Banking The Unbanked vs CryptoKitties: Blockchain And Its Application Today @ TOKEN2049

[Music] okay hello everyone thank you very much for that very warm introduction I find the topic of the panel today like really really interesting and critical for the industry critical for like answering ourselves where we are at the moment as the blockchain projects as people believing in decentralized future and like before we move on with the round of introductions I just wanted to make sure that everyone like understands the alternative we have in a title so like banking the unbanked is quite obvious and self-explaining I believe but cryptic it is for those of you who are not very familiar with the space maybe like a little bit cryptic so cryptic it is was a hiriam well maybe caelius Acurio killer app and it's like a killer app in both senses so first like it was really really popular long time ago like eight weeks ago and and it literally killed if you're in blockchain for a while because of the number of transactions at the same time it is hard to say that crypto kitties solve any problem on problem like like Bank Indian Bank like this is not crippled kiddies it's not even like the first world problem I would say this is like a Bay Area problem solving so yeah so that's really our alternative like what we are able to use blockchain technologies for at the moment and like ultimately what is the state of adoption we have a great panelists here like pre old industry leaders representing critical projects so maybe you will start with the rant of introduction starting with Max and I would like everyone to like introduce not only him or herself but also the project and please be honest where you are with the adoption and user base at the moment okay thank you Julian good morning Hong Kong I hope you're as excited as I am to be on the stage my name is max codec I am the CEO and president of the list foundation based in Zook Switzerland and to tell a bit about myself I'm German I'm living in Berlin I'm 26 years old and I'm in blockchain space since about five years for me it's like a journey where I learn new things every day and it's super exciting les is building tools for developers to enable them to build their own block chains because we think that this technology is amazing and that we need to spread it and that we need to accelerate adoption of it but development is super complicated it involves a lot of complex technologies and that's why we want to simplify this whole process and that is our journey Atlas we want to make long chain development simple and to answer Julian's question where we are in terms of development or adoption we have to say we are still extremely early we are still heavily in development our users are mostly speculators and traders we still have to go to many many development related conferences to attract developers into this blockchain space because well let's be honest it's still small if we compare it to other areas like the Internet of Things or other like new nests and technologies which are coming up in the next years right so it's early but very promising for us right now and I'm like looking forward to the next years where we can just increase the adoption of development where those developers can really build like disruptive technologies with the tools we will provide to them Thanks yeah I am Martin I or we we started building prediction markets actually already six years ago we started building a Bitcoin prediction market and since three years working on gnosis that is a project I'm representing now and I co-founded yeah it's it's a prediction market platform on aetherium again we started three years ago when aetherium wasn't even live starting developing and were one of the first applications kind of in a very early stage launched in a very very early stage two weeks just after a theorem launched but to your question well it's it's still even though we kind of were in the process from from the beginning there are kind of you you want to build that and kind of on that way you discover all there are all those pieces that are still missing so we kind of had to build first other things infrastructure components that are now in a way their own products but are not necessarily that what we wanted to build initially so where are we at well we had a kind of life or demo with the or test run was a few hundred users and and so far I would say our main target group at this stage is actually still other developers we want them to build applications on gnosis good morning everyone I'm Brad zoster on the global head of business partnership or a business development for - we are a blockchain payment network we are a alternative form of payment using digital currency in this case - our goal is really freedom for money and we look at our environment with really serving four different types of customers we have our users we have our individual merchants and we have larger business partnerships and then we also have developers our overall value proposition is really I think around kind of three three key things we are we are extremely quick so near visa light transaction speeds through our instant send feature we are extremely inexpensive to transact as well so the instant send is currently about four US cents to actually transact and then the third is our governance model and how that works in relation to a cell phone during Treasury system to help invest in the network and invest in our partners moving forward so what I like about that specifically is around is it allows us to take a proactive approach we share our block reward between both the miners and another layer called the master nodes which are which are our shareholders and they're the ones that then vote on proposals on a monthly basis what happens is 10 / 10 percent of that block reward is what's used to actually fund that Treasury system so it creates that that budget system that doesn't rely on outside investment or external forces to propel that network so not very excited I think as far as adoption and where we're at like like a lot of people in this space it's still very early days we have a little we have over 2,000 merchants but again globally that that is a small number and we're averaging around 9,000 transactions a day what we've found is also though in more niche areas one of our areas of focus is around the unbanked and that's where we are seeing a lot more adoption at a grassroots level specifically for example in Venezuela right now cool well really happy to be here in my home of Hong Kong speaking to all of you so I'm co-founder of Zen cash right now I'm focusing mostly on academic partnerships