Payment Financing and the Scalability of Emerging Markets

[Music] [Applause] okay all right all right hi my name is Lily Leo I'm the president of the salon of Foundation uh and today I want to talk about how salana is building the original vision of programable money um so everyone here has probably heard of Bitcoin uh and in my mind uh the world is moving toward the blockchain world is moving towards a world where you've got Bitcoin a store value and salana is that platform to uh do all the other things that we originally uh thought of with blockchain which is open finance programmable money so I want to talk about how Bitcoin and salana are coming together first the original vision for blockchain is not digital gold it actually says it on the top of the white paper it says it's a peer-to-peer electronic cash system and the reason why blockchain has been so impactful starting when uh about 16 years ago is it started off with a seemingly simple Innovation which is that you can have self- custody have if you have access to the internet then with uh self- custody you essentially have digital property rights and if you have native smart contracts on top of that this becomes quite powerful because now you can have programmable money right uh and with that you can potentially build an open Financial system which you've actually seen scale to the hundreds of billions of dollars today and many of us have used some of these platforms uh and we've gotten I would say m much more than a proof of concept um but uh in building an open Financial system and why this becomes even more significant in terms of society uh going forward is this is the basis for economic sovereignty in a digital world and economic sovereignty is the basis for self- sovereignty so what we have here is he starts off with a seemingly small thing self- custody which really becomes uh one of the seedlinks for self- sovereignty and increasingly digital world so the vision here for blockchain has always been where there's an internet connection there is a bank account right where there's an internet connection anyone can have access to the financial internet uh so what is bitcoin uh Bitcoin has chosen to be store value and back in the early days there was a discussion as to whether blockchain is be store value medium exchange technology platform Bitcoin has settled very successfully here so then the question is who's going to do the rest of this and in my mind ethereum and afterwards everyone is working on this vision of blockchain uh and looking at some other narratives that have emerged from very early days is the idea that blockchain would be faster cheaper and constant right for payments movement around the world which is good it's just not a 10x value proposition and in my mind if you look at the original internet it was never just about digitizing the newspaper although that also happened it was always about enabling new markets and on the information internet this was about creating new markets around content creation and content consumption and so similarly uh with various kind of uh technical technological innovations after that it's always about enabling existing supply and demand to find new markets uh and to re reveal organize and monetize longtail markets so what does that mean in the world of crypto what are those 10x use cases uh so in my mind what that means in crypto it's not just moving money faster cheaper and constant although that's very good that's certainly better than the banking systems kind of efficiency we have today but it's really something I call payi so defi we've probably all used who are aware of at this point is where you're putting one in to in one token you're getting another token out it's trading right largely speculative in use and payi is really about the transactional economy where you send in money in consideration for goods and services that's Commerce that's that's a transactional economy and that is actually the majority of human uh usage of money right it's about Commerce it's not just about trading liquidity so in my mind payi is about new Financial Primitives that are based around settlement around Commerce around transactions not just trades and what stable coins give us these days is typically to move money across the world it's about 3 days and now you can do that relatively instantly with stable coin so what you have is you essentially have uh a new time value of money of at at the very least three days uh that becomes a new not just efficiency but potentially also profit pool now let me talk a little bit about why I think this is not been not been possible in 16 years in blockchain up until now you need to have three conditions you've got a performance Capital liquidity Talent liquidity uh salana delivers on performance salana delivers on Capital liquidity and also on Talent liquidity and set another way you've got to have rails that are fast and cheap where you have depth of liquidity and money that people actually use which is stable coins you've also got to have developers uh community of developers and all these things take a long time to build uh and also critically up until now we've always thought these three things are a trilemma and which one are we going to trade off on but I don't think that is possible and now we don't have to make that choice anymore now let me make another point which is around okay composable Finance programmable money the idea that you would always have uh you would have you know assets and you'd be able to pay with them save with them and invest with them which in actuality are three very different experiences for most consumers around the world you have one app for payments one for savings and then one if you have enough money then you can have a brokerage account you can invest regulated entirely differently what you have when you have composable rails is the ability to have all three of these experiences embedded in the same in the same environment so what are three examples for what this might look like in a retail situation you have something which is called not just buy now pay letter later but buy now pay never so when you pay for consumption potentially take some of your savings deposit that into a lend borrow type type of environment the yield from that potentially pay for the initial consumption that could be a cup of coffee buying a phone buying a much larger item these are the types of experiences for consumers you cannot have in the existing world you have to have instant programmable rails instant settlement uh sophisticated Financial products at click of a button and also the ability to do these as relatively microtransactions uh and so uh also importantly the new primitive here is the ability to architect yield have multiple types of yield go into that one yield container and either spend from that yield or even trade the yield container itself as an asset itself uh a second example is in this new digital economy uh there's new types of producers for example content creators usually single uh single sole proprietor businesses and have no access to credit markets why can't we tokenize their assets which are digital content collateralize them and create a financing Market uh for uh for small businesses uh essentially this is the type of Market that's has absolutely demand in it today but there's no traditional uh lenders that can actually participate in this market at that size and at that scale uh third everyone is very familiar with this Market APA APA financing what you have here as well is very proven use case boring in a certain way but you have no access to this Market unless you are generally based in us or EU have a great relationship with your Banker uh and three years of audited financial statements and just a lot of folks in the world do not fit those criteria doesn't mean they are not worth good credit risk uh so you know time value of money applies to so many different products out there these are all transactional in nature and they're all based around the time value of money and if money can move faster and if money is programmable there are new opportunities in here um so payi is around tokenizing the time value of money it's about introducing new profit pools into payments it's not just about bringing down the cost of payment transaction processing and what it also does for blockchain it starts to move us as an industry from being largely speculated speculative in nature to actually having a transactional onchain economy uh and you know here's some other ways you potentially sort of disaggregate what we call Payment Processing kyc today introduce defi liquidity pools um to create more transparency reduce credit risk and at the same time preserve uh the importance of kyc on and off ramps so on and so forth and potentially even Credit aration in the future um so here are some ideas as to how crypto can move Beyond just being a speculative speculatively driven economy and actually really start to add value to really what is the majority of how we use money today which is really about consumption goods and services and transactions uh so that's uh that's what we're building one of the many things we're building here at salana and I do believe it is only possible on salana today thank you [Music]