Ethereum for the next billion: DeFi for the unbanked/underbanked | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] well good morning everyone thank you for for being here I know uh mornings after Ravi can be a bit of a struggle so appreciate you all all being here uh so I'll do a bit of an introduction to myself and the ethereum foundation next billion program and then I'll pass it on to the brilliant panelists we have up on stage so my name is my name is Marcus I'm a fellow at the ethereum foundation where I am currently researching the implementations of Last Mile defy focusing primarily in Latin America and essentially asking ourselves how can we leverage defy to not just you know bring financial gain but actually Empower livelihoods in a real very tangible way so always happy to talk about these things at a later stage and context-wise into the next billion team really the the essence of next billion is to ask ourselves how can we leverage ethereum and web 3 not just to onboard the next billion users but to create tangible very visceral changes in their lives and do so at a very scalable level so with that I will pass it on to the three panelists here to my left and allow them to introduce ourselves and tell us a little bit about what they're working on hi I'm Abhishek bhattacharya I'm one of the co-founders at a project called world what we do is we are a C5 to D5 Bridge we are we started three years back helping Farmers enabling Farmers take loan against their crops that they can store right after harvesting uh Farmers receive very less uh price for the crops that for the for per kilogram price for the crops that they grow we enable them we encourage them to store it in a warehouse in a government or a private warehouse and sell it off after three or four months when the prices are 40 or even sometimes 100 to 100 percent better we use blockchain to do that to bring banks on the table we'll be discussing about that as well that how we brought Banks onto blockchain and that is what we've been doing now we are going on to decentralized finance soon so that the same farmers in a country like India and maybe everywhere else can get access to D5 lending as well thank you thank you so I'm Gabriela I'm from Mexico I am working on blowings blo INX that's an application decentralized application that manages saving circles you might know them as standards Couture's cheat funds or many ways around the world that's a way of people to actually let's say get an interest-free loan if you're one of the first uh from your friends or your family members and if you're the last you're actually contributing for them to get this these loan why this is important for us in Mexico and Latin America Asia and Africa it's not easy for us to get a loan and if we get one it's super normal to have 50 interest rate 100 percent and people don't read the small letters so we get into very big depth so this is why it's important to give them options to actually have this let's say social credit options so that's what we're doing hello everyone my name is Benson yuguna I come from Kenya we've been working with smallholder Farmers with acre Africa solving the insurance problem so Agri insurance has been a problem where we have very low penetration for years it has been around three percent of the smallholders taking up insurance and we feel it's important for them to take up insurance and many other traders who are earning an income because we were able to protect them because lack of insurance has left most of the the farmers exposed to hunger because after a climate effect then no food then it means they can't sell because it also the food has been affected meaning no income and a whole cycle of unfavorable things so with that we are doing this solving the problems that are making them not take up insurance and blockchain has helped us to do some of these things which we'll discuss as we go on thank you Marcus awesome thank you um so yeah an incredible group of people here doing amazing work uh really just changing people's lives in a very real sense using you know this technology so I mean I just before maybe to set a little bit of context we could just go around and and uh just perhaps lay the scene of you know we've got India Latin America and Africa up out here on stage across each of your respective regions what have you what is it about the traditional systems and our current incumbent systems that are set in place that are currently falling short for whether it's for Farmers or for local communities and saving circles where are traditional and Company institutions falling short and on the other side of the equation there what is it unique what is unique about defy that enables your proposition to be unlocked through leveraging you know distributed ledgers Etc so uh maybe I'll be sure kick it off to you sure currently uh in India everywhere else also as we are expanding globally we've seen many other countries um the the systems that are in place for example talking about the loans that we give to Farmers these are centralized Finance Loans given by Banks since ages it's not something we brought on but there's a lot of fraud in that and that's of course fraud is the biggest thing that blockchain solves anyway that's where blockchain finds most use case in fintech uh so as a fintech organization we saw that the government systems the the banking systems the entire uh platform that is available to the farmers and to the banks is not is not sufficient and blockchain could help banks are pulling out of this entire uh ecosystem leaving Farmers into the hands of usurious money lenders with outrageous interest rates so that's one one you know drawback that uh systems like in India the government organizations they have and uh you talked about D5 D5 is a very new thing farmers of course have nothing to do with D5 like to understand the concept but it is at play at the back end where I personally believe that it's access to so as we say there are more than 1.7 billion unbanked people across the globe with D5 we do not have to just go wait for a bank to process the loans even though if it's in real time it's