UNLIMIT 🛠️ Gen3 Fiat Onramp & Offramp - Jack Jia

foreign [Music] company called unlimit and today I'll be going over a little bit of the history of on-ramp since 2015 until now and also I'll tell you a bit more about what we're doing in terms of building a gen 3 on and off ramp um the reason why I think not a lot of people are going to be here today is because we didn't get the bounties sponsored in time so usually people come to these things in order to you know learn more about the API but we joined uh the youth Global late so uh but it's all good I still think that we're a really good counterparty to work with so you know um I've been in this space myself for the past nine years so you know come to talk to me afterwards if you guys need any help with payments or banking but um yeah let me just go through this uh so unlimits as I mentioned is an OG OG payment company we are a principal member of Visa Mastercard and JCB and Union Amex and discover and also we have our own Swift Code because we're principal murder Swift as well you can think of payment companies as kind of like node providers into web 2 payment networks because just file like inferior or Alchemy allows you to you know read and write into ethereum or any EVMS a payment company that is a principal member of Visa or master or you know being a an acquirer and a processor we basically have read and write access directly into Visa net right you can think of like the Visa mempool as a place where like the acquirers gets to support just to put in payment requests to the issuers and they'll just give more like analytics while is in this mempool so that's what a payment company does I mean there's many different types of payment companies point being that as an acquirer we're like directly at the source right it's like the difference between like inferior versus gelato or uh or Morales right one is a node infrastructure provider the other is a higher order API for doing something on top so we are more like uh uh like an inferior in that sense that's like a web 2 node provider good and now we are launching an on-ramp on top of our payment company the payment stack that we already built up so imagine if like stripe or like World pay or checkout launch like Moon pay or transact or Ram right that's what's happening we um I have this next Generation via on and off ram that we're building on top of our own payment stack right there's a lot of efficiency gains when you do that because you know as an acquirer you already get basically the Best Buy rates and the best bank FX rates uh which are savings that we pass on to the users right so imagine if like a user went from let's say uh like brl to eth and you're using like the merchantment record that is transact or moonpay that is based in Europe well every time that Moon pay receives a merchant settlement they'll receive it from like brl to Euro first before they convert the euro to to eighth right uh so so it's not about the transaction fee of like 2.9 plus 30 cents it's about the fact that there's a hidden FX cost in the Fiat of Fiat and the fiata crypto conversion that then is put into the spreads that is passed on to the user right so here we don't have that because we're in acquirer we basically get Bank rates like five bit 10 bibs as opposed to 300 bips for uh for our crossbuilder FX settlements and these are all savings that we then pass on to the user uh in the form of better fees and as I mentioned at first as an acquirer you get to read and write directly into Visa which means you have better analytics for controlling conversion rates so you have like good conversion rates along with lower fees and just wider coverage anyways tell us a little bit about myself and and uh and the company and the parent company but uh let's go through like today a history of on-ramps as I mentioned right where you have gen 1 gen 2003 and what the current kind of typology looks like uh so you know at gen 1 we have simplux back in the days there was only send plugs and then Gen 2 around like when D5 was born in 2018 we had uh wire Moon Patron zag uh ramp and and uh some other like local ones and then over the past couple of years things have been changing really quickly unfortunately instead of having like a Fiat Dell with like a standard API that allows every on-ramp to adhere to this API standard everyone kind of started Computing and therefore fighting for the same uh market share within the space as opposed to having a standard API that allows people every developer to then just you know it's like saying if you're using Alchemy or if you're still using the same RPC API you just change it providers you don't have an RM space so I'll go through a little bit about what's going on in the Gen 3 or the current landscape for what should happen next so here's a form a long form from Simplex this is actually from 2023 and that just tells you kind of how much things haven't improved you see this very long form ux is uh kind of clunky right it's um I was trying to find a screenshot from 2015 through Exodus wallet and BRD wallet but don't have it anymore they turn it off we're already while it got bought by coinbase and uh I can find like a 2015 version of this but imagine like a longer form that is basically uh you know not embeddable right and it's completely off chain because you have to copy paste your own address there's no wallet sign in there's no wallet connect right but at the time it was literally the only option right so you know let's give them some credit for being a Pioneers here in terms of uh a company that's enabled on-ramping in 2015 even pre-etherium uh you know but there was just a lot of problems obviously at that time with like high fees super low conversions uh huge problems throughout at the end of the day they had to bout out of the race because uh they could not compete with