what's up you two sorry i think i
i'm meeting too soon but we'll get there i love the awkward silence
yes it's kind of meditative you know crypto tutors a lot sometimes sit with your thoughts
no we'll get underway almost as bad as the royalty free music
for real i wish you could totally like actually pick the music you wanted to share but we're
stuck with our like vending machine music keeps us humble gotta keep our feet on the ground somehow
for real fungible has his favorite one i forget what it's called
but i made the mistake of using a different one in a different space he's like bro come on
gotta keep up i feel like having some like elevator music would be cute some jazz some
little jazz yeah that's kind of the energy of some of them i don't know i forget what they're
all called honestly i guess i can look here oh wait are they like built into that yeah so there's
four journey vibes jazzy and nostalgia okay four picks yeah what is nostalgia for
like what kind of twitter says do you use that one on it's so janky honestly like i should be
able to play it but just because i happen to have unmuted i can't um just something with the homies
okay sweet um i'm just going to share this yeah stephan and i already chatted today about some of
this stuff good to hear you again man hello hello how's it going to be with us what's up give me a
minute i'm just gonna tweet oh my god stephan i miss you so much you have no idea i was literally
same thing next week yo denver's next week that's crazy let's go i'm so jealous of y'all heading to
denver emma we need to transport you there i know i've checked flights like at least six times a day
and i can't let me help you oh boy wait emma where are you right now i'm in canada so far okay yeah
not as far as you to be fair yeah that sounds like an easier trip potentially it definitely is
it definitely is are you in the bahama still yeah how is it i mean it's warm here uh it's
i'm not gonna be warm next week so real but you live in paradise so yeah fair enough i guess i
can leave once in a while fine gabby are you in new york right now i'm in new york i'm trying
to decide if i should bring my ankle length puffer to denver or if i'm gonna absolutely yes
i say go for it also that's like that sounds so good for the plane
that's true oh my god portable sleeping bag i love that
nice i'm literally shopping for a jacket right now
yeah joke jokes aside like i live in canada don't have a winter jacket because vancouver
is kind of not even really canada so i need to buy a jacket before i hit denver
ben i live in canada too also in vancouver and it's absurd to me that you don't on a winter jacket
usually i'm gone at this time of year anyway i know what i'm getting you for your birthday
yeah exactly okay this space is starting off so well um welcome to everyone who is listening
to us just chitchat i've pinned a post just sort of sharing the space if you feel like you have
someone in mind who wants to listen in please share that retweet etc and we'll get after this
in a second here i'm i'm really excited this is a great crew for a lot of different reasons um
but yeah i think this is like a fun series just to stop and chat uh about themes in crypto that
are meaningful with people that are kind of high integrity and hopefully like curate some cool
conversations that way um and yeah kind of our core question is just what does it make
what does it mean to make crypto accessible uh today especially like in developing markets
versus developed ones and we'll get into all of these good things um but hopefully people will
trickle in and yeah we'll have some fun thank you all for coming thanks for having us really
appreciate this awesome guys well let's do an intro um you can tell we'll go through everybody
um you can tell us a little bit about what you spend your time on but i think more than that it
would be fun just to share like why does this question matter to you could be something you
studied where you're from where you spent time any version of that just to kind of set the stage
more personally for people who are listening and let's start with uh gabby cool ben thank you so
much for doing these and bringing us all together i'm so excited and i'm really excited to learn
from everyone in this conversation i think everybody else has amazing things to say i'm
really excited to hear the perspectives um i'm an investor at TCG crypto we're an early stage
consumer crypto fund and the reason i'm really excited to chat about this is i feel like the
last you know i've been with TCG for three years and in some ways it feels like it's been like
a week and then in other ways it feels like it's been so long just this cycle has done a good job
of really pushing me to like check my assumptions and what i believed when i came into the role
or what i believed when i came into crypto and what i believed to be true now and especially
in the depths of the bear market when i was questioning a lot of these things the thing
that i always kept coming back to over and over again was the killer use case of crypto actually
being this freedom to transact and maybe like more tactically like global access to the dollar or
global access to stablecoins and i couldn't find you know when i was really pushing back on myself
i couldn't find a reason where i wasn't getting really really excited about that and continuing
to believe in that every single day specifically i work with a company called GIA which maybe we
could talk more about later but um like my relationship with that team in that company
and working with them throughout the last couple years and seeing the work that they've done in
emerging markets has made me so excited about how crypto is going to actually help make these
things true so i guess i'll stop there i think we're going to like touch on all of those things
throughout the conversation but yeah i'm super excited to chat about it in depth
awesome thanks so much Gabby and i should say i'll just interject like if you guys have things
to pin from different companies around crypto through the space just do that it's supposed to
be super casual people who are listening hopefully are somewhat interested in the same stuff
so we'll be able to point people in the right direction awesome let's do Parker and then Emma
awesome um what's up guys so happy to be here and really cool to be in this space especially
because i have a few other speakers here who are irl friends and then some of you are like newer
internet friends which is really fun and exciting um i've been terminally online since like age 10
but that's another story um i'm an early stage investor at fintech collectives d5 fund we're
