25-03 ikigii Stage 11:30-12:00 Reinventing Money: How Web3 is Changing Payments

Responsibility digital assets. Mask webard. Welcome to uh to today's panel discussion on a fantastic collaboration between MetaMask, banks, composure and and Mastercard. We're going to be discussing how web 3 is is reinventing um money and shaping the future of payments. And and I guess our panelists will will will sort of do more than than just discuss here, but they're they're going to walk the talk, right?

as as we're here today to officially announce the launch of the of the MetaMask web 3 card with with banks composure and and MetaMask in in in Argentina and this is this is a big deal right this is a big milestone um for the industry not just in this region um but but for the global sort of crypto ecosystem as a whole as this is one of the first truly decentralized onchain payment product out there and it's giving the the users the power to essentially spend directly from your self-custodial onchain wallets, you know, it's it's you, it's your cryptos, it's your keys, and today it's also your your card. And that's exactly what we're going to explore here today. Um, and we're going to understand a little bit mean what this means for for users, what what this means for for Latino America and for the future of decentralized payments. Um, and so we've got the the perfect panel to do that with Simon, Danielle, and Samia here. Um, and and I guess they've already been introduced, so I I really, you know, my job is not too hard today.

So, bamos. Daniel, I'm gonna I'm gonna start with you. You answer in English, Spanish, whatever you feel more comfortable with. Um, tell us a little bit. So, your keys, your cryptos, your card, and and this kind of notion of self-custodial neo banking.

Yeah. How is how is Metamas doing this? How is Metamas one of the first to innovate on this front? And and most importantly, why should our Argentinian friends be excited about this? Sure.

Yeah. Thanks again for everyone here. Uh, I'm from Queens, New York. Official language is Spanglish. So, uh, I'll try to change it up a little bit.

top or prepaid. Our card is not like that, right? and for us I think that is a very exciting thing. Uh namely that it's a real card that feels like a real card and we want it to be the most successful card program in the world, right? But I think if you work back a little bit, we'd like to see it as a way to bridge web 3 and the real world in a way that represents all of the things that you would expect out of financial services.

So if you if you think for a moment, what do I get out of my bank? What do I get out of personal banking? I think there's five components, right? There's saving, spending, lending, credit, and rewards, right? So how can we offer that in a self-custodial way that is superior to what exists in uh incumbent banking, right?

So saving pretty easy. stable coin crypto in Ethereum in ETH intending. Well, we solved it in banks. Hey, do you accept crypto? Uh, they might say no.

Well, they have no choice here, man. You tap the card. Guess what? You do accept crypto. So, the exciting part for us is where we get in the other three components that we're thinking about progressively.

So, it's like lending, credit, and rewards. Number one, I think with rewards, we have a space where we can be very competitive with the incumbent system because we have all the levers of tradi and all the levers of DeFi. So today we offer 1% cash back as a base, not a promotion, as a base for all of our virtual cards. And when the metal card goes on sale, we of 3%. But uh that doesn't mean promotionally for a month, we can't do 6%.

That's us. But different stable coins that want to see their adoption are starting to set up funds for us to add to that. Uh different crypto projects, we can give more interesting cash back. We're thinking about giving like fractional staked ETH. So you don't just get your cash back, but that cash back continues earning.

we could give you a USDC, the A version of USDC. So, we're very excited about that. And additionally, because it's a real debit card, coin meme coins and of course with lending and credit I think uh marrying DeFi with uh the traditional world is fantastic because I don't know about you I pay 15 I don't pay 15 that's a base rate I pay like 20% on on my variable rate credit card. Meanwhile, I can go get a 2% loan in USDC or USDT out of a today. And then further on the um on the lending, uh we were enabling AUSDC in two weeks.

So try it out. Uh you make a deposit into a you get your AUSDC and you're earning interest until the precise moment that you tap your card. So again, when we work back and look at savings, spending, lending, credit, rewards, the card's going to be a great card. We love building it, but we really that's not our only ambition. We want this to be a thing that is fully competitive with anything that you could find in personal banking today in a fully self-custodial way.

Thank you, Daniel. Your ability to switch between English and and Spanish is clearly better than mine. Um, Simon, we're jumping over to you. No curveball in Spanish, I promise. Um, but Simon, you you work at banks.

Um, tell us a little bit more about banks essentially, what it what they are, what you do, how you power this type of payment solutions, and essentially how how you think this product and the MetaMask card sort of helps enhance the entire sort of web3 payment experience as as a whole for for users. Sure. So, just get this out the way, I don't speak Spanish despite Scott from Mavivate's best efforts to teach me Spanish last night. Um, so banks, we're we're the market leader in non-custodial payments. So effectively we were the first people to utilize ERC 4337 uh which is the account abstraction native account abstraction standard on Ethereum and what we effectively did was basically we wrote our own smart contracts our own delegation modules everything else to enable you to connect your wallet seamlessly to your card.

