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Aptos x PACT: Real World Pactos
Recorded: Feb. 25, 2026 Duration: 1:15:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. . Thank you. Am I being rugged already or is it just very quiet?
Ah, okay, great.
Just wanted to make sure.
What up?
What up?
Solomon is here. Wow, what an honor. What up? What up? Solomon is here.
Wow, what an honor.
Will you look at that?
Happy to be here.
Happy to be invited.
A round of applause indeed.
That's right.
How you doing, Brady?
Good.
What's up with you, Alex?
Everything's great. Where are you calling from?
I'm in beautiful Chicago.
Oh, wow. How cold is it right now?
And you?
Give us a number. How cold?
Yikes. Gosh, I'll give you my American Fahrenheit number.
I know. Our made-up measurement system. Just one of them.
It's about a nice 25 degrees today, I believe.
But you know what's good?
The sun is out.
Packed in Atos or on a Twitter space.
I got nothing to complain about.
I'm doing the conversion as we speak because I am clueless about her.
Yeah, right.
Fair enough.
We seem to be the only ones who follow it.
Minus four Celsius for everybody else listening who's not American.
That's right. That's right. I might even go outside. You never know.
Wow.
Maybe not today. Today's a busy day. I don't know if we're touching grass today, but that's okay.
You're going to touch snow, my dude? Touch snow.
Exactly. More like ice, actually.
Everything's frozen over here.
I was going to say, isn't that shorts and t-shirt weather for you?
It basically is.
It basically is. I swear, if it gets to 40 degrees, people are wearing shorts out here.
That's what's going on.
What's up with you, Alex?
Well, I'm in 35 degrees Celsius weather, so it could be worse 30 where are you I'm
in a beautiful Bangkok Thailand ah okay incredible did you were you in Hong Kong
too I was before I was and then gotcha just stayed up out east I do be staying
out east I think it's the place to be. I know.
It is.
Certainly in crypto, that's for sure.
Yep.
But let's not monopolize this conversation.
Dave, I feel like you are probably the one person in the team at Pact that I have interacted with the least.
Well, let's fix that, shall we?
We shall. Where are you chiming in from um in the bay area uh just north of the city that's very trash by of you
i'm not a trash by guy it turns out i was in genomic it was in genomics before
i got into crypto about eight years ago oh okay so so I kind of want to get into the story because I feel like, Brady, we hear you a lot, which is amazing.
But it would be great to start off with a little bit of an intro on the people building PACT.
So Dave, please tell us a little bit more.
You're in the Bay Area.
You got into crypto eight years ago. What's the story there?
Yeah, the super brief background is I got into crypto.
So I worked at a genomics company, which was, if anybody knows who Balaji Srinivasan is, it was his first startup.
It was his first startup.
I was like one of the first employees of that company.
We reconnected when he pivoted his Bitcoin mining and Bitcoin hardware company, 21, into
Earn.com.
And that was sort of like my first foray into crypto.
So that was 2017 when I joined Earn.com as head of BD.
We grew that pretty well, got bought by Coinbase,
120 mil or whatever, which I think was one of the biggest acquisitions at the time.
Oh, wow.
This was in 2018.
Saved four years at Coinbase, did a bunch of stuff there across BDE institutional sales,
did a bunch of stuff there across BDE institutional sales,
and let a few kind of worked my way into my niche,
which was sort of like helping new SaaS and services
related businesses get off the ground.
And then I left to work on a WebAssembly-based
smart contract platform based out of the PokerDot ecosystem.
Ooh, nobody likes PokerDot.
So...
There's no...
Dave, it just means you're battle-tested, that's all.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I'm the prodigal son.
I've, you know...
Listen, as far as my spaces go, not to say
it's my space, but there is no such thing
as TMI, so any information
you should share, please do. There's
no banned words, so
I'm totally fine with
talking and expressing other ecosystems
and the experience there.
Yeah, I'll appreciate that.
Yeah, so, you know, connected with one of the original Parity Core developers, we built a WebAssembly smart contract platform, went to market with it. It's called Vara.
I connected with PACT, gosh, it's almost, I mean, not quite a year, maybe eight months ago, and came on board to, you know, PACT had some obvious traction and some product market fit and was doing some really interesting things.
you know, what I lovingly just call the token product side.
So everything related to the, you know, listings process,
which I don't know if anybody saw the announcement today.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.
And, you know, I'm also just helping out with the foundation
as far as just like growth and all things token related.
So that's sort of what I'm doing here.
Well, you mentioned an announcement.
Do you want to maybe Aptos can pin it, but do you want to go over it very, a little bit?
Our first exchange partner announcement has gone live this morning from Mexi.
announcement has gone live this morning from Mexy.
If you saw my face right now, I think you'd see bags and wrinkles
and white pale pallid skin or whatever.
But we're near the end zone here.
So it's exciting.
The signs of determination.
The signs that you're going to make it, likely.
This is great.
Yeah.
If you want to pin the post, actually, we can drive more people to the details of it.
I've been doing spaces for the longest time, and I have still no idea how to pin posts.
But someone else will, I'm sure.
Okay.
Oh, let me try this out.
Try it out.
Try it out.
Nick, I know you know how to do it.
So if you want to take charge here.
Dave, I have a question for you.
How, if anything at all, do you feel like working on Geonomics and Coinbase has shaped the way you see a protocol like PACT.
Ooh.
That is a thread from Genomics.
well here's what I will say about working in healthcare in general is
working in healthcare I think kind of radicalized me toward sort of like freedom and opportunity
because there's nothing I don't know how many folks on the call live
in the US or familiar with the US healthcare system, but it's like, I feel like probably
worse than you think that it is, especially for like startups trying to do something.
I could write a book about it probably, but I'll spare you all the details on this call. But I really made a decision to make a hard pivot from arguably one of the most
highly regulated industries to the least highly regulated industries, which is like
crypto and tokens.
