Mobile-First = People First - Marek Olszewski

hey everyone how's it going my name is marek kolszewski and i'm with the cello ecosystem i work at sea labs and veloura and i'm going to be talking today about um this talk called mobilefirst equals people first and uh if you like this talk uh definitely uh check me out on twitter maric underscore you don't have to spell my last name which hopefully you guys will appreciate cool so uh if you're new to cello maybe you haven't seen our mission uh we have this um i would say pretty beautiful mission uh that we're all working towards uh which is to build a financial system that creates the conditions for prosperity for everyone uh and it's really exciting uh to say uh that i think we're slowly uh actually executing against this mission and finally starting to put a dent against this uh here you can see a bunch of users of the ecosystem all throughout the world and i wanted to start this talk just by sharing a little bit about what's going on in the chain what is some real world usage of the actual protocol that is just beyond you know the traditional defy and nft stuff that is also happening on cello but is perhaps a little less new to the audience here today and so the first story i wanted to share is about a person named lucy lucy lives in a informal settlement in nairobi in kenya and things have been pretty hard lately with kovid she is no longer employed full-time uh and so when she heard the mercy corps who was teaming up with a company called corsali um to provide micro work uh and to do a pilot around using cryptocurrencies to do microwork in kenya she got excited she signed up uh and she started using corsali to to start doing microwork on her phone uh one of the really nice things about corsali is that it pays you in cello dollars straight away after each micro task that you perform so you know straight away that you're making real money as you're doing the micro work and you know what the fees are you know how long it takes to get paid and you don't have to worry about you know working for a couple weeks and then finding out that paypal takes you know up to 30 percent to to transfer funds into kenya and so she likes this a lot uh she's been using corsali ever since and one of the really nice things about kenya is that there's a company called katani pay that allows you to actually convert your cello dollars that folks are earning using corsali into mpesa so she can actually use it day-to-day for her day-to-day spending um and so so this is exciting this is a real example of people actually working and getting paid overseas on the blockchain being settled all on a public blockchain fernando's the the next example fernando lives in brazil in laura de fretas he is a ubi recipient of a protocol called impact market if you guys haven't seen impact market i highly recommend checking them out you can go to impactmarket.org and donate funds to them you can think of them as a crypto base give directly they're able to raise funds they raise millions of dollars and then disperse them to folks all over the world and one of these recipients is fernando who heard about impact market from his community he went on to one of these community onboarding sessions where he was [Music] educated about the program and where he installed both the impact market mobile app and the velour mobile app the wallet and started receiving on the order of 40 cents a day from impact market now at first he didn't trust this he was like what is this and he's went straight to the community organizer and cashed out every day his 40 cents but over time he started to realize that every time he went to cash it out he was able to get real brazilian hard currency from it and so he started to trust it a lot more and so over time he started holding a balance and actually using it at the end of the week to buy groceries and one of the reasons why um he's able to do that is because as this currency started to circulate in this community local merchants also started getting interested in acquiring it it's being dispersed in cello dollars which um is a good inflation hedge in brazil uh and also velour offers some additional incentives for holding a balance and so people in this community started getting excited and they started to also want to hold it which meant that they started accepting it and so now he can buy groceries at the end of the week he uses a qr code to scan it this is a real photo of him making a purchase here on the right and it wasn't long before the whole community started using velora the way that you and i use venmo here in the u.s and he started and they started just transacting and settling these transactions all on a blockchain folks got excited they painted a mural um they even tried to organize a fair uh but kobet put a damper on that um they got hit by another wave and in the lockdown um ended up canceling those plans but the mural is amazing and it's just so heartwarming to see folks actually using blockchains to settle transactions day-to-day again the way that you and i use something like denmo the last example brings us to the philippines there's actually been a number of programs in the philippines one by impact market that we're going to talk about today but also others by the grameen foundation with funds from jpmorgan um in this particular case impact market went into uh this community um in the philippines where fairing a 67 year old weaver who ended up having to stop weaving because of kovid was able to actually restart her weaving profession and and start selling her her craft again and one of the really i would say heartwarming uh things about this story is that um at first she was able to uh to use her ubi to uh to rebuy all of the equipment that she needed to start weaving again but as she got more comfortable as the broader community that she was in got more comfortable with digital payments she was actually able to start selling her craft online using a service called paychant and start selling it to other people online and so by receiving this ubi using a crypto based digital wallet she was able to then um actually get comfortable with selling online and receiving those payments electronically overseas which obviously in these days with kovid was just really life-changing especially since tourism just completely tanked in her community and so all of these things that i talked about today that they're possible because we uh we're at a stage now where this reality of a global venmo is actually starting to become possible so when i started cello about four and a half years ago with my co-founders this was the vision that we were hoping to create we we really believe that there will come a time when the ability to send value to anybody anywhere in the world will become as easy