Now there's a lot of people out there that talk about you know crypto cards and this and that and everything else but what we really wanted to do here was build a product that wasn't just shadow banking right i.e. funds stay with the user up until the point that you tap. So essentially, you know, what we've done is we have digitalized your physical wallet. So up until the point where you say, I want to pay this merchant, those funds are with you.

So effectively, it's purely self-custodial. Now, if you think about that from the evolution of trend perspective, what we're really focusing on here is changing concept. So traditionally, you know, the world has worked on this very basic idea that to be able to access your money, you have to be able to put it somewhere that gives you access. So that's what you call a bank account. For us, it's this idea of saying, well, look, you should be able to have funds in your wallet and you should be able to choose as the user where you want to distribute those funds.

So in terms of the challenge, you know, that we face. I mean, I think there's there's a number of them. I mean, the technical work that we've done underneath this year, we're the only people who have actually launched this product and built it and shipped it and it works. So that's the first piece. There's a lot of technical work.

The second part I think also is looking at the kind of landscape that we work in because we're now dealing with kind of global client bases, right? And historically payments have always been a local thing or a regional thing. You know, you go with someone like Metamas, you've got, you know, hundreds of millions of wallets all over the world. You have to be able to reach users and that's a huge challenge in itself. And that's why we work with people like our friends at Mastercard and Visa to be able to scale, you know, globally.

And I think that the third piece that we have to really challenge here is this kind of educational piece because a lot of people kind of naturally act on their own conscious right there's this kind of preconceived idea of hey you need a bank account preconceived idea of hey you need a custodial solution and these are things that people don't even think about right they're just innate they're what you do it's how you've been raised so it's really reaching out to a different audience and saying guys you know there is an alternative here and to echo what Daniel said you know if you look at For example, the cashback rewards that we're offering on the Metamas card. They're unparalleled, right? There's no other product that I have seen that's in market. Why is that? Well, because what we're really doing is creating a peer-to-peer relationship between the consumer, i.

e. the holder of the wallet, and various different people who want to interact with them. So we've disintermediated the kind of world of Google and the world of kind of platforming that's gone on in technology over the last you know two decades and basically saying look you can get 5% cash back because you are shopping through this new type of product and people will incentivize you and it directly kind of get want to reach you as a consumer and the interesting point here and I'm going to pause on this note but the biggest problem in retail today it's very straightforward I can be your customer I can go to a store, I can tap my card. But if I don't leave my details, the retailer doesn't know who I am. Now, you start to visualize a world in which you've got this rich stream of data where you have a wallet, you have a consumer, you have an interaction.

Suddenly, you can start to solve all these problems, but you can also solve in a way that works for both consumer and retailer. And that to me is what's really interesting about this space is like we're only really just building that very basic foundation at the moment. What becomes next will have a huge amount more functionality than traditional finance product can offer. Amazing. And if I could add one thing actually, just the really exciting thing is you're motioning these people sued anonymously or or or you could with the MetaMask card you can spend from one EOA.

You could spend from 50 EOAs. You frankly don't even spend from MetaMask all the time. I use Ledger, Tezar, I I use Fireblocks, Arculus. Yeah, Arculus, of course. Yeah.

So, you have a choice. You can have some EOAs that are your Swiss bank account. That's totally you. That's private. But if you have a different EOA and you don't mind Nike knowing that you spent 20,000 USDC that year, you can let Nike target that EOA without knowing the entirety of your identity.

So, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt there, but I I just couldn't agree more with Simon about that. Yeah. And you can connect the Metamas card to another wallet like Trust Wallet for example. You can and should interrupt. This is the point of the panel discussion.

Um, moving on Samia. Um, right. I mean, the card looks absolutely phenomenal. Uh, amazing. Got it right here for those who want to kick by the stand later on and get get your own.

Um, this this card looks absolutely amazing. Um, it's potentially one of the coolest cards out there in the market. And I know that somewhat uh between the the last and the two last weeks, I get the internet's been going a little while buzzing buzzing about about this one. Um, can you tell us a little bit more about Compost Secure, the Arculus technology that also underlines this this product and and essentially right other than outstanding features uh and looking amazing, what type of technology do you enable for for this type of very novel product? [Music] Secure is a uh a public traded company.

We've been uh inventing the concept of metal cards, very beautiful metal cards uh since 25 years. So we are clearly the worldwide leader when it comes to doing metal card and metal cards today. I mean when you look at the metam mascot, it's just stunning. It feels good. Good.