an early sage vc um and i work on the dedicated fund uh for our digital assets um why is this
space uh interesting to me or important to me i think we all know hopefully or maybe not but
i think most of us probably know why um why stablecoins are important why crypto is important
and why like the accessibility of these technologies is important um if you want to
read more about that i have something pinned in my twitter um that sort of goes over the impact of
stablecoins and emerging markets um but specifically for today actually one thing that i'm really
excited about is uh the fact that we're kind of taking two different lenses so we're sort of taking
a comparative lens right um i really like that this space isn't just focused on emerging markets
or focused on like the western world um i'm really excited to see what comes out of this conversation
as we sort of take a more like intersectional lens um and comparative lens um in thinking about how
um how accessibility translates or doesn't translate across those two um regions and um how
accessibility might mean different things in those two different contexts
i love that i love the extra color that you added too because my brain immediately goes to
kind of emerging markets but expanding the conversation kind of to the scope of
the world that we might come from as well um just to jump in with a little background so for my nine
to five i work on the growth team of super rare which is an nft marketplace and rare protocol
which is kind of our decentralized ecosystem developing at the intersection of art and culture
then five to nine i spend a lot of time working in a very very non-tech space sitting on the
grassroots or sorry sitting on the board of a grassroots non-profit um in liberia and they
focus on education and economic development which really segues into kind of my interest
about accessibility of crypto and technology at large into emerging markets in places like
liberia because you know i think a lot of my excitement and also frustrations about the space
kind of emerge from seeing two seemingly isolated worlds that don't speak to each other very well
at the moment right now and also seeing the potential upside for a market like liberia or
any emerging market in this world to benefit from the things that are being innovated in the space
right now so i'm super curious about how we're democratizing internet and really revolutionizing
the financial system and i hope that we kind of come to some interesting answers today because
i'm definitely armed with more questions than answers about how we make crypto more accessible
i'm already enjoying this i'm already enjoying this so much um so i guess for me chronologically
i run the caribbean blockchain alliance which is an advocacy org that focuses on education
mainly but but pretty much just advocacy for blockchain for crypto in the caribbean
um outside of that i've done a lot of work in the dow space uh mainly with govern and a few other
firms and most recently um i did or i launched oasis on chain which was a consumer crypto focused
conference in the bahamas and that was just in january so yeah that's that's me in a nutshell
and then for for the reason why i'm interested in this i mean this is just my life uh so i live
in the bahamas i'm from the caribbean and yeah i mean for us the the idea of financial access
or economic access it's extremely limited um so even like ben what we were talking about before
even things like uh venmo and cash shop like very you know very popular fintech apps they've
we just don't have access to any of those so when i got really interested in fintech a number of
years back i realized very quickly that oh this actually doesn't help us at all and then when i
started understanding how blockchain as a technology actually worked how crypto worked
that's when i decided yeah i need to pretty much dedicate my life to this
so that's kind of how it's been since then awesome guys this is a great lineup um i feel
like well yeah we're gonna go in a bunch of different directions here but one final thing
to flag for anyone who's listening if you have questions you want any of us to touch on just drop
a comment in this space and we'll see if we can kind of weave it in to the conversation
and then near the end hopefully we'll have a little bit of a spot for a q&a if anyone wants
to come up and actually ask something but um yeah let's get into it i think what could be cool just
to start off with is to ask the question like how if at all is crypto being used in developing
markets like in contrast to our crazy internet whirlwind of like the western world um and maybe
i'm not going to play teacher too hard but maybe we start with you uh stephan just around some of
the bahama stuff um feel like it's a natural segue and then anyone feel free just jump in
sure and can you let me know if my audio is okay it felt like it was
yeah you're good okay um yeah just in general i mean the the Caribbean is interesting and you
just mean in general like what are the issues right yeah just high level stuff yeah um again
it is it does come down in a lot of ways to financial access so if you think of like in terms
of like the fintech or like the the user-friendly apps there's just no real access or availability
even in terms of banking i mean there's a very high unbanked population uh an extremely high
underbanked population um and even for the people who do have access to banks the banking relationships
are let's just say they're not great they're actually they're pretty bad and we've also been
going through a lot of like in the region been going through a lot of what we what's called
de-risking where a lot of the international banks um and a lot of the corresponding banks are pretty
much pulling out or like losing uh contacts and connections so just the the wider um banking
ecosystem has become pretty fraught so it's like you know simple things are becoming harder and
harder to do so it's just it it really just all comes down to access at the end of the day um
so if there are things that um or banks that you would normally interact with a bunch of money in
and then they pull out the next day or the next year for some reason and maybe you live on a very
small island um so for example the Bahamas is an is an archipelago so it's a number of different
islands if you're going from one to the other and you have almost no way to electronically or
digitally send money um that means you have to like go on a boat or go on a plane with a bunch of cash
and that gets problematic for an obvious number of reasons um so again uh the the having access
