EthCC 2: Fennie Wang and Caroline Dama

if you feel comfortable only if you feel comfortable you can come a little closer we can make this a little more intimate all right no takers all right so my name is penny Wang and I'm really excited to talk to you guys about open source money and why I'm so excited about the potential for open source mobile transactions especially when combined with open source identity and what that means for financial inclusion so this is the agenda for today's journey we will start with our definitions so our point of departure what do we mean exactly bike by cash is that better then we'll go into exploring the different forms of of money looking at wholesale banking money electronic banking money versus what we mean by digital cash we'll take a look at local currency some of you guys might be familiar with local currency versus formal fiat currency we'll talk about the rise of mobile money looking at and pace up for example in Kenya and why we need something that's open source so we all talk about a really really cool project that my friend will Roddick is doing down in Nairobi with a tokenizing and creating a local currency on the poet network and we'll finish with an interview I recorded with Rick oh sorry will last night so we'll go ahead and get started on what do we mean by cash so the definitions that I'm gonna use as the working definitions in this discussion will be cash is a direct claim on some kind of asset or if something is not asset back it's it's some kind of some kind of direct promise to something and so in the context of fiat cash ie government-issued cash it's a direct claim that you have with the central bank right and and this claim is not intermediated by a financial gateways such as a bank or a telecom so now you might think well if I take a dollar and I go to the ATM and I insert into the ATM it goes into my account I go and use Apple pay ago and make a transaction is that not digital cash so to make that distinction once you've put money into your your bank account that no longer becomes cash because it's now money it's no longer to wreck claim that you have on the central bank you have a claim now against JP Morgan bank which then has its claims within the interbank settlement system so we'll make those distinctions so the different kinds of different shapes of money so we have two axis here one is a direct claim and the other is when you have an intermediary on the other axis on the y-axis we have physical and digital so if we start in the lower left quadrant we talk about paper cash so this is what most people think of quill oh really when they think of cash so we've got physical cash that's that's public cash Fiat Fiat money you can also have private cash so this would be the realm of local currencies often the case when either communities can't actually get access to national currencies so they have to create their own or they just want to create their own currencies because they want to encourage local flows of production so that's one example there the corollary for example of a paper cash local currency in digital form would be a cryptocurrency for example stable coins like dye the corollary of paper fiat cash would be central bank issued digital currency CB DC so you might have heard this in different contexts so CB s-- DC is increasing something that different central banks are exploring because physical cash is rapidly disappearing so a couple of different rationales depending on where you are in the world so if you're in a developing country as I said you just don't have access to physical cash even for example the Central Bank of Bahamas was looking at some kind of CBD sea they have all these little tiny islands and it's very expensive and difficult to get physical cash out into these small islands because they literally have to fly the cash out on these tiny charter planes so you could kind of think of that as the original airdrop in in developed countries the trend increasingly is that retail shops are going cashless so it's kind of an incredible reversal of trends from ten years ago where you go someplace you like cash only and now it's like no cash so that becomes problematic as well because if you are unbanked then you have no way to actually engage in economic transactions so central banks are looking at this issue the central bank of Sweden for example has issued a call looking at various technology tools including potentially using a distributed ledger technology or if it doesn't this is really kind of cute you can have a direct account with the Central Bank of Switzerland oh sorry of Sweden which might work if you're in a small country like Sweden that has less than ten million people and a very small unbanked population but obviously it doesn't scale very well if you have a larger if you have a larger country and also you would want ideally your CBD see to mirror that structurally decentralized nature of physical cash right so we all have our cash stored and are various different physical wallets under our mattresses in the bank vaults it's it's if someone wanted to rob the central bank there's you would have to risk life and limb and there's only so much physical cash you can steal right so if you were to replicate that mechanism digitally ideally you you would think you would want to use some kind of technology that mirrors that level of decentralization so so there's there is work that central banks are looking at in this area so the central bank of England has done quite a bit of research into CBD seized and and they've looked at on the other side for example JP Morgan coin and interbank settlements so there's a lot of work in the wholesale electronic money markets that are looking at tokenizing very aspects of interbank money so Singapore's been doing this Canada you might have heard about JP Morgan doing this so that's kind of where they're all playing but what the Bank of England has said well you can you can try to tokenize that that's fine but the