You know, the aesthetic, the weight, people like it. They get emotionally linked to the brand of MetaMask in this case. So, they love it. This is clearly a trend. And this is what we see today.

So, it's growing. I'm responsible for Latin America. And I see also the growth in Latin America. And when when people want a metal card, they want to use it. If they have it, it it becomes top of wallet and it makes them feel just good.

So this is the thing about metal card. I mean we do millions of them all around the world with Mastercard others but uh this is such a cool card and when it comes to segmentation of people what you see is that you know you have the ultra high net worth population and it's not only targeted to the elite. When you look at the MetaMask debit metal card where you can pay with your crypto, it's targeted to uh innovators, you know, the Gen Z's, the millenniums who like the technology, they like, you know, being cool. And today you have the uh upand cominging uh segment, the Henry's, which are the younger people coming into uh the world uh the the the working environment. And these guys or these persons, women and men, not only guys, they love mobile app, they love technology, they love crypto.

So this is clearly a real trend and and we love it. I mean at Comp Secure, we're passionate about what we do. And what is very important to us is I mean, innovation, it is in our DNA clearly. It's c customer experience or customer convenience and it's also safety and security. So what we did uh it's not only a payment card because today when it comes to security and safety a card can do much more that just tap to pay.

Today with our solution Arculus which is it is a digital asset and um identity multi- signature uh authorization solution. We can not only you know with a card tap to pay but you can tap to authenticate yourself which is very important because today you know in the mobile world it's all about security and safety and there's a pass key on the chip so you tap to authenticate yourself extremely important when it comes to uh using Arculus. Archalus is also a um self custody hardware wallet. So in the case of metam mask you have this self-custody wallet and uh compos arculus is a self-custody hardware that we can add to the payment card and uh so you can do the three in one pay tap to uh talk to uh pay to transact as well as hold your private keys on on a card for your for for for your wallet. We talked earlier about your crypto your your key your crypto.

This is about having your digital keys uh in in your card and people know how to use a card and it's not a UV key or something like that. You use the card to tap and we use and we try to emulate something that people know know how to do. They don't want to do things that you know they don't know how to do. And additionally to that uh with Arculus we enable DeFi payment. So today with this card you can pay in crypto which is really a big thing uh when it comes to uh to the new technology we can do with with our metal cards and we continuously innovating adding new change new technology we recently added um monogram integration to the remittances uh you know USDC receiving cash in any monogram location in Argentina I'm just mentioning it because for Argentina or Latin America remittance is quite important.

So we continuously um innovate and do more with our products and very proud to to showcase you this card today. Google Authenticator Ethan. [Music] Fire. Yes, it's very important what you just said. This is a multi- signature authentication tool which is Arculus.

So what u Danielle just mentioned and uh we're talking about three factor of authentication. What you know which is your pin, what you are, your biometrics and what you have which would be your card and you can uh uh You can use authentication for anything that you need to signing on or to authenticate. So very very powerful today. CL it's secure. It looks amazing.

It lets you tap into uh into whole pool of of of digital assets that that you know up until today we didn't have access to. Um so this is this is outstanding and and thank you very much for for innovating over there. I guess I understand now why why my card is just the demo one and and it doesn't actually work. It's because it's for mass affluent. Really give it to VIPs.

Yes, exactly. Um I'm going to switch gear because we have six minutes left and otherwise they're going to tell me that I'm Italian and I can't keep punctual. Daniel, um how did this idea initiate? What was the genesis of of of this of this concept? Can you talk a little bit about the journey from the ideation to the design to the actual launch of of of this kind of exciting in innovation?

Well, that's IP. I can't sh No. Uh, if I can uh let's pull back the curtain a little. Masterard. Fast forward.

Boom. equivalent code. We were with the group and we were like, "All right, what can we do on Lineia? That's first." And we kept talking to people about everybody wants a card.

A card is good business. Why does a MetaMask do a card? And I just said clearly, look, I don't want to do a credit card. I don't want to do a debit card or I don't want to do a I don't want to do a collateralized credit card. I don't want to do a prepaid card.

I want to do a real debit card connected to my accounts on chain that can integrate into DeFi. So, actually funny. Masterard Merchant. They said, "Okay, give us a minute. Let's see.

We're going to talk to some people." And surprise, they had one group that was in fact Banks and Simon that was able to do it. So, we did a few fun demos in New York. We had some fun. And then we said, "Yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it. We we let's build this." So, actually, all of us flew to the Bahamas uh to a Margaritavville hotel uh where they had a conference room that we locked down for like four days and we just all built it and we built the first uh functioning version of the debit card. I think a few of us went out and made the first purchases. I made my first purchase in Latin America.