still 15 minutes 30 minutes that's as real-time as it gets for the farmers at this moment but with the D5 it is access to the global D5 capital and on the other hand it's a good thing for the for the D5 lenders as well because they get access to really stable assets not not against speculative crypto these are crops non-perishable crops me soybean rice anything you name it and that's that's where they would be interested in driving the D5 capital and we would be interested in replacing those systems that are already there uh and and the shortcomings with with this new system helped by D5 blockchain web3 all together Hey so uh situation in Mexico right right now with the ethereum foundation where I'm going to focusing on women what's the situation there so we have uh legally a 48 Hour Work week so imagine a family a single mom that has two kids has to work 48 hours and then has to take Transportation then she has no time we don't have a good health care System well a child to a day care system so it's difficult so what option do they have in formality there are two billion people around the world talking now about next billion we have 2 billion people around the world that are uninformally employed why because of this because they sell informally because they're Farmers so uh this is the situation they live day to day they either bake cakes or creams do massages or whatever thing they might think of so uh it's difficult what happens when they need they have medical emergency with their kids they need cash right they try to get it from a centralized financial institution but what happens is that they require a proof of income which they don't have so this is a serious issue they have this option of getting loans from informal lenders but it's super high interest rates or they have this other option what why these options already exist these options have been there for 100 years in many countries what you do there is you put in your social credit right so uh why blockchain well it's decentralized you can join a saving Circle uh yes you have the same risks of a common saving Circle but we can exploit their uh trust ability we know exactly what was the posited and when it was deposited and then to who it what it was paid to so that's super important in our case where we have a lot of corruption and people doing none let's say legal or correct ethical things so this is important for us and also we can leverage a reputation system that can eventually uh serve as a foundation for for them to actually get a loan from our financial institution for a bigger amount so this is why blockchain is there everything is Unchained so it's permanent immutable and node subject to to change by anyone so that's why well I'll I'll cue what Gabriela said so in defy in our context in Africa kissing point in Kenya we have mobile money as is a digital technology uh it's for example in Kenya it has over 98 adoption meaning almost every adult citizen has a wallet a mobile money wallet um but we still find challenges challenges in how how much they paying how much they're paying for the loans so we have very high interest on the loans in fact they are regarded as predatorial uh in fact even the central bank has been tracking down so this access to finance uh has been a challenge because of high interest rates and when it comes now to defy to protect for example income so a farmer has income how what why are they are we saying if I can help solve the problem so for us it was the transparency in the traditional Insurance business so an agent will go to the field convince a farmer to buy insurance but then keep quiet for a whole six months the season would take around six months next time they see the agent will be next time they're selling so no information no no didn't know what policy where the two quote was happening about it now with blockchain we're able to enable the farmer using feature phones the penetrations of feature phones is high uh to dial a style a number and able to see so far you your policy has triggered this percentage which is equivalent to this amount of money and also the triggers that were used to say determine whether they qualify for a claim or not are tamper evident so we generate hashes put them on chain so you can to prove you just need to produce the hash and compare it with the data since we don't publish the Pharma data on chain but yeah that's how we Define and blockchain is revolutionizing financing incredible amazing um yeah I find it really interesting that each of you is sort of working it through different sectors you're working very much so you know with governments and large Regulators as well and trying to figure out a lot of the real world asset integration as well and Gabriela you're very much so kind of working with local uh you know women level cooperatives and and figuring out like how do you download and work with metamask for example we were talking about that earlier right and how you even would you know add polygon to your metamask wallet and just thinking about what that user experience is like and then Benson like you're tying in all this technology that already exists out in the world too right and you're saying hey we've got mpesa ussd transactions as well and we're tying in you know climate data and so I just appreciate the the breadth to which each of you is is leveraging this and on that point I mean perhaps Abby you could paint a little bit of that picture of what it's been like working with uh kind of incumbent institutions in your jurisdiction right so you mentioned you're speaking with banks you're speaking with Regulators in the space as well you're very much so working with real world assets which is just a fascinating Concept in and of itself too so I wonder if you could set a little bit of a light on that because that's been a really sort of Hot Topic in the space recently how we integrate real world assets within D5 so maybe you can shed some light on that yes I mean I understand because the entire blockchain ecosystem has always been wondering that uh how do banks and governments fit in with the ecosystem how to bring them on board I have met so many