to crypto being able to actually use crypto is automatically such a game changer um and of course
even then our issues are the on-ramp and off-ramp issue so let's say you know you go
send someone maybe like 100 usdc or usdt um that's one way to honor someone of course that's that's
very individual way it's it's still harder to get access so like exchanges for example even that's
really hard for a lot of people here to get actual access to and then even if you're able to send
someone crypto it's the off-ramp that is pretty much impossible like there's almost no way for
someone to actually get those ones off so even with access to crypto there's there's a lot of
building blocks still missing a lot of things we need to figure out and make happen but i'll stop
just to add um kind of one point on that as well echoing a lot of the experiences that you know
you bring from your perspective from the bahamas stephan but you know the on-ramp and off-ramp
thing is such an interesting thing i even see it in the way that the ux and ui of the existing
apps that we have that kind of parlay between the two worlds of traditional banking and crypto
banking to create that access are still geared to a very very minute number of kind of populations
and languages in the in the world that we live in so for instance a lot of the cultures that might
benefit most from a crypto economic system don't speak english or don't speak a language that's been
ratified as an official language so an app can't be translated into so there's these
really nuanced barriers to entry that i think come down to the specific kind of socio-economic
challenges that are faced in each country so yeah again i come with more questions but curious if
anybody else has thoughts on that as well yeah i've been thinking about the on and off-ramp thing
for a while i think just to sort of first um echo like some of stephan's points and sort of get back
to the core question of like why why is crypto important um in emerging markets i mean there's
there's a variety of reasons i think another one to highlight would be um that you know stablecoins
are a very efficient way to hedge against inflation and authoritarianism which is very pervasive
in a lot of emerging markets to the extent that you know paycheck to paycheck um people don't
know you know really how much money they're going to actually be getting because the inflation is
so volatile and severe um but just to get back to the on and off-ramp thing um yeah i want to
add on to that i think um you know there's there's so many ways um in which stablecoins for example
can be used in banking and lending and payments um and even payroll to help solve some of these
issues and provide a more uh stable currency um than what is you know locally available to
different citizens in certain emerging markets um that being said um the current available on
and off-ramp solutions are quite insufficient um so they're not seamless they're not diversified
they have low interoperability and optionality um and companies that are building in this space
are as well as you know where people can off-ramp geographically and what currencies they can
off-ramp into um so i think you know one sort of call to action there or like gap in the market
that i see is like we need more solutions that can allow for off-ramping into different local
currencies um you know what does that actually look like maybe that looks like physical or local
vendors um that can convert local currencies into crypto or vice versa maybe that looks
like some kind of automatic currency conversion and integration with the existing well-known
well-used fiat payment system like was mentioned before the venmo um and i think hand in hand with
this is actually something else right very intertwined with the fact um that there's a lack
a severe lack of regulatory interoperability um in a lot of these markets and you know even
like in our western markets today um so these companies have extremely limited geographic reach
um because the cross-border interoperability between countries is so low and that makes it
even harder to off-ramp um even despite the fact that you know the infrastructure itself is
insufficient today i have so many thoughts on all of that um i wanted to share some more like
high level um data around what the demand looks like for stablecoins globally and then i have a
bunch of thoughts on what parker just said so i tried to take very quick notes so i don't forget
the end of it all but i think even just going back to the name of the thing like the word
stablecoin carries a lot of weight of like stability in finance and when it's not an issue
that you have with your own um kind of like financial wealth and well-being like for example
i was born in the u.s i've lived in the u.s my whole life this is not something i've had an
issue with versus um obviously so many people in the world people in this room talking about this
you know having a stable currency is already the killer use case and there are so many statistics
of what this looks like globally um right like argentina has experienced 100 annual inflation
for over a century last year the kenya and shilling depreciated 21 against the dollar
which was its biggest drop since the early 90s meaning if you had access to the u.s dollar
via stablecoins in kenya you would have earned 21 that year um and there's so much stablecoin
volume like um i'm trying to find the the numbers again but i think it's something
like over the last five years stablecoins went from three billion in circulation to
well over 100 billion it might have been 125 billion i'm trying to remember the number
and we know that people are actually using them to transact because even though stablecoins only
take up like 10 of the crypto market cap they make up like 70 of all cryptocurrency transaction
volumes so clearly we see there's a huge demand for this product globally and we see that people
are actually using them and then the issue is how do we actually expand access so more and more
people can use them when they have needs in those areas which is what emma and parker were talking
about so i'm trying to remember the point that i wanted to bring up from parker's point but
i'm pretty sure it was like on-ramping has largely been solved because it's basically
just viewed as a standard outbound transfer for banks off-ramping is a much more difficult problem
because of bank restrictions regulatory compliance and then obviously like the liquidity issue to get
out of crypto and into fiat and then the regulatory interoperability as parker brought up is super
tough the thing that i've been trying to noodle on which is like very much half-baked is like
