Flash Talk by James Beck, Head of Growth, ENS

So, I heard that Marrick was stuck in a lift, which sounds actually really stressful, but um I'm ready to give a little talk. Uh so, I see a few people sitting in the stands. I have a question. How many of you have been using various stable coin apps to pay for everyday goods, coffee, food, taxis while you've been here? All right, we got a couple hands.

No, actually, yeah, about half the crowd. Um, so I I initially titled this talk apps where sending stable coins are as easy as sending a text, but let's be real. This is, you know, I've been in crypto since 2017 and even back in 2017, we didn't have mobile wallets. I would argue today we can send money globally as easy as sending a text as long as you have an internet connection. So I actually changed it up a bit.

And specifically for Argentina, the idea is, can you do it as easy as spending cash? Cash is universally accepted. It's private. Everyone knows what cash is. It's harder to uh Well, yeah, let's get into it.

So, what I ended up doing is I took four apps. I included the Dev Connect app because there is uh a way to pay for goods at the Dev Connect venue. The other apps I used were Pay, Peanut, and Tuyo. And what I've done is I've gone through a number of metrics and decided along these five metrics which are the best apps to use for payments. So the first metric is identity verification.

How easy is it to verify a stateisssued identity card or passport? How many countries are supported? How long does verification take? So these are pretty standard verification steps that most apps that require KYC make you do. You have to enter your personal information.

You have to upload a picture of your passport or identity card. In Peanut, I live in New York City and unfortunately we have the bit license. So, I tried to get my verification and it was processing. I spoke to the uh customer service and it ended up failing because they said I'm in New York. So, unfortunately, I wasn't able to identity verify and that also means I wasn't able to use Marcato Pago for uh scan to pay.

I actually think they had one of the best KYC app flows. The UI basically brings you through a form, but it's button byton. You can enter, you know, where you're from. I'm from Brooklyn. your name, your address, and then they actually had a really quick verification period for the uh scan of my passport.

Tuyo was pretty good, too. But by the time you're doing your third app, you're like, "God, I wish we had some common KYC provider that we could all just attest to and have it upload all our information." There's um you know, similarly required you to enter all this information. Adding crypto funds. Okay, so now you've verified, you have the app, you have it downloaded, you've done an identity verification.

How easy is it to add crypto? You know, these are all about spending your stable coins. When you receive, can you get USDC from other wallets? Does it have ENS support or is it just copy and paste? How many networks are supported?

So, right now, Peanut is using USDC on arbitrum one. They also allow you to connect to bank accounts, but we're we're at a crypto conference. We're going to be using stable coins. the deposit address. Look at that.

24 character hexodimal. What was actually interesting and something of a UX problem, they only include 23. So the actual last letter or the number zero was cut off. So if you're actually trying to verify that you're sending it to the correct address and you can't even see the full address, there's a problem. They need ENS support.

Pay is a good example. Pay actually truncates the address on both sides, but it's about copying and pasting and trusting your clipboard. Similarly, Tuyo allows you to scan and then they support more networks. So, they support Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitum. Once again, there's a truncated address.

So, you still have to trust that you're going to be reading the entire address correctly and that there's no one who's doing a address clipping scam. Privacy. Privacy is big. I'm glad that privacy has become more of an important topic at Dev Connects. Do you need to submit sensitive information or data to a card provider?

How transparent is the info on the card provider's uh application? Where's your data being shared? This is all stuff that, you know, usually you sign a privacy policy when you sign up for a credit card. Most people skip it. You just scroll to the end and you say, "Yes, whatever.

Do whatever you want with my data." I think it's actually important that apps themselves, especially when using stable coins and using onchain networks, tell you a little bit more about what they're doing with the data. Uh, it looks like this slide didn't get updated, but unfortunately, so Peanut does say we do secure verification and limited data use, and they use Persona, so it basically gives them a yes no with Peanut. Pay has a section in their docs where they also describe uh the transactions are private. They use um UTXO transactions so they bundle them so actually you can't figure out who the sender or receiver is.

