um, so a friend of mine who was also at Revolute at the time thought we thought let's just build Revolute on chain and basically provide a much better service, a 10x service uh in terms of financial benefits. So that's what we did with Bleep. You can just use it as a regular day-to-day uh bank account, but it's not a bank. Uh, it's your money.

Everything is under your control. Um, nobody can steal it from you, etc., etc. Um, so yeah, that's basically me. Fantastic.

Um, so starting off, um, is one of sort of my favorite questions and things that I've been working on is you look at payment systems right now, digital payment systems. You have like WeChat pay, payt is there's their bank account. You can pay, use it anywhere. You know, people out in rural areas can just pay with the QR code. It just works.

No one thinks about the technology, anything else like that. probably have like three to four billion users at this point. I mean, it's it is the de facto, you know, it's maybe outside of what we see every day, but that that's it, right? Um, can crypto do this? Can we can we achieve that standard of payment, whether it's just like cash for instance, or these very intuitive, extremely simple um barebones payment systems that everyone uses with no friction, the speed, the cost, everything.

Can can we do this in crypto? like is that an aspiration we can have? Um what are your thoughts on that and then especially as it might pertain to the privacy angle also? So I would say definitely like not just yeah probably but definitely um these kinds of uh I guess legacy payment rails it's just tech it's just ways of transmitting data back and forth of who sends what to what and um they're constrained by all kinds of you know centralized structures blockages legal things KYC all kinds of different things um and they're efficient despite these things I think that we can be efficient without having those barriers. Um, obviously if we just use, you know, neutral data networks, neutral networks, cryptocurrencies that anyone can use without permission, obviously, I think things would go a lot kind of better.

Um, but I think that um it like everything, we need to keep working at it for a while. And I do kind of feel like with the payment space, a lot of people did sort of say, oh, Bitcoin's great for payments. Oh, then it's maybe not. and then kind of got got distracted doing other things for a while. But I think if we really hammer down on making these networks work and hammer down on like what are these like what do people do when they send a we shadow?

There has to be like a username. How do we put that data on the blockchain? How do we do that in a private way? If we actually approach these problems and solve them as a real way like this has to be something that works and we actually make sure the underlying blockchains work and stop saying well you know 40 second block time is fine or you know if they have to get rid of those excuses and start trying to like actually make the underlying tech better then I think that building an interface like that on top of this should be I would say easy but very doable. Awesome.

Um, thanks. I can add to that. Um, more from the perspective of where users in web 2 are today. Um, we handle with a lot of fiat, which I think technically is still a problem because these are all licensed uh, money businesses. So, KYC, AML, and we'll probably touch on those topics later on, are still very much a thing.

Um but once on chain which is I think where everyone should be uh things are getting better uh and all the parties that we speak to whether it's B2B whether it's B2C from remittances to to business payments um we see stable coins on the rise um and there you can actually see that settlement times fees etc are starting to compete with um Trafi which I think is a is a really really good uh development Um and so far uh at least at onramper we've not really dealt with um uh remittances because getting money onchain getting money offchain. I don't know whether you guys all know on and off ramps but they earn quite a bit of money. It is quite expensive. Um nowadays you see uh Revolute you see companies like ble you see other companies like bridge uh iron that provide stablecoin infrastructure that makes it a lot faster and cheaper to move money uh across border. Um so yeah I definitely think that there is a lot of opportunities uh there.

Um let let me go to what you said. It's like with PTM or whatever. Uh people are not thinking about the technology. They're just oh this works so I'll just point my camera at it and it'll work. And the problem with like these big centralized players is that you have to be part of their e ecosystem.

Like for example, Revolute, you have to like for for you to be able to send money for free instantly, you have to be part of Revolute and you have to be part of PTM or whatever to be able to send money for free between uh your friends. Like they both have to have a a PTM account. And with blockchain, you don't have to have the same account because the the blockchain is just the infrastructure. And then you can have an account with Bleep and then you can have an account with MetaMask or whatever and you can still just transfer instantly virtually for free. So you're you're not locking customers into an ecosystem because the or think about it like probably you've heard this a million times but think about it as the internet.