and governance Zen cash is essentially an evolution of Z cash technology that kind of expands on the principles of embedding ZK snarks into the blockchain and creates a holistic platform that also supports distributed messaging and distributed publishing services and entirely enclosed encrypted space and so we like to say that word - defying Z cash we have definitely taken some of the principles from Dash's governance and build these out - in a secure node network that has a very low barrier to entry and allows users from around the world to stake a certain amount of zen and participate in essentially voting decisions so where we're at right now we're focusing mainly on scalability studies alongside IO HK who is a research partner and we're also focusing on building out this governance model we have about 40,000 community members we like to say that they all believe really strongly in the right to human privacy and we also since launch of secure notes which was in January of this year we already have about 7,500 up and running around the world which is pretty exciting for us and we're really excited for 2018 and opportunities that hopefully will come especially in regards to helping people in really stressed economies specifically Venezuela post-soviet States and certain African nations as well hi good morning my name is Federico ass I am from Argentina it's a country that had lots of problems in the past right because of governance and bad yeah institutions and a couple of years ago I started to become like obsessed with how can we transform justice systems because they are very slow they're very expensive and ordinary people I cannot really have access to lawyers maybe on justice and I started doing research on that and starting from the point of view of the problem I was not talking or thinking about blocked in at the moment but then blockchain came as the technology that could solve this problem right and that's how kleros was born it's a decentralized autonomous organization that its justice system on the internet that chooses jurors using game theory for adjudicating disputes in a fast and transparent way and we are now at a proof of concept stage and starting to test the system and see how it works and very excited about what's coming for hey my name is see relevance off' i am co-founder syndicator i'm 31 years old from russia originally and for the last 80 years I live in decentralized mode 50% of time in Russia background my background is software development and at 8 years I'm moving with entrepreneur ship and syndicator is 4 years startup where we are building a platform for effective decision-making we combine a collective mind of mostly financial analysts at this moment we have about 100 thousands of financial analysts that are contributing their mental assets into the system and we can bind it with artificial intelligence so this is the what we call hybrid intelligence for effective asset management and this is the ecosystem and we are at the very beginning of the process still we have really long pass to go but I can say that the adoption of our token is already showing its success and the utility token of syndicator is intensification of participants of the ecosystem these people are and our our community is very active and very constructive so we experiment with governance with decision-making not only in terms of investments but also in terms of strategy of the whole ecosystem and I'm very excited to see how the tokens are changing the mind and how the ecosystems of the project are becoming kind of virtual governance systems now I can say that our communities virtual governance split it around 160 countries of the earth really decentralized and I'm a CEO of Gollum Gollum is the centralized market for computing power so a little bit over simplifying it's already been Airbnb for computers and we are in a late alpha moving into beta next months hopefully with the mountain et remain it at the same time okay guys so it seems that although our projects are on a different stage of development and adoption like in in every case it is it is quite early we don't have like a project here like with a 1 million user base hopefully that will change in a year and I'm pretty sure that like we are all convinced that our projects will have like millions of users you know in a year so to not like repeat ourselves what do you think has a greatest potential for the mass adoption in the next 6 to 12 months apart from your projects apart from the projects on the panel what do you think like you would have the biggest hope for bringing blockchain and decentralized technologies to the people yeah I would say is also shirt or relatively short term things it's hard but but one one one thing I I discovered from from from the etherium ecosystem there are tiny pieces and if you look at it kind of the defining the standard for a token kind of that was his process and and you would need to kind of ride the smart contract and that was a process that took I would say six to nine months and it was a tiny piece but kind of what it enabled well is quite huge and and I think we will see those those and that is a little bit of UT off of this decent place world that you can add a little tiny piece and suddenly everyone can jump on it and suddenly everyone can use it so I like to think of those as crypto primitives or so those small elements and I think we will see more of those small elements and that might be elements around governance and suddenly everyone can use it or there is this token created registries I'm pretty excited about it's essentially just a thing where you where you have a list and you have a mechanism to add things to the list or remove things from the list and it sounds kind of well not not very spectacular but again token also doesn't sound very spectacular but I think as soon as those things already and then proven to to work well you will can massively see then or it's possible that you'll see a massive explosion of suddenly everyone is using it and suddenly it's becoming a huge thing conceptually I think for mass adoption it has to go back to UX the user experience so not maybe so much a specific project I know you said I can't talk about mine on this question but joking aside I mean if you look at where the user experience is right now we're not going to get our parents or grandparents on the blockchain we have to make that simpler it scares people in the sense that you lose your keys your money's gone you get an address incorrect by one add one digit your money's gone so that user experience needs to be improved before the everyday person I think conceptually is going to start