the social and economic impact of June this kind of CBD see in the wholesale markets is is not nearly as impactful if you can do it for retail money so that's the money that you and I would use right having that Tareq link or that direct claim to the central bank so that's one thing that's really interesting so if we move to the other side we talked a little bit already about all the interbank settlement and commercial bank money and how that works so now we look at mobile money and this basically is picking off that those legacy banking rails right in places like Kenya where people don't have bank accounts they were using airtime as a form of money and so we'll talk a little bit about that as well now you've seen probably the news about Facebook having its own payment coin as well so what we're seeing is that telecoms and Internet giant's are becoming the new de facto but unregulated banks although they still rely on the legacy banking rails for for that to work so we'll just talk a little bit about what is the local currency if anyone here has heard of local currencies before your raise your hand it's just some of you you might have been at youth Denver and used buff dye so that would be an example of a temporary local currency so local currency programs basically function like loyalty programs except you're loyal to a particular community or trading network and the idea being is that because this voucher can only be spent amongst these cooperating shops that kind of depth that economic value stays within that community and especially if you have negative interest rates or Demerara it really accelerates the velocity of money greater than the national currencies and therefore stimulates greater local economic production and activity but these courtesies are not usually considered legal tender so they're complementary and often softly pegged to the national currency one thing about local currencies is that they do have trouble scaling because it's inherently based on this very grounded local community trust to barter with each other and as I mentioned some examples of local currency include both I if number there's the Brixton pound which is in the Bristol pound so two cities outside of London they've been doing this since 2012 and maybe they'll want to do this more after brexit and then we'll talk about my friend wills project with seraphic credits in Kenya which is super cool so mobile money 1.0 and pacem and yes a brief history of colonialism which is why we need open source mobile money so the story of m-pesa people this was this is really kind of around a bottom-up innovation that I feel like has been co-opted and made now really unaffordable for people so in 2002 researchers funded by diffent which is the UK government international aid organization so it's the UK equivalent of gjz in Germany or USAID so they were doing research in Uganda and Kenya Botswana these are all former British colonies and they discover that what people will poor people who were unbanked were doing to send money to the relatives and different villages were that they were they basically use airtime as a form of money as it's kind of like a tokenized money right so I can go to a kiosk send money to to a relative on their phone number they would receive it at a kiosk they could cash it out resell it and that'd be the way to to send money around because they didn't they didn't have bank accounts much less any kind of mobile money mechanism so in 2000 so diff it introduced the researchers to vote a foam which is a company that owns Safaricom one of the main telecom operators in Kenya and they went and did a hackathon and this poor kid like came up with the software and they gave him like 20 bucks and they took his patent likely so good software gave it so qua way and an IBM to develop into what is now and pace us and so now you've got a pace of be incredibly popular with over 20 million users but they are not regulated banks but they've served that that banking function but because they also operate as a monopoly the transaction fees for M pace have become really inaccessible and so we'll talk about and explore that in a bit as well so what's next you know in terms of what's next after n paisa and this is a project I'm really excited to share grassroots economics is in nonprofit based in Kenya started buying my good friend will Roddick he's been working on local currencies in Kenya for the past 10 years so way before Bitcoin and all of that serif you credit is a network of six different local community currency programs in Kenya and their constituents are subsistence farmers and traders that are making less than $2 a day so here's more information about grassroots so they've helped over 1,000 small businesses in 20 schools so you can is through through the use of a local currency you can basically barter your tomatoes for your school fees and that allows these kids to get to school these all they allow flows of money in these communities that couldn't even get access to Kenyan shillings so what will has done since end of September of last year is to tokenize or to create a cryptocurrency version of Sarah free credit because before when he was doing was printing physical pieces of local currency which is very expensive to do and again you have to think about this scale of cost when people are living on $2 a day print doing a piece of paper it's a significant you know percentage of your total cost so and the other thing about the physical cash the physical local courtesies like it was hard for them to track how that money was exactly circulating certainty started the live pilot with the crypto version of Sara whew it runs on the poet Network and it works on very simple feature phones using a USSD connection into SMS messages so this is what it looks like so that's a woman using her phone to send a transaction of Sara few credit and we have a little block Explorer where you can look at all the transactions so they're they're tagged by what people are spending