Onboarding the Next Billion into Web3 | European Blockchain Convention 9

[Music] 3 2 1 [Music] go hello everyone welcome to the final panel of the day how's everyone doing pretty good good good all right cool don't worry we'll have a little audience participation so we'll keep it keep it Lively for this last panel before happy hour and top us time uh my name is Prat penali I um uh helped build early products at Google like Chrome and Google domains so I've very much uh forged in the web one and web two fires uh but with that said have taken a keen interest to web 3 I currently lead an advisory uh to help early stage Founders build their next companies so we bring um product and Technical expertise to uh early stage and growth stage companies so with that I have the pleasure of introducing a bunch of technical experts and and uh and product and Business Leaders here with this panel um before we get to our uh esteemed panelists though um we have our topic which is onboarding the next billion users to web 3 so as we had some of our early conversations before the panel we were wondering okay first of all what does it even mean to be onboarded to web 3 um is just having a wallet enough is connecting and and using that wallet for some purpose uh enough in terms of engaging is it the total number of users who have engaged with web 3 at all so we heard actually in an earlier panel today a clue which said uh that about 75 million users worldwide about 75 million people have engaged with web 3 in some way shape or form so we'll talk about that but the audience participation part was um let's think about uh let's take a guess as to what how many people we have in terms of connected wallets total and there's some debate on this but you know looked at a few different sources so I want everyone to just kind of stretch out put your hands in the air like you know for now okay now keep one hand in the air okay everybody's got one hand in the ERA this is good all right cool so let's think about a number total number of wallets and again there's some debate here so I'm just going to use log base 10 numbers here uh and we're going to say either 10 thousands hundreds of thousands millions tens of millions hundreds of millions or a billion and we're done and we can all go to topst right now so today how many wallets do we think our are uh are connected created in connected today so keep your hand in the air if it's tens of thousands okay we think some people think maybe not even how about hundreds of thousands yeah okay good keep your hand in the air if you have that y uh keep your hand in the air if you think there are millions so anywhere from 1 to 10 million okay um all right so keep your hand in the air then if you think there's tens of millions between 10 and 99 million wallets already okay now we're all down to the last few so we have uh and then okay so with I think we're above 100 million wallets currently okay great and then a billion we can go home these people are just hungry or thirsty I think they're just like let's get out of here okay good so that's kind of the that's kind of the landscape so we peaked at about the one Millions which I think is about right where uh evny I think uh you mentioned what do you what did what did you hear as the latest number in terms of total connected wallets about um I think it's um my assumption is few hundreds of millions okay uh cool bden did you have one we talked about this actually at the happy hour yesterday uh yeah yeah well uh it's hard for me to think globally because we are like specific so I would agree with you g well actually we uh we we looked up I think we had data from fire blocks and a couple others which said 1.6 million was all we had in terms of wallets so it's actually much lower than than we think um and and then again you know there's some wallets that are created for us as orphant and all that stuff but that gives you an idea that we have a long way to to go and so with that um so with that context uh we have a long way to go and then uh where we today I'll uh turn it over to our panelists in a row here and maybe you can just introduce yourself and with the context of what we just discussed here maybe talk about what are the metrics that you use today for to think about adoption and engagement within your organization so I'll start with John hey I'm John Woods I'm the CTO at the algorand foundation and algorand is a killer lir one blockchain and so um my previous work I was the lead architect on cardano uh I led architecture and applied cryptography uh for Charles and then prior to that I worked on ethereum um I've also had jobs in in the normal world as well I worked for City and Ericson and other normal companies um I think at algorand we think of adoption as volume on chain so the number of transactions of course and of course the number of active wallets um ultimately I think that that's part of our strategy if you look at the things that we've been doing over the last kind of year it's focused on uh reducing friction for the user and making the developer experience absolutely great and so if you can make it easy to build on these platforms and what are things like algorand ethereum cardano they are open source operating systems they're decentralized operating systems they execute code but they do so rather than right in front of you on your laptop they do so in a decentralized context and so just like regular operating systems like Mac OS and Linux and Windows you've got to make it easy for people to realize their vision and to build their Enterprise products on your platform and so with that yeah I think I would focus mostly on transactions per second and indeed uh the number of active accounts hey hello I'm bden I'm in startups for maybe 15 years so I'm like doing startups for my whole life uh initially I was like a developer there maybe then uh a senior developer and then the team lead and then