as it is today for us to communicate with anyone in the world if you think about it you know a couple years ago it's actually not that long ago it wasn't actually that easy to for free send a text message to anybody in in the world to any phone number in the world and you know whatsapp really changed that whatsapp came and pretty much anywhere in the world you don't have to worry about whether you have to pay for it if you communicate with a person ahead of time and have them set it up you know pretty much that anywhere where they are you'll be able to message them for free and stay in touch and so the same we believe is going to be true for value where you won't even have to think about it anybody in your contact list you'll be able to send value to and with that all of the things that we just saw today all of those amazing examples of people earning a living receiving a ubi will become possible fully globally and so fast forward to today we have that wallet it's called veloura now if you haven't tried velour i highly recommend checking it out uh it's available at velourapp.com and it's a crypto wallet that really is designed to be a fully decentralized venmo you can send value to anyone in the world and you can send it not just to public key derived addresses but you can send it to people in your contact list using their phone number as an identifier and best of all you can do all of this in a fully decentralized way and more importantly you can actually pay for those transaction fees with the stable coins that you're actually trying to send and so again if you haven't tried velour i highly recommend checking it out um it's really easy to use and you can earn additional 25 percent apy-like rewards simply by installing it and holding a balance and so maybe this is obvious to this audience but you know when i when i talk about cello and i talk about velora i frequently get asked um you know this kind of makes sense but uh why are you focusing on smartphones shouldn't you guys be focusing on feature phones isn't the majority of the world using feature phones and it turns out that that's actually not quite right so if you look at the erickson mobility report um there are now eight billion mobile phones in the world uh with active mobile subscriptions this does not include iot devices these are just mobile devices and 75 of those are actual smartphones so the number is actually quite staggering 6 billion smartphones in the world that exist today that have active mobile subscriptions and so we're building for those six billion smartphones and that number keeps growing of course and then the second thing that i get frequently asked is well what about connectivity is there enough connectivity out there you know using a blockchain typically requires more connectivity than just doing a web 2 product and the answer on that front is absolutely again if you look at the the erickson mobility report you see that connectivity is just exploding um by the end of the year 5g subscriptions will pass 600 million people subscriptions and in four years over 90 percent of all spectrum will be pretty much 3g or better which is certainly fast enough for all web 3 related kind of mobile needs so that's exciting and so and so we talked a little bit about some example use cases of cello uh we've talked a little bit about valora and the mobile wallet but you might be asking you know what is all of this running on what is uh cello exactly and the answer is it's a evm chain plus plus uh it's fully decentralized it has a really elegant proof-of-stake protocol but it has a bunch of additional features that uh really i would say make it quite unique and so what are those features now what are the plus pluses so to speak um they're really three things that enable kind of this decentralized venmo experience uh the first is stable value currencies so similar to terra cello has these native stable coins built into the platform um three stable coins right now we've got the cello dollar the seller euro and the cello brazilian real these are all implemented as tokens on the platform but unlike on other chains you can actually pay for transaction fees with tokens on sello and so this is quite elegant so when um impact market is sending a payment for example to lucy say using valora and they're sending sello dollars they can actually send that and pay for that transaction fee in cello dollars itself and so from a usability perspective that's really quite amazing the other feature that's quite nice is uh around addresses so if you look at pretty much every wallet today [Music] people are typically expected to transact with public key derived addresses these are very very intimidating as i'm sure all of you know for your typical consumer and so if you want to build the whatsapp of money that's available for anyone in the world they're just simply going to be way too complicated and ens helps address this a little bit but i would argue that ens is still too complicated for uh your average uh non-crypto savvy person and so sello uses phone numbers which many people in the world are comfortable with and has a decentralized phone verification protocol that allows you to actually send money to anybody's phone number which means you can send money to anybody in your contact list so here's an example of me sending money to vitalik i can you know just look him up by typing his name and i can find his phone number in my contact list and then just with a tap of a finger i can look him up and send the payment to him don't try to write down the phone number vitalik will get very upset and then i'm going to have to tell you that that's not really his phone number and so just don't do it one of the really nice things about doing decentralized phone verification is that you can actually also send money to people's phone numbers even without the recipient having a wallet which is really again quite unique web 2 product protocols do this all the time but it's totally impossible today in web 3. now with cello you can send the payment to a phone number that isn't yet on the chain and the wallet can easily just put the money in an escrow smart contract and then have the funds be pulled from that escrow smart contract when you verified your phone number and the final thing is around like clients if you want to have a whatsapp of money that's available or whatsapp for money that's available globally it has to be censorship resistant it has to be surveillance resistant if it's going to be the de facto wallet that everyone's using anywhere in the world it has to use a like-line protocol it can't just connect through infuria and so cello has a really efficient like-line protocol it's 17 000 times lighter than ethereum uh and then there's a new zk snark based version that's even 1.

