Micro On-ramps Into Crypto: The Case for Building More Bridges Between Web2 & Web3 - Justin Ahn

okay hi yeah thanks for your patience um oh okay uh so hi my name is justin ahn uh i'm a co-founder and of of quiddly i'll talk a little bit more about what we do at quidley a little later into the talk but basically to give you a quick idea right now what we present to our users we provide a we provide an app for users to share blue chip crypto like bitcoin ethereum with uh with their contributors with their communities through web 2 tools you use today our bread and butter as uh up to today has largely been through like slack and discord uh largely kind of like p2p based um you know tipping kind of transactions but happening entirely hosted not very decentralized i know that's not so cool for a conference like here but um that's how we've grown um and from a higher level what we what we present to people is we're building micro on-ramps that connect better between web 2 and web 3 because i think while most of us here are enthusiasts and we're really excited about the future of blockchain and web 3. i mean for your average person it's still such a bleeding edge far away kind of concept and so bridging that gap today i think is um for us our biggest goal um so just a quick intro on me um i'm sure you can tell from the way i'm speaking i'm from here but i actually currently live in france you know it's the future of the future of france i'm as i mentioned one of the co-founders of quiddly and uh my background originally um is from i started in tradify working mostly in accountancy uh then i moved on to tech largely in e-commerce and a few sas businesses um and got into crypto um not so early but not so late i bought my first uh bitcoin in 2013 but didn't do it was already 800 i didn't do anything with it i didn't know what to do with it and only got back in uh during the ico boom in 2017. um but yeah that's my background in a nutshell i tried to uh that's uh that's an nft actually oh that's not an nfc that's a right click save but um it's it's by the pixel portraits um and i try to keep it as you know as as approximate as possible to uh um to my portrait uh so basically the way we position ourselves are for organizations like companies projects communities and for us we really believe like tokens play a big role in the future of work um things i want to establish before we get deeper into the project um we really believe completely out of the realm of crypto not even thinking about blockchain not even thinking about like the crypto principles of like decentralization we believe um the future of work is online it's increasingly online we believe it's increasingly decentralizing people can work from anywhere as they're working online and largely more permissionless that means no longer necessarily having to work full-time jobs you can work on projects from like a contributor basis from a mission basis from a project basis um and that's increasingly growing and uh it's it's for us that's the future of work and up to if you if you look at workforce demographics today i think more than 60 of uh of of workers um out there today are digital natives they're from uh they're from millennials up so um more and more people are are more internet forward are more are interested in more like digital solutions for for collaboration and and working and i mean this is the this is the general direction we're shifting into today um and where crypto and blockchain comes in for us is tokens do enable greater alignment of incentives between uh between all stakeholders um you can you can see it from a monetary perspective i mean the currency part of cryptocurrency something like bitcoin or eth today is approximately kind of an internet native currency you can move on to other tokens like for example on erc20s that are that rely more on kind of like network value things like sharing the value of the network you're creating together um and then you move into digital assets things like nfts which are more unique uh non-fungible um these are it's another form of value that you can share online with the people who are helping you build whatever you want to build um and ultimately um in the realm of work what we think will become more and more important is identity identity in the form of who you are online whether you want to be anonymous or even if you want to be anonymous you should still be able to kind of verify like the skills you have or who you are in terms of what's necessary for your employer or your the organization you're working with to understand and i think those are things that we'll see more and more um grow we'll see more and more develop um and integrated into the normal kind of future of work not necessarily from like an entire crypto perspective so um yeah i mean for us these are kind of like uh these are kind of like um what would you call them cornerstones are not cornerstones but they're like the points like we we'd want to establish before we start talking more about what we're do why we think tokens uh tokens will play a larger part in the future of work um and so um as i mentioned the title of this is uh micro on-ramps and the i think a large kind of challenge that crypto is trying to overcome today is on-ramps today are largely designed i mean for better or for worse they're coming from centralized kind of uh entities or organizations or tools um and they're largely really designed for exchanges or um you know like whether it's whether it's whether it's trading like on kraken or coinbase or it's the nfts like on openc so i mean for for everyone here it's kind of like a no-brainer yeah this is like an entry point to the new digital economy but for people who've never had any kind of exposure it's like um okay what do i do if i don't want to trade if i if if if it's not necessarily a board ape yacht club nft that i want to buy like what is on-ramping getting me and so although we're seeing a lot more influx even from not non-whales even from smaller buy-ins we're seeing a lot more influx of fiat into crypto you're not seeing that crypto go into actual decentralized wallets or applications or things like that it's it's it's largely just staying in like centralized exchanges um and i think i think crypto itself plays a big role in how people you know enter the space kind of understand the space i think if most of us are frank well i don't know i can't speak for most of us but i i do think value the value of a token plays a big part in how we become interested in the in the in the space um when i saw bitcoin pumped to 800 that i mean for me that was like holy like i i i'd like to get in on that and that's why i did i did make the buy but i think i think that's kind of a natural transition for most people you um if you're tran if you're kind of transitioning beyond that uh you you start getting more enthusiastic for that you're really in it for the tech um and uh you then then um the more you start to dig you actually are red pill you you become someone who who starts kind of understanding where decentralized decentralization can add value where um ownership of a network can um can provide more access can provide more visibility for for communities that are not normally being able to that are not normally like well integrated into like kind of institutional tools we're using today and um that's how i think many of us become builders in in the space today um i don't think it's any secret that uh people who enter this space it it