CTO and then CTO co founder and now I'm CTO co founder uh of a web 3 company uh so uh yeah we are unstoppable domains in the nft field we do naming systems based on ethereum and some other chains uh and uh well the way we adopt people I can uh I didn't want to go into bare example but I have to is that for example what we do is we make sure people can buy some FS without having any other token right this is a very uh serious problem for people to own board that in order if they want to buy some nft first they need to buy ethereum right and uh we solved at least that problem right working great hi uh I'm Tim Walther I am um I'm group manager for web 3 and metaverse at the Volkswagen group so Volkswagen group is probably one of the uh Brands uh here in the room and probably uh a lot different uh to everyone else here in the panel because actually what's been talking what we're talking about here is not our natural habit we sell cars Volkswagen group basically is not only the Volkswagen brand but it's also Audi Porsche scoda Lamborghini Bentley and a few more so I think we are about 12 Brands but what we've seen a bit more than two years ago that with basically the Troy and horse of nfts uh we've seen the potential of web 3 and what we can actually and how we can use it to engage with our audiences in a much better way than we did in the past so I'm looking more with the lens of a marketing person here less with an investing uh opportunity obviously but even there uh we see great potential and we've done we've started a lot of tests a lot of innovation projects and a lot of serious projects in within our brands in the last two years and yeah this is me hi everyone I'm MGI I'm the chief product officer at cryptology I'm for a long time at this industry since 2013 I had my own company uh back at the days of uh named purchase with me it was about about how to accept Bitcoin Litecoin converted in BTC to Fiat so I saw the adoption of uh blockchain and how it's adopted by the end users so I was back uh actively into blockchain industry back in uh 2017 18 on the boom with the Ico I was a co-founder of sedex this is a Diamond Exchange so if we are speaking about adoption we were saying blockchain is not about only trading blockchain is resolving uh problems day-to-day problems so at sedex back days we wanted to resolve how people trade diamonds basically diamonds is uh UNF funable assets very tiny very expensive blockchain was looking back days as perfect solution as nft where before it was popular and then I saw the next adaption where we're working on Project named footies for sport event sport organizator so today's Barcelona playing in the Champions League you will see very active secondary Market outside the stadium so blockchain is exactly how it can be resolved the problem of the match day they're reselling tickets and creating a an experience so as I said like blockchain can be with us in many many domains and meet us on day-to-day in the last year and a half I work in cryptology with uh one Focus so according to the World Bank about 1.7 billion people around the globe are unbanked we look at the countries such as Morocco Egypt Vietnam Mexico huge population and huge percentage of unbanked so still the question remains how many people uh can get access to the services how many people can uh access to the money and and do doing the day-to-day action such as paying for electricity bill and so on so from my side the main parameter is how can can we educate the user with simple UI and still it's a trade of always right UI versus security so to stay secure to give good experience and still be able to on board uh people without nontechnical knowledge and give them access to crypto trading and New Opportunities go here um wonderful well thank you thank you for that context let's actually stick with the because you mentioned as a brand Tim so uh let's actually stick with uh partnership so again we're if we're going to get to a billion we're on this journey together um it's we're going to have to need we're need to add users and and value and reduce friction by way in big groups so the 1.7 billion unbanked I mean that's a great way that entire countries potentially um Can onboard users with the advantage of either blockchain technology or two web3 uh to create to create to adopt uh to to bring in more users in Mass so maybe using examples from your own platforms or Brands um maybe you can speak to uh as a group here a conversation around um finding users by way of Partnerships and mass love to it's a great opportunity to announce that alaran is partnering this year with AI was a joke dry crowd okay um now I think uh alaran had some major Partnerships we've partnered with FIFA and and other organizations of that size I don't think it's very fruitful to be quite honest if I'm being honest I think it leads to some excitement for a week or two and then it goes nowhere uh I think a lot of these organizations are more interested in potentially you know exploring the technology but they're not fully committed to it because they don't fully understand it and indeed how can they be fully committed to it when there is as you've already described only you know a couple of million people who are actively using it it wouldn't makes sense and so um our focus is more Grassroots our focus is on making a platform that's available for everyone um yes it's important that the platform is suitable for Enterprise grade applications and Enterprise is very much part of uh where we see major applications uh on the Chain we see them as being Enterprise grade applications for for major uh firms but also uh just like Linux we got to make algorand uh I think the Linux of blockchain the platform that people choose to build on as the individual and so Partnerships are very important still I think more important is the individual and the points made about the unbanked you know we enjoy in this part