Can Crypto Fix the Internet? - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

in 2025 we have technology for that you know it doesn't have to happen and so it sparked a big debate in our industry around uh KYC and uh better solutions but yeah certainly that's one of the key areas where we see the internet being broken today

who here uh wonders whether they're reading content on Twitter written by real humans or not I mean I wonder every day when I'm on Twitter. Hib is also uh one of these people, right? I think he he pointed out here that he just uh in the last year um especially replies on Twitter have gotten to the point where it's really hard to say like is this really a human? Most of them just look like a agents now writing. And it's kind of crazy that, you know, it's only been what, two years since LLMs have really taken off that we now live in a world where we have to really wonder whether or not we're we're speaking to a human or or an AI agent.

Uh today's uh Sora announcement by OpenAI is only going to make this problem even even worse. Soon we won't even know if a video is is really uh of a person or AI generated. And it's just crazy. And one thing that I think few people realize uh that's coming is soon AI agents themselves will be curious if they're speaking to a human or not. This isn't just a problem for us.

This will be a problem for AI agents as well. This is something that's maybe nearer and dearer to our heart. Uh right any airdrop um any token distribution um this has been a big problem for everyone in our space like how do we keep the bots out right? How do we make sure that as we build our communities, uh, the tokens go to real people? Um, so something that I think resonates well with this room.

Adult content is now restricted to people who have to do KYC. This is a great way to protect minors. Uh, and so I think generally it's it's a good thing. Uh, but it does mean that suddenly these sites are collecting your KYC information. So if you thought the Coinbase hack was bad, wait until one of these sites gets hacked.

It's going to be I think a catastrophe. Um and you know again there are better solutions here.

Another uh way in which the internet is broken. And um I remember Tim Berners Lee um you know a few years ago saying when he was asked how he would what he would do differently um if he had a chance to kind of reinvent the worldwide web and he talked about uh sort of the lack of a payments layer built-in payments layer and we see this a lot. We work a lot across kind of global markets, emerging markets and and some of these markets for um sort of any kind of on online commerce transaction. Uh it gets built through the carrier and the fees can be up to 40% which is obviously just ridiculous and um yeah something that you know if there was sort of a native payment layer to the internet uh would uh you know probably work pretty differently. And I would say that there's kind of two big solutions in our ecosystem that's looking at at both of these.

Uh the first is the whole ecosystem around Opera Mini Pay uh that that we and and Opera the browser company have been growing together. Um once again the cash links that you're redeeming um are uh through Opera. Um and the second one is around uh the ZK identity space. So there's a new protocol on seller called self uh that we're involved with that um allows you in zero knowledge to prove statements about yourself uh that can be verified onchain or offchain. Um and so maybe just jumping into self real quick.

Um once again it's a ZK identity uh protocol that um lets you use your biometric ID. Uh so this can be your your biometric passport. It could be your your EU ID card. Uh or uh you know we just launched support for the Aadhar card in India. Um any of these IDs um now have cryptographically signed data embedded in the ID itself and that data is signed by your issuing country.

And so this means that we can prove cryptographically uh that you have a valid ID. And if we do that uh with the smart contract on chain, we can also prove that you have a valid ID uh without a counterparty. So there's no one to give your data to to then have you have for you to then have to worry about the data being hacked. Uh and so that's pretty exciting. Uh but if you do that, you know, you're going to be sharing your information with everyone on chain.

And so the way that self works is we're actually doing that in zero knowledge. So we create zk snark proofs that prove that you have a valid passport or a valid ID or a valid adhar card and from then on you can start proving statements about yourself uh in zero knowledge that third party applications can can verify and so this allows you to basically prove that you are a unique individual which allows you to solve the civil attack problem. Uh so for airdrops like that linear airdrop um you could use this uh to prevent any civil accounts trivially and again you can do this in a in a privacy preserving way uh you can also prove that you're a human right because AI agents don't get passports don't get IDs so if you want to prove that you're uh in fact a human creating content online then you could use something like self for that uh and you can also prove uh your age without revealing your actual birthday. So for um certain use cases, you want to prove that you're over a certain age. Uh we're also working with some dating applications uh that actually care about the opposite.

