The Future of Consumer Finance and Investing in the Crypto Age, Bill Barhydt - TOKEN2049 London 2021

all right good afternoon uh my name is bill barheit i'm the founder and ceo at abra today i'm going to give you an update on what we've been up to over the last year and then i'm going to show you something that we announced an hour ago that we've been working on actually for a couple of years all right so today we've run three services as a company um we've got a couple million users so i'm guessing some of you already know this abra trade our bread and butter is now operating in over 100 countries this is a u.s number i think the number here is probably closer to 140 cryptocurrencies and growing zero fee trading any to any trading pairs have unlimited i i think we're the only company in the world that offers unlimited global wires into the abra account and you can actually earn yield on those deposits as well via abern which i believe is by far the safest yield on crypto assets available today we've now processed i believe over a billion in loans come to that in a minute um this is going to be an exciting part of what i want to talk about but we're already paying very high yield on dollars bitcoin ethereum and a bunch of other crypto assets no limits on deposit size we designed it for ourselves as the management team at abra we all use it it's the only service we use to manage our crypto deposits we give you over-the-counter trading access if you want to move between holdings in the app and we have not only retail through the app but we have direct institutional account support so if you represent a trust or a family office or a business that wants to get yield either on dollars or crypto it's a fantastic way to earn very simple yield in a managed account model and then lastly earlier this year we opened up our institutional lending product to consumers uh abrabarro and it's a great way to borrow against crypto holdings in english that means if you're holding bitcoin ethereum you don't want to sell it but you want to access the gains you can stake the the crypto and we'll lend you dollars we launched a zero interest option earlier this year which has proven wildly popular i believe we're the only company in this space to do that if you're willing to stake for a low ltv you can actually borrow for zero interest and just roll it over forever okay we support bitcoin ethereum as collateral i expect we'll more support more cryptos in the future and it's live in 50 countries and we're adding i think we're up to 43 u.s states as well adding more locations all the time our team has done a fantastic job with this so as i mentioned we're up to almost a couple of million users now we announced new funding last week and we just closed the rest actually today uh but i can't tell you who they are yet so we're going to announce that soon uh we're we're processing about a billion uh in assets under management probably more than that given the run up in the last few days and um i believe we're closer to five billion now in transactions processed so far and the number is growing very very quickly so what i want to give you some insight in is to what i've actually been spending most of my personal time on as it relates to crypto uh for the last couple years i spend a lot of my time thinking about the token economy right we're all integrated into this kind of little crypto ever expanding bubble where you know we all know each other now if you've been in this space for more than five years and everything's crypto crypto crypto but we don't think about the real world right our largest shareholders besides myself is american express and american express really doesn't understand our world at all right they're interested they're excited that's why they invested but they don't understand it that's part of why they invested and and so i've been thinking non-stop for years now about how to integrate this new economy into their existing economy right and if you think about it who is the most kind of aspirational kind of reward system in the world right it's probably american express at least that's what i come up with when i think about it right so i've been thinking non-stop about how to integrate the token economy into existing economies and at the same time create a compelling model for abra that allows us to bridge the gap between reward systems in the existing world that we all know and love whether it's airlines or you know cards or whatever and traditional crypto programs that are very popular now with d5 and other services so we spent months analyzing these first generation app and existing uh exchange tokens right very highly centralized they've all basically raised money in some type of security offering which isn't necessarily good or bad it just is but in many cases it creates misaligned incentives in our opinion it provides limited liquidity because certain people have a lot of control over the float highly centralized government governance for obvious reasons although they'll claim utility status and then for better or worse it's made a lot of ceos very very wealthy so as we analyze this we wanted to again bridge the gap about getting into this kind of real world and at the same time see if we could address these issues so what if tokenized rewards and incentives were totally decentralized meaning nobody owned them released for free to the world somehow usable via any app not just crypto apps but banks and and games right we're all hearing about play to earn games well what's the difference between tokens in a play-to-earn game and crypto today if i was rebuilding starbucks point system or amex point system or airline miles it all sounds very similar to me right and it could free float so that i could actually make the tokens fungible uh between other tokens that were already out there similar to uh what many of these exchange tokens already do and hopefully not used to enrich uh specific executives that may have been involved in creating the tokens in the first place okay so we did this we spun this out so what i'm going to talk to you about right now we don't own it's already been spun out and it's called crypto perks it's a new type of token the definition is new the blockchain is existing um the first simple definition of this is ethereum based although we're looking at other blockchains and multi-blockchain support so give us a little time i'll walk you through the details and why i think it's so exciting it is the first fully decentralized rewards token system and will it will migrate over the next few months to a completely decentralized governance model it is not issued and owned by abra i don't get any of it my employees don't get any of it um with one exception which i'll show you in a minute which is the same way you're going to get it and there's no token sale right we're not raising money via tokens even the foundation that i'm going to show you in a minute is not raising money via the tokens okay and it will be usable via any app in the world that is willing to go through the grant process that i'm going to show you so how will crypto perks work again initially it's going