of the world uh in Europe and the US certainly we enjoy uh a financial system which is incredibly mature and generally quite inclusive but that's certainly not the case in the majority of the world other thoughts other thoughts uh yeah we also we also face this problem where organizations not engaged with the web uh three they are they engage but they have a lot of enthusiasm but they have no idea uh how they want to use the technology what what's making it even worse is that uh they're not ready to do effort right they're not ready to think web 3 or uh getting to know that technology is pretty difficult at this point so our main partnership are with com uh with companies that are already in the web three field like polygon or binance um so I believe it's still like the technology needs to be improved before we go there because there's still a lot of downsides uh to it like the one I mentioned before uh with the fact that you need to First buy the native token of the blockchain before buying any other token in the blockchain let's solve this first and then go to other organizations I think looking at uh Brands and looking at uh the web uh or looking at the use cases that we've seen in the past years it's clear to uh or to to you me you need to make sure to and to understand what is the motivation why are Brands actually entering web 3 why should they right and if the answer or the expected answer is decentralization that's probably not the case why the brands are entering it right there's multiple layers and every case is obviously different but I think in general there's lots of opportunities the opportunity of engaging with communities in a whole new way than we did before for right in the past for example you could either be I don't know a fan of a brand or you could be investing in a brand with the stocks and now you have something basically in between you have a potential product where you can be a Super Fan you can be really really close to your brand you can engage with them you can do co-creation but also you're kind of invested so you become an ambassador and so on so the potential there is huge and if you look like a at a brand like a luxury car brand for example let's take Ben Lamborghini whatever from our brands for example or from the other brands um and you think about those kind of brands are having more than 30 million fans on social media on one platform alone but for example our brand Lamborghini is only selling and can only sell 10,000 cars a year so how can you actually use this huge audience what can you offer them other than I don't know maybe a t-shirt with with the logo on it or or towel or something like that how can you create exciting products in the digital space for younger Generations also um that actually use the power of the brand uh and and can serve as a much closer relationship to to the brand so this is the potential this is the positive side I think also as I'm I said I'm a marketing person and I look closely on how large is the audience that I'm actually able to talk to and how how much is the invest that I have to take there and how much engagement can I take with what customers and what can be the outcome and I think this is also a learning or this is a fact that the web 3 bubble or the web 3 space is still very very small and if you look at the overlap of potential customers of some of our Brands there is still a challenge right um so I think there's still a long way to go um in terms of ux we've spoken about it um in terms terms of security uh lots of things but it doesn't hold us back on uh keeping exploring this maybe can I just quickly build on what Tim said because I I totally agree with you and you know I've worked like I said on cardano and ethereum so I've worked with lots of big companies who've built blockchain Solutions right when you're building Enterprise grade apps for for a large customer base you want to have as simplest solution as possible the more the more complexity you add the more uh difficulty you going to have maintaining and executing a user experience that is uh in keeping with your brand okay and so really I would encourage companies that are thinking about building on blockchain to identify whether or not the value proposition of their app falls into the following kind of three categories disintermediation where you're removing some kind of middleman because blockchain's pretty good at that um data uh veracity so the you know the chain of trust or you know the the authenticity of or provence of a product luxury good like a Lamborghini for example that's blockchain's pretty good at that um and I think decentralized Identity or self- Sovereign ownership self- Sovereign identity blockchain's pretty good at that but if it's not one of those three things and if your app or your uh you know your product doesn't benefit from the from from adding block you know uh the value proposition of those three things I think you probably don't need a blockchain you know yeah worth underscoring disintermediation Providence of some sort or self- sovereignty I think that's a that's a really good uh way to think about actually when people get down to what the value that you might be able to add and by the way when we see companies that Embrace web 3 oh I hate that word but like you know use blockchain chain right when we see companies do it and they don't give their users that self- sovereignty oh you can buy an nft for the World Cup oh but sorry you can't move it off the website yeah when they when they do web 3 but they violate these principles it pisses users off right they get the opposite effect of what they want and then have you any anything else to add on the partnership side or even to add because you had uh as a lot of people probably saw right a prime location today at uh with the cryptology uh uh uh Booth so any insights that you heard that you'd want to summarize we're getting towards the end