Bitcoin as a Tool for Financial Inclusion - TOKEN2049 London 2021

thanks everyone for being here today my name is joseph weinberg i'll be uh moderating this panel uh with great uh speakers that we have here for the next 40 45 minutes um quick introduction uh i'm joseph i'm the co-founder of shift network we're working on identity and compliance solutions uh both on the d5 sides and addressing some of the biggest regulatory challenges in the ecosystem today um i'm an early bitcoin miner in 2010 and 2011. i've been in this space for quite a while so this topic particularly is pretty close to heart um maybe we'll start with intros across everyone and jump right into it nick yeah thanks joseph um it's wonderful to be here in london thank you everyone for uh coming out i know this resocialization is awkward um but i think the event is doing a great job today uh it's a special time here for me um 10 years ago we founded blockchain.info which was a predecessor for blockchain.com in a little town in northern england and so to be reflecting on a decade's worth of work um right now is especially topical on this specific issue um this is one of the reasons i got involved in this industry and it's still true to our mission today at blockchain.com we're focused on building an open financial system that enables anyone in the world to basically control their wealth to be able to send receive secure trade and exchange digital forms of money so that we can basically reduce poverty and increase human liberty and so i'm really excited to discuss this topic because it was important 10 years ago and it's more important than ever today it's also one of the most important arguments our industry can make to win this crowd and regardless of where you stand on tokenomics or hard money or whatever we can really do some incredible things by wrapping the planet in this economic fabric so um yeah i'm really excited to see my friends and colleagues in the industry and discuss this important issue today hello everyone i'm anthony i am one of the co-founders and managing partner at nexo we started out almost four years ago with nexo you know providing banking-like services for the blockchain space and since everything is coming on chain slowly but surely to an ever increasing uh you know customer base uh and just truly borderlessly uh throughout the world we worked 200 jurisdictions you know uh we built out our product just uh out of on all needs and what we saw as lacking in the space you know the ability to borrow against your crypto holdings which allows you to hold on to it much longer than you would usually uh you know have the courage and even the be in a position to do you know out of that the earned products the various different assets just to give you an overall uh banking experience and you know help you solve your financial needs when they intertwine with uh with the blockchain space we started out of europe in the united states you know just a very western focus of our product and then increasingly tried to provide uh the products in such a way to be more inclusive and throughout the world in the less privileged areas of the world and super happy to be talking about that and uh you know what we had on that front we worked with some of the guys on the panel here blockchain.

com specifically uh so you know it's a pleasure here to be sharing some insights great steve yeah so i've been i know many of these characters for also about nine or ten years uh i was started in uh bitcoin as it was then space in 2013 uh initially at fortress and then helped to co-found pantera capital um at pantera we invested in a couple of different things in the space bit pacer uh ripo and coins.ph um so we kind of looked quite early at uh these issues of remittance and banking being banked in different regions in 2017 i started a company called orcid which was focused on a different aspect of freedom um which was uh digital privacy um still running that uh recently moved to europe and uh also a venture partner of fabric ventures uh based here in luck in london and luxembourg and we've been looking a lot recently at uh specifically africa and the recent predominantly increase in smartphone penetration in these regions which is meaning that you can actually start running uh wallets and and so on so very fascinated on this topic thank you awesome um so yeah so first i'm going to kind of walk each of you guys through a quick question to kind of kick this off starting with you nick so uh you know in my personal experience i've you know been working in developing nations with governments and actually providing wallets from blockchain.com thank you over the last kind of four years uh to people getting their first crypto uh you know what are you seeing from the you know organic wallet growth side to support kind of this you know what i look at is the grassroots you know adoption and spread of of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies generally yeah so for those of you that don't know blockchain.com builds the world's most popular digital currency cryptocurrency wallet we've had over 77 million people sign up for one of our wallets and one of the key differentiators between us and a lot of the other players in the space is we took an early position to build a non-custodial wallet first this was a position that also enabled us to serve on a very global basis and so our top 10 markets actually include frontier and emerging markets right now countries like nigeria countries like ukraine indonesia and many more around the world and we're seeing stronger growth in some of these markets than the ones you'd expect like united states or even the uk so we are seeing faster than normal growth in those places and obviously there's a bull cycle going on right now if those of you that are new to this we've been through