times very uh times very well with what um the booms uh the what do you call it the the booms and prices in 2011 uh in 2013 in 2017 and now with nfts at the at the beginning of 2021 um and so for builders i think tokens have have really kind of opened their eyes to like what you can do with digital native money or assets and things like that but for your average person who's maybe not so interested in the kind of um who isn't initially interested in um in in in crypto beyond the speculation point uh the speculation aspect it's uh where do you go from here and i think you see that with the adoption today um crypto i think at the end of 2021 um it was reported uh that maybe four percent of the world owns uh some is qualifies as like a crypto user quote-unquote today um and but uh from our friends at gemiini uh they tell us the average at least in the us the average crypto user is a middle-aged male with fairly decent income more than 100 100k plus and they're largely just using it to trade in exchange and you know either boost their savings hedge kind of like hedge hedge against inflation things like that and so um i mean really uh if we're kind of frank and honest with ourselves this isn't really the decentralized future that a lot of us are thinking about this is still very much like a tool for financial speculation which which isn't necessarily a problem but i think there's a lot more ways that we can make the space accessible and that goes beyond kind of like there's a lot of you know talk on in the space in crypto twitter about how dapps need to be more accessible and things like that but maybe just depths are a bit further away than most people should be expected to understand today and um i mean i like these choice kind of quotes about web3 because the idea is like bridging web 2 to web 3 but i mean what even is web3 right now like it's a very nebulous definition um i think those of us here will probably kind of more or less accept the lines of like it's an internet of value it's it's it's now it's no longer just collaboration through open platforms but it's how to share the value you create together with the people who are helping you create that value um but if if we haven't really defined that kind of terminology yet um how do you expect like normal people to get involved um i was going to add a slide but i didn't for the sake of time where you know back in 2006 people said the exact same thing about web 2. like what the hell does web 2 mean like okay we're talking about open collaboration but people aren't really collaborating things like and but today it's like a no-brainer web 2 is web 2. and so um it's not web 3 isn't really here yet so how can we how can we we we make more attempts how can we create more opportunities for people to get in on this new digital economy um hence for us we talk about this a lot excuse me um for our users we call these micro incentives um just ways to share value our user set tends to be globally distributed teams that's that's where the bulk of our users come from today and we we share with them you can use crypto kind of as non-local micro incentives that you can share any there any value it's faster it's efficient um but more and more we're shifting towards we're trying to move towards a term like of micro on-ramping um today um it is admittedly a hosted solution um it makes it faster for adoption it makes it faster for our users to kind of get a handle on it to understand what um tokens are um we position it kind of as a crypto layer to use in web 2 tools and largely uh we've been using it to give people access to um to what's happening in blockchain um for example we have a partnership with the near foundation where they bestowed with us a grant that we then airdropped to our network of users um and that led to the creation over 500 near wallets um for i mean something that they probably would have not gotten organically like to a subset of users who would have never kind of checked out the near blockchain or anything we were able to still incentivize and kind of bounty bountify the process of okay it's still a centralized system but we can create incentives and we can create rewards for for behaviors and values that we want to that we want to promote that we find is valuable to us and um that's pretty much what tokens are anyways in a decentralized network our approach today um uh for our users they don't interface with the blockchain at all it's a hosted ui postgres permission partition database it's kind of like we design it for like coinbase for groups but we take a hub and spoke approach where the web app is kind of the hub and more and more we're integrating web 2 tools that you can then create workflows for create programmability for for the distribution of tokens today um on the blockchain side on the blockchain blockchain backend users don't touch it at all it's just us working with a with a with various multi-sigs across various different nodes we work with them we're on for we're we're across chain we work on uh the bitcoin blockchain we work on ethereum we work on the near blockchain now we're also on cardeno and we're also on the dodge chain um so uh but our users don't interact with the they don't face they don't face the frictions of dealing with on-chain transactions and um we find for noobs that that creates a more um that creates a smoother experience and it streamlines that i mean eventually they will off ramp and [Music] it's not always to a binance or a coin base we have users asking of us asking us about uni swap we have asked is asking us about how do i how do i um how do i get into more like dicey kind of liquidity pools and so it i mean as if there are ways to kind of share and expose and distribute tokens to a wider set of of audience members that aren't your typical kind of djen or like crypto crypto fanatics i think you will find a more equitable kind of accessible way to uh spread the crypto kind of philosophy um as you can see um we initially started off as a uh just a comp a web app from your browser traction wasn't so crazy it was uh at its at its peak it was like i don't know like maybe we were on ramping from fiat to crypto like 2 000 a month usd um when we started the integration um things just skyrocketed i think people i think people really want to really want to kind of the convenience of doing it of using it from the tools that you're used to not having to learn a new decentralized tool not having to kind of deal with the learning curve of going through with like a wallet like metamask an extension or or even like a an arjun smart contract wallet um we saw that slack for us was a beachhead and we saw that that really we had we on ramping jumped from like 2k a month to suddenly 10k to 50k to the then we did 100k and um by the by the start of the year we did 250k and it's it's largely thanks to the convenience of being able to do it from the tools you understand and where you're collaborating with the people who are helping you like build the value you're building um we we recently did a discord integration as well um it's actually powering the the sport dao uh discord um if you're in the if you're in the east denver um discord server um we're powering the spork dow distributions that are happening um with spork token um so our users today are largely uh non-crypto companies non-crypto natives like i mentioned earlier they tend to be like globally distributed teams globally distributed members where something like if i'm in the u.