And now some synthesis of the two, which is tokens and crypto within a highly
regulated framework, which is RWAs.
And so I think that maybe that has, you know, been informative about how we can use a liberating,
what I consider a very liberating technology, which is blockchain and crypto to help unshackle more kind of like regulated and confined and walled garden kinds of products like RWAs.
And so that's what makes me really, really excited about PACT.
And then, you know, what is it? Coinbase, youbase, I worked across a bunch of different teams.
Anything from the, like I used to run the Coinbase Analytics product, which was the kind of like chain analysis type of thing.
So that was like highly compliance oriented.
I used to run the Coinbase Learn and Earn program.
So when Earn.com got bought by Coinbase, it turned into Coinbase Earn,
which is like watch videos,
do on-chain tasks and make money.
It turns out that that seems to have stuck
in lots of places.
PACT has done the Petro Learn and Earn,
that collaboration there.
So that was exciting.
And I was on the listings team at Coinbase.
So I saw lots and lots of different projects.
I, you know, tracked and followed what was hot, what was trending.
And the thing that, frankly speaking, I got really annoyed with,
especially having been in the trenches in 2017 through the ICO boom,
is lots and lots and lots of sold hopes and dreams and, you know, promises.
And, oh, we're going to, you know, bring Uber on chain and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But at the end of the day, there's just a lot of folks sell hopes and dreams and cash out before they actually,
number one, the technology is ready, which that is one of the things that makes me really excited about Aptos is,
man, it really feels like a much better user experience than we're used to
in crypto. It's fast, it's cheap, it's amazing. And also, like, PACT is a project that's gotten some
traction, some product market fit, pre-token, which, well, you know, let's asterisk, asterisk,
asterisk for those who follow the project closely.
But like really kind of like pre-redeployment on Aptos.
And so I think that like the focus of this project,
one of the things that really appealed to me was the fact that it's like,
oh, wow, they're really, really, really heads down on getting adoption
and actually traction in their core product.
And then it's like the access to the token and availability
is kind of the follow-on effect
where that was kind of the inverse traditionally.
So anyway, a little bit long-winded,
but I think that those two things tie in really nicely
with what I'm doing at Pact.
Oh, this is perfect.
I think it's really important for people to know what's the background of, you know, someone
that I interviewed recently, which is the CEO of Orcadia, his name is Mickey, said something
to me that really stuck, which is people make statues of people, not of company.
And so I always take the approach of getting to know the people who are building these companies because that's ultimately who you put your trust in.
So this is great. And for those who don't know, genomics is basically the study of DNA, right? Am I right?
Yeah, so that's right. So we, the company had the first of its kind panel of inherited recessive genetic diseases that we developed.
So you could test for like 130 different inherited genetic traits.
So like mom and dad would test, see if you carry the same disease, because if you carry the same, like if you're a carrier
for the same disease, you don't have it, but you have a one in four chance of having an impacted
child. So these are things like cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease, sickle cell anemia, these kinds
of things. And then we later pivoted into this new technology at the time called cell-free field DNA,
which allows you to detect for like Down syndrome and other trisomies with a
simple blood draw. And then the last thing,
and that's a funny story about how this connects,
but that same technology is also used to detect early cancer syndrome.
So like detect cancer early.
So you can actually do cancer screening with a very,
very similar kind of technology.
So that's kind of the product suite that that company built out.
Very impactful. That's great. Great to know. I mean, that's the word to me, right? Like,
it's you're actually making an impact on a very, very large scale.
Yeah, I've always been attracted to things that impact people in their real lives.
So, you know, everybody gets a loan.
And so re-architecting credit is something that just has global mass appeal for me.
Exactly. So that's another similarity that I would draw
between what you've done in the healthcare system versus now being at PACT. But before we get deeper into the PACT question,
Saul, how often do you come here? Not enough. I need more invites from you.
Oh, wow. You're throwing it right back at me. Unbelievable.
Happy to be here, but we definitely need to do a lot more of these.
I'm excited to be with PACT.
I've worked directly with them for well over a year now.
And so the growth, evolution of the business has just been amazing to watch.
It's a real practical application on chain that, one, solving real world problems.
We call them real world applications.
But at the same time, puts full display
what kind of Aptos capabilities are as well,
how we're uniquely positioned to address
kind of these large-scale opportunities.
What is it about PACT that made you intrigued
and interested from the get-go?
Well, there's a number of different variables,
and for those that are less familiar with PACT,
and I'm sure that the team could do a better job than me describing it, they built a fully on-chain credit engine.
So originating, servicing, managing loans natively on-chain. So tokenizing off- You know, at Aptos, we're heavily, heavily focused on, of course, money movement, whether
it's not just trading oriented, but remittance, microfinancing, anything around cross-border
transactions really are an area of focus for us.
And it also highlights our ability in terms of being able to facilitate the lowest, fastest
cost of stablecoins.
So we think that plays well to like the high volume applications that tend to thrive on
Aptos.
But then also just the team, you know, a series of very impressive individuals, a lot of serial
entrepreneurs and whatnot that are looking to really scale a business.
They're not looking at this from a transactional perspective.
They really want to change the landscape and utilize, you and utilize blockchain in order to do so.
And so given their track record and their thoughtful approach around partners, not just
on the Aptos side, but just in general, they have a number of different institutional partners,
some that they've already announced, some that they will announce that I'm very excited about.
And their focus on distribution is something that really captured our attention.
So that's the short of it. There's a wide range of different other variables that were factored in,
but we're very excited about the partnership.
Fantastic. Before we dive into the more directed niche questions,
I would like to hear from the PACACT team because I'm sure most people
are familiar with what you do.
Solomon just gave a brief description.
What is, as of today,
what you would consider to be
the one-liner of PACT?
Yeah.