people here people working with the Colombian government I work with Indian government he's working with the Kenyan government so uh definitely now Banks and governments and all those institutions have started opening up to you know to to adopting blockchain based systems but then there are certain boundaries that you always always would have to keep in mind so for example I we could not have just asked to ask the bank to come and join us on a public blockchain right like ethereum polygon um but on the other hand uh so so it has to be designed very specifically so that you can take them in confidence one very important thing about Banks and uh I mean especially big Banks right and in India there are a handful of big Banks big odds and uh is that their sales Cycles are too long because it's just how they are right and further crossing the barrier of going onto a blockchain platform internally they have that bureaucracy as well that is a tough sell already but one thing we have constantly seen seen in our use case is that not a single bank has ever said that uh no this is not something we want because again this is not a domain this is called Warehouse receipt Finance you store a crop you take a loan against it it's as simple as that it has been in fact it has been it is one of the oldest lending products known to mankind what we did was we we just made it better right but Banks knew it and banks have been facing these fraud since decades so and they tried solving it with Legacy Technologies which they haven't been able to so they were open to at least open to adopting blockchain right they knew firsthand so yeah there's a very clear distinction here firsthand they knew we are only talking about blockchain technology and we are not talking about cryptocurrency blockchain banks on blockchain will barely ever get involved with cryptocurrency at least in such use cases not in uh the ones where we are talking about cbdc or or cross-border payments Etc but here they had to be very clear so what we did was to onboard them we created a permission blockchain which Quorum which was built by JPMorgan so came as a perfect use case that JP Morgan is running a 400 Bank strong Network on the same blockchain so why not we use it use the same thing and then when the banks were on board we also uh talked to the governments of course as much as possible reaching out there are state governments in India and then they saw that okay there's an opportunity no cryptocurrency involved the Indian government has been very supportive of blockchain I mean you know we have seen we have heard the Indian honorable Indian Prime Minister srina Modi we have seen him speak about blockchain at the Singapore fintech Festival last year he was very very you know praiseworthy for for blockchain so uh the government accepts it accepts it really uh till the time we do not bring cryptocurrency the challenge here is that bringing D5 onto the same platform which is where things become very complicated which is something we're trying to navigate even at this moment we are trying to keep them uh separate Banks won't be interacting with the crypto ecosystem the crypto D5 lenders won't be interacting with these C5 lenders but the farmer should be benefited so the farmer on the click of a button on a multilingual app would be having access to whether to take this moment this crop loan against that particular crop in D5 or in C5 that's what we're trying to abstract it's a challenge it's still a challenge I'm pretty sure that Kenya and Latin America they would be facing the same problems because it's just how it is I mean you know it's just a decade of blockchain that we've seen governments are not ready to accept it just at the first go that's that's what we've seen yeah yeah it's true for example in our project uh we were dealing with the insurance regulator so you have to prove that you're not using crypto so you don't have you don't need to mention crypto results we start with the efficiency so we're bringing a technology that will do exactly what has been happening but now we can pay claims immediately at the end of the season you don't have to work for six months so after a while the Kenya government is really good the regulator has what we call a Sandbox so it gives any crazy idea to to apply and say we want to try out this and this and this so part of this sandbox is where we are now trying to see how can we introduce risk uh crypto based risk pools where now we can pay out from from a certain risk pool that has been funded by the community like the default Community uh Abby is talking about so the regulator has been yeah start with the technology and then crypto later yeah I mean we've obviously seen a lot of um regulatory talk and that you know sorry we'll sort of get back down on throughout much of this conversation but it is a really important consideration right especially if we want to reach sort of critical mass if we want to do Integrations with wider Partners as well thinking about how we do that definitely we'll we'll take a lot of thought and and you know having even sort of these spaces for all of us to say hey these are the benefits of defy here is how and I think being able to align with traditional financial institutions and governments and Regulators saying listen these are the these are the benefits that comes to I think oftentimes there's obviously this very um oppositional position that that comes up when we speak about defy in emerging markets and around the world right so and we've seen the likes of uniswap with the DFI education fund as well really push for more education more advocacy at the regulatory level which is obviously hugely hugely important but switching over you know gears a little bit uh gaudia I think one of the really fascinating things and Abby was touching on this too was the idea that what you're offering I'll be for example isn't necessarily new right um and and being able to Warehouse financing isn't a particularly new innovation the problem is that the traditional financial institutions haven't quite been serving Last Mile communities because there isn't enough value for them to engage