Nobody is thinking about uh like when they buy a internet subscription. They're not thinking like oh is this using like IP or is this using like TCP or whatever. They're thinking oh I just need to buy like a subscription to the internet service and then the internet is just the underlying infrastructure that's uh allowing all the data to to go back and forth. So there are some advantages to centralized um like infrastructure just a little bit faster like you don't need all of this trust list val validation and all of that stuff but you lose all the composibility that a a global underlying infrastructure gives you and you lose the like the freedom to go where a new protocol is or a new service is because you're locked into that um like provider. Um, so cost like we've all we've already seen transactions per second like on chains like Salana like cost like that's all been solved for the most case in my opinion.

So now it's just a matter of like uh in my opinion for like forgetting seed phrases, forgetting all that complex UX. Again, nobody knows what an HTTP packet is, but everybody uses it every day, right? So we just have to make all of that infrastructure like agnostic to the user or like abstracted to the user and and then we're there. Then it works like PTM where you just point at a QR code and it works. Yeah.

with some of the uh some of the features I guess that have been developed progress we've been making. Can you guys give some examples of some privacy preserving payment methods now that people are literally using in the real world even if it's more minimal? We're not looking at massive massive adoption yet. I know there's been some, but are there some, you know, these glimmers of hope that we can all kind of look or maybe use? Maybe we've used them before.

Can you mention some that that you see literally in real life now actually getting used? How real are we talking real life? Like coffee and Starbucks people here. It could be anything. It could be B2B payments.

It could be buying a subscription online. It could be buying a a house. It could be going and buying coffee at the neighborhood shop. Literally a transaction crypto, ideally a privacy preserving crypto for an exchange of value of some kind. Yeah.

So, first of all, I like this has been, you know, my own life for a long time and I try not to let that bias me and look around like what are other people actually doing? Um, but I definitely have noticed that privacy is back on the the it's kind of coming back in a big way generally. Like we see, for example, Apple advertising about privacy and stuff like that. And then um I've been kind of a big fan of usability in crypto and usernames are something that really still today are like maybe not the best from a privacy perspective because typically like an ENS name or whatever just maps to an address and you can just see everyone's money and all their NFTts and everything and who you should rob and hit over the head and stuff and it's it's a little little little nasty but so there are a few different setups that make people be able to use this a lot more. Um, obviously Dash is one of these that doesn't expose the address, right?

Like the whole stealth addressing type thing. I don't want uh can you give some examples how Dash is being used? I know of some, so I don't want to lead you too much into it, but uh could you talk maybe about some of that? Yeah. So, I mean, for my own personal thing, that's kind of what I use for money, used to pay bills, used to buy things, etc.

Um, one, let me give you an interesting kind of example that intersects with a lot of things. Um I don't know if it's Milan here but uh Milan's giving a talk on nano GBT later. Um he has this very uh fun service that's basically a a privacy preserving front end for all kinds of LLMs. So if you want to use you don't have to sign up for chat GBT. You don't have to sign up for Midjourney.

You don't have to do any of these. You just pay like as little as 10 cents worth of crypto and they it does accept Dash and Monero and some other things like that. um then you can just use and obviously the prompts that end up there aren't really private at the end of the day but no it just no one knows who's sending these in and so like as a real example like uh I've noticed my wife using a lot of the free version of chatgbt I'm like why don't you use nanopppbt I'll send you some dash to top it off and then kind of doing that way I've noticed that a lot of like privacy tools like that whether it's you know VPNs um I'm big privacy nerd in a lot of ways uh like VoIP numbers that I pay for for my phone. I don't even know my real phone number. Um those all take crypto.

Um there's one-time verification uh numbers for services that will give let you rent a real phone number. They all take crypto as well. There's a lot of these kinds of things where like the entire privacy ecosystem I feel like is starting to to run on crypto. And um so I know for example um there's a a service called privacy.com that let you generate like one like singleuse card numbers for privacy and payment but you have to link your bank account.

But there's so many different crypto companies now that will do the same thing but you pay in crypto. So like you want to buy like a $108 subscription online or whatever you pay with crypto, get a onetime use card with no name on it and you just kind of use it like that. So those are kind of the things that I'm in my particular orbit, but I'm very interested in seeing less weird people maybe what they've kind of come across. I don't have too much to add to that and that's because on-ramping is very much regulated obviously uh I mean I know Dash is supported by a few but some of the other privacycentric coins are are actually not uh due to whatever regulations. Um most that we see is apart from like bitcoin ethereum is onramping into stable coins and moving from there.