I think the one-liner of PACT
is that we have completely
rewritten the process of issuing loans and managing loan payments entirely on chain.
and using crypto rails and stable coins to become more fully integrated,
decentralized financial infrastructure partners for fintechs as well.
So that is, there's a lot to unpack there, but that's the one-liner.
What's the main benefit that you get of doing this on-chain?
Like, why is this a product that needs to be
on chain yeah one of the biggest reasons is because um the because of the opaque nature
of the traditional financial system um there's a very very high rate of fraud and just frankly, not deliberate waste, but just like technology
inefficiencies that cause high costs that just don't need to be there.
So on the fraud side, there was a pretty famous case that dropped last year where uh uh um like a lender called tricolor uh was double pledging their
assets which were like car loans and um basically people were using one car to get multiple loans
and this um blew up in fantastic fashion and that was only possible similar to like how FTX,
you know,
it was only possible because of traditional financial rails and the opaque
nature of those, you know, people, you know,
Sam rehypothicating user funds to then go run a hedge fund and gamble
everybody's money.
It was a similar kind of thing where it's like people think that they have money in one place,
but it's actually being used in multiple places because it's all just like paperwork and spreadsheets and stuff like this.
When you put that on chain, you have a deterministic record of where all the assets and liabilities live. And then the other thing is you
get deterministic payment flows. So if anybody's like watched the big short, I think you get a
general idea or follow the great financial crisis. I think you get a pretty good idea of how complex
some of these debt products can get. So you go and get a loan originated, that originator sells a loan to a bank, that bank
packages it into a debt fund, that debt fund gets chopped up and tranched up and repackaged
and resold to lots of different investors in different ways.
So that anytime that somebody makes a payment, there's a pretty complex logic of how to enforce those loan covenants and those debt books such that you then can get like some structural risk like we saw in the Great Financial Crisis.
And it's just, you know, settlement happens like monthly or quarterly where you actually kind of reconcile all your books.
Settlement happens monthly or quarterly where you actually reconcile all your books and it's just very, very inefficient and ripe with error.
So what happens when you put all that on chain is that you have a very transparent, number one, look at where all the loans are.
parent number one look at where all the loans are and then because you have basically all the
repayment logic um written basically issued as an nft and then plugged into the protocol
every dollar that gets repaid into these loans automatically routes to the person who holds that debt immediately, thanks to Aptos and the fast transactions there.
So, you know, you don't have to think about or worry about going back and reconciling all the
books because the blockchain becomes the ledger of record and it deterministically routes all those payments and um so what this
does in practice as far as like cutting out costs is in order to set up a debt fund there's normally
about a half a mil like you know call it quarter to a half a million dollars worth of setup costs
from like getting legal and auditors and and just all the paperwork of setting up all the infrastructure
around issuing a debt book that you can completely remove by putting all this on chain.
And then what that allows is it allows us to enable smaller debt funds that can serve
more niche markets. So right now, if anybody read our Delphi report,
there was a pretty good analysis in there,
or shall I say the report that Delphi wrote about PACT.
There's a pretty good analysis in there about this exact problem.
And basically the long story short is that
with the traditional way of doing
these debt books, you need about a half a billion dollars debt fund before it even becomes economically
feasible to serve loans. This doesn't work when you're dealing with emerging markets and microloans,
where people are taking out $50, $100 loans for a 30-day duration.
Those big debt funds just aren't going to chase that kind of money. And so what that's left the
market with is about a $6 trillion gap in small to medium-sized business lending that just doesn't get served because it's structurally not set up to do so.
PACT can basically help address that by making it more accessible to spin up debt books and serve these markets.
up debt books and serve these markets. And we did a deal with a company called Rhoda,
who does lending in Columbia to people that are borrowing to basically upgrade fleets from
pedal bikes to motorized bikes for delivery services. So not only are they able to
increase the amount of funding that they're sending out to these fleets? It's a
relatively small fund as well. So that, again, wouldn't really have been economically viable.
The most important thing from my perspective is that what we've seen is that the cost of capital
to the borrowers has gone down, the median cost of capital has gone down by 42%.
And so what that means now is that if you're in an emerging market running a small business,
you now have to pay 42% less to grow your business in terms of cost of capital.
And that now means that you have more money for like real life things like, you know, kids going to, you know, uh, going to better schools and,
you know, uh, affordability for, for maybe better nutrition and health.
Um, and so again, that's the kind of thing where it's like,
we talk big picture, oh, we can change the financial system,
but like we're actually starting to see the,
the real world impact to, uh, people in emerging markets because of this technology.
And so that's the thing that gets really, really exciting to me.
Do you guys work directly with these small businesses or do you work primarily with lenders?
We're primarily a B2B kind of think of us like the plumbing for the lenders and asset providers.
So we're the connective tissue that makes their systems more efficient.
But at the end of the day, they're regulated companies.
They have their regulated processes and they kind of like manage that part of the stack.
And so we don't work directly with borrowers today um you know it's there's
and and you know frankly speaking i think this is our lane so i don't think there's any immediate
plans to to go direct to consumer um because this this system is working quite well and it's
quite large to be able to address this market.
But yeah, we're basically the plumbing for lenders and asset providers in this context.
Plumbing is the same analogy that a zender, I think, takes very, very often.
Yeah, I do pull my pants up though all the way, so no plumbers cracks on the packaging.
That's great to know. I think many of us are very happy to know that.
To know that part, quite important factor.
Last question on that end.
So, to your knowledge, is the Bower getting funds in the form of fiat,
or are they getting it in the form of stable coins?
PACT has a flexible enough platform to offer lenders the ability to issue in either fiat or stable coins. The ideal case and where the things get most exciting is when they actually issue in stable coins for multiple reasons I can get into.
But we are backward compatible.
So, like, for example, in India, it's like there's a lot of really, really heavy regulations around stable coins.