of day one here so uh in terms of what people approached you with what types of interesting Partnerships were out there or ways that people were growing in this in this market um before it you know uh there is an interesting discussion here so I think that the key about the Partnerships is um you know big Brands and big names like uh Lamborghini yeah so we see it the adoption of web 3 is look at polygon Labs right they're doing a partnership with Starbucks very successful partnership with Nike so we look that the big Brands the big names with high engagement they bring a lot of new users into web three so we all agree that some Industries will move into it like trading for sure will move uh onto blockchain we don't know which protocol exactly will win there are many great competition but it will move Mo loyalty points and so on so the big companies the big um volumes and passion will bring this technology into the masses we are here uh to the question uh what we see in the today here at Barcelona so we see a lot of companies that coming to us offering again uh iban and financial services solution so it shows that that the banking system has something wrong if there is you need so many intermediates and there is a place for all these intermediates in the market it means that the banking system is wrong and we are in the right direction of resolving this problem that is going across the world yeah so if you cannot open easily a bank account and you need some intermediate of intermediate of a friend of a branch manager to send you a contract something is very very wrong so yeah this is about the Partnerships that they see also um AML and compliance yeah I see here uh coming to our boo also it becomes an issue uh MAA is coming uh next summer everyone talks about it without any clear picture how it going to be implemented or how it be uh effective because can you describe what that is just for any normes like me out there yeah Mika is EU regulation of uh crypto assets and and set of rules that crypto exchange like us will need to keep in order to be aligned with the regulation so it was like a big jump because it was like the officially the European Union recognized crypto yeah it's never knew if it's an asset class it's a security it's a token what is this so mik was the first time that it been set rules about it and they accepted as The Regulators now we are coming to the point how it will be implemented some uh parts of this it will not be we free it will be like a banking system which we all want to change because as I said before it's broke right it's broke so it will be interesting I personally again this is my humble opinion and uh not advice but I believe that it will not go in 2024 and it will be postponed because comes the feedback from the industry from the players again the regulator doesn't want to kill the crypto companies we see it's in the United States with the Seck yeah it's going further and Seck lose they lose in the court so I hope that the European Regulators understand it and they will listen to crypto companies to exchanges yes regulation is important regulation is welcome but still there is a unique things in web free that we don't want to lose and by the way you know I worked at the European Central Bank I worked at the Irish Central Bank and so I've been indoctrinated into their thesis right around what is their job when you're there week one you go in they play these propaganda videos for you and you you learn right and the number one thing you leave after watching the propaganda is you leave with we are here to protect the consumer right and so I'm all for protecting the consumer I think that's a great idea because not everyone is sophisticated like the guys you had on the last panel who are Savvy investors people need protection but at the same time uh you don't want to choke the life out of an industry uh just because it doesn't fit your agenda that's not protecting the consumer you know so where are we in that Journey right now so it sounds like there's some sort of a if Genny thinks as well there's some sort of a bridge or we're not going to go directly to all the benefits in the financial system of um of uh of decentralized banking for for all for a billion people uh in the next one or two or even five years but uh what is the Bridge kind of look like in the meantime um and not asking you to predict you know what regulations are going to pass or not pass But continuing on the existing thought of um you know regulation compliance and uh and um and and addressing maybe some of the headwinds are having like a positive future coming out of this next this bear how does it look different from previous yeah I think that what we will see is that more and more people people will use um Solutions like on Street buying so we see it in the four third world countries that um you know unbanked people want to save some of their savings so they have basic Android devices there is this street points where they exchange some cash into stable coins usdt mainly because usdc has its uh it's other discussion how it's backed by Black Rock but they want usdt they want to have a some safe Zone about hyperinflation and some accessibility so yeah Regulators um if we are talking about third world countries like uh Morocco and Egypt and Cameroon Nigeria at all these countries there is like very complex regulation and set of rules Etc but the people who use this money they find a walk around to go into this um possibility to to have something that will save their funds so they will use Android and they will change small portions of money but still they will go there against the regulator because I think uh that the common population yeah as uh mentioned here the regulator wants to protect but it's not always accepted by the masses that regulator wants to protect okay they see how Regulators Drive Lambos and their sons driving Lambos and going to vacations