four of them before and uh it can be quite horrific when the thing's correct um it takes a long uh sort of effort it's different this time right but it's different this time around um so yeah i mean the important thing for me is that we have still a lot of work to do on the financial inclusion and financial literacy side steve's right the penetration of smartphones has dramatically improved access for people in these emerging markets to gain access to tools they put them on an even playing field or even a better playing field than some of the wealthiest people in the world that use you know centralized financial services and canary wharf and to me that is extraordinarily exciting it's cheaper for them to remit they have ways of earning rewards and saving money they give them rates or far exceed what you can get in a savings account in a traditional bank and we're watching the real-time unbundling of all the wealth extraction that the financial services sector has been benefiting from for hundreds of years happening in an extraordinarily condensed period of time so the reason you see a lot of exhausted people running around this conference is because they're working 24 7 365 in a market that's alive with an opportunity of a lifetime to give people more financial freedom more financial tools and honestly tool them for a way for them to exchange wealth in a way that they never have been able to before the centralized banks the main street banks do not move into these markets they cannot serve them at in any way and i have a lot of privileges i've been trying to get a bank account for a charity i started here in the uk for 12 weeks and i still haven't gotten one and it's in like i've run a concurrent process with four of the largest banks in the world and i still haven't gotten it done yet and so in 10 seconds you can download an app from your app store and immediately have a bank in your pocket and that is a powerful idea tied along with all of the other amazing features that are being developed so anyway i'll pass it on to the next uh colleague here but that's kind of some things we're seeing no it's complete come yeah i echo your statements i'm banking myself um anthony so you know like i think like one of the biggest things on the inclusion side is you know there's this concept of to hold and store assets there's this this concept of being able to transfer whether it's in remittances or or otherwise and of course the next thing is really access to credit access to lending could you guys could you give us kind of a high level you know on your views on on this as it pertains to your business what do you guys are seeing in this space as well growth wise yeah well sure um we were one of the first guys to actually offer uh credit for against crypto uh you know back in the day like four or five years ago they were just this uh forums and this subreddits and just like really dodgy stuff where people were exchanging bitcoin against bitcoin in a pure early stage peer-to-peer manner where a lot of uh fraud proliferated and everybody was losing huge amounts of bitcoin not that much in terms of value back then but you know with the price appreciation uh i'm sure some people are quite unhappy so you know uh we developed this concept whereby you can borrow against your crypto you know we have hundred thousand dollars a worth of bitcoin you can borrow up to 50k uh instantly in 45 different uh fiat currencies exactly what nick has been talking about giving you instant access as easy as downloading an app to traditional banking services which is not a huge thing for us in the west but uh you know you go south east you know pretty much everywhere from the west and you start to see that this is truly amazing and life transforming for uh you know close to four billion people uh they don't have access to the same tools that we uh that we uh we have access to you know the jpmorgans the chases the bank of america's hsbcs etc so um you know we have been focusing on that and like when people ask me where are your clients from it's really fascinating that it's truly everywhere it's as distributed as crypto itself and you might have you know somebody like a well in tahiti or somewhere in africa and it totally uh shifts the the the distribution of uh your client base so you know truly people from everywhere and you know we have met a couple of people you know just you know see the badge they see an one is like oh we have been a customer for a while thank you so much for having this opportunity because like previously if i needed access to the liquidity that's tied up in my uh digital assets uh you know i had to sell it essentially and now you can borrow against it which is essentially what you know wall street and silicon valley have been doing for the better part of the last 30 years that she's continuously borrowing against their holdings you know steve jobs never sold a single stock uh of of apple and just uh you know taking that and bringing that unmasked to uh people that never even fan of that and had this possibility is uh life-changing and it allowed them to hold on to their bitcoin in this fourth bull cycle that we've seen in the past couple of years you know obviously there's some downside uh risks associated with it so you have to be careful and one of the initiatives that we have for uh for inclusion is financial literacy uh but you know it's been a proposition that has been really appreciated by the market and uh you know our customers worldwide yeah and definitely when you think about it from a like a developing nation perspective the ability to get leverage on assets just is so incredibly hard the barriers to entry are so hard so interesting and and to steve so you know we remittance is a you know uh has a deep place in my heart um you know from 2013 you know when you guys started