what obviously off-ramping is a huge issue we need to continue solving it to enable people to
earn in crypto and then take it out and use that money and fiat currency but what does a world
look like if more and more is moved on chain and you earn crypto by way of maybe borrowing working
capital taking out a loan through something like a gia or maybe earning money on a crypto protocol
and you earn crypto and then instead of needing to immediately off-ramp it there's an entire
financial suite that you can use of there's peer to peer like a crypto version of venmo or there's
a crypto version of toast to pay merchants and you can store your savings and crypto and earn
interest on it and like obviously slowly these things are getting built but increasingly that's
the world that i get more and more excited about of earning natively in crypto and then actually
keeping it there so it's very much a ramble but that's it's kind of how i'm thinking about things
of like the demand is clearly there the question is how do you actually expand access so the people
who need it most can use those things and then what does it look like once you have them with
a wallet once you have them holding crypto what are the ways that you can use it
this is super interesting because like first of all i you mentioned gia i really like what they're
doing i was really happy that you guys are working with them um and also there's so many questions of
how what are the best ways to actually honor on people because again like if someone has a wallet
they can be on rounds it's just the different the methods that makes sense back when i was a little
more bullish on dao is changing the world in like five years i was like well even if people aren't
in crypto they could eventually join a dao and then they get paid in like a stable coin and from
there more and more people will be doing that which means more and more merchants will have to
basically um end up accepting crypto in some form or accepting stable coins and i still think that
is a valid um like there's potential for that but i do think that's going to take a lot longer
than um initially thought but i i'm just really interested in and i cut and this is also why
oasis was pretty much focused on consumer crypto because one is just it's easier to bring people in
through consumer rather than through like finance or anything else um and if you provide these kind
of easy touch points or quick ways to to get people excited or get people to have fun with
something or get them into space that you might see more and more people just kind of casually
on ramp um but again the off-ramp aspect is still a really really tough problem but gabby that was
a really interesting way to put it too i love when you bring your smart friends onto a twitter space
because they have the receipts i feel like that's a good mini master class and at least diagnosing
some of the problem right it's like weak financial infrastructure inflation someone said authoritarian
ism access issues around language status income level uh and then stable coins effectively being
uh an answer early something that's interesting um to circumvent some of these issues but then
you run into the roadblocks of the banking system regulatory problems off-ramps being
kind of a core uh tricky thing as well um so yeah i just feel like that that's a good
at least level one to this conversation of just saying like that's when you look out at the world
where the disconnect is between the crypto think boy kind of take of oh my god this is going to
change everything and then realizing like rubber hits the road it's not that simple in a lot of
these places obviously right um i'd be curious to shift a little bit into like what exists today
that is at least trying to solve some of these problems um we can bend it in another direction
later but uh why don't we start with jia gabby for people who might not be familiar with it
yeah um i guess i'll start with companies that are not in the portfolio because i think there's
a ton of exciting stuff happening and i wish we actually had more emerging markets exposure
within the portfolio also i see j mo listening and i just got a plug i think you might have spoken
about this on an earlier session but um he's the one who brought in this amazing company sphere
with arnold um i'm sure many of you listening know him into the tsu crypto portfolio and it's
also doing a ton of amazing work in emerging markets basically trying to rebuild what stripe
has done for fiat on chain like end-to-end payments apis and it's a really really hard
problem to solve and it's a big like education and distribution problem getting in the hands of
merchants who are building in developing areas but once you're there i think it's a it's a
massive opportunity so i have to plug that while he's listening um i think one like one of the
biggest maybe like success stories i've seen in this space so far has been lemon they have over
two million customers in latin america where they can store stable coins like they would with a
traditional bank and do a bunch with it and so i think it's a good example of like a company
being very creative in expanding access to stable coins for consumers one of the areas where i'm
getting really excited right now is like what a peer-to-peer payment app like a crypto version
of venmo might look like the big question i'm trying to think through there is like how do you
actually win or like how do you figure out what wins early because it's a huge distribution issue
as we all know like i keep going back to that like the distribution and education is so so tough
people send money right now on western union and money gram and the fees are insane like exorbitant
and even still the switching costs are really really high because there's a huge amount of
trust that's baked in with financial services and so moving people off of their existing systems
is so much easier said than done and so it's a very hard problem to crack
there are a ton of companies building in this space like i have an ongoing list in my notes app
there's slang otter decaf code dimo there's another one i saw recently pay with two y's
but i haven't tried it yet utopia has been building in that space so i'm really excited to see like
if there's a unique like distribution angle there um and then i'll talk quickly about gia
and then i'll pass it on um that peer-to-peer side i'm very interested in what gia is working on
is uh emerging markets micro lending to small businesses um i'll try and pin and maybe ben
i'll send it to you an article i wrote kind of about about the problem space and why i'm so excited