their their money on they're tagged by you can see the wallets is it a woman who's been registered to the wallet etc what kind of business is she running and so forth when I was looking at through the stats through the data yesterday we've got over 1100 unique wallet users and I'm really stoked that nearly 60% of the wallets are with women and as some of you may or may not know in communities in these kind of rural communities women are really the linchpin so you might have heard about microfinance and how it's that they discover that if you loan women money they will be much more responsible with using them money to run small businesses and and the profits go back to their families so this is really cool of the wallets about 30 percent of the women are actively using or conducting transactions and forty-five percent of the men so forty percent total are using their wallets we've got over 11,000 traced to date about ten thousand USD dollars worth of trades and then you can see what they're spending their local currency on so this is this is data that we've never had before because when you have mobile data that's mobile transactions that are captive by by telecoms like Vodafone you don't get open-source data you don't know any of this information and we'll talk about why that's really really important so you'll see here people are stopped three buckets of what they're spending money on or food labor in health so we'll compare a seraph you with an ASA so to send a transaction with sarahfey credit it's a fixed amount so one you SSD connection into SMS is about two US cents so two Kenyan shillings and the PO and network fees are currently negligible you compare that with M paces so if I were to send about a dollars worth of a transaction to someone else in the M pace and network I would be charged 11 cents so that's a pretty significant transaction fee right that's so the average revenues that em pay son makes is about 15 cents per transaction although that might include some cash withdrawals but you can see that the difference is it's pretty significant if you are someone living on $2 a day and again as we mentioned no Seraph you is is based on open source so it doesn't require a national currency to back aware as and paces still runs ultimately on legacy banking rails and because that data is completely locked up and because and Pasic is they are such they're effectively now your gatekeepers on your identity and this is important for that for all that data to be open and free if if you are someone living on $2 a day you don't have a government ID you don't have anything except for your phone and if you don't exist you don't have rights and you certainly can't get a loan underwritten because there's no information about you so if we can take the the data from from mobile transactions now suddenly there's all this rich information about someone right it serves as an identity attestation that allows a microfinance institution to come in and say okay I see you're actively trading in this canoe people can make at to stations about who you are we see there is a digital history now I can have something by which to underwrite you alone or an insurance program or something else so this is where I get really excited about the next wave of Financial Inclusion and why I think it's so transformative so with principles of self sovereign identity you know the way to that I imagine as think of identity as digital history like do we have history about someone and and it's through a web of trust so instead of thinking of identity as being reduced to a single identifier such as a biometric or some kind of other data strain we think of identity as this web of identity claims or at two stations by trust anchors so the as someone from Kiva described to me you know think of it as like a Christmas tree and the more you start to decorate that tree the richer and more beautiful that tree becomes right so so Kiva as anyone has heard of key but in here I'm surprised sokeep is a really well-known and well-respected microfinance organization they were one of the first to use kind of tech to pioneer with crowdfunding to get people to put in donations and they would then send out the money to various and the Flies and their networks and so they're getting into the blockchain identity business because from their perspective identity is a key linchpin to be able to funnel more institutional capital to the unbanked so there's only so much they can do in terms of crowdfunding donation money from the retail public and funneling them through a network of small Emeth eyes if you can have ways to do identity ground up for the bottom of the pyramid that's that's their belief and how real capital will flow to the unbanked and so they're they've signed an MoU with the government of Sierra Leone to to be their self sovereign identity provider to build that system for them and so in in Kiva's model what they will do is issue a decentralize identifier for each citizen and the first attestation will be made by the government as Sierra Leone so this will include named age date of birth place of birth maybe there'll be a biometrics like fingerprints attached to it the Central Bank of Sierra Leone will require all M s I saw the microfinance institutions by law if they want to receive their licensing from the central bank to be identity providers to make attestations - in the system right so one of the major problems and I you know I worked in Uganda for five months is that you don't have like a national credit bureau so as an MFI you're like well I can lend this person that's a certain amount of money but I don't know what other liens or debts this person might have so in this case it can help solve that problem if the m5s come in and they kind of help boostrap also the identity system the private keys associated with the the DI well because of a keep here for signing your ID any claims will be held in custody by a trusted entity it couldn't keep up but it doesn't have to be keep