And so any lender that's based in India can't issue stablecoins as lending collateral.
And so that's, you know, hopefully we'll be there as regulations sort of like update and modernize.
But, you know, we can still serve that market even today.
But yeah, we do have the ability for lenders to also issue stablecoins directly.
And that's, frankly speaking, where they see the most benefit and that's what uh fintechs also get the most excited about because
when they issue stable coins all of a sudden now their borrowers like most of the borrowers in for
our clients um i think we see something like 50 of borrowed funds get sent via some kind of remittance,
whether it's domestically or internationally.
And if there's one absolutely killer use case that is undisputed, I think, in crypto,
it is sending money worldwide 24-7 without barriers.
And then you also get access to yield- products and things like this so you can put
your money to work immediately as well in a permissionless way and so that's like where I
think that the next evolution becomes really exciting is like yes it's cheaper and more
accessible for the people that are operating these businesses the lenders and asset providers
the cost of capital goes down for the borrowers,
but now also borrowers have access to a global financial system on chain and can immediately
benefit from the interest and very cheap remittances instant settlement that was just not
possible before. So that's where i think that pact is going
to play a significant role with our partners in onboarding the next wave of like people uh on chain
what is the the region where you see the most demand
um right now most of our books and our partners are emerging markets where, again, the cost of capital is extremely high.
We're competing with, again, outdated systems for these really, really tiny loans that are very hard to keep track of and just require a lot of manual labor to monitor.
That's the easy, dead simple use case that just is very, very clear benefit.
So these are places like South America, certain regions of India, Africa.
But as we prove this system out, we have some partners upcoming that will be more like upmarket, shall we say, more like US-based companies and those kinds of things.
So we can serve globally and we're seeing demand globally, but our first kind of amount of traction has mostly been emerging markets. Makes sense. Makes sense to me.
Especially when it comes to micro-landing,
which is what you were mentioning is being used the most for a product like this one.
Exactly.
Solomon.
Yes.
Are you still with us?
Of course.
I have, I mean, anyone can really answer this, but we hear and we see a lot of institutional
player going into the tokenization narrative across, you know, the industry.
What are the type of conversations that are happening behind the scenes that really sends a strong signal that on-chain, you know, here is where on-chain finance is going next?
Like, what are the behind-the-scenes conversations that we hear?
What are these institutional players looking at?
So, at this point, it's less so about should we explore tokenization?
It's essentially what's the timeline of integration and what is the exact
application that we're going to focus on?
So, and also how do we manage risk?
How do we integrate?
How do we ensure compliance?
But at this point, it's more of an execution lens as opposed to kind of a
if it's more of a when. And so different kind of a if. It's more of a when.
And so different players, let's say we focus on financial services, have different kind
of immediate catalysts to why they're actually pursuing it.
For example, asset managers, when you think of BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, Apollo,
Hamilton Lane, a lot of them are initially pursuing it and putting very traditional assets
on chain because they essentially want to tap into the capital that's already been starting to accumulate on chain.
They won't have access to it.
And so they're essentially looking to grow their AUN, their assets under management at this point. with them and say, okay, how about, is it possible to allow these assets to be used as collateral
in, you know, on-chain, whether it be through crypto exchanges, whether it be having these
assets to interact with, you know, DeFi, like, you know, BlackRock did with Espital, for example,
and Apollo did with 8Cred. And we're trying to actually introduce utility to these assets.
And then others, like if you think of like the DTCCs, the New York Stock Exchange of
the world, NASDAQs of the world, they're looking for performance in terms of trading.
And so, of course, another core focus from an Aptos perspective.
And so they're looking for changes that can actually handle their volume.
And so from their side of things, we're an active dialogue, of course, with a lot of these incumbents and making sure that we have a seat at the table as they explore and act as a resource.
And then also, of course, highlight our capabilities as we benchmark.
They benchmark us versus peers.
But each of these different financial services companies have kind of a key short-term priority.
But at the end of the day, they're looking for broader distribution.
They're looking for instant settlement because that has a number of different financial impacts, which are also positive from an end-user perspective because they'll reap the rewards of having either the remittance payment come through instantly as opposed to taking multiple days for cost reduction as a sender of a payment.
Things along those lines that the end user will experience, may not know is on blockchain, but
they also don't need to know, but they will basically reap the rewards of basically utilizing
that technology. So we're watching the kind of evolution real time, but the tempo has definitely
changed, especially as
regulatory clarity has come to key jurisdictions, of course, U.S., as well as APAC and so forth.
So you feel like the main change right now, the main signal is that it's not a question of
is it going to happen? It's just more like how and when?
That's absolutely right. Naturally, for a lot of these applications, they're regulated applications within the financial services space.
And so they have, of course, investor protection rules.
They have a number of different constraints around if it's on the public equity side, best execution.
They have so many different considerations that they need to factor in.
And so at this point,
if they're going to take a more iterative,
step-by-step kind of approach to this,
integrating blockchain within their systems
and also determining interoperability,
but it's definitely a when
versus whether they're going to utilize
the technology at this point.
That's great news. I think we all have a pretty strong feeling about that side, just because if
you, you know, if you look at the news, if you go to conferences, it's turned heavily institution
focused, which is frankly, for people like me, quite boring to be a part of.
But it also signals, you know, that the bigger players are taking it seriously.
And it's not as much as, oh, is crypto going to happen?
It's more so how we're making it happen.
But side notes on that one.
And jumping in, I think how, at least from an Aptos perspective,
how we look at it is not just, you know, institutional or not, we look at it as
institutional grade. So we're looking for basically opportunities that scale. And so it doesn't have
to be, you know, the conglomerates of the world, it could be opportunities like PACTE, PACTE is,
you know, actually servicing a real problem. And a lot of these jurisdictions
that Dave mentioned, they don't have access to credit, or if they do, it's cost prohibitive.