about it but um effectively i'll try and do it in a very like quick nutshell in many developing
areas lending happens within these local savings and credit organizations where we're all in a
community we all know each other i can vouch for certain people within the community and there's a
very high trust coefficient and so these lending organizations have existed for generations and
they actually work really well on a local level because there's a very high level of trust
that level of trust breaks that scale obviously because you can only know so many people and
vouch for so many people so over time fin text basically moved into those spaces trying to figure
out new ways to underwrite and lend to these borrowers and it's kind of like the classic
problem like you'll talk to any bc investing in emerging markets lending and they're all
much harder than me but they'll say like it's a huge underwriting issue how do you know like
that the underwriting is going to work at scale or these people are going to be good borrowers at
scale to me the reason i got so excited about jia is this level of trust achieving trust at scale
is something that i feel crypto is actually uniquely poised to help solve so borrowers can
take out a loan from this crypto liquidity that is sitting idle all across the globe that people can
lend out basically getting retail access to emerging markets private credit which is a
really interesting asset class and then on the borrower side they get that loan when they repay
the loan not only do um not only does that basically update a sense of like credit score
on chain for them but they get rewarded with a piece of the pie like a piece of jia um and so
every time they take out a loan and repay it or they refer someone in their community to take out
a loan and repay it that helps them continue to grow wealth not just for themselves but for
their communities and that's something i get really really excited about and it's very cool
to be able to just look at the numbers of borrowers who are taking up these loans and repaying them
and seeing that that level of trust is something that really matters not just on the underwriting
side but also for the borrower's trust with the lender as well so then i'll send you that sub
stack um and maybe we can put it up but i'll stop there there's lots to be excited about
that's such an interesting um concept that they're dealing with there i'd also love to
just double tap on something that you're speaking to there which is this concept of trust and take
kind of zooming into the individual consumer kind of focus of or concept of trust and how
converting people into a new space and building that trust trust can be challenging especially
when the industry has such a challenging narrative around it to date with you know
just all of the the challenges that crypto faces um an interesting thing though is seeing the high
levels of crypto adoption especially of stable coins in markets where there's almost such a deep
brokenness of trust in the traditional financial system that it's allowed kind of a highway to
adopt crypto so much faster than elsewhere i think one of the um great examples of this
has been seen with you know stable coin adoption but specifically tron definitely surpassing kind
of anything of ethereum and salana to date just being an early mover in the space so
that conversation of trust i think it's on kind of a company-wide level and enterprise level but
also on the consumer side as well it's interesting to see how um that kind of narrative plays into it
i feel like i just want to listen to my own twitter space and digest all of the things that
are coming at me um definitely just as an aside for everybody if there are like companies that
you mentioned just pin stuff like don't uh don't worry about filtering it i feel like if we can
collect a whole bunch of things for people to look at that's honestly like a the best case scenario
um love it i yeah i mean i i can pause and just see if parker or stephan wants to jump in on
just anything that you're excited about that people are building right now that could intersect any
of the topics we've touched on stables um onramp offramp just actually making crypto useful for
people beyond you know north america and europe basically yeah i'm excited to see um more
stablecoins kind of coming up from different countries and i think uh this is actually going
to be really interesting to see with like the recent launch of solana's token extensions uh
feature which allows for a lot more customizability um specifically a lot of uh or sorry specifically
enabling a lot of the kind of customizability that um institutional or enterprise or government
kind of partners need uh with privacy and compliance um and i think there were two stablecoins
that were announced to be launched uh following the announcement of the token extension
launch i think that'll be interesting i mean there's a lot in this space that
like there's there's so many different you know verticals that that are exciting and interesting
and have merit i think um where where i'm excited to see the most uh development i think
like all of the banking lending payment applications super viable super needed super important um all
the b2b uh payment solutions all the payroll solutions super important um but once again
like i think there's a few pain points um where no matter how good the company or how useful the
company or how important it is um it's going to be really hard to scale without um sufficient on
and off ramps um without um without more you know regulatory interoperability between countries
which is a huge question that i think we could have a whole other conversation about how to tackle
um and then also uh i think one you know urgent kind of i guess call to action would be for
for a lot of the companies i've looked at in this space um a lot of them still have very
strong dependencies on other tech or other infra or other company rails and so i think like the
more that you know some of these startups can reduce those dependencies the better um so that
they can be more resilient and sustainable uh long term and less um less exposed to other potential
like threat vectors uh in terms of their own infrastructure is that clear yeah that's an
excellent point actually and i i think it would actually be amazing to have another one of these
just focus on the regulatory side um because something i think about all the time is so many
countries um i mean i'm speaking from the caribbean and this is throughout the caribbean but i know
it's in a lot of like other countries too heavy exchange control which means that from the
