Keynote - Silas Boyd-Wickizer, Valora & Bogdan Dimitru, Mento Labs

hey everyone uh hi everyone I'm silus I'm the CTO at Vora we're building a product called mobile stack that uh aims to make it really easy to onboard new web through users Via mobile app uh I'm here with Bogden from mentol labs and we are excited to share what we think is one of the biggest challenges for broadening stablecoin uh adoption uh and how we're thinking about solving it okay uh so first want to start by highlighting an opportunity um over 7 billion uh users across the globe are connected to the internet via a mobile device this is a number we expect to continue to increase over the next six years at about 200 million or about 200 million users per year I think an interesting segmentation of this data and something that seems like a theme of of this conference is that a lot of this growth is coming from emerging markets in Latin America in sub Sahara Africa uh Bogden is going to drill into like a specific example of an opportunity there in uh in a few minutes but if if it wasn't obvious the our opinion is if you want to onboard many more users end users to your protocol the thing to do is is ride this red line and do that via uh a mobile application okay uh luckily um there seems to be some nent emerging interest from these like more casual mobile users in engaging in uh in web 3 applications I think traditionally it's been okay uh for uh sort of more technofile engineering Focus users to sort of stitch together coherent experiences in web 3 by opening up their laptop opening up a bunch of tabs and sort of uh sewing things together to have a usable experience I think the interest in some ways is like broadening or gradu graduating um to be uh something that like more casual users are willing to at least try to engage in from a mobile device um we see this quantitatively in the data on this slide uh about 50% of users to the top 100 daps are trying to engage from mobile device um this conflicting metric over here on the right shows that only eight of the top 100 daps actually provide a naal mo native mobile experience and so if you believe that a native mobile experience provides a much better ux than um trying to use a webbased app then there seems to be this issue where there's demand for these experiences but we're not filling in the supply by providing native mobile apps uh so probably not a surprise but it turns out that cranking out really good native mobile experiences is challenging in general but particularly in uh in web 3 I think one rule of thumb for what is a an okay starting place for a native mobile experience is that all the sort of core user Journeys that you're selling is a value prop to your application or to your protocol need to place within a single application and as soon as you punt a user um out to some other application or ask them to switch contacts uh they're going to turn out at least the Casual users uh are going to churn out and so as a concrete example consider like a simple stable coin savings application where maybe the user wants to earn some yield uh by providing liquidity on some stable coins they hold if they're switching between a Dap and a wallet uh or something like that they're they're going to churn out and is like we heard from the panel uh two talks ago this seems to be consensus and it's like don't even bother uh unless you're going to try to make this more cohesive uh and take place within a single application you can kind of visualize how much work this is um if you think about the really simple example of of trying to have a sa stable coin savings application have some considerations on the right of the slide user comes in you need to provide them with a way to uh set up an account it should look and feel like web 2 like account creation but still be self custodial in a certain extent um they're going to want to bring value on chain so you're going to need an integrated cach in experience they'll probably at some point want to Route value between assets across chains so you'll need a swapping routing experience finally uh they can you need that integration with the actual protocol that's going to be providing the yield uh the users are probably going to want updates for New Opportunities uh for saving or earning yield they're not going to be checking Twitter so you're going to have push notifications and then it's reasonable to assume that at some point the user is going to want to move value off chain so you need a cash out experience also so you can see uh why only eight out of the top 100 daps actually go through the trouble of providing this native experience they given the choice between uh improving the protocol making Investments there uh or throwing a ton of resources into building a native mobile experience they usually choose the former so I'm happy to share that I have a solution uh this is exactly the problem or one of the problems that mobile stack tries to solve mobile stack makes it very easy to uh instantly um spin up uh end to end native mobile experience on IOS and Android um we I don't have time to like go into all the details about the tools we provide but they sort of fit into three buckets there's uh one around acquisition and onboarding uh bringing your app to Market um we have another set of components and tooling uh around what you might consider like core web 3 features managing your assets uh seeing nfts visual visualizing positions that are onchain but maybe like don't uh abide by some uh token standard that we're familiar with sort of things like that uh and then a third set of features around continuing to engage and retain users and understanding their behavior within your application one thing that um we feel is important with mobile stack and in the design of implementation of mobile stack is that things should just kind of work out of the box it's sort of this batteries included mindset uh and so for example with our our swap feature um it just works out of the box it has a ux that you can tweak if you want to you can like tweak The Styling but the ux is compatible with a mobile form Factor you don't have to worry about plugging in a routing API you don't have to worry about doing estimates or handling approvals in the ux you don't have to worry