using it on a bigger scale project wise what I would I guess a project that I like that I would love to see some stronger mass adoption I think is civic it's highly relevant right now with everything that's happening with Facebook it's a project that I do like and I think that concept around you know managing your own digital identity is extremely important there is another important thing that we have to take into consideration so this is very early stage like if we were talking about the television industry so when are we going to have like good programs for people to watch like this the user interface right well we are still building like the transistors and the chips that make the TV work right so we need to make that right and then we're going to move forward on applications that are going to change people's lives but that's something that have to take into consideration this is a stage of protocol development still so I'm pretty excited about the Lightning Network and the Bitcoin network I think it's one of the major hindrances for the entire industry to solve the scalability problem and I'm just looking forward to a solution for that and I think a first major step will be the adoption of the Lightning Network to well increase adoption and just increase the well usage of cryptocurrencies itself that it's not just something you hold on to for the rest of your life but that it's something you use in your everyday life in order to order let's say a sticker from the block stream shop or to pay for coffee I think the Bitcoin network itself is not designed to do that but the second layer solutions on top of it like the LED like the network the Lightning Network extremely nice solutions in order to bring that utility part into the network itself yeah I think a beautiful thing that we get to recognize is that the industry is still so nascent so I'm really really excited about experimentation in the backend dealing specifically with scalability so this would mean and like looking into different consensus mechanisms and then also like directed acyclic graphs are pretty cool so seeing a bunch of those like be implemented and stress tested this year will be I think just a great development for all of us and then kind of conversely also speaking about like access points you know better better payment gateways better - centralized or decentralized exchanges and then better like Fiat - crypto exchanges with like grid aux but also regulated with you know decent can't I see processes that don't take three months these are all basic things that need to be vamped up to like you said make users just more comfortable with crypto currencies because the idea that you know you you can't cash out easily or it's really really hard to like a time a purchase because it's just ridiculously hard to get an account this is not this is not something that's gonna allow people who don't even have an investing experience and are potentially like we're entering the digital realm for the first time to be comfortable you know to join join us in the space you know this is interesting because to me that discussion although we were to talk about applications and and apps like is going down to the protocol levels because it turns out obviously like scalability it's replacing again UX problems that we talked about are the result of not that the fact that blockchain companies cannot afford this in UX specialist a they are able to afford them but of the problems that we have on technology level and and so on and so on so on so what do you think maybe maybe we should talk not about the state of the apps today but about like what is possible and what is not yet possible and why not Martine yeah I can bring the example year so again we wanted to build this prediction market and like we're still doing that but like over one-and-a-half years ago all we had to create something as simple or kind of been missing in infrastructure component as a multi SiC wallet so could kind of just a wallet where multiple party could have kind of shared X's because we wanted to do this token sale some time ago and of course the keys or the funds shouldn't be her help kind of just buy one one key but instead by many and it really didn't exist at the time right now it's a smart contract it holds the most funds of all smart contracts it holds many billion this multi-sig wallet we developed but now we're trying to get a step further and trying to improve those UX issues and offering that as a solution to kind of normal users currently it's only used by teams so when the idea is well you have one key on your phone one key on your computer and kind of the user doesn't you have to think about keys they doesn't need to know about keys they just think of devices you have three four devices and if you lose one device well you have so other devices to read kind of change that key and and and there might be if you lose all devices you can also kind of have back-up solutions where you don't have to store down your seat phrase and and and and stuff like that so yeah that is again one example of pieces that are missing to then actually build those apps or depths that's actually what we're building right now with evolution but to your point that technology has to come first building that behind the scenes and then the the output if you will from the user in our case with evolution will be you don't transact on a crypto address you're transacting based on buddy lists you know you're paying a hundred dollars to care in or build or dad or mom and again creating that just kind of behind the scenes all that technology though of course still has to be built first I think a really big point of vulnerability in the industry right now is actually during the KIC AML process with all these new exchanges that users are being on-boarded to every single time it requires application or submission of your you know address proof of address ID sometimes a selfie with holding up like this is only income to be used for cracking calm and the day and your signature and so the fact that across all of these potentially small exchanges that sometimes don't outsource kyc processes are most personal data is just being stored we and we don't necessarily know how I think that's super risky so I'm really excited for digital identity verification projects that can then kind of develop kyc gateways potentially using ZK snark technology where users can really easily submit essentially claim and be validated an assertion such as like their identity and then not have to give actual like proof to each independent processing platform I think that's like really really exciting and it gets more