They want you to prove that your age is under a certain limit, which is pretty funny. Um and and then finally, especially for crypto use cases, you can also prove that you're not on the OFAC list. Um, and you can do this in zero knowledge without revealing your name, your date of birth, your your passport number, all the things that typically are listed in the OFAC list. You can prove that you're you're not on that list without revealing any of those things. Uh, so it's pretty exciting.

Uh, definitely recommend checking it out if you go to self.xyz. Uh, you you can play with it. Uh, and we're very very excited by the reception to Self. you know, we only launched this uh earlier this year and already we have uh a bunch of people um building and integrating with it.

Um you know, probably first and foremost is Google that announced that they're using Stealth for three new products that they're actively building. Pretty exciting stuff. Um a recently announced that they have uh boosted rewards now. Uh so some pools uh if you verify that you're a unique individual uh you can rece you can receive double the rewards. So you can double the amount that you're making for example on your USDT.

And then finally Drrome is doing the same. So we have boosted rewards uh for LP positions um if you verify that you in fact are a unique individual. This definitely, you know, if you go back to our earlier examples, you can see how that addresses a bunch of these big problems, right, that we outlined in the beginning. Um, you know, to prove, for example, uh to to a site that you're over a certain age, right, or maybe instead of uh doing cumbersome KYC and risking your data being uh being hacked and exploited, right, just simply sharing a proof with those applications. Now the other uh one of the other big problems we talked about was around microp payments or you know just generally commerce on the internet and carrier billing really you know having pretty massive fees for and making many use cases impossible.

And so a few years ago we partnered with Opera uh the browser company uh 30 years of uh bringing people onto the internet uh 500 million active users. So massive distribution market leader in actually many of the global markets and uh they started uh by actually launching a non-custodial wallet called miniipay in one of their Android browsers and that became so popular that they decided to also launch standalone wallets for iOS and Android. Uh fast forward to today, they have over 10 million users um over two million um weekly activives and with that actually making it the the second most important distribution channel for uh Tether's USDT. And what's really incredible to see is the the range of use cases. So, of course, peer-to-peer payments, people sending each other uh payments in in stable coins on seller, you can do that simply based on on phone numbers uh which is a is a really nice UX.

Um but then also enabling really a kind of a growing kind of rich ecosystem of uh of merchant payments. So I was uh my colleagues was just recently in in Kenya and was able to use mini pay at every local merchant that's what that was accepting Empessa and um if we go back to that earlier example I think we have a we have a slide on that right um this is one of my favorite examples uh who here knows M Dundo uh so it's kind of like the Spotify for Africa and previously if you wanted to like buy a subscription right you would have had to go to your carrier billing and the fees on that were um just uh enormous, you know, up to to 40% depending on the country. Uh

I thought Apple was bad.

Yeah, it's worse worse than sort of the uh fees the kind of uh yeah fees Apple charges. Um and it's wild now. Uh if you have Mini Pay, which you now have thanks to claiming your cash links, uh your free cash, you'll you'll see if you go into the uh um discover section of of the wallets, you have a whole range of really cool mini apps. Mundo is one of them. And you can go and for I think it's as little as two cents a day, you can buy a daily subscription.

Um at the you know the fee on that on chain is you know ten of a cent you start listening to music right away. Um and it's really a gamecher not just for the user uh but obviously also for Mundo. So just one example of really um you know where we see the future of payments evolve on on the internet and and definitely fixing one of the internet's big problems. So yeah maybe just sharing some additional stats here. Um this was a funny tweet we we picked up but but yeah there's millions of stable coin transactions a day.

I think Opera Mini Pay itself has uh you know generated over 270 million uh transactions to date. Um pe you know kind of people transacting in stable coins and that's also starting to really reflect in the the volumes that we're seeing on on sell overall in in stable coins.