with as they do these things so gorilla also with the tandas you know there's something really interesting there as well where as you said you know these are Traditions that are hundreds of years old so particularly with D5 like what is it about tandas and decentralized finance that unlocks that value and and really enables people to be able to do this at scale yes for uh so people were people we like tradition especially in markets like Latin America uh we do what our parents and grandparents did because it's just how we are we're very familiar uh let's say uh community so uh what happens if you for example um someone tells you hey getting to crypto because you can pull your funds and then you can put it in a farm and then you get the yield and then you're a farmer and it's like Paul right uh till this to a mom who lives day by day and has very few to actually take that risk right so uh what happens there is that this is a way to get them with a known thing right they also say big circles they already have been in many of these many times so you take this something known into the blockchain and then you get them hey you can use your wallet uh you're using your saving Circle but they don't know they're using adapt So eventually they will be able to get loans to stake to eventually get into a pool and do whole D5 things right then they can that can unlock like that fear of what's this right the yield and it's just too much information from the beginning so these tools that are things that have already been happening many years uh can enable this to go to an audience that may not be that technologically savvy but has a need for these Technologies and they can use it for something very tangible just like like we saw with Ubi right for pay for uniforms for school or for a medical emergency or something that could really benefit them in day by day right so that's why we think these types of tools known could be good for these next billion users we're looking at yeah um casing point in Kenya as well what what or in Africa um to actually have a farmer operator wallet and they can deposit and withdraw its yes as Gabriella put it it may not it's quite hard it's not it's a it's it will take time as to train but we see an additional layer of we see a layer of um we call it custodians so for example we have a payment Gateway an on-ramp of ramp called kotanipe we have bitlipper in Kenya doing a good job so what they do they they store the keys for for the farmer and now translate each wallet into a ussd based wallet so a farmer would dial style 800 hash the co access your wallet oh yeah withdraw to m-pesa because the m-pesa is their mobile money they can withdraw but you see they are they they are used to the ussd they're used to m-pesa the part of wallet connection somebody else is doing it at another level for them and with time as we get more adoption of smartphones because also smartphone is an issue uh we have like a third of the people uh have smartphones or 2 that is the one that still has the feature phones the button ones so once we see more of smartphones coming in then we feel more people will be able to control the the defy Wallets on themselves and uh yeah and also we other strategies that we are introducing uh the government is really keen on Capital flight so on ramp you're changing your local currency to a usdc for example so if you you we start with projects that bring in money into the country for example there's Diva protocol and Fortune connect we tapping donations globally and reaching and pushing through like uh this off-ramp to to the farmer so the farmer is able to access uh ussd and withdraw for example a donation but then this has started introducing them to differ so they'll see oh with time so this money was crypto now I have converted it to my local currency ah so we can slowly move down from the custodians of keys to actually having them be the holders of their own keys with time yeah yeah I think so the work acre Africa by is doing by the way is super fascinating right so they're essentially enabled like just when I when I learned about your project I was super blown away right the fact that you can essentially sort of execute these transactions utilizing ussd and integrate that with m-pesa just speak so much to the composability of these different sort of building blocks and Legos but I'd love to and and you mentioned as well like mobile phones right we've seen an increase in in traction with mobile phone use as well and when it comes to crypto we're still super far off um you know I tried editing an ens record today on my cell phone on my metamask it was like such a pain um and and so mobile phone sort of integration with wallets and generally just like crypto is still really far off and I think that is a huge huge unlock for you know there are more cell phones in Colombia than there are people right so when you think about what that means for the development of a technology that's really powerful so the question is you know and maybe starting with you Benson what are you what do you feel are really the sort of at the use end user experience perspective what are the big unlocks that are missing for D5 here you know I'm sure we've got a room here full of people that are really Keen to get building and are already exploring sort of problem spaces and solutions so maybe we can touch a little bit on the current sort of end user challenges and what you believe are really the the underlying underlock so maybe we can work work our way backwards here to get each of your your thoughts on on those aspects thank you thank you uh Marcus so the biggest two challenges that we see is capacity building for them to understand that this is as good as mpesa it's just crypto how do you make them understand that it's not uh fraud because then that comes to my second point we need to deal with the trust if we deal with them knowing how to work with it then bringing tools introducing slowly building on the blocks uh yeah off-ramp solution connect to m-pesa then with time you can go directly to the off-ramp so uh directly they can now directly train trade they don't have to really