And so offering a solution that is addressing a huge, huge issue in terms of gap of access to
basic financial services is a huge opportunity. And because of the scale of it, it requires
an institutional-grade solution, but not necessarily is the institution itself going to be involved
in that process.
That makes sense, actually. You do not need to raise your hand. That's kind of an insane
thing to do.
I was just being polite, that's all. I didn't want to interrupt Solomon or jump in after. But no, these points are really amazing. And Solomon was mentioning about kind of going off of what Dave was saying about all the different places around the world where people don't have this basic access.
We have Fabian here up on stage as a speaker and, you know, obviously part of the leadership team of Pact, but wanted to touch on too,
because he's traveled and connected with so many of these peoples and businesses.
Maybe he has something he might want to share about his experiences with that and how Pact's
impact really is seen around the world.
Let's get into it.
Wow, thank you, Brady.
Doxxed.
So I created an avatar called Paxos because I just love it.
And I think what we're building is an OS.
Yet, to set a point, what we become, the crypto space, so everybody collectively created
over a trillion dollars of value on blockchain. And the only thing Tradify is doing right now
is finding a way to tap into this value
by bringing traditional finance assets to on-chain users,
which basically is a version one of LWA.
And I think for us, it's not a problem we like to solve. We actually think that it's mostly
like garbage in, garbage out. If you take a bad product and you put it on-chain, it doesn't become
a better product. It just becomes more fees and basically same than always. The second thing we are thinking in the team is the last 60 years, we've been very good
and West Street has been very good at building complexity and instead of changing the center
of SEM, adding patch to it and morphies to it to the point that the end users in the oversight of the world basically cannot afford taking a loan because there's so
many intermediaries and there's so many fees that are being paid.
Like we're talking about like 70 to 80 percent interest rates on a small loan
for someone who buy a bike in Kenya or Nigeria, which is insane.
And mostly it's because the infrastructure doesn't allow
to have a fast and cheap transfer of money.
Think about it.
It's the first time in the entire human history
that money travel at the slowest pace than a human being.
So basically, it takes me less time to go to India by plane,
which is 18 hours and sending money in India, which
is insane. That's first. Second thing is infrastructure and financial infrastructure
in Kenya, and India for people taking a loan are totally different. They have no communication
system with the infrastructure we have in the US in Europe, meaning that there is no trust. And in order to lend money in India to a consumer,
people need to take an enormous risk.
There is no enforceability.
So basically the entire infrastructure and the system
is not designed for lending to people at scale
everywhere in the world.
And money is not being built on rails.
I can allow money to circulate freely all
around the world with no friction. And so what PACT has been doing the last few years
to build an infrastructure, we call it DEFIN, decentralized financial infrastructure. So
it's for us as a sub-generation of DeFi where we are building middleware and system owned by token holders in our community
that allow money to travel faster programmatically and reduce friction, which allow people to
be able to borrow at 10, 15% instead of borrowing at 75 to 80% a year.
The second thing we tackle is that no one thinks about the biggest gap.
The biggest gap in the US and the world is payroll.
Think about this.
For 15 days and in Europe for 30 days, you work for a company that keeps your money safe
for 15 days, who keeps your money safe for 30 days.
There's $10 trillion of payroll sitting in enterprise balance sheets every year.
This money belongs to people that work every day.
Sometimes they have to take a payday loan at 60% to 70% a year to be able to afford bills they need to pay every day.
And there's a new category of finance called earned wage access that we've been working on for a few months with our partners,
who allow to shift these $10 trillion back to the users,
who allow people to take basically payments every day instead of every 15 days or every 30 days,
and don't have to pay the crazy overdraft fees, the crazy payday loan interest rates to access money that they actually earn.
So what we try to say is we are very excited about people being able to sell assets on
chain to this trillion dollars gold pot we created using blockchain technologies the
last 10 years.
But we are more excited about building infrastructure and solving real world problem, which is there
is payroll that people cannot access every day and they need to pay their loan. There
is people unable to gain education because they don't have access to credit. There's
people not able to upgrade their work instruments because, again, there's no access to credits.
People cannot get $1,000 worth of loan to build a company in most countries.
So basically we try to solve for the 6 billion people, not the 300 million people in America
who are already born with a credit card.
So that's the type of problem we're solving on PACT.
And this is Define, which is a financial infrastructure building using middleware,
Aptos, because it's one of the best investors blockchain, is owned by the DAO. So we transfer
the IP that we've been building for the last few years to the DAO and the foundation. And everybody
can be part of it. Everybody can help build it. Everybody can help find use case and distribution.
And we are very excited.
Yeah, so it was a lot of chatting.
And Fabien, my deepest apologies.
You still, as of right now, do not appear as a speaker on my end.
So it's kind of sad.
But thank you for joining.
I have another question which is going to,
I believe it's very complimentary
to what you were just talking about.
But I feel like a lot of people still have some misconception
around what Pact is actually building.
And there's a lot of projects that are talking about RWAs.
I feel like RWAs can be pretty much anything
at this point in time.
And not many are building full credit logic on-chain, right?
Which we touched on quite a bit for the first 45 minutes of this space.
So, you know, in your train of thought, the things that you were mentioning
with what PACT is solving for,
what do you feel like is the biggest misconception about PACT today?
So I think people assimilate PACT as a traditional RWA play, where basically we take a set of chain
and putting them in a nice block and selling that on chain. It's not what we're doing. We're not a distribution channel. We recognize that
most people don't have an issue to invest, but they have an issue to be able to pay and
borrow. So what we're specializing on is DEFIN, Decentralized Financial Infrastructure, which
is building middleware and software for fintech to allow people to get paid faster and get access to
money in a cheaper rate.