beginning you're even again even if you can get access to crypto you're pretty much stuck there's
almost no way to offload no way to off-ramp um and you're pretty much you're kind of hell
hostage in a lot of ways because you can't try you can't interact you can't exchange um and
there's so many questions of how are we going to get people to actually be able to interact
as long as these regimes exist in some form and that's kind of even here that's kind of the wall
that we always get stuck in that we that we can't seem to to that's a barrier we can't seem to
break yet but it's such a huge issue in so many countries totally totally and just quickly to add
onto that um there's like there's a whole other even if there's like you know a mismatch in in
regulation between countries that sort of static and preventing interoperability or off-ramps from
one country to another there's a whole other layer that i think we're still grappling with which is
that these uh regulations and policies are still being updated and they're not even done being
updated and they're evolving at different pieces they're evolving at different rates um actually
like i spent like a whole quarter kind of researching uh this and researching a lot of the
regulatory developments across uh different countries in latin america and as i was doing
that research i was expecting to find okay you know here are the recent things that have passed
here are the recent updates but it was actually like day day of week of day by day week by week
and doing this research that things were changing um i think the other the other very uh you know
the other very like viable and important thing to call out here is also that um it's really hard
for these startups again no matter how important they are no matter how much demand there is no
no matter how much like you know real actual value they're driving on the ground um with this
regulatory misnaturally countries it's super costly um for these small and often young startups
to expand um outside of their own countries because what that requires is either getting
um different you know licenses that are actually like you know equivalent to the size of like an
entire sometimes like series seed series a round or um you know it requires building out a specialized
in-house legal team in every single country that you're trying to expand to which is like very
just very that's not you know that's not capably efficient um and that requires a lot of capital
and that's that's also a lot of overhead um so i think like i think the actual you know use cases
and applications and services that these companies are creating are super important but i also think
it's like super super um urgent that we also talk about like okay what are the actual like
infrastructure or like systemic um pain points or issues or gaps in the market that are holding
those companies back from scaling because i think that um that's i think that's going to be like the
most efficient kind of space maybe where we can focus our time right now um but if others disagree
please disagree and i would love to hear what you think
my sense is in putting this little crew together that there's not going to be a lot of disagreement
um so yeah i feel like this is a it's a super helpful take perker
we gotta get some contrarians all the time we gotta get some people
let's let's let's throw a little controversy maybe we'll find some things yeah yeah let's
stir the you know what i i do i'm curious about people's thoughts on on this in particular going
back to the stable coins question um you know the obvious that so many people globally have
whether it's inflation or whether it's just like lack of you know lack of access
being able to hold usd in a digital form is literally life saving for so many millions of
people um i am curious and i do think about this a lot what does that mean um the fact that
the usd is the i mean usd is obviously the dominant currency globally but is it good that
we're facilitating and expanding this at the end of the day and i mean looking at this across the
board obviously even for the us um usd strength is not always a good thing like especially in
terms of like exports for example and for a lot of countries who are you know dealing with so many
different issues is it a good thing that we're kind of facilitating continued usd dominance in a lot of
ways yes let's go okay spicy question i love it okay i think stephan ami like such a good question
and i think the answer really depends on like what perspective you're coming from right so like
if i'm coming from like a patriotic pro america like i want america to be long-term you know
sustainable i want america to be or the us to be like a long-term global power that's resilient
then i think absolutely like this is actually a huge opportunity for the us to lean into that
they are failing to and they're like the opportunity cost is massive i mean like
if you look at the data um well first of all like just to sort of like set the context i won't go
into all this but the like the us's position as like a global superpower is like heavily dependent
on you know the historical context of the petrodollar system which is um pricing a lot of
the world's like oil entries in the us dollar um actually though if you look at the data across
the past 10 20 years um countries are trying to move off of this system so um you know foreign
buyers have been divesting from us chargeries since 2013 um the brooks coalition has already
indicated a desire to move away from pricing imports and exports and usd um and once used
other national currencies instead um and also like the us share of global gdp is shrinking
um after world war two the us the us represented over 40 percent of global gdp and now that number
has decreased to 13.5 and so if you take all this in context right if you're like pro america you
want america to be to to continue to be like a global superpower and like hold like its economic
uh dominance over everyone um then i would say definitely like you want to lean into civil coins
and so that's why to me it's kind of ridiculous that like our government is not right now because
it's like it's civil coins are probably the most efficient mechanism we have for exporting the value
of usd globally um and so it just seems sort of smart from a strategic point of view if we're
talking about like ethical point of view and like do we want america and the us to sort of be
dominating like the world's economies like that's a whole other conversation i'm not sure i have a
super comprehensive answer to that right now um stephan i would love to follow up with you because
