Cash Is King: What We Lost on the Way to Crypto | Sid Gandhi - Polybase (Zeplo)

I know it's a little bit weird since we're at a crypto conference but we're going to work our way up to that I'm going to talk about a little bit about the history um and what we might have lost on the way to crypto as we kept improving technology and potentially how we can get that back my journey in crypto starts in 2012 uh I bought Bitcoin when it was $8 I had to send money uh over like money gram or something like that to someone in Eastern Europe and just hope that they sent money to my Bitcoin some of the ogs know that that's how we bought Bitcoin back in the day um I have since lost that wallet and a few more uh so no I did not make any gains on that um I found ethereum in 2014 I found uh kind of all the icos after that and of course nfts and all that um after that I started poly based Labs with my co-founder Callum he's sitting right there he's a beast um we wanted to solve scalability cost and privacy challenges in crypto uh and in blockchain so we started that in 22 I won't go through our history there but I'll jump straight into what I think is going to be a really fun topic which is money here's a fact money coordinates people and I think we hear a lot about money is the root of all evil and I think we're past that now I think we know that money has been a system that has coordinated humans since the beginning of time um and it's interesting because money means nothing if you're sitting on a deserted island by yourself right and so here's a thought experiment what if there's two people on the island does money mean something then not really what about three what about four 10 15 20 when does money become something that's useful it's actually kind of a trick question because it's not that money is useful or not useful it's the monetary system or a system of value exchange and so let's go through a little bit uh of History uh we had early humans of course they used the barter system that allowed us to scale to about 10 people or tens of people and early tribes we have Native Americans with trust based giving scaling to a little bit more um we had the Greeks uh build using gold and silver coins as a store of value um we had kuon using paper money in his Empire uh because people were getting robbed while they were traveling for Commerce paper's obviously easier to carry this one's interesting because he basically said if you don't use paper money in my Empire you will be killed it was extremely effective and that allowed him to scale his Empire to tens of millions of people and of course we have fractional Reserve uh that kind of started in England in the 1600s where uh the goldsmiths literally ran out of gold um to back the amount of value that was being created in England at the time um and so they started giving out notes without taking gold receipts that might seem like kind of a scam honestly it sounds like a rug pull to me but we gave it a really fancy name we call it fractional Reserve Banking and that's how we coordinate billions of people today it's quite amazing and it works um but it has problems and so Satoshi and friends and all of us in the last many years have been working on improving that system uh through blockchain technology decentralized ledgers proof of work consensus um but we still have a couple problems uh we probably know this list of problem statements a lot of you might be working on these already um today I can't really have my grandma used crypto it's still too hard uh privacy is a problem all of our transactions are public forever uh maybe there's some cool things that are happening that are changing that but it's still so early that it's still a big problem scalability maybe we've solved parts of it uh cost we've solved some of that as well stability maybe stable coins have solved a little bit but we still have a long way to go there but the real question is remember cash cash was actually pretty freaking G great it was instant settlement try having that on a blockchain you can't you have some latency it was free to transact it was fully private it was peer-to-peer it was decentralized practically of course there's a central bank but practically it's decentralized one of the Simple Pleasures that I still indulge in today I live in New York there's these dollar slice pizzas I don't know if you anyone here from New York that knows dollar slice there we go you can take a dollar bill you can walk up to uh a store and you can buy a dollar a slice of pizza and it's amazing it's instantaneous there's nothing between me and my pizza no middleman no beeps no Taps no clicks um and it's instant and it costs me nothing except for that dollar and so that kind of pleasure uh that instant pleasure of paying with cash is something that I've been looking for personally but obviously we have challenges there you have to carry cash around and you have change and you can get robbed so the question is can we have cash with all those amazing attributes but make it something that's easy and usable today and I'm really really excited because that's what I'm here to present we are today launching pay we are launching a way to do exactly that pay is a way to pay that is the easiest and most seamless experience that you've ever seen in a payments app you want to see it I have some screenshots all right this is what pay looks like it's dead simple literally anyone can use it you can go from downloading the app to that screen with a zero balance in less than one second there's no login there's no registration there's no phone number there's no kyc there's no selfy you get straight to the balance it's a self custodial wallet running on the polybase layer 2 ZK rollup when you generate uh when you make a payment you generate a proof locally on the device it happens in under one second find me one other ZK proof mechanism that generates a utxo proof in under one second on your device and I'll give you a bunch of money I don't know how much you can ask for whatever you want because there is none this is an industry first it is the fastest ZK utxo proof that you can have and that's what make pay pay possible and the cool thing I mentioned there's no username login or registration and so when you don't have that the way you actually send money is through a link you can see that here it just uses the OS level share sheet on iOS um and you can send that payment link via any existing channel so if you're texting someone you can send it on iMessage you can send it on Signal you can send it on email or Whatsapp uh you can even save it uh to your Dropbox and just store it there and the cool thing is the link actually contains a wallet with the amount in it and a private key and when you receive that link you actually redeem from the ephemeral wallet back into your balance and so that's what this looks like this is when you click on the link if you don't have the app it'll prompt you to download the app super easy you can swipe up to redeem we have a Rewards program um I'll talk more about that uh at the booth when you find me later I'm not going to go into that but it's really cool um the one thing you should know about that though is when you refer someone to pay you have to pay them to refer them and when you refer someone that person whatever fees they ever generate on the protocol the future um 1% of that will go to you forever and it's retroactive um on and off ramps this one's important a lot of uh payment apps that I've seen do a lot of cool stuff but the on and off ramps are really challenging we've partnered with Robin Hood crypto you can click that button if you have Robinhood in basically like 5 Seconds you can go from tapping that button to money being transferred into your pay wallet it does the whole transaction from your bank account uh in Robin Hood to usdc and to poly based usdc and one transactions pretty amazing shout out to Robin Hood for that great great team at connect you can also use coinbase binance and other crypto exchanges and also your wallets uh we give you a deposit address to deposit into uh in a few months we'll be launching uh local payment method on and off ramps so that's about 70 countries around the world uh you'll be able to go from local payment methods like a sea in India you have UPI in Brazil you have PX and dozens of others around the world where uh those payments are fast and free to on-ramp into poly base into usdc and uh I think the really fun thing today is that I think I I believe so much and the team believes so much that this is truly the most amazing payments experience that you've ever had uh we want you to try it and so you can download the app from from this link here and throughout this weekend we're going to be doing drops we're going to be dropping 100K throughout the whole weekend for you to try it and so all you have to do is come to our booth when you get a notification you have to turn on notifications in the app uh once you do that we'll send notifications out it'll be a couple times every day so if you don't get the first one don't worry uh there'll be more opportunities and uh you'll get to try out the app yourself and uh you might download you might see that the only way to get off the weight list is to get paid so if your if your friends are downloading if someone else outside East Denver has it they're not going to be able to get access until you pay them and guess what that's going to be a referral so every payment they ever make in the future that we charge transaction fees on for we're going to enable those in the future um you're going to get 1% of those fees that is the end of my talk I hope you guys enjoyed it uh team has been working really really hard on this and really really excited to show it off and I hope you download it use it and uh give us your feedback thank you wait that's what I wanted to see uh questions okay I did a good job no questions on the ZK proofs magic Tyler I know you have questions yeah yeah so the question was is it zero transaction fees that is correct there are no gas fees and no transaction fees today in the future we're thinking about different ways to enable transaction fees we commit to having them at 1% or below uh but we might do them just for international transfers um because we have to do foreign exchange and all that kind of stuff um but that's a great question thank you cool thanks everyone