The only difference, also the biggest difference between LWA and broad category and us is
we, I think we are the only one, and please keep me honest here. I think we are the only one who solves the garbage in garbage out, meaning that it's not like a trade-fi instrument being brought
on chain, literally issuing loans on chain. So we build like an infrastructure owned by
the PAC Foundation and built by PAC Labs that allow every fintech in the
world very easily to put every single loan issued to their users on-chain, natively.
So the loan is not a piece of paper, a piece of code in a server that no one sees besides the lander. It's an ancient NFT assets with metadata, which is like, borrow concentration, the age
of the person who borrowed, what is this internal credit score, or fintech credit score, if it's
an internal process, and the amount borrowed, everything. NFT can basically change hands very quickly across the world.
And people have the guarantee of being repaid, assuming that the borrowers repay.
So we basically call up the entire intermediary structure and make it transparent and efficient.
I don't know if it makes sense, Alex.
It's a lot of words.
No, I do love words, which is why I usually do these spaces.
So no, I think that's great.
And so I don't know if you've called it the way that we usually see it written,
but when you talked about payroll access a little bit earlier,
we're talking about the earned wage access,
which is an expansion from the traditional lending area, right?
No, it's a totally different. It's not lending.
Earned wage access is the way it works.
So for example, I'm not going to give a name yet,
but imagine you're an employee of Walmart and you work for 10 days.
Today's solution is simple. It's like you go to a payday loan and you have for 10 days. Today's solution is simple.
It's like you go to a payday loan
and you have a credit card and basically you're bored.
Earned Wage Access is your employer, like Walmart,
pay a two to five dollars fee to a company,
which I will not disclose the name yet.
And in exchange for this monthly subscription,
every employee can basically get paid every day.
So the company is advancing payroll in a daily basis instead of every 15 days.
So we advance you for free.
We advance for free your wage to the employee.
Does that make sense?
So the employee gets earned wage access.
Earlier.
So, yeah.
How, what does that show when it comes to where PACT is headed? What does it tell us
about the future of PACT and where you guys are going with the product? I mean, this is not advice or any guarantee numbers, but from what we have in pipes,
not financial advice, but for what we have in pipes, I think I will be surprised if we
don't have over half of a million of monthly active users, if we don't cost
three to four billion by end of Q3 in ancient assets, and probably announcing the first
corporate America onboarding process to process payroll within our financial infrastructure.
What's the numbers looking like right now?
You talked about three to four billion on-chain assets by Q34.
What are we at right now?
Yeah.
So the partner we're onboarding and we're hopefully announced soon, I think they're processing $1.7 billion a year of language access.
And this is just one of them.
We have many in the pipes.
Right now I think we are close to $1.8 to $1.9 billion on on-chain assets, cumulatively. Yep, that's kind of the current numbers and prospective numbers.
We want to become basically de facto the infrastructure of fintech relies on
for everything payments, employee wages and lending.
That's exciting.
When do we feel like the announcement
is going to be made publicly?
I don't know.
Brady, Dev?
What?
Sorry.
It's a lot of topic.
What I'll mention too
is that, so for example, from PACT, we've announced and been
discussing earned wage taxes for a little while now.
We've announced some work that we've done with that, for example, with a partner called
Toku.
We've also been putting out a lot of educational content on this to really kind of bring this
topic to light.
I think we can all agree. I mean,
like this is something in the industry I think that we've learned. And I think this is just a
sign of how the industry has matured is that in the beginning, let's say, quote unquote,
beginning in 2020, 2021, the sexy stuff is what was making the headlines and what was moving the
needle. Is earned wage access the sexiest topic? No. And maybe that's why it hasn't made the
headlines, but that's where we're trying to educate the community and the industry and the
market more about it because it's very important and it makes a real impact. It's using blockchain
tech in an incredible way. And another thing too, is we actually launched a really interesting
content challenge with the community, which is focused specifically on PACT and earned
wage access. So actually, if you were to search hashtag PACT powers EWA, you're going to see a
ton of material and a ton of community driven content that's talking exactly about earned wage
access and how PACT is a leader and will continue to be in really advancing
that and empowering that with our infrastructure.
In terms of user flow, to Bradley's point, in terms of user flow, imagine any day you
can go to your partner, FinTech App, or payroll providers and click to get access to your partner fintech app or payroll providers and click to get access to your payroll for free
in advance, not waiting 15 days, any given time, night and day 24-7. Then if you need to send money
to your grandmother in Kenya or in Italy, wherever, in a few seconds, you can send her money because using blockchain
rails and stablecoin.
She can redeem it and use any type of payment to pay a bill.
So what used to take like multiple calls, app signing, three to four days, especially
if it's a weekend, can be done in a day.
You can A, request advance on your salary, B, transfer to anyone in the world,
and all of that for maybe, what, 30 to 45 minutes of action on your phone,
and basically we cost you, what, less than a dollar.
So it's very game-changing for us to reduce the friction that people
are experiencing every day. And to be frank, on more than 7 million people, most people
don't have a problem on trying to buy T-bills to optimize savings or reducing currency risk.
reducing currency risk. What they want to be able to do is to access their very
hourly wages and also be able to make payments and transfer money efficiently
and have control over the time and the money they're sending, especially when it
comes to helping people that are living in another country. So that's what most people need, not buying another wrapped token
that are representing an asset issued by a top-tier asset manager firm.
I don't think people have this problem most of the time.
I would also add that I see kind of a parallel in a sense for the use case of stable coins.
For example, if you're in the United States or maybe you're in France or you're in China,
wherever it may be, there's that centralized financial infrastructure that creates basically
the foundation to hold your funds, hold your assets and have a confidence that
they'll maintain their value. But for example, like places in Argentina, they rely on USDT,
they rely on these stable coins to hold value because of the fluctuation of volatility of
their currency and their environment. And I say that's a parallel to the earned wage access,
because as Fabian's pointing out, maybe in certain places around the world, that actually isn't a massive conflict or restraint.