funding uh you know early remittance companies until now what are you kind of seeing in the differences between you know where we're at from a growth stage in companies that you guys see today in the portfolio or incoming uh you know is there radical changes uh yeah just maybe a high level yeah so bit pacer which is one of the early things that we funded um at the time was just trying to combine mpacer which is the kenyan mobile money payment system with bitcoin and allow people to um basically like if you're in the uk and you wanted to send money and get it directly on mp so that was the initial application um and now pacer is is providing a lot of liquidity and providing trading services across all of africa um the other one we did back then was rippio um uh bit pagos was the name originally and they had similar thing it was just very very early and emergent and just tiny use cases but people looking at and saying first of all i want to be able to hold assets in something that's not my local currency because even though bitcoin goes up and down it doesn't just go down well sometimes it does but it doesn't just keep going down every single year which is what you see with many currency i think uh south african rand has lost something like 50 over the last few years against the us dollar so um you had uh merchants and individuals wanting to be able to hold things um and then and then also the idea of just being able to bank like be able to have we take this very much for granted in the developed world of the idea that you can just get a bank account you can store your assets somewhere and this is uh you know in varying degrees practically impossible in many cases for the ordinary person um what we're seeing now in a fabric is much more advanced systems much more evolved solutions um we're also seeing the emergence of stable coins as alternatives so maybe you don't want to hold it in bitcoin but you know which is still a volatile asset well everything's volatile i guess um maybe you want to hold it in the currency the euro or the dollar and so on um so definitely starting to see a lot more sophistication in that space and i think that as we were saying from 2013 to now uh we've really seen a much broader penetration of affordable more affordable smartphones which we're still coming down that curve that have the capability to run local wallets um yeah so that's been the other thing we've seen from the orchid side is we're starting to see uh penetration of our our application so we have a an application allows you to connect to multiple providers running vpn services so you can build different circuits or you can just use it in a simple way and so it's outside of normal payment rails so you can use crypto you can also use in-app payments regular payment rails but it's uh it also works in a way that's harder for it to be filtered by regular firewalls so we've seen a lot of emerge of growth in places like nigeria and then the conversation we have with users in nigeria is like what else is going on they're like well it turns out we're like trading bitcoin or we're storing or trying to like build these like proto banking systems right so i think it's it's it's starting to happen um slowly but surely yeah yeah and i think that's kind of come to the next the next kind of piece here is you know el salvador has been uh you know we've the last 10 years we've all been saying that bitcoin will solve you know a lot of these these problems uh you know every year we've said that and i think only in the last 18 months have we actually started to see uh you know larger initiatives that are a lot more top down as i mentioned things have been really grassroots developed nigeria is a really good example of that i think it's the third or fourth largest trading country today in terms of bitcoin and so as we kind of get to the el salvador model as i kind of call it um you know never been done before this is really taking bitcoin as in i think my view as a reserve asset um you know what are you guys thoughts on this approach what do you guys look at from like a risk versus reward is this you know is there is there things to consider that might be a con in this model you know kind of what's your guys's thoughts maybe start with with you nick um yeah i think uh it's interesting if you think about the arguments have been made against crypto over the last decade you know at first it was only used by cyberpunks and then it was only used by criminals on the dark web and then only used by nerds and then only used by small companies and now it's only used by small countries and um i'm sure there'll be many more arguments made against crypto that we'll all have to defend against over the coming decades but this is a pretty big deal because it possibly changes the tax status of the currency itself and the way certain countries treat it now i think there's some valid criticisms of how the program was rolled out in el salvador being top down when i think one of the main ethos of cryptos is that they're really grassroots and adoption happens because people are doing it voluntarily that being said um the latest reports that we're hearing suggest that over half the country has actually signed up for a digital currency wallet now anecdotally i can share at blockchain.com we were seeing just a trickle of wallets um coming in from el salvador over the first uh maybe you know six seven years and this year we've seen a 600 increase in the number of sign-ups coming up from el salvador and so it's not just a little thing happening it's a real thing and it's not just el salvador i mean the you know uh gdp of tesla is actually quite a bit bigger they're holding crypto on their balance sheet now and so are many other companies and so the conversation is really changing um and i think the arguments are being debunked around