Um but um we we are agnostic so we would like to work with uh with everything and obviously support it. We are not part of the flow of funds. So I don't touch fiat I don't touch crypto it's just an infrastructure. Um but on the agnostic side it's obviously also uh working with currently I think a bit over 60 different blockchains including many uh zero knowledge proof uh chains that will also add to uh to privacy uh as much as possible. Uh and the option that I did want to give is prefunded debit cards with a lot of privacy in it but you just took it from me so I'll just pass it over to you.

Um, I'll maybe this is not the purpose of the question, but I'll play devil's advocate and uh and go on the other side. I don't have a lot of examples other than the ones Joel mentioned um like short or small payments online. uh we don't provide those because uh we are similar similarly to on-ramper we are heavily regulated with mica here in Europe and and all that stuff like um we provide a bunch of no KYC services that are cryptonative but the moment you want to buy something uh that right now that privacy is it's not gone uh because nobody knows that that address belongs to you but the transaction is there on the blockchain um but I think the way that we should uh like the the the future that I see is yes, it's going to be regulated. Like there's nothing we can do. Governments will exist, regulators will exist.

Like they they will want to know where a million dollars uh went if they were stolen and stuff like that. But it should be a privacy by default uh where it's like your home. Like your home is private by default, but if you do something shady, even if you haven't done it, it just looks like you did. The police can go there with a search warrant and look at your stuff. doesn't mean that everybody else in the world can go into your home and look at your stuff, but at least the police can do it and and take their conclusions.

It should be the same with your with your crypto. It I don't think it can be fully fully private. It should be private by default and then when regulators or auditors or police or governments or whatever need to find a criminal or whatever, they should be able to, you know, get that information. And I know that like probably here at this conference specifically could turn a couple heads because people are like no but like I haven't done anything wrong so I want to remain private. Um but I that's the future I see and yeah just the examples they gave were perfect I guess now.

So at the we we started with some of these larger payment systems and we gave a few of the examples that we currently have. Um what's holding it back then? like what are the pieces that are sort of like because you all gave answers and said almost like this is inevitability we can get there this is going to come together which I also believe by the way so I'm not countering that by any means but we all have conviction that this is all happening and like through the efficiencies of the technology we see this all coming together but yet there probably is nowhere near the traction we're looking for just yet um what how and how has that changed how is this target potentially changed or what's sitting in front of us right now that what is the biggest barrier to adopt adoption and what are some of the things we can do about it? Yeah, this is like a 30 minute thing, but I'm going to try to get it to like 2 3 minutes. U the first thing is people don't try to use crypto.

So most and people in crypto don't try to use crypto for money because of this the knowledge of what works and doesn't is like so bad because you have to like try something bump up into it and be like oh this is this is the the thing I now I understand more. So number one, there's just the consumer demand really kind of fuels the rest of the space. So you need to know, you need to try and then you will know. So that's number zero or number one, I don't know. Um the next thing is uh along that lines, we have to start demanding blockchains work well.

There are some there are plenty that do but there's also a lot of like you know for example the Ethereum flag fragmented layer 2 road mapap or whatever where now it's like oh I got the wrong US it's the USD t not the USDC and it's on the wrong one it's the wrong extension this and then oh they don't accept this but I don't like and then oh so it's arbitrum I need to have arbitrum for a guest no ethon arbitum is just people like this entire situation And the fact that I get that like people are trying their best, but the fact that there's a situation people said this is fine. It's like the meme with the burning thing. This is fine. Like no, it's not fine. Just don't tear don't tolerate it for a single second and then we can move on to things that like actually work.

Uh so those are the the two big ones. Um I do think that there the ability for again like I have a talk at two that's like a lot of this stuff but um a lot of the extra information around payments is just not associated with them. It's like I sent you know to an exchange okay 800 USDTR on whatever and then what else like what else do we know? What's this for? Well you know there's an invoice somewhere in an email.