newer RMS at the Gen 2 level so you know they sold to another company called nuve which is like a Canadian payment company that bought Simplex um and yeah so that's kind of gen one like I would say probably 2014 to 2017 the only option available there were some like other original ones like PTC Direct that's been around but um in terms of the B2 b2c model I would say that you know Simplex was kind of pioneer there and and what we Define as on-ramps today and then around like 2018 you had like wire come in the road they raised like a series a like I was first employee at wire uh and uh we were doing like a lot of other stuff before this we were doing like OTC trading and like cross-border payments using crypto as a rail but when when D5 was born we realized that hey why don't we take our licenses that we have in the US with like you know Money Services business or money transmission license and let's offer that uh into the default ecosystem with non-custodial wallets and dapps and to allow users to on and off ramp so we kind of like repackaged what we did because if you think of like what cross-border payments using crypto rail is is it's just like USD to usdc and the usdc through local currency that's like an RM and off-ramp together right so if you separate it and you say okay well instead of doing an end-to-end flow of like USD BTC and BTC to PRL let's just offer both as like one is an RM and one is an off-ramp so so we kind of repackaged and restructured uh the company to you know to become an on and off ramp uh for D5 you know it was very exciting time at that time uh we did have an embeddable widgets you know we were the first to work with maker this was like literally August 2018 when when the USD to die rails were turned on right imagine that right like we're talking about like the first year of D5 and this was like pre-uni swap days in 2018 and we already had like USD to die which was you know phenomenal I think um and we had Apple pay like if you guys ever use like rainbow wallets and rainbow wallet has like an alphabet checkout feature where it's not like an embeddable widget at all is completely white label and it's like literally two clicks and you're done right that I still think that that's the best flow even though you know for some compliance issues you can actually do that um but you know we were breaking things at the time in 2018 2019. um still there was like some problems once again due to compliance we didn't know if we can do D5 like for example like Fiat to like a meta transaction to so that you can stake into compound at the time like we didn't think we can do that it's like a US Money Services business so so yeah so now you know Simplex is dead wire is dead and you know you kind of move on to uh transact all right transact I have a lot of respect for what they do uh is still is a developer first uh company that just has really good tooling and they're all devs before they're payment people uh and uh you know they did build out like all the meta transaction stuff so like you can go from like Fiat to anything right literally like user pays in Fiat it goes to like a uh transact hot wallets and then there's like an approve and allowed with the function that basically interacts with any other contract um through like a forwarding address that the couples the sender's address from the user's address so you can it's almost like you're it's almost like a pay master that allows you to pay on behalf of the user uh with the ease that transact purchases with the user's Fiat to then forward it over to the user's wallet in terms of like a staking like LP token uh it was ahead of his days I think in terms of this being done uh there's easier ways to do this if if we can adopt uh you know account instruction obviously but you know this is all pre-owned abstraction so uh The Meta transaction stuff was pretty cool um you know they were able to add more payment methods as well working with local payment companies to to add more payment methods right but still I think there was huge issues there because uh at the end of the day so far like every single on-ramp has very similar issues in that they are a crypto startup that got into the space very awesome people every single one of them but they're not a payment company so they you know had to pay higher fees they weren't in control of conversions because they received back some you know send some red access from the payment company but they don't really know why they have no way of like analyzing that data Beyond like what had you know they couldn't really fight it right so there's there's ways to fight fraud on the client side um but if you don't have control over the server side because you don't read and write directly into Visa then you're kind of fighting with like one arm behind your back um yeah so you know moving on from the second generation to like kind of where we are today there's a lot of cool stuff this is moonpay right here right so mumpe you know also iterated a bit more you know they got a lot of money from the VCS which arguably kind of screwed the industry because you you know you kind of give them 500 million dollars and they are now trying to become the only one but you know that's not how web3 works right like web 2 is like oh yeah let's back the winner you know Winner Takes all like web3 is like no we all should collaborate we should create a Fiat Dao that has local on-ramps all across the world it has like distributed notes that can make sure they take care of those countries very well so you know I have my beef I guess with uh these web 2 VCS that gives money to web3 companies and the influence how they think you know now they kind of Steal every non-custodial Wallace users by launching their own direct facing app right user-facing uh application so retail application and uh yeah you know I'm not