whether or not it makes sense to hold some of these assets in your treasury whether you're a country whether you're a company whether you're a family office or a high net worth individual and soon i expect to see some of the largest most patient funding sources move in but frankly it's one of the most exciting things that's happened in this space is that that capital was the last one to show up and so for all of these um you know people all over the world that participated in this network effect value creation um you know that was an opportunity that was never present before they were never accredited investors that were allowed to do any of this stuff and all of the you know clients at goldman sachs that are pounding on their doors to get access to this stuff goldman has to tell them they can't serve them right now so where do they go and they sign up for services they're being built by entrepreneurs all over the world um so i love that about that and i think the el salvadorian model is blazing a trail here i expect other countries will follow suit i think there are other countries holding crypto on their balance sheets that haven't talked about it in public partially for security reasons partially because they you know they don't want to um raise a you know any flags for their um for anybody else but it you know for every company that goes out in public and says they're holding some treasury and crypto there are probably 10 to 20 that are doing that that aren't cheerleading it and so um they're real good reasons not to you know put yourself out there as a high holder of crypto because you will be targeted people will try and get access to your wallets um and so for security reasons it's clever to be rather quiet about these things so anyway just some observations but um i think the uh the opportunity for el salvador is a big deal i mean the amount of money that has been stolen from el salvadorians working abroad remitting money back home to their families in a country that desperately needs it is unconscionable and now they have tools that allow them to teleport value from the countries they're working in back home to their families at a fraction of a penny and that's a big deal absolutely and that's you know remittances in el salvador are between 20 and 30 percent so it's off gdp that's a substantial amount so obviously it's an experiment and there's going to be hiccups you know like early with the tech with the wallet etc but that's a normal trajectory of something as uh innovative and uh you know i i've made this uh point that quite frankly nowadays being outside of crypto and being outside of bitcoin and having zero exposure is the biggest risk you know it's much bigger risk than actually owning some and you know living through a bear market that some of us have you know 2018 we saw bitcoin lose i think something to the tune of 86 throughout the year of its value um but you know for countries especially small ones where you don't have this huge amount of opportunities to you know boost your gdp i do think it makes sense for for companies such as el salvador and some of the smaller countries to hold bitcoin and other crypto uh perhaps in smaller amounts of course on the balance sheet because bitcoin has been the best performing asset of the past decade of the past year the past three years the past five years whatever time scale you want to take it has outperformed just about any asset so the risk really is being outside of of it all then you know being in with single digits uh of your treasury the same goes for countries and companies obviously uh but yeah i think it's a much larger risk and you know sooner rather than later other countries are going to follow uh you know just like with tesla we saw other s p 500 companies come into uh the treasury game of holding crypto and that that's a trend that uh you know it's going to only accelerate steve you have anything to add on that one yeah it's kind of interesting right because you you look at it and say well on the one hand you might think be better to hold a stable coin yeah it's like hey like i want a cryptographic like usdc right but then you're making a political choice i was like okay now i'm on the dollar basically i'm holding a euro i'm holding the one like which one do i want to pick so i think it's interesting that they went in a different political direction and said no we're just gonna because i wouldn't have picked said hey i'm gonna hold bitcoin i'm gonna use bitcoin as my payment rails like lightning is great and so on but there are other payment rails that i would perhaps have chosen and said this is i think it's a bit more involved i think the tooling around ethereum is better i probably do that but the fact they did bitcoin and said not only is it something it's a store of value for our treasury but also we're going to put in lightning in these things which has got to be the biggest build out of lightning i think that has happened so far absolutely um i think that's fascinating yeah and i think it's i think it's i hope the experiment works for their sake primarily but i also think it's it's it's a fascinating case for all of us who who are in this room in this industry who've been doing this either a couple of days or for many or a decade to sort of seat like work with these nations and individuals who want to embrace this um back in 2013 we we would be pitching to lps to raise money for adventure fund and the question was is this thing going to survive is this is this thing going to like last is it you know and i'll be like yeah yeah i think it's great it's going gonna work out well and as you said you know tend to be criminals and the conversation around that um now the conversation has switched to is this thing gonna survive regulation or is it gonna get co-opted by our government um and just to