DeFi For Normal People - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2024

all right can you guys hear me okay great um okay so I'm GNA talk about D5 for normal people that's the the title of the talk uh and I think hopefully it'll be a little bit entertaining and a bit of a call to action in terms of things that we can do to actually bring more than the million or 2 million or whatever number people are out there actually using Defi and help ultimately onboard the next 100 million or billion users into into crypto so first uh by a show of hands how many people here use dii regularly maybe you have a hardware wallet or a metamask or whatever uh all right so I'm going to say 30% and then the rest of you just don't want to raise your hand but that that's fine uh when you use dii for those of you that they use it um uh do you feel comfortable like do you feel safe when you're signing a transaction how many of you feel safe and comfortable using defi dayto day one person two three four all right uh I mean I use dii every day you know pretty large transactions and I mean I got to tell you every time I hit that button on a hardware wallet uh there's like a little bit of sweat uh that uh you know that develops where I'm like is this it is this the time that I get rugged um and you know that among many problems this is the type of thing that ethery ultimately hopes to hopes to address um so uh uh I thought a fun way to uh to go through this uh this conversation is to uh show you text messages these are actual text messages from a real person a friend of mine that I got to deploy Capital into ethery so uh I'm going to show you kind of like open the kimono and uh show you some of the issues that even ethery which I think probably is regarded as a as a relatively userfriendly protocol even ethery has uh with trying to get normal people that aren't crypto degens to uh uh to use the the project and I should say my friend is uh you know he's probably about my age maybe even a little bit younger um he's a smart guy uh he ran a software company he made tens of millions of dollars like he's like a you know a person that you would actually consider like very technically Savvy he's a programmer you know smart smart guy and one day you know I was telling him about ethery he got super excited and said yeah all right cool I'm going to put you know I'm going to deploy some Capital into uh into ether five uh and this is the conversation this is the the journey that he went through uh in terms of trying to use crypto for the first time okay so the first thing that happened is he tried to send money in his case to Kraken uh he sent the money and for some reason you know for like a week and a half nothing the the money just didn't show up and so he sends me a text message being stressed out like what the hell is going on uh you know where like where did the money go is this typical so you know I try to reassure him I told them to reach out to to support um um uh but understandably that wasn't a good uh good experience even for like a relatively you know small small amount of money so he said okay you know what forget Kraken I'm going to use something else he's Canadian so uh he tried using some something called wealth simple which is a Canadian crypto uh you know it's a Canadian Robo advisor thing that does crypto so uh so he said okay forget Kraken I'm going to try wealth simple so that's like the first barrier that he had to he had to get through um uh so I asked him okay well does weal simple let you just withdraw it into into a wallet and so he said yep he he did it he set up metamask he muddled his way through the seed Fray and like the whole multi-step process of setting up a wallet and trying to understand how how it works um and then got that got that going uh next he realized oh he bought some ethon well simple but they charge a 2% fee on eth and he didn't realize that the UI you know on on the actual exchange didn't make it clear to him that he was actually paying 2% and so he's thinking all right I'm going to deploy like 50k or 100K like that's ridiculous that's you know that's way too much uh uh you know cost associated with uh with just getting some e so then he says okay well I'm going to go back to Kraken now um uh so finally he gets on with Kraken support uh you know they dig around I don't know they look in the couch cushions they find his money and then he realized oh they charged him like 150 bucks for like wire fees or exchange fees or whatever just to get the money on the exchange so $5,000 and4 $545 became $49 $100 okay pretty frustrating experience very opaque not not really uh uh you know this is not a person that's going to be raving about how awesome crypto is okay so he finally gets his eth he finally puts it uh you know into metamask and I told him hey you got to use a hardware wallet don't use a software wallet so he doesn't even understand the difference okay like if I use metamask then I have to transfer it to treasure like does does that mean like he didn't recognize that there's a connection between metamask and treasure he didn't realize these two things work together he thought he has to like send it from one to another so that was like another point of uh confusion for him uh so yeah so then finally he's like okay oh now I understand I can use treasure with my metamask so he's gone through like five different steps just to get crypto to a point where it's in his you know his his Hardware wallet that he can even begin to use it in in D5 okay finally he connected his metamask to his treasure he goes to ethery deposits one eth so he feels great okay I I get it but then and this is you know as ethery we can certainly