It's like, okay, well, why isn't it with the payment? Like, especially like if you get like a card decline, for example, like there's almost no information that comes with that. Just say, yeah, your money didn't work. And thankfully, it happens very rarely because otherwise people would be revoling. But we should be able to enc attach encrypted metadata along with crypto transactions to say like this was for rent at this valuation at this time.

So, when you're looking through, you're like, "Oh, okay. I see what that's for." And then people actually kind of start to use that. Then the other problems of you know not adopted enough the accounting problem like oh the exchange rate of this I got paid how much like all those things are like a couple people can figure it out. It's not that hard but the big things you do need to start trying to use it so you encounter the problems.

You need to stop using crap tech. Don't wait 20 minutes for Bitcoin confirmation. I mean hold your Bitcoin but spend other things like stop messing around with it and stop lying about it. Stop lying that lightning works. Like come on.

stop it and then yeah you need to start figuring out those like data problems along with transactions and then everything else is doable I think. Uh all right um I'd like to touch on the consumer side as well as the business side. I think from a consumer perspective abstracting away everything um I mean I've been in in this business for 3 years and my mom still doesn't know what we do. Um so it's just too difficult. hundreds of different I saw a shirt around here today that says my mom thinks I work for Bitcoin.

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's probably the same same thing. Um, so just making it seamless and user friendly I think is the way forward uh to bring more users on chain. Um, and I think again apps like uh like Bleep might might help there. Um, because you just need to make sure that users on board as smoothly as possible as if they are just downloading Revolute and make it make it good.

Um I think zero knowledge and and KYC is a big part of this. Um even with where I am today, centralized exchanges KYC and then you want to on-ramp, you have to KYC again. You want to use a different payment method and a different on-ramp, you have to KYC again. About a year, two years ago, we spoke to many like zero knowledge KYC providers. What they're doing is all like super cool.

However, institutions, regulated entities cannot rely on this level of KYC. I would love to see that solved. Um, and on the B2B side, institutional adoption might actually push that and and help drive this because once institutions start driving money on chain and using blockchains to move money from entity to entity, country to country, etc., they will also want privacy um there from A to Z because they don't want others to see their business transactions of course. So um yeah, I think B2B might actually help B2C solve a few of these things.

Uh but yeah, my main thing has and probably will still be for a long time abstracting away as much as possible for end users. I obviously agree with both of you. um might disagree a bit with Joel, but like without trying to get political or anything, um cryptoolitical, it's even worse. I think I think the two main problems are UX and cost, which basically what we talked about. UX is seed phrases like, oh, I have to download this other app in order to pay for this other thing on this other app.

Or, oh, I have to connect something like what is this? like I just want to trade or I just want to buy dog with hat or whatever. Um, all of that that's UX. There's no reason for it to be complex. Like you just whatever the customer wants to do, just make it just make that the one click that the customer needs to do.

Uh, when you can't do that, try to make it in as few clicks as possible. And the cost like it it's not free to run Facebook. It's not free to run Google. It's not free to run Instagram and all of those services. Yet they're all free.

Obviously, somebody spoke about this earlier. You're paying with your data. Doesn't matter. Like you're paying with your data because they're an advertising company. But their business models and especially like I think u with crypto and DeFi because it's so much more capital efficient.

You don't need to make customers pay for gas or make them pay for like signing this thing or signing that thing. But just just don't go get your money from elsewhere. Go get money from another capital efficient protocol where you can still give the customers good value for their money. like and I'm just thinking like all of these like uh liquid staking protocols whatever uh like I think I saw Lido somewhere over there partnering um or like yield stable coins a customer like a retail customer doesn't need to do doesn't need to know all the intricacies of all of those protocols they just need to know oh oh sorry I cursed um you need you can make whatever 5% a year or 10% % a year on your thousands, that's great. And the the the service providing those five or 10% could be making just 1% just taking a 1% fee and then it covers for all the gas and all the the complexities that the those users would have to go through otherwise.

So I think I mean I I wouldn't I we wouldn't have started ble if we didn't think it was solvable. So uh we are solving this and companies like Dash and and and oner are solving other parts of the problem as well. Yeah, you were saying like uh what's the blocker? I don't I don't think there's any blocker right now. And I think we we are proof of that.

