10 Minutes to Midnight: How to Save Crypto Payments Before It's Too Late | Andy Bromberg - Eco Beam

he's a CEO of beam and a contributor at Eco here you go Andy thank you thanks guys hey everyone as you just heard my name is Andy Bromberg I'm the CEO of beam and a contributor to the Eco protocol and I'm here to talk about payments and for me payments is the killer use case of crypto it's the reason we're all here it's the reason this technology even exists I've been in the space for 10 or 11 years now and when I first got into it in 2012 payments was the only thing that's what we were working on we're working on building money and better ways to pay outside of the existing system but here we are more than a decade later and nobody's really using crypto payments and I find that quite odd because for me again it was the original point it's still the best thing this technology can be used for and yet it's not really used today and if you don't believe me that that was the whole original point of the industry this slide came back here there we go you can ask this guy Satoshi wrote this white paper and the title of the white paper is Bitcoin a peer-to-peer electronic cash system the original vision for the technology was peer-to-peer electronic cash a better way to pay and if you read this white paper it says a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without intermediaries that was the vision and yet here we are 15 years after the publication of the Bitcoin white paper and people still aren't really paying and why is that well it's because a lot of problems had to be solved along the way and many of them have been solved and I would argue we're actually very close to that promised era that golden age of onchain payments where people will actually be paying with crypto paying on chain and some really important things have happened in the past few years that have enabled this one is stable coins although Bitcoins existed since 2009 people generally don't want to pay with Bitcoin I don't know about you but I certainly don't people want to pay in a currency that they're familiar with and so that led to the creation of stable coins in 2013 or 2014 that was a huge step forward in enabling onchain payments because it was giving people an asset they actually wanted to pay with but that wasn't enough when that came through it was still expensive and slow to send transactions on the blockchain and so over the past few years we've seen an explosion of rollups and alternative l1s and l2s that enable cheap and fast onchain transactions and then last year actually at eth Denver on ethereum a new piece of technology was launched and that was called account abstraction and account abstraction also known as ERC 4337 in the ethereum ecosystem is technology that allows you user wallets to be much smarter than they used to be before account abstraction user wallets were really simple all they could do was sign and send transactions on the ethereum blockchain paying gas in eth for those transactions and that was fine but only really fine for those of us who are in the industry because if you want to send stable coins to someone it just doesn't make sense for you to also need ethereum in your wallet for mainstream users that's just a non-starter and account abstraction enabled us to get past that to get to a world where people can actually use wallets in the way it makes sense paying fees and the currency that they're sending and so we've seen all of these Innovations stable coins rollups account abstraction and yet people still aren't paying on chain why is that because I think there's a few problems that remain and I want to talk about just a couple of them today we talk for hours about all of these but I want to touch on just a couple the major ones that I see are one privacy people have an expectation that their transactions their financial transactions are private but on the blockchain they're not and so there's lots of smart people out there today working on SOL in privacy but it's not yet a solved problem for transactions for payments that's one another is on and off ramps and again there's great people working on this the coinbase team's doing great work we work with meso and KO and a bunch of other great on-ramps but getting funds onto the blockchain and then back off is something that needs to be solved and if you look around there's a lot of widgets for on and off ramping a lot of easy ways for you to get funds from your bank account or your credit card or your debit card into crypto assets but most of those ways today charge really high fees and it's just not usable for people to actually seamlessly on and off R so that has to be solved as well and one more that I would highlight is disputes and irreversibility one of the great Promises of this technology is that crypto transactions are irreversible they make it so that you can't you don't need an intermediary to mediate disputes but at the same time a lot of consumers today have expectations that they'll be able to dispute transactions when you buy something with your credit card you expect that one day if the seller doesn't deliver you'll be able to to dispute that that needs to be solved as well so those are three problems that need to be solved privacy on and off ramps and disputes but today I want to talk about two more and how we're solving them and those two are the user experience and liquidity fragmentation when I talk about user experience this is about making these products such that they are actually better than their web 2 equivalents we are not just competing against each other in the crypto payment space we are competing against this world of incredible payment products that are competing in the market today against each other in order for us to win and bring payments on chain paying with crypto needs to be easier than venmo or cash app or transfer wise or PayPal or any of the options you have today it doesn't just need to measure up to it it actually needs to be better and that's not quite true today and I'm going to talk about how we can fix that and the second problem I want to talk about today in depth is liquidity fragmentation when I talk about liquidity fragmentation what I'm referencing is that although we've solved this problem of cheap and fast transactions the way we've solved it has created a thousand in one different blockchains and rollups in L2 Each of which are not interoperable with each other if I have stable coins on base and I want to pay you on optimism or arbitrum or polygon or salana or whatever chain I can't they're not interoperable we've created all of these global payment systems that don't actually work together and as a result we've seen liquidity fragment on all these different chains all of a sudden there's stable coins on all these chains and they can't be sent to each other and so we need to solve liquidity fragmentation as well those are the two things I want to talk about the first is user experience like I said in order for crypto payments to win the user experience of using them has to be better than their web2 equivalence so we built a product called beam it's a really simple peer-to-peer payments product we talk about it like Global venmo the easiest way to send money instantly with nearly zero fees to anyone around the world and when I say that I really mean it anyone anywhere in the world that's a really powerful concept because