up but they will be one of the key custodians and so that's an example of how there's already things in the field being done with identity with someone with such a deep background in microfinance and and how closely related identity and financial and being you know financially included is so if we add transaction data in there so grassroots economics would be for example another a tester right and and their attestation will be backed by all the transaction data from from transactions in sarahfey credit you can also have Emma flies make attestations based on loan repayment and so forth so you start to really grow that that rich you you start to really decorate that tree of identity okay so ways for what can we do the first point is around how do we open up our dialogue and our narrative in a way that's politically relevant so there's a lot of discussion around crypto and a blockchain and decentralization but most people don't really understand what this means right so how do we how do we change that narrative in a way that that people can care about so it's not necessarily about crypto but it's about having cash it's about having a currency that allows us to freely transact and engage in our right to economically associate without having barriers and second to experiment with these with private cash I don't think you're gonna see CBD see to the retail market for a very very long time because governments are inherently very risk-averse right so if we can show more of these experiments on our own like what real is doing in Kenya right that's hugely powerful in showing here's a new way there's a new way for us to have this kind of dis intermediate access although there are always going to be levels of just intermediation because the cost of an SMS text is to send sarahfey credit right is determined by Safaricom which always you know which owns an paisa but they still have to be more competitive there than they have with you know transactions on in paisa so there's there's still different layers to be cognizant around but with that said I do want to share with you an interview I recorded with will last night we weren't sure how good the Skype connection would be so to talk about his work in Kenya so I think you'll really enjoy that I'm really excited that you're here on the line from Nairobi I'm really excited too you can't see them but there are people here and introduce you to the ECC community when I'm really impressed by the work that you're doing is that you've been out there in the field building this stuff way before no black shanghaied came along even out in these communities in the past ten years and there's there's so much blocking for impact high people in this space I think it's really important that people see what it's like for someone to be actually living and breathing and working and building in these communities so thank you for being here and I would love for you to introduce yourself and your wonderful interesting background and and and your work with grassroots thanks Rodney getting into communities almost 15 to 20 years ago and and basically I went around the US and a lot of the world and I looked at how currency systems were being developed in terms of these community local currencies and and most of the technology at the time was just printing little pieces of paper and and that's how I started so I I went from my PhD in physics into econo physics into economics and I was really excited about the idea that communities could you know create their own tokens or their own currencies back in the day and you know the the main problem that we were all looking at at the time this is you know the people who were before me was like Bernard leotard passed recently were basically looking at fractional reserve and looking at interest-bearing debt and saying well if we only have one kind of currency in the world it has huge huge impacts and problems and if communities can create their own currencies if we can actually create a decentralized economy where money is really backed by the production and you know future capacity and try and trust but trust in smaller much smaller units I mean will create a much more stable world and you know couldn't poverty and all the stuff and that was the talk in the day you know in the 90s and the 80s even and in the early you know thousands to thousands and yet really there was almost no one really doing this work where people were you know it was mostly stuff being done in like the you know Brixton pound in London or BerkShares Massachusetts and you know there isn't a chronic lack of cash there and in Kenya I started printing these the first one back in 2010 and you know this this twenty shilling notes with the you know the number twenty on it was trading hands twice a day and that was in a year one pieces of paper was hundred meals that weren't there before and I was you know the fact that that worked at all to me was just a message to say how screwed up are we as humans you know if people are not eating they're not going to school because they're missing pieces of paper it just it seemed ridiculous and you know like architects should not run out of inches right humans shouldn't run out of money if it's a measurement tool right and so that was the fundamental idea there and and you know it was a it was tumultuous when I first started they thought I was a secessionist terrorist I had to go to jail and was eventually cleared by the Attorney General here in Kenya and we we kind of just started spreading from there and it wasn't until last year that I really got into blockchain because Bank or protocol enabled it so that we could create tokens that were not connected to a theory and volatility anymore we're actually using a side chain that is connected to aetherium the token prices themselves they can be connected to each other but not the greater network of speculative currencies and so now we're in a situation where we can create an airdrop tokens into economies to fill this missing Kenyan