make our experience better but he's like okay what so to make something liquid I had to pay two trans I had to do two transactions $5 then $10 like what the hell is actually going on and so what he's talking about here is he had to do an approval and I for a normal person trying to you know to interact with a D5 protocol it's like what am I improving like what does this even mean and then he had to do a deposit and in each of those he had to pay $15 in total just to get the eth into the you know this D5 protocol and then he's like okay well I put it in liquid does it mean it's not staked so liquid in our case is a D5 Vault so he this person understandably thought that when he's taking his Stak eth and putting it into liquid now he's like oh it's not staked anymore now I have to stake it if you think about like the number the the amount of context that you need to actually understand what the hell is going on when you're interacting with these protocols even something as simple as depositing it into a uh there there are thousands of pieces of information that you actually need to have in your head to be able to operate even at the simplest level in defi let alone trying to like lever up on Pendle and mine your YT tokens and all the fun stuff that some of us uh some of us like to do uh okay so now he's like all right I got them I finally I staked it I kind of understand what's going on how do I know what my performance looks like and so uh like there's there's no way for him to tell like has he made money has he lost money like is it in eth is it in dollars it's it's like a completely opaque process so I said okay you should go check out debank so he says great okay I'm going to go use dbank and every day I guess I'm going to log in and track this stuff on a spreadsheet like 1985 um and then finally all right what now he's Canadian so he has to pay taxes on this stuff so he's like well is this income is this capital gains like what do I how do I generate a report that like an accountant can then actually uh use in order to file a tax return so again if you think about the number of steps someone has to go through to use uh whether it's ethery or I'm using ethery because I I don't want to you know uh talk poorly about other people's prod so you can you know you can blame me um but I think any protocol that a person actually uses uh today involves at least this rough sequence of steps of like onramp onto crypto from crypto put it into metamask Hardware wallet deposit two or three different transactions and then try to figure out what the hell is going on after the fact so the context that you need is really tremendous and I think it's substantially different than trying to interact with like I don't know a bank or buying a stock like there there's a much more straightforward process that uh trafi as much as we criticize it has created that makes it much more accessible to normal uh normal people because right now I think objectively we have to say that defi is basically incomprehensible to normal people which is why it's limited to whatever it is maybe a million people that are using it worldwide okay so now I get to show either F so our mission we started and we currently for the most part a liquid staking protocol that has reaking built in so ethery you can stake your eth and it's automatically restak igen layer so you get to collect your loyalty points and staking rewards and reaking rewards uh we've been pretty successful in that small pocket of the universe that is defi we're at 3.5 billion in tvl and continuing to grow and we launched this new liquid product that my friend was uh was struggling with um so uh we've done well in this tiny little niche but our goal ultimately is to make defi accessible to millions of people uh worldwide and what a normal person typically needs to do needs out of their let's say Financial Services universe is they need to be able to save their money they need to be able to invest it and then they need to be able to spend it those are the sort of three basic functions that a you know a human operating the financial Universe needs to needs to have and that is basically the ethery road map ethery stake is your your savings account ethery liquid is your non-custodial investment account and ethery cash is your spending account so the idea is with ethery staking you deposit your eth it's stake that's restak and gives you all the benefits of uh uh of staking and the natural kind of interest rate of the ethereum universe ethery liquid is a an automated uh non-custodial strategy Vault so you take your stake teeth you put it into liquid and liquid deploys it into the default Universe uh and automates all of your dgen activities so that you don't need to worry about it in a risk-managed way uh and finally ethery cash which is has not yet been released uh but will hopefully be in the next uh in the next few months is uh a mobile app with an MPC wallet and a credit card attached that lets you actually spend and borrow against your assets in ether 5 so the idea is you open this app you buy some eth you deposit it and then you can spend it any any way that you want in the real world so the the idea is that you'll never have to off-ramp again you onramp onto crypto once and then you're fully done and we think that by doing this by making defi accessible so it's it's a couple of clicks without having to have a whole world of context uh in your head in order to be able to use uh you know these basic functions uh we think we start opening up the world of defi to a much broader audience and allow normal people to benefit from all the great stuff that's uh that's happening in our our ecosystem that's it thank you