s and my colleague is in i don't know india or in korea i mean if i want to tip him like 10 us dollars the entire process of trying to give him 10 us dollars to someone in a country who doesn't have a usd denominated bank is um not even worth your time frankly with with the friction with the with the fees um so for globally remote teams this is a way to stay here um grab a beer on me here's 10 bucks in bitcoin or eth or something like that online communities is somewhere where we've also touched kind of like a sweet spot of good users in these kind of communities the idea is to build participation to build contributions and um you know internet native value um is is a great way to kind of build that we're getting more and more requests to um you know help organizations build their own tokens um it's not something i think today we're sticking with blue chip to provide the liquid faster liquidity faster kind of real value but i think more and more as people are naturally as organizations are naturally more decentralizing people are understanding the value of kind of using tokens to um to to to reward and incentivize um crypto orgs are now starting to use this too like i mentioned uh spork that was using us um the near foundation uses us in their slack um we're we we we're we're we're working with ixec to then ixec is doing more and more bounties and um and and and uh short term kind of like social media based tasks with their community and they're looking for ways to bring more people not just crypto enthusiasts but like newbies into into into their fold and so they find us as a good compromise to um to achieve that upcoming bridges we're looking at um it's not necessarily the apps that are so much important as like the functionality the apps bring um contributions participation are a big thing that people are looking for now that we kind of have the p2p aspect of it people now want to do performance based or success-based sort of things so we're looking at um collaborative tools like trello or github where for example where a lot of dev work is being done same with participation social media based things are something we get a lot of asks for i know twitter has been work has been working more and more in this space with tipping um natively from your twitter accounts um and eventually we are making a purposeful shift on chain um we already offer yield for uh um for users that keep their tokens with us we plug into compound we plug into y vaults on yearn we plug into um the different delegator nodes on different chains as well um for for newer tokens like near um we are we we do blockchain automation for the on-ramp and off-ramp of tokens using tools like alchemy and tatum um we are looking to slowly integrate more new features that that do bring value and do do teach people more about the benefits of decentralization and using actual crypto tools we will do sign in with ethereum and eventually we do hope to be uh fully on chain probably looking at a side chain or a layer too to kind of keep micro incentives efficient and affordable um so just to close um i really like this slide very much i think um it gives it it should give people an appreciation for like the timeline of how adoption and mainstream adoption kind of works this is actually um a timeline of internet browsers um it starts from 1990 when you know um when when the early when the early prototypes were built and then mosaic was built a few years later you see the first circle i made that's netscape the commercialization of mosaic back in i think like 93 or 94 or something like that and this wasn't even a viable commercial browser it was made free for like all the users possible i don't know if how old most of most of you guys are here if you remember using netscape navigator things like that internet explorer came shortly after that and the the big the big square i've kind of blocked out there that's probably at least in the u.s context that's probably when internet became more accessible when when people when your browser could do when you weren't forced to use a dial-up modem anymore there was broadband you could do things with cash cookies and stuff like that you could save on applications um that's probably the first kind of mainstreamization of um of a browser but you have to wait until like 2008 almost 20 years later for chrome to become a thing which is like the massive force of a web browser today and for me i think i find this as a great parallel to think about where we are in crypto how early we still are and why like more accessible on-ramps more accessible browsers so to speak are necessary to get more people um exposed um so that was my presentation i hope it was um at least entertaining or educational you can um contact me here or uh i think yeah that's my twitter and uh yeah thanks for your time