shillings app connect those community currencies together into a real decentralized economy so that's that's what 6-2 / exciting right now and where we are today can you give a quick overview of blocks and aspects the technical design including key management and how that works sure so right now where we are somewhat centralized in that we're trying to service you know eventually millions of people using feature phones right so these are people with no internets and without a smartphone and so we're acting as a gateway right now for them to the blockchain so there's an API where we connect to the telecom and that gives us a USSD menus which can be on any kind of phone so they essentially kind of have a text menu access to their wallet right and that is encrypted with a simple in that they have in that phone okay and so that's it's important for us at least at this stage as a stopgap before people get smartphones one for one reason is the population here they need to have the ability to do to reset transactions or to you know to reverse the transaction to do the opposite or to reset a pin that is lost and it happens all the time so you know right now we're sort of filling that gap in a sort of a bit descent is a bit centralized way but that's you know the we're using essentially like an AWS server that can be replicated many times over by different groups as well to control or to host token issuers in different ways in different areas too so you know one of the things we're really pushing for is that us as grassroots economists in Kenya are not the sole token issuer right that there's many many organizations and groups down to the level that we have an a you know a platform where a municipality or a refugee camp or even a cooperative the small farmers cooperative can create their own tokens you have to work with particular groups nor to identify who are the relevant constituents to airdrop and Simon can you talk a little bit more about how that works like human interface of all work so I you know going into a new community we've got nine community currencies in different areas and in each case there's always this sort of like the the door opener is the the sort of holder of trust there in a way kind of like a backer of last resort and so we work with schools in this way we work with farmers cooperatives in this way and the school basically says we're gonna start accepting these currencies into our school and that opens up the door to saying okay every single parent in that school we're gonna airdrop four hundred shillings worth it's like four hundred tokens into that you know into each individual's wallet that's gonna go into the school for school fees it's gonna go out to teacher salaries the teachers are going to spend it in at the local charcoal distributor or the local you know water kiosk or to get a haircut or some cheap at ease some of those that are going to be parents and it's going to cycle back into the school so usually we start with some sort of central node and then we just keep well we do it it's a process we call braiding right so that's a braided loop of economic activity and then we take that braid to the loop of people trading with each other and we just keep expanding that to another loop another new and we're actually eating that community and back out of that community within about three months and you know we have a really small staff of about five people and so we go in and do some training with the community and then they're doing that braiding process themselves and we have a lot of kind of push-pull incentive systems where you know we tell people look if you part of the system it built in is that if you don't trade every single week you actually lose one percent of your account and that goes directly into a community fund that is then redistributed as a basic income to the people who are trading right so if you want to save your money we tell you don't save it with this save it right now with Kenyan shillings but that could be another token you know a saving space token or investment tokens or an asset-based versus what this is is very much a medium of exchange and you should be sending your kid to school eating daily with it you know paying your landlord with it if if that's what you have to do you know and we tie that into all sorts of developed loan programs - like tree planting health care services education there's a inherent constraint to this - scaling up community courses because the whole what what makes what makes them work is that it's essentially based on I know I know these people and liking me right it's it it's an identity reputation system pre-talk in blockchain right so if it gets too big I don't know right like how do I trust that I can trade my vegetables for that person's school fees and so forth so what are your yeah I I think in the past you know we still have this idea that you know that currencies should get big you know and what we're trying to do in Kenya is kind of an opposite of that is like what is you know there was this economist Jane Jacobs since she would always say what is the salient unit of the economy for which a currency is appropriate and exactly what you said there are currencies in Kenya are basically the size of who you do know right and so we're not suggesting that a currency get much bigger than let's say it at least in these villages of you know 200 businesses in a in a currency Network that's a wonderful size of a network everyone in that network can basically know each other right and they can connect to another currency that's another 200 businesses you know five minutes away right that's perfectly you know an appropriate scale for these systems in Kenya and it works well in terms of identity as well because each one of those people in your network is a verifier for your own personal identity right and so this can work in the in this identity state is as sort of a self verification system right and the trust that's that's put into that system is based on the