sure if that's good for the space to to do that but um yeah before what it's worth you know they executed very well um well deserved round and uh also part of this kind of Gen 2 uh on-ramps between 2018 to 2021 right introducing new elements like NFC checkouts uh super well funded obviously you know pretty strong counterparty in that sense right they're not gonna die I don't think you know it's not like sample or uh or wire or you know um even transact are arguably only raise 20 mil when they should raise 50 at least right not a as not as strong of a counterparty when you think you know on relying on a partner and provider for the long run right um Prime trust died as well yeah so you know I think you know Moon pay for what it's worth is a strong counterparty but they do steal your users and they force like exclusively and uh at least from what I hear the sport is not very good um and then these other kind of like Niche on-ramps that are like nft only but are super like Tech first once again almost like transact in 2019 but on the nft side and just like offering really awesome ux and and easy developer experience um you know and I think this was very Monumental this happened like two days ago where third web bought paper right I think that's super good for the space it's like you know like you can say that oh from my own perspective as like another on-ramp why would I say that's good because aren't they competing against me it's like no they're not this is good for the space period like we're not competing we're trying to go after like other users in uh in the world right like if you're only fighting after the current block of users where like there's so much rehypothetication happening Founders making money and stop you know Giga bringing themselves into building new stuff like it's super incestuous and it's a super small Fringe space like do you really want crypto to stay Fringe where everyone is just fighting over the same users or are you here to change the world and make an impact and actually onboard new users from the world outside of this Fringe like five percent of users that is us right like I think there's only 500 000 Wallace right now they're actually active you know in spite of like metamask claiming 30 million wallets that's like maybe the amount of the walls that's generated but in terms of actual users there's probably only 500 000 or less of us right so how do you actually onboard new users well I think third web is doing God's work and that's you know they made it super easy from a developer standpoint everything is now like end to end from like standardized smart contracts to the deployment of it to the whole checkout process to you know the social login wallets um so yeah I have a lot of respect for third web buying paper um my marketing team made this a little bit wrong what I wanted to show here was like kind of like the aggregators on one side and then the exchanges and acquires on top and then the middlemen first movers in the middle and then the local revs and Dish ramps in the bottom right and what that is trying to show is to say that the current landscape of on-ramps is such that it is so fragmented and we can think of it as like top middle bottom in the sense that you have a bunch of super big companies such as coinbase paid and binance connect right that are launching their own Rams right or PayPal uh and stripe and unlimited is not big but it's still an acquirer right it's like the difference between inferior and chain stack like inferior does a 10 billion API calls a day like chain stack those like 1 billion but inferior has like 10 Network connectivities uh chain stack has 25. so now as an acquirer we have a lot of neural connectivity um but we're not obviously as big as like stripe or PayPal but the main point being that you have a bunch of payment companies coming into the space that is launching an arm ramp such as stripe on-ramp such as you know Simplex with newbies such as online with crypto and then you have exchanges that's diversifying their portfolio of businesses uh you know some like they might have an exchange account but they also have time and custody they now have an on-ramp where you can log into your coinbase account in order to uh on a ramp right so it's the same kind of B2B to see SDK right that's at the top now so super well capitalized teams uh that are exchanges and acquires on top and then you have your you know middlemen first movers that got into the game four or five years ago such as Moon Patron Zach and ramp uh that you know I would say ramp executed the best Moon pay close second best but you know played the BC game very well it's raised a lot of money trezak um you know I have a lot of respect but once again they should have probably erased more uh so those are the middlemen I don't think they have any more Advantage going forward I think they're all going to get squeezed out in theory in theory because because once again they're not an Inquirer so they don't read and write directly into Visa Master uh they don't they're not super well capitalized like Moon pays burning money again uh and they just their position it's not about the money it's not about like how much they raise it's about their positioning right their ass middlemen they're not a bank they're not an acquirer uh and they really only have a good Tech stack that allowed them to integrate with like a lot of other apps initially because they got into initially but but their positioning I think will become weaker and weaker over time uh relatively even weaker than the local or local Rams because if you think of like what a local RM does they they only serve that country right like loopy pay they're just in Brazil they only do picks they might they may only have like a team of like 15 right uni swab only has a team of 30. so you only stay a small team of 30.