withdraw because you'd ask a farmer what's your incentive you have been re you've received a donation in usdc why are you withdrawing it to m-pesa you can go to that Merchant and whatever you wanted to buy or still buy and it will avoid the transactional fees that are in between here so dealing with uh with trust dealing with knowledge and also yeah trying to reduce as much as possible the transaction fees transaction fees are a big issue and the interests that come in between these transactions uh we think those are the building blocks that can really bring a lot of adoption um yeah and also smartphone the more smartphones people have then more control of their own defy gateways right so smartphones I think are key in in Mexico it's the same thing people have phones they access Internet through their phones but have no computers or anything right so we we see that um uh I think one thing that I've come up with is that there are many people that with this uh fomo or with our situation desperation I don't know how to call it um they want to get rich right away right so we see a lot of people that actually got scammed and getting one person that got scammed like let's say at the beginning in their Journey uh it's super hard for them to get them back in again so we see that happening we see them we see there are people that have not good intentions and that are making it very very hard for people like uh all of these people here that are trying to make something good so that's why you're you're not mentioning crypto at all right so uh yeah so that's that's some that's a real challenge uh one person that got scammed once is going to convince 50 people but one person that uses it how many people you think is going to actually convert let's say let's say in a word two or three people so that's a challenge uh also um ux fortunately many tools have been translated to Spanish into different allowances around the world but we still need that Community feeling because in Latin America we are like very close we like being in community doing things in community so uh Community I think is key so we have a lot of uh let's say people building these communities now we need to reach that next billion right so we need to reach out not those communities to keep to themselves but how can we make that scalable let's say not just convert once and then you get your crypto friends and then you have your 50 crypto friends and that's it how can you get that sense of community uh scalable in a trustworthy way so I think that's an interesting question and ux I think is super important having applications we now see more and more Crypt applications mobile first which is great having just enough information in the screen that you need I think that's super important to research and to actually not just research with crypto people research with the next billion right because we're used to having your balance here your wallet here but what do new users actually need right so that's a good question I believe yeah for us it has been a very interesting case study um what we did was we created a multilingual app it's available in English first Hindi then and then Marathi which is another Regional language in it um so what happened was we we thought that okay multilingual app is going to be very good when we launched it we were uh we we saw that okay the adoption is definitely not not much so what happened was so what what basically happened we redesigned the entire system two years back again right after launching and we put all those same functionalities which is available to the farmer from their phone we put that on the the custodians end because they we have given we have given products to everyone to use uh web-based on mobile based so so that the farmer can just walk in which is the easiest thing to do and just request the the custodian that please help me take a loan against it six months eight months down the line or one year down the line gradually we were surprised again we saw that farmers have actually started liking the app I don't know we did not roll out any major upgrade we did not add any more languages it was there what was there but then I think somewhere the custodians started making the farmers believe that it is a very simple app to use just try it once let me guide you use the app and then see how it looks and then they found that yes it's a one-click process one click loan application they are not accustomed to like like everyone else us they are not accustomed to getting uh getting food delivered on phone getting Insurance booked on the click of a button for them this was the first ever such application that they were seeing in their lives and now they have become very confident using it and as you said that you know one person how many people would they say would they you know speak to regarding the benefits that they've received in our case word of mouth has really worked because farmers are very close right it's a very small community they have been there in that area since generation they know which Warehouse is nearby which is nearby where they have to go they just with that word of mouth and they just started telling everyone that hey do you know I mean I just got Loan in 15 minutes I mean in my life my father has never seen it I have never seen it uh and and whenever it happened it was like 13 to 15 days running post to pillar at Banks and then then you know getting the loan and whenever you're running there you are not basically not farming and you're not earning so so this was very very revolutionary for them and now we can see that that adoption Gap has really bridged because now they're comfortable as we move to other states so India has a lot of regional languages right hundreds of thousands I think so we would be just onboarding new languages which is not a difficult thing for our developers to do once we do that we have cracked that okay with the support of technology and with on-ground support and which is already there from the government we don't have to deploy our boots on the ground so I think I think that is something that is is working really well for for farmers in India