productive capacity of that system itself right so you've got this ekend McClair you've got an identity layer that's meshed into that and then there's other layers that we can build on top of that like loading systems is something we're really trying to get some help coding this year so jumping on that how can the community yeah I mean I think there's so much that needs to be done I mean I I'm pretty much you know always my biggest wish list is that we had more developers that were in the currency space not the crypto space and to me the currency space is much more about looking at this as a platform for which you know there's token creation you know this is what you know the the the the bank or team is very much focused on you know in terms of user generated tokens but then how do you connect on all that into marketplaces how do you connect it into point-of-sales devices how do you connect it into taxation systems or localizations you know if we want to take a similar system and move it into bogota-colombia how is that gonna look and you know they're so you know I I kind of see it as like you know in a way you know like Android has created this Play Store that anyone can kind of create add-ons onto onto various platforms and so I'm hoping to see that sort of you know more and more that kind of development where we can plug in an identity system you know into the into the into these networks that the users could actually have those options and saying oh you know I I want to have a you know a plug in that that gives some some of this taxation to local government for instance you know voluntarily for instance you over there you know Kenya we're talking about the informal sector it's you know no one pays taxes it's you know less than maybe 30 percent of the population is really paying any tax so anyways there's lots of lots of you know potential add-ons for different different constituencies and different users and and you know that set of add-ons and analysis tools like really we're talking about building and load balancing decentralized economies now real real practical economies with fruits and vegetables and stuff you know and so if you look at if you look at all the the tokens right now in the etherium space well you know if if those tokens actually were representing you know different supply chains of you know vegetables and fruits and education and labor and we want to actually create systems that evenly distribute that in some fare you know systems across you know people it's a whole nother way of thinking about the space and I and I really want to push as much as people can into the space because we've got you know billions of people living at less than $2 a day they need money and here's all this people in the crypto space that are talking about currencies so there's a to me is a big disconnect it's like you guys are talking about currencies all these people need currencies what are you doing you know so I just want to push people in that space and also you know get people to experiment and you know kind of look at what we've done in Kenya I mean yeah we ended up going to jail for it but you know I feel like that era is really changing and as we've moved into blockchain now you know the government's ears are very open to the idea you know the legal system around what we're doing because we're not tied into speculation right we're essentially doing barter trade right it's a whole nother regulatory environment forget all these issues of you know having to get into you know securities and all this stuff we're trading Tomatoes for school fees if you as a legislator you know are listening to this and saying we need to outlaw that well you know that's that's not right like wow you know like exactly so if what we're doing is really enabling people to trade their tomatoes for school fees like it's it's a whole nother space and people ask me this all the time like oh is it a security and I'm like you know you're really asking the wrong question the question is is she eating three meals a day you know is this helping like our and if these tokens you know the way we've been putting them together the space are ultimately stable relative to each other I mean you know there's all these other different questions you know that we need to start asking as a community focused on solving this problem of poverty solving the problem of you know that entrenched fiat currencies that are you know backed by essentially nothing and that we have private banks over issuing supply constantly well thank you very bad is the perfect ending will to this discussion to this conference and it's a call to action so thanks for all the work down there and I'm gonna visit you soon all right thank you look any question I think yeah hi thanks for the talk was very interesting first of all deserve just might be interested there's a local currency just outside Paris in multi it's called there's a there's a local currency just outside Paris in the city called multi which is like 20 minutes a bike from here it's called the beach just so people might be interested that exists even like they're thinking of expanding it to Paris so that exists locally I had a question about the privacy of the block Explorer of the Sarah food network it looked like there was a lot of data that could be in some way tied back to people like there wasn't directive people's names or identifiers but if there's small networks and and you can tell like you know the gender of the person what they're buying and stuff like that you might be able to start start identifying people and that raises issues I find on top of that because there's there's another layer to that is that there's often in colonial thinking this idea that the poor are not going to spend their money right and so if you start putting aid or anything like that into it and people can look at what people are spending they might say I will see you we're not gonna give them the money because they're not spending it right I'm spending it