Web2.5: The Inevitable Rails for Crypto's Next 100MM Users - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2022

hey guys how's everyone doing uh I'm Bradley miles I'm the CEO of roll uh before I start it's just always good to get a survey of the audience quickly so how many users here um you know have used metamask recently cool all right uh how many users here have uh participated in a dow okay uh how many users here have used um a decentralized exchange before raise your hand if yes or no okay and how many folks have contributed uh liquidity to a decentralized Exchange okay cool uh all right so yeah so as I mentioned I'm Bradley I'm the CEO of roll uh we build uh social token products for the internet uh creators platforms Etc and we're part of a larger category that I'll simply call Web 2.5 it's been really cool to see a lot of Builders and investors uh use this term in Asia and really it just means the infrastructure that gets web 3 to hundreds of millions and billions of users that world isn't going to look the same as it does now it's not it doesn't mean a billion different seed phrases or um you know um platforms that are directly web3 and I want to talk about some of the infrastructure that's important here and how to get there um but just first I want to highlight the importance of infrastructure just really throughout human civilization I mean going back to like the pre-history of how we think about Society you know with the Stone Age Iron Age and Bronze Age uh you know the tools and Tool making technology that you know help Society move forward all the way to the past few centuries think of uh you know the Industrial Age where we transformed Steam and electric currents and fossil fuels into energy and the important uh infrastructure that allowed that to happen engines Railways other other different types of tools um all the way to the digital age you know where the real Mission here was transforming the world's information into a digital format and the infrastructure that made that possible Right memory chips micro processors uh semiconductors you could actually argue that you know the mission of the digital age is accomplished we we've transitioned the world's information into a digital format and we're now living in the moral dilemma of that period right so we have um all of this the economics of the internet now centralized across several different platforms um and now you know we need to create a new epic a new age of the internet uh to disseminate those epic that those economics more widely we could Loosely call this the blockchain age and you know like like uh ages in the past it's going to require its own specific type of infrastructure um you know you could think about infrastructure for nodes side chains just to create uh you know more throughput there and nft and social token infrastructure you can think about the next thousand platforms that integrate digital assets they don't necessarily need to be digital asset platforms it may be Twitter Clubhouse Spotify with the right infrastructure this is how we get the next few hundred million users so many to talk about that a little more this idea that there's 5 billion plus you know monthly active internet users and give or take you know a a sort of liberal estimate uh it's about 35 million uh monthly uh web 3 active users to be kind of you know use the wallets uh holders as a proxy and so in order to get several hundred million web3 users you're going to have to meet uh web 2 users where they are you're going to have to go to web 2 platforms you're gonna need to integrate uh products into email Mass Social mass games and it's going to require a ton of infrastructure and so getting all the builders together and creating this different type of infrastructure for wallets um you know Fiat onboarding the next 100 plus million users are going to get are going to come from web 2 and you can't get to a true web 3 world without web 2.5 it's it's awesome to have great you know crypto native games and nft marketplaces and things like this but at their best you know there's maybe several hundred thousand uh you know daily active users to get to Millions uh it's going to require a lot of infrastructure so here's some examples of just web 2.5 uh products right different types of things that allow uh web3 to scale so one is uh you know MPC wallet infrastructure so for those that don't know MPC stands for multi-party computation and it's just this idea of sharding a private key into many pieces and reassembling it in this Captain Planet style framework to allow transactions to happen and this makes wallet infrastructure so secure and easy that um you know your niece can hold tokens now in this way there's no seed phrase and it's just as secure so a company like fireblocks is great MPC wallet infrastructure my company role uses fire blocks it's really great stable coins of course this idea that there's five billion people on the internet that are all super familiar with fiat currency uh creating the digital equivalent and making it truly stable is some of the first tokens they'll receive right it won't necessarily be Bitcoin or ether it may be a digital version of the dollar for remittance purposes or something like this so um these are all ways Builders can get involved and start building web 2.5 infrastructure for us to properly get to web3 token gating if you guys are you know familiar with the web 3 Creator economy nfts and social tokens um token getting infrastructure like collab land or Guild allows you to you know hold a certain amount of tokens and gain access to different um you know services or Goods or or Discord channels like very easily and so you know creating better token getting projects will build a larger web 3 Creator economy in the future uh Fiat onboarding take your pick wire uh zero hash these are all tools that enable you know those five billion internet users to buy crypto uh easily you know licensing and compliance uh so requires a lot of uh licensing to become a Fiat on-ramp you can be one of those um you know folks that that that that that that allow users to buy or lease those licenses as well uh so just talk to a company legatus in uh in Singapore here that uh that does that exchange infrastructure you can think of something like PayPal um you know it's a company with paxos behind the scenes so if you're buying Bitcoin on PayPal it's this company paxos allowing that to happen if you buy crypto on a U.