and I believe another thing that that comes to my mind is uh in India again same thing as you said more more phones than people in Colombia um India huge population 1.4 billion people but one thing is that with a lot of changes in fintech uh in in technology almost every other person is having a phone now not feature phone a smartphone right there are very cheap phones if I talk about Indian rupees it's about what six thousand five thousand Indian rupees um maybe maybe uh seventy dollars eighty dollars so people are buying people are buying these smartphones and now they are onboarded onto the technology every single uh every single you know the cart roadside cart or vendor or uh or or you know the auto Wallace right the the uh the local auto holders everyone has a QR code you can just scan it and pay it it's not just us paying via QR code anymore it's almost everyone paying my keyword has started paying my QR code that helps us that acts as a Tailwind for us because they already have been using the phones we just say that okay let me let me open an app in your phone and that's it now start using this app for this part of your life and and you it'll all be solved and then they're very looking forward to that so that has helped us a lot in a country like India when we are going outside we'll see you know what what other countries use so we'll have to to adapt to that yeah maybe to contribute to the user interface to onboard more Farmers so it's a combination of the user interface and user experience casing point in one of the example in selling Insurance initially selling Insurance the agent would work with a folder with forms you would fill in the form of feeling feeling Mass signed Etc so bring in a user interface that that is almost similar so we started with scratch cards so a scratch card that they would scratch reveal a certain number and then now use the phone the ussd to send that number and automatically that's how they were on boarded into insurance we collect now information in that way technologically wise using triangulation with you leave them behind with a card and they'll say oh this is my insurance the card but actually the insurance is something you cannot touch but if such people now over time are able to dialed the ussd code without having to scratch a card or remain in something since they've trusted the process so that Journey has to start somewhere slowly bring them in and build that so we see the the Need For You user experience that is well thought out yeah just to add to that I mean you're solving the insurance problem honestly so I've tried selling Insurance before so before starting this organization I was with with a company called policy Bazaar which sells which is an Indian unicorn sells Insurance even selling Insurance in an automated way to Urban people to educated people is a difficult task so with Farmers I'm pretty sure it's a daunting task but if it's getting solved and I think the farmers are really getting a good service I I just uh one question to all of you like you mentioned how much time did they actually like spent spend to get a loan yeah how much time is it earlier it was 13 to 15 days now it's 10 to 15 minutes which is like real time perfect so what about Guatemala yeah so I was uh I met some we held a side event the other day and I mentioned this anecdote earlier but I was sitting at the dinner table with my dad and we were talking about you know I think he's yet to become a full on sort of crypto convert um we're working on it but you he was we were sitting at the dinner table I was like hey let's both sit down on our phones and try and get a let's try and get a loan so he went on his like mobile banking app had to fill out like a 20-minute survey input all these different things and he's like oh they'll get back to me in two weeks um I went on Ave put up a you know over collateralized loan done in five seconds right and I was like check it out here's my here's my money um and and so I think you know literally in Guatemala could take a number of weeks to get a loan and that's the magic of this right and that's sort of a little bit of what the Yankee shows is in a matter of seconds right same in Mexico in Kenya because of the mobile money wallet you can get a loan instantly but now you pay heavily by the time you calculate is over 120 percent interest so yeah that's that's really common by the way for those of you that are surprised in in emerging economies or this is a normal uh interest rate yes yeah I mean you can pay like you know it's bad when the interest rate is posted daily and it's like two percent daily um so yeah this is the reality of of the countries that you know we're in and this is what D5 is here to disrupt and promise right when you think about the fact that you can take out a loan on D5 for you know three five percent obviously there's a lot of questions here around the collateral et cetera et cetera um and but the reality is it's you know there's there's a lot to be said for how can we bring down you know interest rates that are hundreds of percentage points thousands at times um down to you know single single uh single percentage points so just we will do just like one last question um and this will be just a bit of a go around and then would love to open it up to the audience for for a bit of q a in the last 10 minutes um so the we've got a room here obviously of people that are all largely probably very familiar with the space and the ecosystem and the question would be and we we spoke previously about what are the challenges on the other side right so what are the challenges for the end users in Africa and Asia and in Latin America as well uh but I guess I'd like to flip the question on the other side of that is like what's coming back to you to the ethereum ecosystem by deploying these Solutions right we're no longer becoming a self-referential system we're actually able to draw in a lot of feedback and a lot of input around user experience around mobile phone adoption you know all these other things so if maybe we can just spend like a few minutes on on that and then we'll turn it over to the audience for for a