while you know the people on the street see hyperinflation so it will be a battle Yeah so regulation is good regulation Pro should protect and we as a market leaders we should be aligned with the regulation but still you need to get access uh to the people of their money to have their protected and not just as the regulator want to control them yeah that makes sense no thanks that's really helpful um and then uh Bogden for um so what is it two three years ago you know you suddenly especially in this room we're sitting side by side with someone being like you have to get your eth domain there's going to be people are just going to start sending you eth it's the you know you must do it right and so that's where I was sitting in uh in I think art basil Miami a couple years ago and I was like great I snatched up my you know my domain so in the in the domains world you know it it should every um everyone who buys a car from Volks group get their dot you know. TLD domain and then start to stream a bunch of value there or keep your car records or share all your pictures are there any really interesting use cases for the real estate in that sense of being my mailbox to web 3 being a uh a domain name I I think uh uh like the the idea we promote is that uh the domain can be your identity in the Internet it's like you have login with Google you have login with Facebook but why you don't have login with decentralized ID that only you can own right and this is the biggest Market whether we are ready for this Market to start it it's a bigger question and we investigated it a lot and it seems that no we should start somewhere else and that's what you were talking about all right because because with this decentralized ID it's so Global idea and it's so big Market that there are so many big players there and they were going to make their turn later because they want to see how smaller players will make their turn and that's where what what we can do the use cases you mentioned they're more like uh more like fun right but like even like placing your website I would say I would want to move my personal blog from traditional domain to um nft domain right how about that is that's similar technology like WordPress or something but on uh the de centralized ID great all right cool we're almost out of time and we're almost done with our day so um let's uh go back to our laboratory here and think about what do you think five 10 years five years 10 years is like you know we're dealing in dog years right so 10 years is like who knows what the world will be like uh how many people do we think are going to be um uh onboarded to web 3 if we're using that 1.

6 million wallets created today or if you want to use one of the metrics that you alluded to at the beginning of our conversation where do we think uh in terms of the trajectory of where we'll be in five years um in a lightning round format you know what do you where do we think we'll be I guess I would hope in the hundreds of millions of users and I hope with uh privacy by default because when people have um when people realize that their John woods. algo or the John woods. E can expose their entire spending history and indeed like how much money they have uh we have very serious problems and that's something that has to be solved before we on board billions of people Financial privacy is important uh yeah I think it's also hundreds of millions especially like if you take previous speaker his estimate was like 76 million I think pessimistically it's 200 million and optimistically it's half a billion I wouldn't say say a number because it doesn't really matter to me that much if if it's 100 million and they engage maybe once a year or something like that what I do hope is that people get as younger Generations get that digital ownership is a thing that working with wallets is a real benefit that blockchain can secure a lot of things much better than we did in the past and if we achiev this I'm happy uh it will be interesting to look first of all PayPal yes PayPal has 435 million users active users and they're moving into with uh PayPal USD so we will see the adoption first of all it's 435 million users some of them already in crypto some of them on New also interesting factor that we will look in very close in the future is World coin of Sam Elman who doesn't know Sam Elman is the founder of chat GPT open AI so they have this project that scans the eye and gives you uh coins named World coin it makes a lot of hype uh you see like in Germany in Spain there are not such long lines to make a scan but in third world count especially in Africa you see lines of people because they'll say okay we don't care we get like $25 which is a lot and they give their privacy but they're fine with it so it's very interesting experiment The Regulators again in many countries are discussing their privacy but we will see it's very interesting it's ambitious projects not sure that it will be in this format as we know today with uh World coin with the Ein scaning but it definitely goes into this direction as ban says like you have the identity of the wallet that works with you so it will be interesting to see how new approaches beside private key that you need to store and a piece of paper under your pillow goes into the mass adoption with such projects as a world coin and PayPal for sure for sure no I could that's that's fantastic yeah I think the um the friction going down the kind of the invisibility of a lot of the underlying technology being out there Brands and you know other sources of mass adoption won't really care whether we still call it web3 or anything like that but at the same time we're starting to see a lot of that value being discovered so um we look forward to to going into the next 5 years and Beyond in the next billion users with all of you um please join me in thanking the panelist today and have a great evening everyone 3 2 1 go