switch this slightly to sort of an area that i look at a lot the um the risk i see right now is is not the cryptocurrencies don't survive is that the is that they're co-opted by central bank by by institutions by corporations and and then they become tools for them because just like we think through all the cool programmable things we can do with blockchains you know whether it's with ethereum nfts all these different cool things we can do we can also program the money in a different way we can say oh you're in salvador you want to use that to go buy some alcohol sorry no you can't buy alcohol you have to buy diapers and and of course keep keep playing that one out so yeah and i think that kind of comes like even the next question too is you know we have you know we can't you know the regulation's a big topic across the space today um you know i think one of the the benefits of of less regulation and compliance in some capacities is it just allows for cheaper services um what do you guys think the relationship you know needs to be between governments and regulation and continued growth uh how does that create impacts do you think it does do you think that you know the regulation that we're seeing today is is healthy for you know really bridging this gap or divide um in terms of conclusion yeah curious everyone's thoughts well regulation is going to happen regardless of what we as panelists or generally as a community think and it's just unrealistic to have an asset class surpass 2 trillion dollars and then somehow this states out of the purview of regulators and watchdogs and because consumer protection is just it's not realistic i know this was the early ethos of the space you know less regulation and just you know decentralize everything and you know it's not encapsulated by any of the regulatory frameworks but that's just with the size and glad that we've grown so much that we need regulation it's just not realistic uh the best case we can hope for is to have some say in the way that the regulatory frameworks and regimes are built out uh we're very vocal as a community you know crypto twitter is a powerful tool as the infrastructure bill efforts clearly showed you know there was some you know steps back retraced from the earlier propositions because of the overall uh community and how vocal it is so this is what we should be aiming at you know proactively engaging with regulators and trying to have the best possible concise clear pro-business uh rules that could possibly be designed so that we can have the certainty as companies and individuals as to how we operate within that environment rather than you know stick our heads in the sand and just pretend that this could possibly go away and the same goes for uh you know decentralized offerings as for centralized you know the writings are on the wall and we all see what the sec and the u.

s regulators are talking i don't think this should be taken lightly and whoever does uh will come to regret it so it's better to engage proactively and just figure this out in the most beneficial ways the good thing is nobody's going to crypto we know that i think by now just uh as steve said just how long it has been and lindy effects kicking in for the whole crypto space and bitcoin uh but yeah i mean it's going to be some uh regulatory challenges and we have to see how we go about tackling them um yeah i can i try to break regulation down a bit into thinking about why we're doing it right so um there's various re there's various different kinds of regulation so if you're raising money for a project the the reason you have regulation there is you want to make sure that grandma or grandpa um doesn't lose all their life savings you're like okay are you an accredited investor did this company properly disclose what they're trying to do i do you know and do you kind of know what you're doing like as you sort of sign the permission waiver that says you know you don't um so that kind of made sense when we had the icos where it was like i've got a a white paper just sent eth but on the other hand grandma wasn't really using metamask to send east so it wasn't clear who we were protecting um and now we have this regulation coming after define it's like oh we're going to d5 because people are getting scammed and there's this stuff and that definitely happens and i play a lot on d5 myself and you've got to really be careful what you do but again there isn't really like the ordinary person going in and like getting their metamask in the treasure and doing this stuff so so when they're coming up to d5 and saying oh like we really want to regulate this and control this i'm a little suspicious as to what's the real reason behind it um there are other reasons why we should have regulation aml kyc is is an extremely um burdensome and huge thing especially in europe if you try and get a bank account especially if you're a citizen um it's uh and yet there are studies that show that very little is really caught using these things like the anti-menopausal bills and the checks that go on there's a huge amount of work that goes into it but very little really comes through this and in the end what we're doing with these things is that the area that i've been focused on is that we're trying to put surveillance into everything we're trying to put surveillance into every single transaction that's what i think the the government's sort of underlying like either overt or or covert goal is um and i think we should be pushing back against that and and this is what the big part of the infrastructure bill that this is still has been some problems is the idea that they shall monitor everything and because otherwise someone might sort of screw up on their taxes the u.s is a self-declar declaring tax regime so it means that you all we all declare our taxes and if the irs