Moca | Peer to peer is back in town - Zeymer Montes | Common S3nse - 2026

[music] Hi everyone. Um, thanks for having me here again. Uh, peerto-peer is back in town. That's the topic that I'm going to approach today. I'm Z.

I'm from Mocha. I was here two days ago and I'm glad that you invite me to approach a different topic. U so what I am trying to convey with this talk is that freedom tech needs good interfaces need relatable interfaces and that it needs um really good UX and UI. Basically we have the tech, we have the like all the math all the cryptographic knowledge. It's been there for many decades.

Uh now we have the technology to use it, but some of that amazing tech is lacking on good interfaces and that's why a lot of people well don't know that exist or don't use it. Also, we're competing with web two that it's like instant and easy to use. The price to pay is your data. But well, so peer-to-peer began as a refusal. It begins as a refusal of what?

Of blocked payments, frozen accounts, everyone watching whatever you were doing and permissioned access. That's what was happening. That's still happening today and I think it's happening more than ever and you can see it. Uh how with all this new legislation basically they're just trying to get that control back because they started to lose it with all this technology. Uh but this refusal started with a simple point with a simple idea.

We need fewer people in the middle, fewer agencies, fewer governments, whatever just in the middle of a peer-to-peer transaction. If I want to do a transaction, I want to send money to you guys. Why does it have to be go all over the globe and then land in your bank account? Like why why is that the current state of things? So that was the idea.

Um, we have the tech as I mentioned, but this only matters if normal people, if people that don't really care about privacy can use it and it's accessible and it's really easy to use. Uh, because they are going to compare it with what it's out there. They're going to compare it to whatever app they use every day. And you've seen a lot of new neo banks that are basically using just the crypto rails for stable coins. But at the end of the day, it's another bank.

Uh crypto got bigger with a lot of things. All this technology erupted a few years ago when we got all these new things like ETFs, sexes, a lot of KYC. Everything started to implement KYC. Uh these new cards, the stable cards start appearing everywhere. We we can see it every day everywhere.

Um fiat exits on and off ramps also through KYC's. Uh there were some fiat exits like peer-to-peer kind of Binance used to have something like that, but at the end of the day, they were blocked and now you have to do KYC for everything. And also this introduced a lot of friction because now we used to have a a regular wallet, a simple wallet that you used to send funds, send Bitcoin, send Ethereum, but then all of these things start appearing in the UI and it start to look like a mess all over the place. Like you go to a one of the all these apps out there that are implementing all of these and you have investments, you have a card, then you have all these privacy features or non-private features, ETF, blah blah blah. Everything is out there.

You can swap, you can send whatever, and it just gets crowded really easily because there's a lot of things out there and everybody's trying to get a piece of it. Basically, uh, a lot of that growth helped the industry. Of course, it bring a lot of volume. It bring a lot of money into the crypto ecosystem. Uh but it also uh as I mentioned hurt the the users the people that it's not really into crypto.

It just made the barrier higher and more difficult to enter this this ecosystem or use this tech. So the interfaces start becoming the choke point of using the tech. people is used to using chat apps, maps, checkouts, contacts. Uh they are used to all these really nice uh iPhone, Android apps out there, really welldesigned, thought of instant applications. Um but everything that we were giving out was like a a bunch of weird terminology like hash.

If you ask somebody what's a hash, they might not know what it is. uh instead of a transaction ID that they already know because of bank transfers uh some other terminology like block height they don't know what it is but for us it's kind of like a measure of time in a blockchain all of these terms just make everything a little bit more difficult for their normal users. Um but the rails are already there. We just have to make it feel normal. We have to make it feel familiar for the users so that they can open a crypto app and they feel that it's the same thing that they are used to use.

Uh in Mocha we are trying to achieve that. Um and how we're trying to do that well we're focusing on these parts payments uh point of sale or selling uh messaging apps maps and privacy. We are trying to make adoption of crypto feel as similar as any other app that you are used to use. And how are we doing this? Well, for payments, we have uh our own wallet.

We we built our own wallet. Um we have a long way to go still on the wallet and we are working on it. But for us was like our our baby or experiment. How is the cipher pong rails working and how can we make this easy? Um we start integrating things that people feel familiar with like uh social login for example.