i actually have been doing a lot of uh reading on like some uh interesting stuff that's happening
with like the frank in other countries um but uh i'll follow up with you one on one and we'd
love to hear others thoughts on that too it's a super interesting space i just learned so much
from what you just said parker and i would love to chat on this war too um yeah it's interesting
i mean what i was thinking of stephan during your question is i was thinking of um paypal's stable
coin pyusd and i remember seeing they had grown a ton um within like their first week of launch
like their circulation had grown a ton but i remember hearing they had i think it was called
like an asset protection role which effectively could like wipe out the balance in just a couple
transactions if they wanted to and um it's just a good example of these centralized entities
that have that level of control and regulation um they will succeed in the sense that like
convenience over quality they have a head start in terms of going to market because they're paypal
but if we're trending in the direction of users wanting complete control of their money then like
what does that look like for the long term for stable coins like that um i also think generally
like we're going to continue to see i don't know on what scale like parker i'm curious to hear
your thoughts on this too but we're going to continue to see both centralized and decentralized
versions of just local stable coins because governments are going to want to like protect
their sovereignty and prevent all of the transactions in their country going through
dollar denominated stable coins and so you know like i know there's um gosh i'm gonna like forget
the names now but i think it's like straights x which is a singaporean company issuing stable
coins there um and then a bunch of like euro or gbp focused stable coins or things like that
i'm curious what that looks like on a long term or like if it's going to be a winner take all or if
we're going to see this happen these local stable coins in different markets and then i wonder also
if that means like just the rise of like flat coins and other denominated types of currencies
that are not just back to one to one currency but i hear you stephan like i think it's a question
that's going to become more and more relevant over time these are the things that keep me up at night
giga brain shit we love it um gabby i i actually have been thinking a lot about
what i think i hear you touching on which is like is there gonna is this gonna be is the
stablecoin market gonna be like winner take all or how is that so how does that how does that
landscape um play out i think my current prediction uh subject to change is like
sort of just like you know today we have different bank accounts for different things maybe ones for
saving maybe ones for spending maybe ones for retirement um i think it is likely uh that maybe
in the future we'll have um you know a handful of different stable coins or maybe like a core
sort of dominant um you know i wanted to say three to five maybe um and each one sort of
serves a different use case um i think the the interesting sort of uh
the interesting differentiator that i've been that i've been sort of seeing paypal kind of
play on with pyusd is like okay you know we're we're fully um compliant we're fully
regulated um we're sort of like a blue chip trusted payments rails you know institution
and that's very different you know than than the other stablecoins out there um how that sort of
plays out long term i'm not sure and i actually something that i've been wondering that i don't
really have an answer to yet but thinking a lot about it's like how do the different different
differentiators right that um each sort of stablecoin might need to stay competitive and to stay um
just differentiated um how is that going to play into like how those stablecoins can evolve over
time and specifically like what market share um or what market segments they can capture versus not
um and will they be optimizing for um the biggest tam or will they be optimizing for um the tam with
that's maybe smaller but like maybe much higher volume i'm not sure um but i'd be really curious
like if anyone even if anyone like in the audience has any predictions on um like how the stablecoin
space might play out who the dominant players might be and like if they might work to serve
different use cases what this might be or where those sort of like shake out i'm that's something
i'm really curious about or gobby or anyone else yeah i mean no i wish i had an answer i don't have
an answer but that that is why it's so tough like it is a volume game like if you're taking a small
fee on every transaction you need huge
sorry did i lose you guys yeah sorry you said if you're taking a huge transaction
sorry somebody called me okay i'm back like if you're it's a volume game like if if payments
companies need to take small fees on every transaction they need huge huge volumes to
actually sustain it and make the business work and this is like the problem of crypto is you're
either building for the one percent of consumers who are driving 99 of the volume which is like us
like crypto twitter or you're building for the 99 percent and you hope that that grows over time
and yeah it's a super tough like where the need is the greatest and where i think the volume will
become the biggest and we're kind of already seeing it with stablecoin volumes globally
like that is the market opportunity and building for that consumer base is the opportunity but
it's also you're betting on actually being able to reach those people and it's a huge education
problem and distribution problem and you're competing against these large like
centralized companies like pyusd who have that head start so it's really tough okay to play the
devil's advocate a little bit on pyusd i agree like they have they definitely have a massive
competitive advantage in distribution they have a competitive advantage to some extent in user
behavior and that their users that they're sort of you know distributing to within their network
are already used to using paypal for payments so it's not a huge leap to use paypal for payments
in different way um but one thing that i've been like sort of thinking about and like i don't have
any like confirmed i guess qualitative or quantitative data around this this is just
speculation is i feel like pyusd is kind of like straddling this like difficult uh difficult kind of
space right because um in like tradfi like web2 fintech world right um paypal we love paypal we
know paypal um but we're not sure about stable coins right like we're not sure about crypto