decides to audit you in some way they can come after you and the fines and the penalties are very intense and it can even even be jail time so the motivation to try and screw up your taxes and hide something in a wallet here and put it through tornado cache yeah sure you can think about doing that but yeah there's like a lot at risk there so to me it's like solve some of that stuff with technology have better analysis tools the the the tools for track and tax and so on could be better but i also i'm very resistant to this idea that we should just say oh yeah regulation is coming and no offense but like let's just let it happen because i'm questioning why you want to regulate this like what's the real reason behind what you're doing and to conclude this my little rant but the to conclude this i think what's happening is the central bank digital the central banks and the governments are saying this is a threat to our ability to print money to control societies with the issuance of money and so we're going to find any reason we can to come after this and that's where i think it's really coming from i completely agree with that and and so i guess to kind of move into the last section we have about 10 minutes left um you know we always looked at bitcoin and praised it early on because we had no other options right it's it'll solve remittances and store value it's and all these things are arguably still true today um but you know there is a rise in stable coins and in incoming cbdc's d5 of course is a you know an ever more interesting topic in the case of of inclusion specifically providing new types of services um you know do you guys think this changes the dynamic or the value proposition for bitcoin um and uh do you think these things coexist what do you think the kind of future looks like um you know cooperatively i guess if you will i'll go first um always fun to wade into these waters uh look i think obviously let a thousand flowers bloom um you know i think the no one can rest on their laurels like everything needs to innovate i think there's some 16 year old kid dreaming up some project today that has greater efficiencies with new features that enable uh greater uh more capabilities that we can possibly imagine today and so i'm excited about that project i don't know about it yet and when it comes along i hope we can integrate it into the blockchain.com wallet and offer it to the world um i've been in this space since the early days and i loved bitcoin i was a gold bug before that and i used to collect baseball cards and geodes and i'll collect whatever's cool in the future too um i think bitcoin is clearly solved a use case around a digital gold thesis and uh we're seeing some extensions of that with the lightning network and potentially going back to its roots around being appear to puriform electronic cache there are other cryptocurrencies really focused just on that their privacy solutions are focused on really strict privacy transactions which are also valuable in a pluralistic open internet society we don't want authoritarian systems surveilling absolutely everything we do we have freedom of speech we have freedom of religion we maybe should have freedom over how we control and store and send and receive and transact our wealth it's an important discussion to have so in the long run i think there are going to be some exceptionally interesting projects that come out there's also going to be some that don't make it and we've already seen that if you look at the top 10 cryptos from 2013 there are only two in the list today from that are still there and uh there's rocketing projects that um have you know surfaced in the last year that now have billion dollar valuations and really strong network effects if they can prove out their value propositions uh i think you know we're going to see some really exciting ones and you know there'll probably be like four or five really predominant rails and then a long tail of fit to purpose blockchains that are doing really specific things but it's going to be for sure a weird decade but here's where it's headed the internet will be the largest creator of wealth in the world and will be its largest kind of gdp in the world by 2030. it's going to need a native financial fabric in order to facilitate global commerce and interactions and the crypto fabrics that are natively nesting into this thing are proving out that work right now and so i'm encouraged by all these developments and we need a lot more help to build these things so quick plug we have over 100 open rolls at blockchain.com so if anybody is interested in uh working with us we'd love to have you join the team yeah well nick captured it quite nicely so i just want to directly answer your question of uh stable coins and uh central bank uh like experiments versus bitcoin i think bitcoin has an inbuilt advantage of it just being censorship resistant and immutable and irreversible the transactions because like you know we i hope they're not tethering usdc guys here but you know in the code they have left doors by which uh transactions can be reversed they don't use it very often right uh but they're there whereas in bitcoin you don't have that you know once it's confirmed it's confirmed and the economic incentives are too powerful uh for the transaction to be reversed it's nearly impossible and i'm quite certain that the chinese communist party will have their tools in place to keep control of all the transactions and probably the us and everybody else you know with the benevolent disguise of this being used against money launderers etc uh but the option will be there so i you know whoever underestimates bitcoin and has done that in the past has been wrong can i think uh continue to be the case for the foreseeable future yeah i'm not a maximalist i i think that especially with