S company called public-public.com it's a company Apex crypto behind the scenes allowing that to happen um liquidity right routing liquidity from one um you know place to another so different platforms can buy tokens um so while on authentication this idea of a similar token getting verifying a user allowing them to verify the Wallet balance side chains when you think about the future of web3 social these types of things you know they're going to require massive throughput so the idea of building a um a very very very fast Layer Two on top of something like ethyl one allows that to happen easier and then something that roll does right social token infrastructure nft infrastructure this really allows a platform like let's say Clubhouse or Spotify to become a web 2.5 platform the total adjustable market for all those users is collectively around you know 300 400 million so imagine creating a product and getting hundreds of millions of users on the spot this is the power of web 2.5 so definitely want to see uh more builders start to do this and I'll talk a little bit about what what role is so role is I'm an infrastructure Builder so I am the CEO of roll and we build social token infrastructure so we power social tokens we make it really easy to Mint social tokens uh monetize them through membership capabilities so holding a certain amount of tokens paying creators platforms and eth getting tokens back and staking this idea of you know locking up tokens and getting more tokens uh for liquidity mining or collaboration purposes we've built an SDK that backs other platforms so take the clubhouse example a web 2 platform you can create a world in which each Clubhouse chat room has their own token let's call it a Singapore food token it can use something like memberships to generate liquidity for the Singapore food Dao um you know and then it can have a market value through uh staking creating liquidity Mining and so Clubhouse doesn't have to be a web 3 platform in that analogy they can focus on what they do best spatial audio and chat and all these things and web 2 infrastructure web 2.5 infrastructure can allow these things to manifest and happen um we also have apis that move tokens across platforms with you know billions or hundreds of millions of users so you can connect a wallet-like role to Twitter and tweet tokens to all of your followers uh you can you can connect a wallet like roll to potentially a streaming platform let's say Spotify for example and allow listeners to earn tokens from artists based on uh how early they've listened to a song let's say and so again the total addressable market for this stuff is hundreds of millions of users Financial Services as well so the ability to buy tokens easily so we wrap this stuff as an API that inevitably makes a lot of successful uh entrepreneurs and Founders in the future so you saw this in web 2 with a company like Stripe Right so stripe um did payments really beautifully and that evolved into the gig economy that evolved into a world and where a company like doordash in the US can deliver food and and doesn't need to think about payments a company like Shopify can focus on creating the best online stores in the US and it doesn't have to worry about payments with role our apis allow the foundation of the next internet to really happen and this is an example of like great web 2.

5 infrastructure right so turning Twitter into a social token platform where you could tweet tokens to each other creating something like a social token streaming platform it was a nine ten figure business right where every artist can have a token you can listen to music earn the token you know we're creating categories here like listen to earn right this is new things that are possible um and so you know we're not you know so the idea of entrepreneurs creating stuff like this focusing on their category is really special twitch right so connecting social tokens to Twitch and streaming tokens based on how long you've been in in a live stream something like Discord of course just air dropping tokens to you know everyone that's been active in your Discord over the past few months tipping Etc um investment apps right so if you guys are building stuff apps or if you know folks building stock apps you can plug social tokens into those stock apps and have a crypto option there as well metaverse and gaming things like you know live to earn provably existing in a metaverse and receiving tokens for that these are all you know massive businesses that are waiting to be built in the future um with infrastructure like this so this is the beauty of infrastructure if you guys are interested in building infrastructure or in the process of building infrastructure it's a very exciting time to get involved and just help this category help web 2.5 and web3 uh grow through those products Neo Banks and e-commerce so this idea of rewards imagine purchasing a coffee tomorrow and receiving a token from that coffee shop seems simple but there's a lot of infrastructure required right to connect with Visa all the stuff having a custodial wallet and so very excited about great infrastructure and definitely want folks to uh you know get on board and start thinking about web 2.5 as a category and how it works great infrastructure also incorporates all um you know all of the asset class along the way so um things like fire blocks right so Firebox is NPC wallet infrastructure works with every token things like collab land Guild you know those those token gating things they work with every nft and erc20 similarly with roll um we have the opportunity to turn every token into a social token right so it's not just things for creators or platforms it's also integrating you like we think everything's a social token so tipping usdc on Reddit for that really cool post or tweet uh buying Ethan WhatsApp you know through through different group chat options and a buy API streaming Bitcoin on Twitch to a bit Bitcoin Maxi live stream you know it's these are all things that we're excited about and we get to kind of integrate um across the space earning Matic in an L2 metaverse so when you guys think about infrastructure this idea of integrating um the entire asset class of tokens into it is sort of really important as well and then lastly yeah just these ideas that um great infrastructure connects the current moment with this Visionary future moment that we all see we all have this opportunity to onboard hundreds of millions if not billions of users into this amazing new asset class and it all relies on great infrastructure we can build right now so those Founders or future Founders thinking and building platforms think about building infrastructure and ways to get hundreds of millions of users involved in the category of web3 and crypto um at role we're focused on social tokens this idea of you know millions of tokens across thousands of platforms uh but in the future yeah we're very excited about other folks joining web 2.5 uh infrastructure and helping move the the category forward um if you guys are interested in building infrastructure would love to connect and um yeah in the future if you guys are thinking about um social tokens and different types of infrastructure plays or platform plays that we talked about would love to connect as well enjoy the rest of the conference guys thanks so much