I did in Brazil, Sa Paulo, a bane on Uber. Uh that was my first purchase I think in like February of last year and I guess the rest is history. Now it's not just making the card work to making it successful to making this really neo self-custodial neo banking experience which is our our new challenge now. Bahamas Margaritavville. Who who in this room still thinks that Mastercard is boring?

It was a cheap conference room. It was the best conference room we get at the moment. Yeah. I would I would love to have seen your boss's face when you put that expense claim in. Yeah.

No. Well, we'll we'll keep that for let's take that offline. Um I think this is a a lovely testimony as well of you know obviously there's there's let's say quite a lot of cooks in the kitchen, right? It it takes quite a broad value chain of of different value um chain partners that are essentially enabling this this innovation. Um you know we've got banks with with the vast license with the technology enablement with the communication with the onchain rails um program management aspect.

We have MetaMask who actually has the wallet and the brand Copo Secure who produces these amazing products. We've got Monovate the actual um issuer in the room somewhere. It's a bit dark but so it it takes it takes a village uh to build to build such such innovations and I think that reinforces also the point of of building strong partnerships to uh to to reshape this u this ecosystem and and the future of payments. Um two minutes left. Samia quick fire uh back on to you.

I know I know we talked a lot about the features that that you enable with this product, how amazing it looks, but you know, given we're in this fast changing um fast evolving um space, what's next? you know how how soon is your next innovation coming around and and and can you tell us a little bit more about so in the introduction you mentioned web three payments as a title and for so long uh web3 payments was uh quite impossible to do and even if people were trying to do it it was a very heavy fee hidden uh transaction and uh it was a manual transaction in terms of on-ramping and off ramping so uh to you had to pay fees to on ramp uh from from fiat to crypto you have to pay fees to uh offramp from crypto to fiat and bridging uh these these two connecting these bridges was very a miserable experience really and um today people don't realize that things are changing and it's a big thing I mean a really big thing uh we could do uh web payments basically you can now use your card um to pay with and this is what we're doing with metamax you can pay in about prepayment with the card and at Arculus what we do is really first of all when I say it's a big thing we're trying to educate the industry about these changing with these changes which is for us very important education and then our artless team has made web three payment as simple as just tap tap to transact and you pay with your crypto so when you're a consumer on the front end for you it's totally easy you're going to be paying with your crypto and you don't see what's happening in the back end of the settlement part, you don't have to worry about it and it's less fees and even if merchants are not quite ready today to do direct onchain web3 payments, Arculus is is is ready with our technology to over any web three payment rails like Mastercard for consumers to to be able to pay um with with crypto. Um I mean today we have ourselves our corporate card where that we can use to just you know pay uh you know restaurant taxi whatever and use it uh using whatever uh stable coin you know uh crypto any of your preferred tokens. So uh that's very important. I was I was reading on linkadine this morning a woman that was trying to send money to her uh $1,000 to her son in in in in another country and she didn't want to use the traditional rail she used web3 payments and basically what you do you you pay instantly so in a few seconds minutes the other person gets the money less fees and uh there is a lot of convenience and and commodity around these so digital asset wet three payments is really the future for us and this is where we're trying to go and and and continue innovating.

Thank you. We're looking forward to that. Simon, we're at time so any any famous last words? So I I think yeah, we're going to see quite a few things happening over the next few years. I mean the first one is going to be the shift towards US dollar denomination and spend which I think if you look at the ability to kind of you know bridge the kind of monetary system through using the dollar you know the purchasing power par is very high especially in you know emerging markets um beyond that you know I think I'd probably point back to my predictions for this year that I did with Cointelegraph at the end of last year actually which is you know this year is all going to be about hiding the wires right it's about how do you make this UI and UX intuitive how do you make so that actually it's easier to on-ramp because obviously if you got better off ramps you also need better on-ramps.

Um, and in addition to that, I think, you know, you're going to see a whole bunch of kind of technology coming into this place because what you've got here is a bunch of what's traditionally user permissioned, user enabled technologies. And I think you're going to see a whole range of solutions coming in around things like AI agents that will abstract that complexity away from the user. and we'll take it down to the level of you know one button click which is where we need to get to because for most you know retail consumers unfortunately majority of wallets obviously not metamas but the majority of wallets are very difficult to use UI doesn't work they're not mobile native and really I think you know what I would say and I say this to everyone in the industry is that you have to think of yourselves actually as product creators rather than just pure technologists if that shift comes and it will people are coming into the space from different areas then I think you will see the super app on chain which is super exciting for people like us who are trying to build the connectivity around those apps. It's a wrap. Gracias.

Come by the booth and sign up. [Applause]