you don't try to scale to like a team of 500 150 you don't increase your burn rate you just operate a team of 15 to 30 and all you do is just that Regional on-ramp in that one country it could be Alchemy pay an a pack it could be Lupi pay in Brazil could be whatever Regional ramp you know I'm a vice in a couple of African on-ramps to help them to think through that on how to become like a strong node right or you can think of this as like social rare notes uh where because it's a physical jurisdiction because they have to follow regular regulation in locally so it's almost like a distributed social layer node for maintaining these on and offerings locally and I actually think that that's the best foot forward right there's so many applications there to you know for like FX for example like if DFX has all these different stablecoin issuers locally that use on an off-ramps locally then you can technically like replace like a trillion dollar industry with how cross-border payments work uh and how much later things like 20 trillion dollar per year like it's move across borders right and that's always been the dream but it's never happened like whether it was like Ripple or Stellar or you know what wire try to do in their early days with cross-better payments using Bitcoin as a real and what people are trying to do today was like usdc combining usdc with like on-ramps and off-ramps locally it just hasn't worked for a lot of different reasons mainly because there's a double transaction fee and a double FX right so if you're paying like 2.9 percent to on-ramp and 2.9 off-ramp and you're paying like some bips for the usdc to us or USD to usdc and the usdc brl like why would you pay double FS with double transaction fee when you can actually go to a bank like transferwise or wise and use like less than one percent fees there because you can get like buy eraser like once again one to five basis points right so so but but if you do have stable coin issuers working with local on and off ramps and they're able to both together bring the cost down basically converting stable coins at one to one and having very low transaction fees then it does make sense to build such an international venmo uh soon so so I'm personally more bullish on like local Rams doing this right and the niche ramps too like I think from a developer first standpoint it as long as they stay small and more lean in terms of being a developer first and not like undertake all this uh like regulated payment infrastructure then like great you know you're more like a hard hat and a truffle as opposed to you know as opposed to like a coinbase and binance right so um so there's there's space for that too and then the aggregators right so it's like you know exchange acquire uh middlemen and then local ramp and Niche Rams right three layers and then the the aggregator that can take care of all of that there's value in that there's new uh there's new teams I didn't put Poco app on here Poco is like a team out of YC that recently launched an armed uh aggregator they're really good too uh on rampers the OG meld race last year uh pretty good team um I think they're like from square cash and some other web 2 payment companies they understand aggregation very well um but uh but Poco is like really cool too uh so yeah so that's that's kind of where the landscape is today um you know I'm happy to be discreet with uh definitely come afterwards to tell me I'm wrong um always love to learn um but yeah so that's kind of where we are today as far as landscape I just want to go over a little bit about us again in the context of what we want to build next right we're building a Next Generation field on-ramp I'm taking all my failures out wire uh and trying to apply it here at automatic crypto you know as a principal member of his master we definitely have a really good position to do this right um so you know some of the things I want to do has more to do with like I go avoiding double signing like avoiding double kyc because when you have like because if you think like what happens with every on-ramp it's like they all have this email sign in and then they all make it do like a kyc and then they all like put you through this like form where you have to fetch the quote and put in the source amount desk amount right a lot of that is redundant because like if I'm already signed into like web3 auth or like magic link or any other social login why do I have to sign into the on-ramp again right that's literally like like not native why do I just or if I'm already signed into my wallet why can't I I already signed up with ethereum basically why do I have to authenticate into this other uh app right it's almost like an app on skin but it shouldn't be an app it should be an embedded it should be abstracted so so that's one module I want to work on in this near future as head of Crips over here I want to avoid double signing right another thing is like double kyc is like a lot of apps have kyc already they're using like with Persona they're using with like some sub right thumbs up has an API for reshare kyc Bank said that this was very awesome build uh you know like if we if I'm able to basically say let's have like a multi kyc provider architecture where I can intake like 10 different kyc providers but the scheme was still false under my own you know compliance regime to make sure that I hold the pii of the end user and it still satisfies my compliance requirements then great then I will you know I'm happy to use my partner's kyc vendor uh as my own kyc vendor right so and now you can think about the UI where it's like okay cool there's no more sign in page there's no more kyc page you know and and you're abstracting away these these Pages more and more it's for a better ux right you do like a fresh quote API instead of like a fresh quote UI and everything is now gone and all you land on is like a stripe like payment form right that's kind of the goal right it's like the fine line between the 40 why