5 1.7 million times lighter and so that's the way we get to full decentralization on your mobile phone you don't have to trust a third-party rpc server so that's a little bit about about cello you might be asking what's new in the ecosystem and you know probably the biggest news right now that that you guys might be interested in hearing is what i shared yesterday on the main stage which is that kickstarter is coming um kickstarter announced um two months ago that they are going to decentralize themselves super exciting news uh and even more exciting for the seller community is the fact that they have chosen cello as the ecosystem they're going to do it on absolutely just bonkers we're really excited um and definitely keep an eye out for that um the second news is that we're working really hard to be able to process the kind of transaction load that comes with someone like kickstarter running on sello and so really really stoked that mistan labs has joined the cello ecosystem if you haven't heard of missing labs yet they're an amazing company started by a whole bunch of ex-nov dm and facebook engineers and researchers they're working really hard with c-labs to bring a bunch of really amazing innovation to the seller blockchain now the first is around narwhal which is a really exciting new mempool protocol uh that they're introducing uh to the cello consensus protocol it's going to be much more data efficient than what's going on today there's also a lot of work being done for faster batch signature verification a whole bunch of pipelining being worked on as well as additional consensus changes and also move side-by-side move support so cello is fully ebm compatible but they're also working to add move support so that you can write smart contracts in either languages all of this will result hopefully intelli being one of the fastest evm chains out there if you combine narwhal and tusk using real world latencies on a network that spans the entire planet they're able to get 140 000 uh tps uh pretty easily so that's starting to get uh at kind of solana level uh throughput for an evm chain so that's really really exciting a salon level throughput with really high levels of decentralization with an evm chain the other big news is that cello real launched so this is a stable coin pegged to the brazilian ral which is a currency in a country where where cello sees a lot of users velora actually its second most popular country right now is brazil so this is super exciting uh a whole bunch of stuff is going on there with payments you can use seller rail to buy your mcdonald's you don't have to work there you can use your crypto to buy there and there's debit cards and a whole bunch of other things that are on the ground if you are ever going to brazil highly recommend uh checking that out uh velora recently also added a dap browser again if you haven't tried veloura check it out if you're curious what kind of defy and nft and other things are going on on the platform the dap browser is a great way to discover it and finally cello's second hard fork is right around the corner which will bring it up uh in line with the last ethereum hard fork um so keep an eye out for that it's only a few weeks away and i lied there's one more thing uh which is that ethereum sorry ether scan is coming for a lot of developers in the audience obviously ether scan is a must and so keep an eye out for that cello etherscan is around a month or so away the team there has been working really hard so if you want to get involved i have just a few quick resources for you to look at the number one is this boilerplate code which i think you guys will all really like it has all the code that you need to connect to wallets it has all the code you need to use uh graph subgraphs and to deploy smart contracts using hard hat if you want to start a company check out cello camp batch five these guys i can't believe they're on their fifth batch it's an incredible incubator program a bunch of amazing companies came out of that think of this as a y combinator for the cello ecosystem and if you want to get your dap into veloura now is the time there's a competition called the veloura bake-off highly recommend taking a look at that as well and then the final final thing uh that i think you guys might be potentially interested in um cello is running its first ecosystem conference in brazil uh at the beginning of april april fourth and fifth during the blockchain week in barcelona early bird tickets just sold out today i'm really sorry to say but there's still a bunch of tickets left so definitely check it out mila kunis will be speaking as well a bunch of different uh really incredible builders so take uh take a look at that it's just teleconnect.com so that's everything from me thank you so much um yeah i'll stick around if you have any questions [Applause]