But in even more places around the world, it is and it's needed for people to access those wages and to do what they want with it.
So it's an interesting kind of parallel to see.
But when you're in different environments where it's not right in front of your face on an everyday basis, sometimes it's not as apparent,
but it's a massive global need. And it's a need in the US.
Yeah. So like you need to treat the problem with, if you want everything to be based on the
blockchain and programmatic money systems, you need to solve the problem
using first principle, right? Everything starts with payroll. Every action everybody is taking
every day from their checking accounts for 85% of the population is based on payroll, right? Like, what they earn. First earn, then spend.
First borrow, then earn, then spend.
So the two criteria you need to work on in order
to have an on-chain world, problematic world,
is like you need to solve the borrowing problem for the mass,
and you need to solve the access to wage
that you've been earning for months when it's in Europe, right?
You're getting paid every 30 days.
So that's the two biggest unlock.
And basically you're putting blockchain technology and stablecoins
in the end of billions of people, not 300,000 or few millions
that want to optimize yield.
And that's what we've been working on.
First principle, like first people need
to borrow, then to create value, then they need to pay. And for that, you need to be
able to earn on the platforms that allow you to spend your money efficiently and manage
your own money. So that's why we've been focusing on these two primitive, borrow and earn wage access.
So yeah, hopefully we can grow the community, have more product in the next few years.
World of MOF is important. More fintech heard about us, more we can integrate this technology into FinTech's back-end.
And again, the foundation now owns the protocol and also the IP, meaning that the revenue
made by the protocols and all the software build is basically going to be revenue earned by the foundation,
which benefits the users, but also the people who build it.
And yeah, it's great.
We love the ecosystem.
One more thing that I want to just hammer home is the scale of the problem
and where the money currently sits.
So Fabian mentioned that the annually,
there's somewhere in the order of $3 trillion of wages that don't get paid,
that are just sitting there accruing that haven't been paid annually.
Cumulatively, I would say right now, what happens,
like similar to Costco where it's like you
buy the costco membership uh they sell you really really cheap stuff but then they use the membership
fees to basically like earn a bunch of interest and that's how they make all their money i'm not
saying this is like the way that corporates make money but imagine sitting on three trillion dollars
that corporates make money but imagine sitting on three trillion dollars um and uh you know
that can be like earning money for these big corporations what we're doing is we're basically
unlocking that for the everyday person to number one um like if they want to deposit it into some
kind of uh on-chain yield bearing strategy we can we're integrating those products those kinds of
uh opportunities into the wallets that will be accessible to these users that we're white living on-chain yield bearing strategy. We're integrating those kinds of opportunities
into wallets that will be accessible to these users
that we're white-living through the partners.
And then number two, so it's like you can now
get early access to your money as an everyday worker
and start earning yield where most
really don't have any assets of this nature.
And then number two, as Fabian mentioned,
it's like another use case is like,
okay, well, I need to pay this bill now.
My payday, it's the first of the month.
The payroll cycle doesn't process
until the fifth of the month,
but my bills are due now.
And if I don't pay them now,
then I get hit with late charges. If I do pay them now, I get hit with overdraft fees. And so even separate from earning interest, you're also avoiding fees and penalties by being able to access the money that you have worked yourself for that you're already owed and uh and getting that right now so i we think of this as
like kind of a a worker level individual level empowerment layer that gives people um the
ability to get their money now instead of it sitting in the coffers of of already rich corporates
uh so again like you know my big ethos of what really drew me
into crypto in the beginning was how do we empower people?
Early products, as we mentioned, lower cost of capital,
give access to credit, et cetera, et cetera.
We see this as the next logical progression of this
to say, hey, look, let's redefine payroll
so that we're empowering people to get the money
that they've already earned now because the technology is available to do so and give them opportunities to save on fees or actually invest in and earn yield that would otherwise be just sitting in the balance sheets of these corporates.
So, again, ethos is let's empower the people, give them more control over their finances through crypto rails.
I want to touch on, I guess, maybe one last thing because I know we're at time.
And thank you for this very comprehensive overview of everything that's going on.
And thank you for this very comprehensive overview of everything that's going on.
Regarding, you know, the way PACT is going to be involving the community,
keep the protocol, what we would say, decentralized,
what is the long-term vision for making PACT a decentralized and community-driven ecosystem?
a decentralized and community-driven ecosystem?
Yeah, well, I will say,
I think that we're already a significant way there.
We already have PactDAO governance.
You'll be able to access Pact governance on Aptos here very soon.
Announcement comes out soon.
That allows you to determine very critical things
about the functioning of the protocol.
You know, we'll discuss things,
and I'm not making any promises about what gets passed,
but things that have been in discussion in the community,
as Fadmin mentioned, have been things like, you know,
ensuring that we accrue all the fees produced by the protocol back to the Dow.
We've been hearing people talk about, okay, well, what if we implemented a buyback system where, yeah, some of the money goes to the Dow and that sits in the Treasury, back to strategically reaccumulating PACT so that we can grow the consortium and have
some more PACT sitting around to attract more and more fintechs and other partners, earned
wage access partners, to join the consortium.
You can set protocol parameters, like you can vote on what fees could potentially be
for some of these partners and these kinds of things.
And so we really want to make a lot of the core elements of how the protocol integrates with this broader vision accessible and determined by the collective that is packed through the DAO.
And we take this very, very seriously.
We take this very, very seriously.
So, you know, obviously, you know, once we, you know, have more token circulation in terms of like having it available on exchanges so people can easily on off ramp and acquire PACT and get involved.
That's going to be the first critical step to this.
But after that kind of goes live, then people will have significant say in the direction of this movement.
Great, great.
Is there anything specific that people should be paying attention to in the next couple of days, in the next couple of weeks?
Yeah.