labelable API versus like an extractable widget and that's the line that I'm trying to find for or try to Define for on the cryptos on and off ramp I have a quick demo to give of where things are right now but I think I'm out of time right so um or maybe two minutes and we can take some questions I guess but uh if you just take a look at this right this is what I mean authentication right now is just email for six digit code it's BS I hate it uh we're gonna replace that with like a multi sign-in process like you know what web3 all the magic link so that you can avoid double signing right payment methods are already in there right so this is what I mean I gotta slow this down so so once the authentication page is done right if we're able to save the card token and the user can sign into the payment method then this is all it should be is you should just land on the payment form because the kyc is done in the back end right this is abstracted away you didn't see this because it's not there you went from auth directly into the payment form which is literally the easiest flow that you can do because here what happened was the kyc is abstracted because we received it from the partner who sent a kyc token from the provider from the kyc provider right so that now all you do is land on the confirmation page in the payment form and uh and you're able to finish the purchase flow in 40 seconds right and that's what we want to do we don't want to be in the mix we just want to get in and get out right like user generates wallet we help them to fund the wallets we do the performance the the fraud checks and all that 3ds2 or any other uh fraud checks that we do on our own backend and you're done you can finish the whole flow in like literally um 40 seconds right that's the goal at least and I think I am done so happy to take some questions yeah good hi um how would you uh relate to this uh new um you know this pay uh solution yeah for sure I love noses pay uh you know what noses pay did was they basically took their like you know account instruction stuff that they have uh along with like a partner called monarium which has like a stable coin called Euro e right and then you can basically convert anything into the multi-signant approvals and you can convert anything to Euro e and then the Euro e becomes Euro and then now you can use that Euro on a card you can think of that as almost like an off ramp right because you're going from like crypto to Fiat but you're not off-ramping to like any bank account around the world you're not offering to any e-wallets or even cash you're offer them into a very specific branded card that can only be issued to residents of Europe it's still valuable I still think it's a great product I think the fact that they are offering it as a service in terms of letting other teams use it it's really great right once again this is the difference between using in like Alchemy interfera versus gelato and Morales because if you wanted to you can go to Someone Like Us who is a pure play web 2 payment company that is an email institution in Europe and you can say hey Alchemy of web2 can I get this card issue instead we have a banking service API we're able to you know give you that like Fiat only system raw right or if you say hey I wanted to do shilotto I don't care about that I don't want to deal with you know Fiat systems at all I just want to you know only have this developer touring then yeah you would you know go to gnosis pay and just use them to issue any brand of cards yeah well first of all thank you for the very informative talk yeah um I just wanted to ask how do you see the path towards off ramp as well as like the the asymmetric step here because it is a little bit more complicated and uh sometimes involves more hurdles yeah yeah I think first and foremost you need like people on the ground in every one of these countries who can work with the local regulators and local Partners to just get that web 2 Note set up first and that's part of the reason why I'm here I've been in the crypto native space for the past nine years I decided to come across the chasm into web 2 because in order to win this war it's like there's two ways to fight this war right you fight uh on the crypto Anarchy side right stay in the cartoon native space or you can charge your horse in uh and become like a general and just make sure that the war is going the other side's way so you know I'm putting that on camera but whatever's you know um you know I'm not suicidal but but no point being that I think uh those kind of Partnerships are important right like you have to have local like payment service providers and Banks sponsored Banks working with you first and foremost once you have that and you know that you can scale to let's say like 100 million dollars per day in volume and you won't get flagged okay that means that that node were run with like five nights right it won't go down like that's the first thing and then this and then I think that all the on-chain stuff is actually fairly simple like there's actually so much Enterprise like level tooling now to use like a one-inch API to Swatch or anything you can use leafire and Bridge anything everything comes back to a stable coin and then you use the local stablecoin issuers whether it's Circle whether it's you know straight FX go to dfx.finance and just talk to those guys and they're you know they can help with a lot of that right but but yeah I mean the off-ramping piece is first and foremost anything back to stablecoin and then stable coin to that local currency right and so I think the on-chain modules and the Unchained uh touring is already there what's not there are people I guess like me that's that's crossing the chasm to make sure that you know you can take care of teams from top down uh so that's you know those rails are stable those notes those Web Two notes are live for years to come uh instead of falling one by one like Prime Trails like wire right yeah yep thanks guys