Isha Varshney, Celo Foundation

next up we have Isha V from cell who will be speaking on building with purpose building for all onboarding Everyday People to web 3 thank you and thank you all for being here I know it's been a long day some of us most of us are jetl so thank you for listening to this so I'm Isha I'm head of ecosystem at Sala foundation and the reason I'm here is to kind of talk to you guys all about Salo a little bit I know we had some of our Builders up here some amazing projects in Solo ecosystem kind of allude to Salo before I know mdan did it in his chat with Silas earlier today but yeah just to talk to you a little bit more about solo what is solo what do we do and why are we at stable coin Summit um and why are stable coins so important to us so so Salo is a layer one blockchain we're currently transitioning to a layer two we are on ler to testet on the OB stack um and why do I think Salo is special is because Salo is a very mobile first we have very we have a mission which is called prosperity for all and we want to build for like everyday users and everyday use cases um and the reason we are able to do this is because there's some things that are fundamental to the chain that allow for this one is a our mobile Focus B the fact that we have really really low gas space it's Subs scent on solo and three because I think from Day Zero because we were real world focused we've kind of focused on Emerging Markets right and so that kind of leads me to like why am I here talking at unstable Summit right and as we kind of explore what do real world users in Emerging Market really care about from a web perspective what we have learned is that stable coins are the biggest thing that like we can provide to that ecosystem in the current moment of time and absolutely will build more but right now in the state of crypto stable coins seem to be the thing that kind of is great product Market fit for us um and that's why at solo we're trying to become the home of stable coins we've become we have incredible volumes as you can see some of the metrics here we have incredible volumes in terms of like how much our tvl is but why I think we can become home stable coins is like a couple of things that are fundamental one we have a lot of dollar denominated stable coins that are native on solo but two solo gas fee can be paid in any stable coin right so you think of native usdc usdt cusd are all gas fee currencies on Salo essentially you can have a wallet on Salo with just one stable coin a cusd for instance and you can transact in that stable coin you don't need any other token that's it you store and we've heard this a lot through the day I've been here at the back of the room hearing about like Emerging Markets store of value why stable coins are important an em and store of value store of value but like if you have a wallet in my opinion that has stable coins but then you have to like go get another currency add another currency to the wallet to pay for gas fee to do any transaction that makes it super complicated and I think some of these things we've kind of thought about and are super fundamental to why I think we've done pretty decently in Emerging Markets um from a daily active user perspective we've onboarded a lot of users in the last few years have been on chain um and have incredible daily active users specifically for stable coins and then we also have a couple of initiatives in the ecosystem that are super stable coin focused including Stabila Foundation Stabila Foundation I mean there's members of Stabila Foundation here so please go reach out to them but what it is essentially is it's a community program that um gets funding to proliferate the use of stable coins um for this audience maybe it's interesting to see some of the stable coin incentive programs that are being run on c um so we love for you guys to kind of go have a look at those and like I said we've onboarded a bunch of users onto the chain and so from a daily active perspective we actually Dethrone and Tron as the chain that has the most number of daily active users across any ecosystem um a lot of these users uh use stable coins for store value in emerging market and I know from the dashboards we're seeing a lot of them are cusd users which is the Sal Salo first stable coin and then we clearly have like usdc and usdt as like um other stable coins that are being used um sorry yeah and then this this this the sudden like usage of stable coins is actually being really interesting it's also kind of coming up in terms of like in the broader ecosystem around like the debate of stable coins who's using them what are they doing with them and vitalic very recent posted about some of this in his tweet where he talked about C becoming not only an L2 but also like what is driving the growth of c um and I know like for ethereum and for the evm ecosystem it's really exciting to kind of see like a lot of this like real usage and real peripher of stable coin um yeah and so how are we seeing this growth of stable coin I want to talk to you a little bit about that so we've in collaboration with the Opera team we have a product in the C ecosystem called mini pay Mini pay is a wall a stable coin only wallet that is currently available across seven countries in Africa it is a stable coin wallet that is embedded in the browser it is also the browser that is most used on the African continent as of 6 months ago I think that stat keeps changing um but I think the thing that I love about mini pay and I think why it's super relevant to the conversations today we keep talking about em using stable coins but how are they using stable coins what is the the user want to do with it is it just store of value and why aren't they using it right now because I mean stable coins exist they've been EX in existence for a few years why is the retail user not using it and I think what we learned based on like a ton of research that we did at solo was that it's really difficult to kind of like use crypto like it's scary it's difficult you have a ton of like well you have a wallet address you have like passwords and keys etc etc and we talk to like an everyday user it's it's hard and so what I think mini pay does really beautifully is simplify the use of crypto simplify the use of stable coin in like really easy UI uux um it's built for everyday users and this specific the mini pay is specifically built for Africa we've onboarded 3.5 million users to date in the last one year on the mini pay wallet um we're currently live in seven plus countries um and the target is to kind of go 60 country plus um and so I kind of talked a little bit about like why this is special but let me go through it one by one right um the thing about solo we have something called social connect which helps you kind of link your phone number to a wallet address right so like for those of us that live in the US you have venmo you pick up your venmo app you type in your friend's phone number you just type in your friend's name from your contact address you can send the money and these these kind of things exist in multiple different countries in multiple different