in in in this web2 tradfi fintech space but like in crypto land like dgen land like you know we're
like you know ust um uh sorry usc like um we already have our stable coins that were that we
know and love um and paypal is almost like a little bit of an outsider um and we saw this a little um
you know i think it's too early to say like with the data so far but at least in the beginning
like it was definitely a much slower uptake in terms of like volume of pyusd and i know that
paypal is like doing a lot a lot to try to attract uh developers to their ecosystem right now which i
think is going to be a little more challenging for them in different ways than you know maybe
a more crypto native stable coin so i actually think like like paypal has like this super
exciting um opportunity in front of them to lean into their distribution to lean into um the
familiarity of user behavior uh within the user segments they're targeting um but then they also
are sort of like outsiders on both sides does that does that make sense super interesting yeah
that is super interesting it's almost like you're saying the same thing in different ways though
because i think paypal it sounds like they're facing a lot of the same issues that you propose
gabby of like it's it's a much harder addressable user base to convert but also the upside is so
much bigger if they're successful in doing so so i don't know if this really makes sense in terms
of the question of volume but i'm curious when we start seeing proper like stable coin baskets if
we haven't seen any already but i assume no and like how long that would take and obviously we
need more currencies coming up in the digital form and that also leads to the question of like
when do we really see this blowout of local or national stable coins versus uh cbdcs that may
already exist or are about to you know in the next couple years really start rolling and what like
what does that fight look like because that is like a private versus public thing or like a
institution versus government thing um yeah i don't have an actual question i'm just curious
about those like you guys thoughts on that okay like oh my god i'm i'm a nerd about this i'm not
going to go too deep into it because i don't want to take up too much space but one thing i do want
to say is i'm pretty sure with the basket of uh national stable coin thing facebook tried to do
this with libra and i might be wrong but i'm pretty sure that actually like the the sort of um
a lot of the momentum and development um that really happened around china's cbdc the ecny
which is late years ahead of of anything that america has done with cbdc um a lot of that
inspiration or like design thinking actually came from uh facebook's attempt at libra um and i have
an article to share that that goes into deeper uh detail on this which i'll link in the comments
here okay we have covered some serious ground um i feel like there's so many different
offshoot conversations we could have and that i mean i'm looking at my notes that i've just taken
through the last like 20 minutes we're hitting stable coins like dollarization on the practical
side like foreign policy level stuff versus morally uh flat coins like stable value just
being able to like have the benefits that crypto has kind of sold the world uh but in a way that's
not necessarily plugged into u.s policy um diffusion of different different currencies
different flavors of stable coins like benefits of incumbents like paypal and there's i don't know
for anyone who may have just joined the space that that section of this recording is probably worth
listening back to if you're interested in any of this stuff at all um yeah just want to be mindful
of time uh because i know i finally said this is going to be an hour we can bleed over a little bit
if you guys are good to keep going but um yeah i want to maybe just leave some room for some
questions basically um see if uh if anyone who is in here wants to ask anyone on stage anything drop
a comment there's already one that i just pinned and maybe we can um take that up and yeah go on
questions for a little bit but also if you want to come up on stage yourself feel free to request
and we'll bring up a couple people too um does anyone want to take a run at this i'll just read
out this question um if dominant usage i guess of stable coins is by people that would like to
access usd stability doesn't that limit the potential market size to the intersection of
non-sanctioned countries and entities because stables have to be compliant um maybe just like
a market-sized question if someone wants to take a run at that down that's a heavy one
uh i guess minor hot take here this is also why i think you know assuming everything's on the up
and up um usdt is actually really important um and there shouldn't be just one usd stablecoin
you know company institution whatever there should be a mix given that you know they actually
have full reserves um and because i think if there is just one fully compliant company that does
or potentially at least ends up blocking a lot of people um who do need potentially
access to these to these global stablecoins
yeah base take i totally agree with that
okay i'm gonna pause us actually here guys just so we're gonna wind this down a couple of us have
to drop unfortunately but what we're gonna do is just put a pin in it and flag that we're probably
gonna revisit this theme uh of kind of making crypto accessible but it's also like this
intersection of crypto and and policy crypto and development crypto and just like the emerging
market category um so what we can do is if you have questions for any of these people who are
on the panel i mean i can i guess i can invite you to dm any of them but feel free to hit me up and
we'll form another um space that's like just sort of going to hit on a few of these different topics
and we'll circle back around um but yeah i just want to say thank you to all of you for coming
through i mean this is crazy i feel like i'm in school or something sitting here muted listening
to all of you talk um super fun and we'll um yeah let's pick it up again sometime i think this is
actually something that's worth uh continuing in the public kind of conversation love that it's
been incredible to listen to you all as well and so sweet to cross paths here on the internet
yeah this is awesome thanks so super fun thanks so much ben so fun i feel like i could talk to you
guys for hours awesome guys well we'll wrap it up there thanks again everybody who who tuned in and
and definitely follow along we'll do it again soon take care okay bye thank you