Scaling Your Web3 Startup to Mainstream Adoption | Oluwasanmi Timilehin @Web3LagosCon

in the gym, everyone. Um, it's good to be here. This is my first time at a Web3 conference, and I'm glad to see all the faces here today. My name is Oluwasunmi Oluwatosin Olaleye. I'm the founder and CEO of Evolution Global.

So, Evolution Global, we're a global payment platform that enables people to send and receive money globally, um, powered by stablecoins. So, if you're a remote worker, you're a content creator, you're a digital business that's earning globally, you could receive payment from anywhere in the world, and you could also spend your payment locally. So, the problem we're solving is the problem of, um, receiving the global payment, but spending it in your local currency without having to deal with FX, um, or unreliable, um, off-ramping methods. So, you just spend your global payments like local currency. No need for conversions, and that's what we do at Evolution.

So, prior to us being Evolution, we used to be called Kryptonia. So, Kryptonia was basically an on-ramp off-ramp platform for stablecoins. So, users, um, in the Web3 space that were earning in stablecoins could just come, um, off-ramp their stablecoins, move from stables to Naira, and vice versa. But, we realized that, um, that was just like a a piece of the puzzle puzzle we were solving with just stablecoin. And if we really wanted to scale, we needed to look beyond just stablecoins to looking at how we could power the entire payment infrastructure just using stablecoins.

So, we decided to rebrand, and that decision was also because of, um, we're being limited focusing on just the Web3 markets alone. And the goal for stablecoins, the goal for Web3 is to serve everyone, not just Web3 guys or web 3 folks or people in the web 3 space. So, we made that decision and we rebranded to evolution and we kind of blew up with that. Things just um we had a very exponential growth. And so, that's why I'm here today to just talk to most people building in the web 3 space on how they can also use this strategy.

You know, our industry is fast evolving right now and we can see that um every financial institution, um every every financial institution, every financial system, they want to be powered by stable coin. In fact, if you're a financial institution and you don't have a roadmap for integrating stable coins, it's like you're not serious or you're not ready to grow. So, everyone right now is adding stable coins adding crypto real. So, where does that leave all of us that are that have been focused natively on stable coins on crypto? For instance, we see guys like Flutterwave, we see Grey Finance.

And these guys are giants in the industry. They have the distribution, they have the funds, they have everything, you know, for them to scale faster than and scale fast and for them to enable mass adoption. So, what that implies is that for people that have been in the web 3 space, you know, focusing on the web 3 market alone, um it will be very hard for you to compete at that level with guys guys like this because you're only focused on a small segment of the market. So, right now, you know, I've been talking about this, you know, prior to now on my social media on platform for a lot of web 3 folks to leave um leave or grow beyond the web 3 space. You know, there's a trend or something I noticed about the web 3 um projects, you know, we try to use a lot of buzzwords.

We like to focus more on the technology and not on the utility. And that's where we have been missing it. You know, there has been so much obsession about, you know, the technology, the blockchain, the all of that. But the real users in the real world, they don't really care about all those tech. They just want to use the use your platform to move money from point A to point B.

As long as their money gets to them, as long as they're able to use your their platform for whatever they need, you know, they're fine by it, you know, but the obsession about the technology, the obsession about, you know, generating buzzwords has made us like an isolated space. And this is why a lot of Web3 projects have not been able to scale from where they are right now. And if we want to go past that, or if you're building a project that's going to grow grow past that, you need to start thinking of how to go into um uh mainstream adoption. And this is just focus on what your product has to offer for everyone, not just Web3's Web3 um market, or not just Web3 space. And a lot of this has to do with simplifying what your product does.

Stop relying on the on emphasis on the technology. Everybody right now is abstracting abstracting the technology from um from their project. For instance, you know, in the Web3 space, we have a lot of um issues around gas fees, um seed phrases, you know, all of that. You know, when we started Cryptonia at that point in time, we or we had the opinion that a lot of people want, you know, non-custodial wallets, they want to keep their seed phrases, they want to But realizing that the main market, they don't really care about all of that. You know, they were not really bothered, and they did not want to be burdened by the stress of having to be managing their own um funds.

They want to be They want someone to be able to custody that, to able to do that for them. So, we kind of just removed all of that from our platform, and we just enabled people to, you know, store their funds on our wallet, send money, receive money, spend their stable coins as cash. And so far, the results were astonishing, you know. We started growing beyond the web 3 market. Most of our users now, they're like regular everyday users.

And speaking to people outside now, they don't see us like as a web 3 project anymore. They just see us like a financial app. Because at the end of the day, almost every crypto native platform, every stable coin product, what we are at the foundational level, we're a financial platform. And this is why the government is coming in to bringing regulations. They are trying to make everybody regulated.

They are trying to make everybody compliance. And at this stage, if you are not also thinking of regulation, compliance with the industry, you know, the the industry is becoming institutionalized. We are not We can't be doing things how we are doing things anymore. The SEC, they have brought out, you know, guideline. NRS brought out their guideline.

CBN also did not release a VASP guidelines for people to come and apply. You know, things are changing, you know, the industry is evolving. So, we have to evolve with the industry. We have to get institutionalized, too. So, you know, in that regard, um I'll just admonish everyone that is building in this space right now.

Go back to your drawing board. See what is going on in the industry. See how you can tailor your project to grow along these trends. And see how you can also evolve and grow past the web 3 market. You know, these are the few things I have to say to everyone here today.

Thanks a lot, everyone.

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