right meaning how we want them to spend it of course right so um on the one hand you have to be identified in order to participate in this because they they have to be part of these local it's part of that trust you're gonna issue a wallet or a local currency you're gonna airdrop to these folks because they are part of this community and therefore they're it's kind of that they have to already stake their identity in some ways to the system right so can you anonymize some of it right for the purposes of other data analysis perhaps so but I'm concerned about the privacy poor on that and what's kind of interesting that about poor spending their money that reminds me so with refugee situations there's there's a whole push towards what's called cash aid instead of giving people bags of rice which is really a terrible idea there's no sense of dignity and how you can live and eat and it also really hurts the local host economies that host the refugees so there's been a push towards using caches so you have organizations like Red Cross Mercy corpse issuing prepaid Pavin cards to refugees and and so there was that book that discussion there with just giving poor aid sorry cash aid is that one it is cheaper to the Minster than flying around bags of rice but it's also the sense of dignity that it's not our place to tell people how they should be spending what they need right if they're gonna go and spend like in my previous a previous role like you know there were discussions around up do you block certain merchant codes like if they go to a some tobacco shop it's like well you give them to your bucks a month to buy you know if if they they go and spend it on something that you don't want them to spinning out whether that they spent that money so you know they're not gonna get it back right be so you you take the overall benefits against the cost but but what's actually really interesting about cash aid is that guys like you and HC are in the World Food Program very much interested in in deploying crypto based local currencies for refugee camps because prepaid also has a lot of problems in terms of kyc mo so suddenly you're an aid organization where your job is to make sure are you someone in need - now are you - playing the role of a bank you know - doing aq ICML like are you who you say you are and are you someone that I should be my constituent that I'm that I'm serving so there's a there could be a lots of innovation and deployment of local currencies within these refugee camps um there are refugee camps and Kenya have been there since the 90s way so these are villages with with 60,000 people so if you want a local currency to scale that would be the way to do it if you ever seen in Jordan they've got a Syrian refugee camp it's like a village with streets and shops right you could deploy your local currency there right so there's a lot of possibilities for waste experimenting with this technology any other questions Hey so I was wondering now what type of budget went into making all this happened it's a beautiful grassroot economics project like 100k or less like like all their operational costs how long is just like the technical stuff or how long has this been running and how much did it cost to set it up so the program in general or just the crypto part what we just saw here the soured uh-oh so that's on since end of September so you can go on well the block Explorer will didn't want to share Wiley because if there's more than three people it kind of crashes right now so he needs more help you know because he's just doing it himself so it's a it's a shoe to shoe string budget yeah I thank you for your talk maybe I'm off topic just wondering there's a if you haven't heard hear about the charity organization called give directly there they work in Kenya and would also these kind of use cases where charities like this and local communities would that be also interesting because you can you could just start a local currency program in a village so if you enroll a particular kind of Community Trust singers so it would be like schools and in in cases that raster's has worked with so you can enroll these different communities networks as ways to provide to flow the trade because they you know they're growing tomatoes in their in their backyard they're growing cabbage during that during the wet seasons they're growing other cash crops that there's they have goods to give but there's no way for them to have a way to trade and value against those so I think give directly could be something that allows could also use something like a local currency to to catalyze local economic productivity yeah a great talk this is very interesting I don't you mentioned that you're able I'm right here you mentioned you're able to roll back certain transactions or like fix different transactions that happen I'm sorry what kind of transactions sounded like we'll had mentioned that there was a way to reset a transaction or to reverse something yeah have you had any disputes or theft or anything around the local currencies where you've had I guess take care of the issue or is that the reason for that I don't think he's mentioned any kind of theft issues again because these are still pretty small communities where people have to know each other and they they're all bounded together so there's sort of that reputational trust of course if things start to scale right it becomes a question of how do you it's kind of like image you go to the bank and all the time say I need to reset this transaction so forth but you also have to think about the constituency that that you're working with right because if they if they make a mistake on a transaction a legitimate mistake that could be pretty significant for them right if they're living under $2 a day if they can't we reverse that transaction so it's a lot of it is also kind of the local community trust case management setting up certain rules and and seeing what works in those particular communities okay so if you have people