about tracking volume uh or collecting fees if if that's what you're TR excuse me if that's what you're trying to do it all just works out of the box okay so uh I'm happy to hand over to Bogden now he is going to um talk about uh that opportunity Emerging Markets I I mentioned earlier and how uh Mento labs and and mobile stack are looking to solve that problem thank you syus yeah cool so woo um so I'm Bogdan from mentol Labs um both uh mental labs and uh Vora or like where mobile stack originates started in the cello ecosystem and the cello ecosystem has always been focused on rear world use cases and Emerging Markets like so for the last four years we've been basically looking at how consumers use stable tokens on chain and how to grow their adoption and while it's still a really wrong wrong long road ahead we've seen a lot of pieces fall into place in the last couple of years and we for sure see that there's a huge opportunity there and I'll dive into it a bit like we've all heard about the problem of financial inclusion I if you've been around for a while you've kind of seen this Meme and maybe even grow desensitized to it a bit I know I have like we've been talking about it for a while but we haven't really seen Solutions at scale because in reality it's a really hard problem and it can be solved by just one party we need a lot of different teams to build a lot of different pieces in order for this to come together but even though it's a hard problem the reality is that um people face great adversity and the status quo isn't great we've seen this a lot in the previous talk as well but there's not adequate Financial infrastructure in a lot of places and that makes it hard hard for people to get credit for example and even if they do get credit it's usually as a at a great cost um they can't send money around uh they cannot get access to a currency in which to save and even if they do they can't ear yield on savings and yeah these problems really need to change and we at mental labs are thinking about it a lot and we're building stable tokens but stable tokens themselves aren't a solution for everything right but they are A Primitive is what we recognize like we need these local currencies and a way to effectively swap between them so that partners that we work with can build things on top and we can actually reach those use cases and this is what we're seeing for example with two recent stable to tokens that we launched the Kenyan Shilling in Kenya and the Ghan sity in Ghana we have a partner haraka I think Jessica is actually in the room here somewhere um they've been doing micr Ling Pilots they're basically trying to scale reputation systems that happen there locally um they have these lending circles called Chamas and they're trying to scale it through technology and offer Credit in local currencies to users there and we've seen like on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars already in these Pilots go to hundreds of users and we've seen like more than 90% repayment rate on these assets and we've actually seen people on the ground who manage to scale their business or open up new businesses using loans in our Canyon Shilling stable token and I don't know that's what keeps me in the space and keeps me coming back it's why I joined um yeah and for all these users need an easy to use wallet because otherwise it doesn't make sense like you can't have complex wallets borrowing this use cases right um and we've seen the importance of this also in the previous two talks but also with another partner that built a dollar savings focused wallet in Africa and through their Market reach and easy to use of the wallet they managed to scale it to more than four million users making the cello dollar the second most used stable token after tther by daily active users which is great and it shows that this bet on Simplicity and ease of use is really important in the space um and that's why together with mobile stack we're also doubling down on that bet and working on bringing a local currency focused wallet to Market um it's going to be very easy to use for the basic use cases sending money around making payments to Merchants using QR codes um low friction on and off ramping with local Partners but especially opening up to an ecosystem of use cases around yield and microc credit and by building a very tailored experience like the guys were talking on the panel two sessions ago it's easy to build these use cases into the wallet and have them easy to use rather than kind of a plor of applications that you need to connect to um like the reality is right now so yeah we're very excited to bring this to Market very soon um so thank you silus and mobile stack for sharing in this Vision with us and working together to make it a reality um I'll let you close up oh sure uh let's see uh there was a ton I didn't get a chance to go into around how mobile stack Works how you might operate uh a native mobile application how you might bring it to Market so if you're interested in um onboarding uh a ton of new users to end users to your protocol uh would love to chat uh I'll be around uh thanks everyone thank you I guess we have a minute left are there any questions how mobile that works yeah um are you familiar with like create rack appap Firebase tools like that yeah so that that's sort of the model we take there's a way to sort of instantiate uh like template for a new project that that works end to end and then there's like of course a set of backend services that need to operate uh to make that work uh and we sort of think of it as a little like buying into the Firebase ecosystem uh it's not quite this smooth yet but you can imagine you get back back like a Firebase API key or a mobile stack API key uh and that handles connecting you to all your data providers swap route providers things like that so it's like very easy to get started uh in terms of customizing there's ways to customize without writing any native code um basically to add Integrations with protocols that mobile stack doesn't have an integration for um so there's like an API or a plugin framework for doing that uh and then if you want to customize of course you can you can write the native code to to do the customization thanks thanks everyone thank you