quick q a um so yeah just feel free to take it away on what can you know what can the ethereum community learn from deploying Last Mile defy Solutions good let me maybe let me start with what the the community has done when it realizes you're doing something so for us when we said okay we need to solve this problem but we immediately got support from the community the ethereum community is passionate this the the people who are here I believe most of the people are here are passionate so the first help we got was from Isa risk is a uh they were they had built a generic Insurance framework and they said okay uh you can build your application on top we'll give you technical support and we'll give you time and we will always spend ensure that you're able to run it we received support from the foundation ethereum Foundation they helped in the networking and we also chain link heard about it because we are using weathering data to determine whether to pay a claim or not they say how can we help to ensure that your source of truth is actually a source of truth and not only that moreover financially they got a lot of financial support got a lot of human people spending time with you people experts who are very busy spending time with you to help you and also now with that I think we can say the the community um and what people should do if you hear of a good project I think uh we couldn't have been here if we people didn't just come and jump in and helped in the in the in the journey so we could say let's be lights on the paths of starting projects and you will see great great impact because of that so I could say that's a on the support the community has helped and now now what what are we seeing the Community Learning you see like Lessons Learned for us the community is able to understand you can't just directly bring in uh crypto and you expect the farmer to use So This research lessons uh other people now are able to apply on their different projects if they need to reach the last mile customers thank you well first I would like to say that well if we are onboarding people from our countries that let's say as I said live day by day we're bringing people that can use these to benefit in their real life and we can bring actually these examples and get the community I mean in give it let's say more empathy right because sometimes we are yeah I mean we're here we have a roof we have uh air conditioning and we're not get if it rains there's no problem we can go out and get uh water and drinks and go to a bathroom and we have everything right so uh getting these people into the the space could be very interesting because that way we could maybe uh be sensible to the realities of others and how can they benefit so I think empathy is an interesting part and also we're bringing in people that actually need financing need things so we can actually also balance the offer and demand so that could also be interesting for community yeah so uh talking about giving back to the ethereum community right or or bringing the ethereum community on board ethereum has reached Millions right and that's what the purpose of the next objective is to reach the next billion um with with all these projects so these are these are few handful of the projects in Kenya India Latin America there are so many more projects that are already on ethereum or on one of the l2s and trying to trying to get a larger share of the ecosystem so I believe that that by by bringing by the support first of all with the foundation with the community it's a huge Community right the largest of all the chains that we know all together I think I think we are at such a right spot to to like be in a very synergistic relationship where where the projects need communities no project Works without Community name any right and and then once that is done more and more projects can come on the Chain come into the ecosystem help each other reach more masses if we are reaching maybe a small holder marginal farmers in India someone else could be reaching blue-collar workers in in in Australia or anywhere else right there are still so many projects and things that can that can still come on the on the chain and and I think now is the right right spot right time to do that so that's what we're looking forward to it incredible thank you I'm uh yeah just incredibly honored to be sharing the stage here with you all and we've got a few minutes left here so um maybe we'll just take a few questions uh and then we'll we'll call it a day so gentlemen with a blue shirt uh you put your hand up first yep yeah and sorry if you could maybe we'll we'll just pass the mic over to you hello um fellow Latin American here it's good to hear that it's that this is doing a this is this this is doing some good um I want to know if uh well as I understand you are all using uh the blockchain more to register people or their hashes of their information so are you planning to use uh to use that information and that identity you being a verifier so that for example we they can use uh protocol similar to the proof of humanity that was here around an hour ago so that for example you can prove that that person exists a modern just a person being able to receive a loan yeah I definitely see us contributing to proof of humanity for example what represents a person for us is a transaction which is hushed so if the details of the person has the same way we do the passwords can be hushed because we don't do that we just just do the entire thing then we can contribute in some way because that hash is a combination of the location of their names their phone number registered in government and many other details so we feel uh looking at how uh what we're using how can we use this hash to prove is the truth yeah the ZK roll up Etc I think it's a part of the thing that can work so yeah I just want to add to that likewise we also do not put the direct details it's it's not right you know because you have a right to you need to give a right to forget right um and once you put all your all their pis onto the blockchain you cannot forget them so uh there are these are the challenges but yeah somewhere