And Tuyo on their marketing uh website they do promise privacy but there's no docs or no no way to actually know what's happening. Finally, contacts. So much of payment is about using regular vendors but also about sending money to friends. What is the username scheme? Is it easy to send money to someone's phone number?

Can you send via link? So actually I thought Peanut has a pretty good system and you know you can actually send with a onetime payment link or you can use someone's peanut name which is actually a subdomain of peanut.mme. So actually go check that out and check that out on ether scan. You'll be in for a surprise.

Pay is interesting. They also do that via link. So you can send a link to someone and then they can receive that link with even without the pay app and pay. And then with Tuyo you also have to tap to enter an address. And similarly, I think it should support ENS because, you know, you may end up having uh look tap to enter an address.

Who's going to actually enter it? They're going to be copying and pasting. Finally, onchain native. How are transactions shown? Does it let you access DeFi?

So, when you have money on one of these payment apps, what can you do with it? How decentralized is the network? Are there open source components? So, Peanut is uh you know, it's pretty simple app. It's about sending, it's about buying, it's about receiving.

I think they probably will add some more features, but what's interesting is Tuyo actually allows you to enter some of these uh they're euro markets on a morpho and so you can get some of this like 4 05% APY on ETH or on euros. That's already more than a lot of banks offer. So it is pretty interesting to think about. Many of these apps are trying to become not just uh an app to use for everyday payments of stable coins, but also an app that ends up being kind of a personal checking account and savings account. Most people in the world don't have access to yield like this and uh even in the United States, you have to think about it through purchasing bonds acceptance.

So, is it only accepted where credit cards are accepted or can someone receive it with an app? And then specifically for Buenosares, can you pay by QR code? I used to live in Brazil and a lot of people use Pix for payments and so people aren't even using Tap to pay. They're using QR scanning. Um I didn't end up having images of this because I wanted to test it out in person.

But what I ended up finding is the internet at um at the venue is so poor that there was actually trouble even using my data to use Peanut. What was interesting though about um the other apps is that they give you they use rain or other card providers which used to be only used for businesses to give their employees uh sort of like credit spending limits. They actually give you a card which you can add to Apple Pay and use offline. So I've actually used both Tuyo and Pay at the venue and at other locations. Granted, you end up having higher exchange rates.

So one of the final metrics is around the exchange rate and fees. Peanut actually wins in the closest, you know, 10 USD is getting you 14, 94 uh Argentinian pesos. And that's important because in addition to typical credit card fees, there's often FX fees included. And anytime you're using Tuyo, either their built-in credit card or Pays credit card, vendors themselves are actually losing money and the user themselves is losing money on the FX spread. So, in terms of if you're an Argentinian and you actually are thinking about how do I get the most the closest actual FX spread between US dollars and Argentinian pesos, you're going to actually be losing a little anytime you're using credit card rails.

So, here I I've done a quick wrap-up. There's a minute left. Um, you know, you can talk to me after if you're you want to contest these metrics. Um, but you know, privacy, contacts, onchain native acceptance fees. What I ended up doing was deciding who are the winners for all of these.

So I went through and I for identity identity verification I think pay was the best. It was a simple um app setup where you could just go page by page enter your name your date really good design for adding crypto funds. I think actually peanut had the best experience. Um granted you have to use USDC on arbitum and they could support more networks in the future and add ENS support. Still the quickest method for privacy.

I was actually really convinced by Pay's UTXO model. um you are kind of thinking, do I want all my transactions broadcast to a network? Even if I'm just spending everyday transactions, most people actually want a a degree of privacy when it comes to credit card transactions. Finally, contacts. Uh I like the peanut contact method.

Um they give you a name. You can actually use that name as a subdomain. Um so check that out on Etherscan. It's kind of cur it's kind of cool. Onchain native.

I thought in terms of people who've actually onboarded stable coins onto the app, Tuyo had the best options for one adding multiple networks, but two being able to access some yield opportunities on DeFi. Finally, fees. Uh they've done a lot of work to make sure that they have the lowest FX fees um and or the best FX uh spreads, but also the lowest fees. They don't take fees on transactions. Uh, thank you so much.