Like uh we're onboarding people that have no idea what crypto is because they can just use a card with 2% cash back. They can just trade. They can just do things. And some things will ask for KYC, some things won't. But it's always a journey that where the customer clicks and oh, next, next.

Oh, selfie. Next, next. Oh, okay. Done. So there's no need to for it to be complex.

Um, so I guess Joel, you're uh you're bearish ZK roll-ups on Bitcoin, huh? Well, let's see how let's see how it looks. I I think the whatever the premise is flawed where you have something that doesn't work super well that you're trying to make over and over. Just do something different. Anyway, I liked your comment about the crypto political though, so why don't we go there real quick?

Absolutely. So just to like get a high level, we've got uh various like um let's say application within crypto, right? You have something like Dash which um without getting too deep in some of the technology is more sort of privacy at like a transactional sort of level. Um you have things like Zcash which um you know has a completely um public part and then uh privacy pools right that you can move between them. Um, you have other projects.

I saw Zano is here. Um, they have a proof ofstake uh privacy by default payment network and all the the tokens there. So, it's all private. And then you'd have uh Ethereum rollups of some kind, right? That can be privacy preserving, privacy by default in their various applications.

Um, and then now the myriad of stable coins that could exist, right? That could be really interesting for payments. And so you could have to your point earlier around what chain you're on, what the abstraction looks like, how do you migrate between them and all these complexities. Um, will all these things exist, right? We've got all these different types of ways where we can transact or or preserve privacy.

Will they all exist? Should they all exist? Is there one of these in your opinion that's that's superior from like a philosophical level maybe than the others? one that maybe has the better technology kind of what are your I mean I know there's probably a little bit of bias here which is completely fine uh but like yeah what are your thoughts on that is like where this sort of goes is there room for more what's sort of going to win what's the philosophical angle that would win that people will use yeah so I think um first of all most things won't win just the way the free market works right statistics but at the same time the way the free market works is lots of people try and I love seeing like as much as I complain about you know back in my day we only had one stable coin it was only on Ethereum and much as I complain about that stuff um we need that to be fighting amongst its to like figure out what's the best option um and philosophically right now this is we're coming into a exciting but dangerous era the era of the stable coin where everything is migrating to a stable coin and it's all centralized stable stable coins, right? And that is something that will get the masses on board.

Uh because people are used to just dollars or counting similar whatever. Um people, I think, are sleeping on the sound money thing that got the Bitcoin revolution started. I think where people want a non-inflationary money that, you know, can't be manipulated and censored. the original like private digital cash kind of vision that kind of made Bitcoin launch the whole space and we're sort of sleeping on that still and I think it's going to be back just like we're seeing a big privacy wave kind of of interest in just not in the public maybe but in places like this it's starting to really pick up. I think that um the actual scarce sound money digital cash thing is going to be huge in like maybe not five years because that's the time it'll take for the stable coin revolution to come in and then people start getting censored right and left and then maybe another five years we're back to sound money.

So you would be more the base asset itself, privacy by default, everything having a privacy preserving is sort of your like kind of what I guess that's not exactly what Bitcoin is, but that's your thought of where it starts or or where where it hopefully ends up. I just I don't know if that's going to be like, you know, 5 10 20 years everyone's going to be using a private decentralized sound money thing. I don't know how realistic that is, but I do know that that is going to be popular and we will it will become more popular the more the kind of like protocd stable coin kind of thing will start to get cracked down on in my opinion. I'll stick to abstraction. I think right now you see a lot popping up.

Not everything will survive. A lot won't. Uh but in the end I think for any end user using this technology it shouldn't really matter. I mean right now if you send money um from A to B you don't know that there's acquiring banks and issuing banks and all sorts of Visa Mastercard rules etc under the hood. So it shouldn't really matter.

Um things will consolidate. Some might win others might lose. Uh I think again user experience is is key here. Um, privacy by default, please. Um, will that be the end?

I'm unsure. Let's hope so. No, nothing to add. I think they did tremendous job, tremendous answers. Fantastic.

I think that's all the time we have. Thank you guys so much for your thoughts on all of this and and thanks you guys for listening. Thanks. Thanks everyone.