I kind of leaked a little alpha in the beginning, and I guess it's not really alpha because it's sort of public now, but some exchange partners are starting to announce that they'll support PACT so that, you know, again, people will get more easy access to the token.
We have upcoming partnerships that Fabian mentioned.
Maybe he can delve into this a little bit more.
But and then we'll be right now is a pretty critical time as we start to put forward more
proposals about like, again, establishing fee parameters and potential like what do we
do with the money in this kind of stuff that's sitting in the Dow treasury.
By the way, you may know that we,
as a part of the migration to Aptos
have expanded the supply of PACT specifically to the Dow
to increase the amount of capital that the Dow has
to at their disposal to help drive the ecosystem forward.
And so we take this very, very seriously in terms of empowering the DAO
to be a meaningful contributor to the direction of the project.
So stay tuned for those discussions and upcoming proposals
to really establish the direction in coming days and weeks.
What is the best way to either get in touch with you guys
or just stay updated with everything that's going on?
What's the best channels?
Yeah.
Obviously, follow at Packed Finance on Twitter.
You can DM us there.
You can DM me personally.
I'm on Telegram
you can go to the website and reach out
to us that way if you want to submit a
request for
somebody to contact you
but yeah and then
join the DAO and come
and participate so we also have
a PAC governance forum that's going to be
available soon so stay
tuned on Twitter for details there but forum that's going to be available soon, so stay tuned on Twitter for details there.
But yeah, that's
the best way to, and then obviously join
Telegram and or Discord as
well to stay up with the conversation.
Great, great. Anything else that
you guys want to add before we
close this out?
Let's move.
How was that?
Very original, Brady.
Come on.
Classics are good.
Classics or classic.
Exactly.
Thank you, Alex.
Fabian is still here.
I still see him as a listener, not a speaker.
He's a speaker, yep.
Okay, okay. Well,
one last word from everyone
here before we close it out.
Solomon, you're included in the everyone.
Who's starting?
I'm happy to kick it off on my side.
Do kick it off
and I'll round it up.
Please do.
Perfect, perfect.
I cannot be more excited on behalf of Aptos about this partnership.
This is not only just a massive, massive application within kind of the Aptos ecosystem.
PACT is truly one of the top private credit providers on-chain globally at this point, regardless of what ecosystem you look at.
You can look at rwa.xyz and they list the top private credit players and so forth.
And they're right up there in the mix.
And now the fact that they've been executing so well on the private credit side, 1.9 billion on chain, the fact that they're going into payroll, I know that they're going to execute there as well and solve a real problem around access to capital on a real-time basis
on the payroll front. So many people around the world basically live paycheck to paycheck.
And then I think someone mentioned the volatility of currencies and other geographies. So also,
given Max is a stable coin, it's going to help from a wealth preservation perspective so they're really uh solving real world applications that we cannot be more
enthusiastic about so a lot is going to happen over the next few months with pact and we're all
excited to watch you saw dave you're up next yeah um i i maybe will end where I began with my journey, which is I believe very, very strongly perhaps the most significant counterbalancing force in all of technology today.
And I'm very, very excited about what PACT is doing, has done, and the future role that it's going to play in empowering individuals to take more control over their financial lives
and become more and more financially empowered.
So very excited to continue building with the team
and also within the Aptos ecosystem.
Great. Fabien, you're up next.
Just so you know, I don't think you were here
at the very beginning, but we got a pretty
and comprehensive analysis of Dave's background,
which was very interesting. If you had been here at the beginning, we would have
done the same, but that means we're just going to do it the next time, just so you know,
you're aware of that for the next iteration. But please
give us a couple of words to close this out.
Yeah, happy to do it next time.
So on us is Samper.
We build a foundation.
The foundation is...
We have set up the foundation.
The foundation is sitting in Cayman Island.
The foundation is basically a wrapper for the DAO and the token holders.
The foundation has more than 40% of the supply that's being unlocked.
We truly hope and want and hope that people can help and participate.
It can be create new applications, new incentive programs to increase our product penetration.
And so my dream for the next three months
when it comes to foundation and the
PACT ecosystem is to grow the
ecosystem and
up to cater
basically have people joining us on this journey.
Because, you know, it needs to be a shared journey.
We are a team, but we cannot
do that by ourselves. And so we hope people join and participate and give us ideas and we can all work together.
So yeah, my wish is to find a way to grow the community and engage and build something together.
Fantastic. And I think you and I share a homeland as a little bit of context here,
which is interesting because I don't actually
work with that many people from there.
Brady.
Alex.
No, really appreciate you hosting.
This was fantastic.
We'll definitely do it again.
But obviously this was a huge moment and a really big milestone for PAC and the whole
community.
I think Salman, Dave and Fabian all said it really well.
I'll just add that, you know, the community is an amazing place.
And as Dave mentioned, there's a lot of ways to get in touch and be a part of it.
We're really building something special and have built something special and will continue to.
So we welcome everyone who wants to be a part of this mission on board and certainly those who want to come in and learn more about it.
So really appreciate you being such a fantastic host and really appreciate the time up here and appreciate all the listeners tuning in as well.
Definitely stay tuned. Maybe turn notifications on for Packed on Twitter. I don't know. Could be helpful.
But there's going to be a lot more coming out so um i would just stay in the
loop and you know join our channels and be a part of the pack fam it's a great place to be
that is a great way to wrap it up um the thing i will say is that i have rarely met a team that
is so insanely passionate like every single person in the pack team that i've spoken to
is very passionate about the product about the mission of the product above all.
And I think that's very refreshing to see.
And I had a very interesting conversation with Zander and Eric a couple months back.
And I believe the full version of it is going to come out on Friday.
So stay tuned for that as well.
Thank you all for joining.
Thank you guys for the insights on Unpacked. And until next time. Cheers, everyone. Cheers.