crosstalk solutions like cosmos and polkadot we're kind of just leaning towards the world of it's a bunch of cryptography secured by different mechanisms proof of work proof of stake and so on so i'm excited for a world where these things interoperate uh you know obviously as an investor we have to make bets and we're trying to do these things carefully uh um but it's um i i've been proven wrong more often by trying to be maximised on anything uh so yeah so i'm excited for how this thing plays out i do think that's bitcoin lightning um it's not exactly an experiment but that this deployment is fascinating and does take us from what was becoming just bitcoin and digital gold which is really good at being um to like oh we can make payments of this stuff so i think that's great i'm very supportive of that absolutely so we have about four minutes left do we want to try to do a couple questions from the audience so we can does anyone have any questions we get a mic potentially yeah okay thanks mate um what do you think about uh bitcoin or cryptocurrency's role in equality talking about sort of financial inclusion for people clearly there are different gaps between you know race and gender across the entire world you know you look at a country like afghanistan that's just fallen to the taliban for example you know uh women's control over their own finance in that country in that country is now under jeopardy serious jeopardy uh what sort of roles do you think cryptocurrency can play uh in that um and uh liberating people and their finances and that in that way i'll take this one really quickly um last week uh i met with the founder of the human rights foundation in new york and uh he's a huge proponent of cryptocurrencies basically exactly for the reasons you just raised now i think if you look at the distribution of cryptocurrencies and some of the earlier ones without a doubt they were adopted by young people with access to technology predominantly in the west and so there's obviously you know an argument that that was not very equally distributed um there are newer cryptocurrencies though that have had larger widespread distribution mechanisms that airdrop tokens so widespread number of users that were globally distributed so regardless of that debate i think if you look longer term there are really interesting human rights arguments um and human freedom arguments for why cryptocurrencies are vastly superior to naturally controlled ones especially in countries where you have disproportionate you know power dynamics and family households how is someone going to get access to say literature or driving lessons or you know controversial concepts that for us would be easy to access but wouldn't be in some of these other jurisdictions and so at the end of the day like in many ways root of all evil may in fact be essentially controlled money you have to search where it comes from and understand what that does and how people get access to it so if we want to fight poverty and we think that that's a real damaging factor in human uh existence and freedoms and i think one of the ways we needed to really support a better future is to give everyone an equal playing field to access so uh the financial system should act more like a global utility and less like a privileged thing that some people get to use you know if they have all the right credentials for something and so um in the long run i think this is you know part of the march toward this world where we live in a slightly better place than we found it um to me you know this is the tool like i have not found anything else that um can turn the needle any more than this so to me it's a total effort like that's why we don't sleep and work on it constantly we have one minute you guys want to add to that we got a question on the back oh there we go yeah thank you very much my name is rick shreeves and in the last five years i've spent most of my time working with international ngos trying to convince them to use new digital financial tools to help improve financial inclusion so whether it's oxfam mercy core red cross etc the problem that we found across the board is always the same which is simply putting those tools in the hands of individuals does not solve the problem in fact in some cases it actually worsens financial inclusion for reasons like the last gentleman mentioned say gender inequality where the male head of household controls the only phone in the house also the lack of on-ramps and off-ramps the inability to meet any kind of kyc requirements so my question to you is the panel is is how do we reach the most vulnerable the people who are really out there on the fringe who live in a cash economy who have problems with the friction between the boundary between digital financial and traditional financial systems i think it's gonna be it's gonna require a hero's effort like like to be honest and the ngos will need to play a role and the companies now uh in our space that have finally accumulated significant capital positions most of them have some kind of financial inclusion mandate as part of their either esu or corporate governance or csr work so the money will come but it is going to take a long time and unfortunately someone's going to have to go to the last mile and do the education on the ground the financial literacy work but the important point i would make is that we do have the tooling now um even though the dynamics on the ground are probably not ideal always um but there are people that care about these things and if that's something you'd like to talk with me about i hope to find you in the hall and we can i think it's a good challenge i appreciate you you're raising up at that point so i think as an industry we do we need to do more yeah thank you all right cool thank you thank you everyone thank you so much guys