ways but he doesn't exist in crypto so even if I'm sending money from my one wallet to the other I kind of have to like make sure that the wallet copy paste the wallet address scary for me itself like I have to like check the first two digits last two digits that kind of thing um what we have inherent at solo ecosystem is you can map a phone number to a wallet address so for instance if my mom has a wallet or if Will on in there has a wallet I literally can Will can map his phone number to his wallet address so if I want to send money to will I literally pick up on the mini pay app type in will to my contact address and send them money simple as that it's like how I traditionally use um money systems in like today's world and we've kind of like replicated it as onchain two it's really easy and fast because like finality on solo is really really is fast like 4 second finality and gas fees are really cheap um transaction it doesn't hurt in terms of like transaction cost um sign in is super easy it's it uses Google authentication um so makes it really simple and easy to use for users and like it's as simple as like what you're currently used to is what you can kind of replicate in web 3 um the interface is really easy um and then I think what makes it extremely great is that it has a bunch of like on and off ram providers um so in any country when you kind of sign into this wallet you get a drop down of like four or five different ways that you can on and off ramp from four or five different providers each so think of it this way if you want to on-ramp from your credit bit card there'll be two providers if you want to on-ramp from your bank account directly there's like three providers if you want to on Ram from like mobile money which is very prevalent in some of these countries there's like two providers it gives you rates it gives you this it gives you trans transaction fee and that kind of like gives you autonomy as to like okay well I kind of want to use my bank because it's cheaper or I'd rather use mobile money because it's easier so it gives you a bunch of like really great on and off run provide um providers across each country um and this like network is I think one of the critical things for us when we think about stable coins in em if it's really expensive to on or off ramp if the spread is like 30% I don't know about you but I wouldn't want to use anything that has like a 30% spread and so what mini pay has done really well is they've integrated across different countries and they made sure that these spreads are super minimal and then um you can send without using data for minay because mini pay the browser itself gives you free data in in some countries right kind of also I know you and I don't think about like well data bundles and cost of data but in some countries data costs a lot and so kind of like helping you remove even that additional burden is really helpful for when we talk about everyday users and some of these economies the other thing that makes this really really special and I used the word special a lot is that it has this function where you have your total balance and when you pull it down there's like pockets in there right and so as you can you can see some of these Pockets there's like three Pockets currently in mini see USD usdc and usdt the again I think something that like we take for granted is like swapping between stable coins because we're Crypton native you can go to deck kind of swap or like one of these like swapping functionalities right on Mini pay they've abstracted all of that complexity away right you can literally drag and drop and it swaps one is to one this feature is like powered by the Mento de um which helps you kind of like it's zero it's zero cause swapping let me show you how this works okay maybe the video is not showing maybe the video doesn't work maybe not okay so literally you drag and drop and it swaps for you right it's really simple UI um this is going really well clearly thank you um yeah and then we have some really exciting news we just launched the Standalone So currently it's available to any Android User across the world so if you have an Android phone I really recommend that you kind of download this and check it out right you'll see how simple this is to use but why is any of this relevant right like why are we talking about mini pay so much yeah it's store of value then what what happens after that right why are we talking about this I'm talking about this because people are actually using it as anecdotal evidence I was in Kenya like in the month of September I didn't buy a single Kenya shelling I used Mini pay wallet for every single transaction from an Uber to Coffee to dinner to whatever you say from the time I landed to the time it took off I used only mini pay which is really incredible for me but it's also like why why should I mean I'm clearly like not the majority but as you can see we have like actual usage of this by people on the ground and so you have Richie here who's using USD he earns money only in usdt he's a content creator um it was really difficult for him for a retail user in some countries across the continent it's really difficult to get a dollar denominated bank account and so he now receives his entire payment for all his content on with usdt and kind of uses it is able to kind of even pay the Tuk Tok or depending on which country you're in um in usct using minay um we have another Emma kind of uses it to buy groceries and I've done this myself kind of bought a lot of groceries in Nairobi with mini pay um but I think what makes it really special is that you can like like me um you have folks like Nick who kind of lost his wallet and it's not uncommon in some countries to lose your wallet and lose some of your belongings even with with losing some of his belongings he was able to kind of access um payments in Nigeria as he was traveling net net why am I here why why do I think this is why do I think this is relevant right and I know we've had some interesting takes on this right but our take is my mom thinks I work for magic bean money right literally like that's what she tells me you working for magic bean money right my friends kind of tell me what is wrong with you crypto is completely useless right but I'm tired of hearing this crypto is useless unless you need it right until you need it right crypto is useless unless you're that person in Nairobi or in Nigeria or in somewhere in like Guam and you're not able to kind of receive payment for like online online content creation it's useless till you can't get a loan or the loan that you get is at like 10% per month return you have like products like haraca that are like building lending functionalities in Emerging Markets um at rates that are reasonable right crypto's useless sure crypto is useless for some but it's not useless for all it's not useless for everyday people doing everyday things in markets that are not here right and so my my thesis is crypto is useless but I love I think stable coins are a great product Market fit and I can't wait for all of us to prove this wrong right to kind of build towards this future thank you