interesting and complex and you think about it in the context of privacy right because if I'm trying to remain anonymous when using these digital platforms how do I go through the ki caml process I think we had we had a hackathon actually this weekend zen partnered with legal hackers and we worked in 50 countries 50 so countries around the world to kind of hack a governance model for our community and this is the problem that they kept coming up against like how do we allow users to maintain their privacy and anonymity but still make sure that one human gets one vote of our system because their identity has been verified so I think over the next year that's gonna be a really interesting conceptual challenge and I'm excited to see like who cracks it pretty hard and just wanted to build on what Martin just said and at the beginning of the ecosystem so you were building a platform and you had to build all these services connected to the platform because nobody was building that right but now that the ecosystem is starting to become more mature specialization is rising and so you have like different project at earth specializing in different parts of the ecosystem doing just one thing but doing that very good so in our case its arbitration and in other cases of Martin is like prediction markets so I think that the the ecosystem will move so much faster as we start to each one of us pick one vertical and work and very hard on that one yeah hitting what was said above I'm definitely agree with that governance is the area but I'm very optimistic about her graph and decentralized app that will allow I believe that this will allow adopt finance industry and make micro payments fast and cheap medical industry was not mentioned and I'm very positive about that also mmm we didn't mention the centralized file storage and this implies computing this is the area where utility tokens can be very adaptive and also there are new kinds of ecosystems and technologies that create agility tokens that could be adopted by users in creating content or crane like one of the project with artificial intelligence that targeting average audience that are huge huge mass of people that are marketing the data and it's very simple work where it's illicit I can incentivize people to get into and educate them ok guys so now the last question a couple of months ago I think when the market cap of the space reached half a trillion dollar there was a famous tree tweet by Metallica Turing it was like brat on stage yesterday so maybe I will not refer to all the tweet but basically it was like that yeah well the market copies trillion but you know how many unbanked have we been how many Venezuelans have protected from inflation and so on and so on and like their the conclusion was the question like have we deserve it obviously this is not a half a trillion at the moment pretty close to it so have we deserve it like who has who took most of the benefits so so far and who you think they could respectively benefit must from their technology because I think that the benefits are very concentrated and we meet it right now and as we want to build like the centralized future obviously those benefits should be like really distributed as well I would like to raise the one more question here do we really own it if we ask we deserve it isn't it just a number isn't it an illusion that the value with this amount is there well this that might be very well any illusion yeah obviously the question is valid yes so we have we deserved that delusion even so I would say like I'm in no way to decide if humanity like deserved it or not but I would say like the brightest minds on this planet are working on blockchain tank right now like it's absorbing all the talents from different industries and if you're investing you're always looking into the future you're looking for the potential technology has and for me reduction technology definitely has a huge potential which can disrupt like entire industries and I have no idea about the actual value where it should be evaluated at but I just think that behind this whole like topic so many more topics yet to discover that the true potential is just not really like visible at this stage and that's why if I come back to the question if we have deserved it I would say it's not a matter of if we deserve it it's a matter of let's just push it forward and let's make us deserve it you know I think right now the benefit exists with primarily in the creators the speculators and then the investors the majority of that value that's where it sits I think the intent is definitely to push that and bring that to unbanked people like what we're both doing with Venezuela for example volatility is a disincentive for say us up here to want to transact with digital currency but when you do flip that lens to someone that is in Venezuela or in Zimbabwe the National Fiat actually is more volatile than digital currencies so it's a completely different paradigm and I think that's where we're starting to see momentum are we there yet no but I think the focus is there with with people I think again the intent is also going there but the value at this point still sits at the higher levels and there's an author of history of technology from Venezuela who's called Carlota Perez and she always speaks about when you have a new technology cycle it starts by high speculation and big bubbles and that's what brings capital to the right place of course some of that is going to be wasted has happened in the 90s with the internet and the bubble so why would this be different right but in the end so all this capital that it's coming to the area and connecting with the good teams and the good ideas this is going to like eventually change the world some of the companies are going to fail but some of the googles of the Amazons and the Facebook's of the central ice age will emerge so yes we will deserve it some years from now I always think it's a little bit funny how founders I always ask this question and I like to turn it on the audience a little bit because if collectively we're trying to bank the unbanked I would just say that money talks and if we all if investors are better unifying around that vision and around that intention I think that's when real value can be created for end-users but I do agree that right now value is being captured mostly by investors curators and founders as well so I hope that over the next year projects that are kind of hacking around around issues that will really benefit the emerging world will get a little bit more attention and because I think there's a lot of potential for like learnings for all of us but it