within the local community also kind of I guess governing the system as well or is it just you guys for the time being they well they work with they have to partner with particular communities so they partner with schools farmers cooperatives and so forth so there there is there is a human interface of governance right so and I guess it sounds like in the future we'll wants to add more governance layers on chain as well so that could be very interesting oh thank you hey so I I'm curious about the the integration with bank or and kind of so so a lot of can you hear me yeah yeah so a lot of what the local local currencies do at least an American in the past when you look at like black Wall Street it's been super successful but a lot of kind of the fall backs and the pitfalls of actually expanding this have been you know in person governance right it's that idea that we can't as a people uh-hum tell others and we broach the subject before as we can tell others how to best spend their money right it has to be kind of an organic as this is right it has to be an organic had a movement where we want to use this currency so I'm curious about the integration with bank or and how that actually plays a role into this because it seems kind of weird to me right the in effect why it seems weird to me is that the integration with bank or allows you to kind of go in and out of different currencies so on the one hand there's remittance where it's like this is great you can you know travel across but the idea of this is local currency right it's not that I can go in and out shouldn't be able to do that otherwise you're not keeping the money within the local communities it seems a little that's really your intention yes so the way to think about this is trading between communities so if I'm here so there's there's six or guess now nine community currencies in the seraphic credit system right so this one particular community here wants to be it's a trade also with another community somewhere else right because regionally if you're in absurd part of Kenya you might be able to produce a lot of produce such as such as tomatoes and and lettuce but in a different part you might be more producing things like rains right or sugarcane and so forth so it allows those two different communities to trade with each other so it's not necessarily I want this global remittance game between you know different countries but it's just we have different goods that were producing each and we want to be able to trade amongst each other more easily that makes sense I guess my question is more on the the larger scale of bad actors as opposed to I understand the use case right that makes sense but so if I am a personal banker and I see these local comedians kind of trading with each other if I am in the town I can pretty much like say I want to buy all this stuff up and sell it on vanqor and then make money with bitcoin instead of actually keeping within local communities and that's really the tackiness that kind of mentality that I'm talking about there's a huge conflict there to go I'm saying has it been thought of yet or is that like I mean you know you know there's a lot of the game theory around but when you're building something from the ground up like it's it's not people aren't thinking like that's not what their day-to-day concern right like they're like I just want to like get school fees paid like I want to go and like get some food right like I want to save 20 shillings so I can like feed my family right so I don't think there's is it it will it at some point if it gets becomes interesting someone from the outside starts doing that I think those are things we do need to think about but it's just it's just like so far from the kind of immediate issues in terms of like does the ussd connection work is it is it cheap enough can we get it under choose two cents right can it be even cheaper right if you're doing a twenty cent transaction to buy some tomatoes it's two cents out of that is still it's still too high right so that's like the scope of the very mundane issues rather than the game theoretic issues and so how much money is actually flowing within the local communities I think they've done about ten thousand USD worth of trade since in the last four months okay amongst about but there's like there's over a thousand wallets but 40 percent have done trades on them so about I would say cheap like 400 to 500 people have been participating thank you so is this kind of like creating utility token for a local community what is a utility token so it's a new currency that you're tying to specific goods and services which you've graded out of nothing know what the right semantics would be because I think of utility tokens as like I don't know like I you know I would like to think that these aren't because they actually provide real benefits to people so how is the supply controlled so I so the supply um there's talking so it it's there isn't like a pre kind of fixed supply no it's just it's just it's not so obviously no it's not a utility token right it's it's looking at what are the news in the community how many and they in their ear dropped a certain amount each of the participants and the wallets and you know they're not they're not kind of a priori controlling the amount of tokens that can be because the reason why utility tokens do that is because they want the price to rise right so there's a there's a prefixed supply and if people use this cool thing than the price of this utility token goes up and we all get to make money right so that's sort of how I'm feeling what a chile token doesn't which is very different than what they're trying to do here with a community currency so there's just controlling the supply ad hoc to try maybe stabilize the price or stimulate the economy yeah so they're just they just need lots of demand right if you think about it it's just it's they just need a lot of demand that the supply isn't isn't a huge issue at the moment [Applause]