to be erc20 based and a lot of people who are looking at next generation l ones are like hey use something better totally fine with that i believe that it'll be multi-chains over time but you have to start somewhere this is where they've chosen to start the crypto banking alliance is a new um i don't know what the swiss term is but it's a let's call it roughly a foundation based in switzerland that exists it has a separate managing director who is floating around here somewhere nope there he is thanks julian and abra has no formal ownership or governance role whatsoever in the organization and any again any service or app or company or kids or whoever games will be able to apply for a token grant and there will be no token-based pre-sale or token-based fundraise whatsoever okay so now of course it makes sense given that what i've been talking about that the first user of the cprx token is going to be abra okay so now i'm going to talk to you about a new reward system let's call it a massive global test that we're going to run to prove that this works and we're not going to risk anyone's money to do it all right so so follow me for a second so if you use abra today or going forward right you're going to receive cash back on all advert trade transactions paid out in c perks bonus yield so you're going to if you're holding bitcoin you're going to continue to get interest paid in bitcoin if you're holding usdc you're going to continue to get interest paid in usdc but on top you'll receive rewards paid in cprx if you borrow right through abrabarro you're actually going to get rewards back on the principal right in the form of what we call negative interest which effectively lowers your overall rate on the borrow right and if you're borrowing at a low enough ltb where you're paying zero interest it's a really good deal and not only will we pay an ignition reward in cprx for new users but for existing users there's going to be a really big airdrop coming up as well next week we're going to i'm going to talk about this the next slide but next week we're going to launch a referral url system uh for cprx which we're hoping acts as kind of a a demo for other apps and games that would use a similar model to get into the token economy and we're already working with the alliance to get cprx listed on multiple exchanges and it will be at lunch time and i'll give you the details of the dates in a second so as i said at launch starting next week abroad.com and the app will have built in a personal link where you can share get cprx for sharing the app and again for us not only is it exciting that people will get rewards but we're also looking at it like a big global test to prove that this type of token economics can be scaled up quickly and scaled across eventually multiple applications starting with abra okay so as i said before there's going to be really big accelerators as part of this this kind of global launch during the first 60 days we're probably going to give away upwards of 15 of the entire token allotment that's given to abra so to be clear abra is only getting uh you know a chunk of the tokens that's way less than 50 right so the idea is that the vast majority of the tokens will go to lots of different apps okay so the accelerator rewards 15 percent will actually be given away over the first 90 days of our grant not of all of them all right so you'll get 2.5 cashback on trades which is way more right than the spread on a trade right so you're actually getting paid to trade effectively five percent yield so back to my earlier point if you're earning eight percent today on usdc which i believe is what we're paying you'll get the eight percent in usdc and then the five percent on top in cprx again and then if you're borrowing you'll get uh five percent back um on um on the principle uh in the form of uh cprx and lastly that referral link i showed you before we'll pay 25 worth of cprx okay and effectively you're going to get an airdrop for whatever you do starting now right the target yield that we're looking at is 13 impossible to peg but you know we think the economics will work out that it will more or less come out to 13 because the token is free floating on exchanges so the ultimate yield will depend on the value of cprx and nothing like this has really ever been done before because usually the value of a token is set via token sale we don't want to do that so this was in the back end very complex but on the front end really simple right so we hit the complexity of how to do this and we're working with our exchange partners to make to make sure this works really smoothly this is launching on november 15th the referrals will be live next week over the first several months uh not only will you see more exchanges indexes come online but you'll see third-party apps both crypto and non-crypto and i'm probably more excited besides abra of course uh for for the non-crypto apps uh looking at things like retail gaming uh credit card systems anything that where some type of points or rewards uh make sense and integration into the phys into the digital realm makes even more sense so to summarize cprx is going to be the first fully decentralized token based economy that is interoperable with any app that wants to have a rewards component abra is going to be the first hopefully of hundreds of partners into the crypto perks ecosystem we are going to make crypto perks or cprx our rewards token at abra right so it's the first time to my knowledge that a large company has given up control over how its own reward system is managed so we're taking a risk but we think that this is the best way to create kind of an open token economy within abra and as i said it will include cash back on trades uh higher yield on abba earned cash back on abrabarro customer referrals and incentives so as i said we analyzed every major token and app uh i'm sorry every exchange and app token that we could find right and probably created hundreds of pages of notes uh with this big huge slide deck internally which more or less shows everything out there and this led us inexorably to this model we couldn't figure out anything better than this to open this up to the world and so that's why abra perks is now based upon this crypto perks token which again we're opening up to the world so as i said we're launching this as part of abra on november 15th exchanges will be announced throughout the month of october and november there will be actually several from what i understand which is great and after that not only are we going to be announcing more apps but we also want uh again all of you who have interesting applications not just in crypto but in other aspects of retail and banking to become part of this rewards ecosystem and and the token economy so you can get going now [Music] this is part of our kind of application standard app for abra going forward but we also consider this separately a big global test to see how together we can start to create a crypto economy and so in that regard you know we're really excited about uh getting feedback uh from the community as we go so yeah that's crypto perks thank you very much you