really is on the people in the audience and investors around the world to you know decide to do due diligence and then invest into those coins yeah totally first degree people who benefited most are us so far but but on the unbanked bank I actually prefer the the Oh miss the slogan unbanked banked right yeah but anyway so I mean I I think it's more exciting to find new paradigms and not kind of just say well we should try to get the unbanked into the banking system let's create a better system actually well I agree that we should look for fine cars and not faster horses okay yeah well this is really appealing perspective to me that although like maybe it is a little bit a little bit too much and too fast that help us in any way in many ways and when I see like the great talent acquisition to the space at the moment I'm pretty sure that we'll be moving faster and and better like with every commitment because even when I when I compare like where we are at the moment at a year ago with the number of people number of great talents trying to solve the heart questions and I'm really optimistic but apart from like hiring more talented people going to more conferences spreading the world more and more what else can we do to advance our ecosystem our blockchain industry faster what are your thoughts on that you can add to that like your final thoughts on that panel because we've only five minutes left so the what holds us is technology regulation and user experience so we are we have to move on all these three dimensions we're working on technology so we're hiring talents and deep diving there we have to work with regulations so we have to set an intention and go into that dialogue all over the world and help governance form this loss and understanding of this industry and on the third dimension we have to educate average people so we are all responsible for sharing the knowledge and bringing in to mass like yes just wanted to say that in the end technology is about solving problems you blockchain AEI or whatever technology it's about saving times making things faster cheaper right so and I think it's very important for all of us in the ecosystem to keep the eye on the problem we want to solve because why is blockchain so so cool because it's going to enable us to do things much faster much cheaper and in a much more transparent way than the previous stack of technology so I think that we should always keep an eye on what's in the end the problem we are trying to solve I am from Argentina right and a couple of years ago we held currency controls in the country I couldn't like send money abroad so for me cryptocurrency was actually a way to solve the problem of sending money abroad right so and that's why you think that some of the key use cases and killer apps are going to come from the emerging world right I think if I was giving this advice a couple months ago it would hit home a bit more because we were in a euphoria back then and now the market is certainly corrected but I think something we all need to keep in mind is not to let all the speculation and hype distract us from our intention and why we're here I think it's also really important to leverage the ethos of the blockchain space in general and just be super supportive to other founders and other teams because at the end of the day like we're an open source community a win for one team is one for everyone and just generally to be compassionate to new people entering the market it's risky it's scary like there's there's no way to to do it right because the market is ridiculously inefficient and there's a lot of asymmetrical information and so I think just showing up to your communities and really trying to educate about the why blockchain is so important and crypto is so important instead of just like the how to make short-term gains I think that's yeah a lesson that we should all learn and agree with what Yuri was saying and specifically around the the regulation piece I think that's coming I don't think that's something that's going to be avoided and I think there's a lot of education to what Yuri was saying as well I mean you still see politicians to think block you know that bitcoins anonymous which is obviously quite far from the truth so at the end of the day we can either have a seat at the table and work with regulators and and try to influence and educate and show them why their misperceptions are just that not accurate and their misperceptions or we can have or we can be steamrolled by those regulations so I'd prefer to have the seat at the table under question how to move faster I would say actually more more crypto kitties now I'm serious I'm serious I'm serious so it kind of I would say experiments are needed so and I I see that as an experiment and to be honest I'm very happy that it is just crypto kitty so kind of I would say let's start with those things that are not life-changing because well the technology is not robust or I I would be quite skeptical to do things that are life-changing for people at that stage so I'm very happy you can kind of about those experiments where well if it breaks something well then it breaks something but it's fine so let's try to break it and let's do experiments and and by that getting to better and more secure and more robust systems yeah so one of the key learnings I had from my partner Oliver barrows who I had the pleasure to found list with is that you have to focus in life okay and let me be a little bit controversial here I think we should be on less conferences and be longer in our offices and just work our asses off I mean we have the responsibility to make this technology as widespread and as awesome as we are always talking about so I think we should just like work you know we should just contribute as much as we possibly can we should get as many people into the space as we possibly can and just make a tap make it reality and I think everyone on stage is really passionate about it and everyone's really doing it and I can just tell it to everyone in the room just work your asses off you know contribute do whatever you can to make this happen let's build the future which is decentralized [Applause] that there is also one important thing that I want to mention that behind this digital as its revolution there is an ideology and that it is aimed to solve our problems and that we have to collaborate all together with humanity and so the most important problems of our civilization okay guys thank you very much so the conclusion is that more cryptic it is and am banking panics endless panels thank you very much thank you thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]