if he can you know you know taking more solutions and bringing some sort of identity on blockchain like from the foundation I was having a very good discussion regarding so in India we have aadhar which is like with 1.4 billion people if we onboard that onto the blockchain just imagine what kind of identification can that be right and then you can subsequently use it possibly across other chains you know cross chain as well but yeah it will always have some challenges it will have you know uh barriers to entry as well uh but at this moment I don't think that a lot of people are putting identity directly on blockchain or maybe combining it with some sort of did decentralized identity and making it work but not not in 100 of it yeah in my opinion I think it could be interesting combining reputation with proof of humanity because that makes uh if someone uh for example didn't pay a saving Circle they get a bad reputation in their wallet and it's permanent right um then they can just change wallets right but linking that to uh proof of humanity I think that's interesting uh for a moment we're not putting any personal information on chain it's your wallet if you paid or you didn't pay it's stored with the event of the smart contract and that's how it's tracked thank you um yeah sure right right there second row okay the principle the capital comes from D5 or C5 and the interest rate the initial guari approximately uh how much pay of Interest the the taker thank you I think that the question is to me anyway so um so uh yeah so that's that's a that's a beautiful part of the entire platform since two and a half years banks have already been giving loans on the platform 7 million till now that's completely centralized finance loan as you can see now once we go live on the mainnet it would be uh D5 loans as well they would be disjointed amongst themselves right the C5 D5 part but the Pharma would have access to both from the click of a button so you see it's a bridge it's not we are stopping one and starting another it's just that we're bridging in fact yeah so that's that's what it's the need of the art at this moment and whenever the farmer would see that okay one C5 has a lower interest rate or defazer lower interest rate they can just go ahead and choose that option farmer has nothing to do with which I'm specifically choosing right one point here is that for the D5 solution we would also need an off-ramp solution because you can imagine I can just go ahead and give usdc to a farmer and say that okay yeah you know buy your next crops uh you know next season cycle for that with that usdc so that is the challenge you asked about interest rate it is uh currently nine percent for annum so it's very low it's one of the lowest in India and we have seen across other countries as well that this interest rate is very very low uh in the market and once we go on D5 were expecting somewhere around seven to eleven percent again which is a very stable interest rate in in terms of D5 I'm personally really excited for when a farmer in India can buy their crops with crypto that's that's right something to be excited about yeah so um yeah deeper there and this will be the the last question and then uh we'll just yeah I just wanted to say that ethereum Foundation has done a great job by uniting for I don't know how many fellows are there in all together there's seven seven in the second cohort and now you all are talking to each other and you're collaborating and learning from each other but there are many other projects in the ethereum ecosystem and that are doing reaching to the next billion people like this good dollar there's proof of humanity there is uh human Dao human Dao is actually bringing work to people providing economic opportunities so I think it's very important that maybe we need to form like a next billion Dao or something where everybody can be in one group and then on top of your like your services you can provide their services and stuff like that and learn from each other because uh for instance good dollars in over 200 countries and as part of my study because I'm writing a book on impact that was uh human now and good develop a part of my studies and they got to learn about each other and now they're working together you know in in a lot of countries that they're going to so I think it's very important that we start like a next billion Dao or something like that I think that's like a really really fascinating idea and I mean I think that's a lot of the the work that I'm doing is basically ecosystem research um and what will come out of that is basically a whole ecosystem map of different folks working on these specific Solutions sort of focusing on defy um so I think that's a great proposition I don't know if there's anything else you guys yeah no it's just similar to where we were talking about yesterday like how to gather these projects in an organized trustworthy way so yeah interesting question yeah I think those are pretty early still because you know so many more use cases are coming on now but I think that's a good idea next you know now for the next billion is is going to be good yeah yeah so I think that's a good thing to explore and congratulations on your book yeah awesome so just last minute maybe just a quick go-round um where can people find your work where can they find you and uh yeah we'll wrap it up yeah you can find us at be blowings blo like uh block with the sound of a peak where you put your piggyback savings that's it you can find me on Twitter at benjuguna on in uh Instagram no no Twitter is uh Benson understand you're good on the telegram it's at benjuguna and email uh Africa and website africa.com yeah so for me it's uh it's the product name is World w h r r l comes from Warehouse receipt lending with an extra R in between uh or just search for Abhishek bhattacharya Twitter is that Abhishek yeah that's all so I think you should be able to find this online from the agenda anyway it's there incredible thank you yeah marcus.

am as my website and my Twitter as well and um yeah thank you so much big round of applause for these incredible panelists [Applause]