when you use web2 products today you can't do that most peer-to-peer payment products like venmo or cash app are only usable within a single country I can send money really easily to my friends in the United States on venmo but I can't send money to a friend if I go out for drinks in London with a friend and I want to pay them back I can't do it with venmo I can't do it with cash app I can't do it with any of the peer-to-peer products I want to use and even money movement products like transfer wise now wise or PayPal they work cross border but often with really high fees and more importantly often not with full Geographic coverage they only support major markets and they don't support a huge number of people out in the world that are not only unbanked or underbanked but underserved by even these Global Financial technology products so beam is a non-custodial wallet it's like metamask or Ledger or coinbase wallet and what that means is that it's available globally on day Zero anyone can use it anywhere in the world I can send money to a friend no matter where they are and they don't even need to be a beam user yet and that's one way that we can improve the ux of these web two products we can actually make it so that you can truly send money to anyone another way we can improve the ux these web two products is that because wallets can be non-custodial that means that onboarding to them can be much much easier when you go to sign up for venmo or PayPal or any centralized custodial product there's a huge onboarding process you have to go through have to kyc submit invasive personal information and go through a whole process just to be able to access money or receive money from friends but these non-custodial products they don't work like that anyone can open up a non-custodial product and because it's like cash because it's truly just using assets that you own you don't need to go through these painful processes and so you can create much more viral much easier to onboard products than any web2 product out there and then one more thing I'll mention is a really interesting feature we have in beam called beam links and beam links I think are the easiest way to send money in the world because all you have to do is text someone a link you go into beam and you say I want to send you $5 you hit create beam link and you get a link and you can message it to the person on Signal or Whatsapp or iMessage or carrier pigeon or however you want to send it to them and they can simply tap that link even if they don't have a beam account open it up receive money and send it to someone else and when you think about some of these features they're actually better than the web 2 equivalents and that's what we need to emphasize so much time is spent in the space talking about getting to parody getting to the same level as web 2 products and while we need to do that it's not enough we need to actually surpass them and use the advantages of crypto and non codo products to build better ux the other thing I want to talk about here is liquidity fragmentation I mentioned this that we've created all these blockchains as an industry all these rollups l2s all these different state machines but they don't interoperate with each other cleanly and they're all running their own campaigns to acquire users and products are being built on all these different chains and yet they simply don't work together and I find that really odd we might be okay with it as people in the industry we're okay with bridging swapping to a different chain asking a friend what chain they're on before paying them but for most people that just doesn't work there's no way my parents are going to be comfortable with me saying what chain are you on what chain do you want to receive this money on and them having to answer optimism or Bas or polygon or whatever it may be that just doesn't work and so we need to defragment this and we need to create a single layer that allows payments to settle on any of these networks such that the people using these products don't need to worry about what chain they're on and our wallet beam actually already does this at some level when you have stable coins in beam you can see them summed up on any supported Network works so if you have five usdc on base and five usdc on on optimism you'll see in beam that you have $10 you can send $10 and when you try to send $10 beam will send that automatically on both networks but the next step is going further than that and actually letting the wallet figure out where the user wants to send those tokens and intelligently routing between chains and getting it to the destination it needs to get to if you're paying someone who wants to receive funds on optimism your wallet should just figure that out for you you shouldn't have to worry about it you shouldn't have to think about the idea that you have to bridge from base to optimism to send the funds to the person on optimism and that has to be solved at the wallet layer the reality is I don't think we're getting away from a multi-chain world anytime soon we're not going to end up with a single chain that everyone agrees on and everyone agrees to make all their payments on that's just not going to happen so we can't solve it at the chain layer the place to solve it is at the user layer the interfaces that users use to make payments should abstract this complexity away from them make it really simple as simple as saying I just want to pay this person and the rest of the problem should be taken care of behind the scenes and we're working on this building out a protocol to solve these intents to make it so that onchain agents can go and accomplish whatever goal a user wants to accomplish without the user having to specify the details again users shouldn't have to say I want to bridge this I want to swap here I want to do all these specific things they should just say I want to pay this person this amount of money we're really close I believe to onchain payments being solved and I think this is the year 2024 is the year for Consumer crypto to really Happ we're running a bunch of activations this week and we've gotten a bunch of vendors a dozen vendors in Denver to accept onchain payments there's a bunch of coffee shops you can go to Nowhere coffee Yours Truly cupcakes pit fiend barbecue our mutual friends Brewery all these different amazing venues that have no relationship to crypto by themselves but because this technology has gotten good enough because the ux has gotten simple enough and because it's easy enough to interface with they're willing to accept crypto so you can go there and you can pay with stable coins at these places and that to me is an indication that we're there that it's time for us to bring payments on chain to fulfill that original Vision that Satoshi laid out of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and building better money that the world actually needs so if this is interesting to you if you're curious about this if you want to experience it yourself and either try paying or you want to help us build out these products build out better wallets and better infrastructure and ways to abstract away all the complexity that crypto brings to the table in the interest of bringing about the benefits that it can provide come talk to us you can tweet at us beamco on Twitter or as we prefer on farcaster beam hyen Eco we'd love to hear from you thank [Applause] you