Uh we added stuff that non normies are really aiming for like cipher punk stuff like multi-party computation and multi accounts and self-custody. So we kind of had both options there. But the important part is that payments need to be self-explanatory and there and there if you have to explain someone how to use it, you're losing on the get-go. Uh we build the point of sale. Uh we think that there's a lot of volume out there.

There's a lot of different tokens. There's a lot of different chains. Everyone has their own solution. They think it's the best one. Uh we're not here to fight and debate which one is better.

I'm pretty sure all of those chains have something important that they're bringing to the table. Either is privacy, speed, uh pricing, fees, whatever it is, smart contracts, all of those things are really important and amazing. So on our point of sale, what we have is basically you pay with the token that you want and the business settles in the token that they want. And we are implementing also uh some uh offramping solutions for them. Of course, as I mentioned, most of them require KYC and those features are optin not mandatory.

So if you want to check out the point of sale, if you have a business, you can check it out and maybe you'll get a really good use of it. The messenger, we have the Mocha Messenger already there. It's in beta. Uh we are using the matrix protocol uh on the background that it's the same thing that is used on element. Uh it's really secure.

It's really h hard to build. Uh privacy is hard and and it's also really hard to make it uh understandable and feel familiar for for users. But we believe at Mocha that payments are social. Uh peer-to-peer is social. If you want to send money to your someone uh your your mom.

It might start with a message. It might start with, "Hey, mom, I'm going to send you $10 or 10 euros." So everything starts from there. So we build the Mocha Messenger thinking of that instead of being a wallet with messaging capabilities. It's a messaging app first.

You can use it without even touching or knowing that there's crypto behind it. It's really private, really secure, but we added the capability of sending uh tokens through the app with just one button or request also tokens through the app. We also all this one I spoiled a little bit of this one on the my previous talk because somebody asked me about it. Uh it's not launched yet, but we're working on the map. Each community has its own map.

Each community has its own places that you can go and spend their token. Um but we are trying to bridge that uh independence of maps and put it all in in one place. We are having our API so that if you are part of a community and you have your own map, you can send us data and we can integrate your your businesses as your ex whatever chain you are working with. You can see that this business only accept that token. You will also be able to see all the places that accept uh Mocha point of sale and basically allows most of the current tokens and chains.

Private what I meant with private is that everything that we're building it's built on top of private privacy. Everything is start on privacy. Mocha is private by def default. Of course, there are some features that by law require you to give some information. You don't give it to us.

For example, we partner with third party uh of ramping. And if you want to use those services, you can use them. You're going to do KYC to those services, not to us. But that's optional. We are not forcing you since when you create your mock account, we are not asking you for any private data.

you don't do KYC and that's the basis of what we're building here. Something that I want to put a lot of emphasis in is their redundancy. Uh if you were listening to some of the previous talks that were on the other stage, uh they were talking about why the swap providers need to have redundancy and there there have to be like a lot of security on them. We are at the moment we are using these five swap providers that you see on the screen. Uh near intense, Maya, Thor chain, chain flip and relay.

We are uh aiming for double this amount of decentralized swap providers. This to have a more reliable service and also to have more tokens supported. This is what basically runs most of the transactions in every every mocha product. If you are doing a payment to the point of sale, it's basically a swap that is happening in the background through a decentralized exchange. So we don't need to know who is paying and who's receiving.

At the end of the day, it's a decentralized swap. You pay, the business gets the token that they want. So that's why we think it's really important for us to have redundancy. Uh, of course, this is not bulletproof. We've heard a lot of the recent hacks to some of these providers.

Um AI is basically killing a lot of of the swap providers but we think that using that AI we can also have a lot of security. So uh the technology will get better and with Mocha I think we can get better interfaces also for the user and bring more users to crypto and peer-to-peer transactions. and make it familiar. So that's our handle mocha.app and our website mocha.

app. If you want to learn more about what we're building, if you want to use our products, everything is in different platforms. We have uh Apple, Android, uh we have desktop and everything is web. So if for some reason one of Apple or Android is blocking the app in your region, you can still use the website of the apps and use the PWA version of the apps. So thank you for your time and attention.

If there's any question, I'm glad to answer. If not, next time