How to Onboard 1 Billion Users to Crypto - TOKEN2049 Dubai 2025

So we're going to be talking about how to bring a billion people on chain stories people have been talking about for a long long time in this industry hasn't happened yet. Santi I want you to talk about what you are building that supposedly is going to solve this problem. Yeah. Yeah. So the idea for Inversion is since I've been investing in crypto in 2012, I've obsessed about this idea which is how do you bring a billion users on chain and look, we built incredible tech over the last 12 years.

You guys have funded a lot of it. I funded a lot of it. And I just grew tired of um you know, everyone in crypto is trying to export this technology and build distribution. The problem with transformational tech is that it takes a lot of time to convince people like the internet took 20 30 years, right? But the thesis for inversion is very simple which is we're at a point where this technology works.

We have enough proof points that we can support billions of users. I believe it and instead of trying to convince normal businesses to adopt crypto and I call it cryptoenabled businesses not cryptonative in their own right can be hugely transformational to cut down costs. So at inversion it's a private equity approach. who want to go and buy traditional businesses where we think that we can meaningfully cut costs and really prove to the world something that hasn't been done before which is you take a traditional business and you really optimize it and you know you might be here hearing from a bunch of people says you know we've talked about crypto being the sentiment layer of the internet and super transformational no one will believe us until someone you know does it and so I'm very motivated to do that and that's where we're hopefully in a year's time when we're sitting down here we can deliver on that okay so you you describe the approach as you're building the Bergkshire Hathaway of crypto. You're going to acquire traditional businesses and shove crypto inside of them in order to make them more efficient.

Um, okay. Paint the picture for me. What kind of businesses are we talking about? Yeah. So, over the last four years, I've evaluated hundreds of different types of businesses, which is equally valuable to know what we are not going to buy today.

But let's talk about a mobile carrier, asset light mobile carrier. Doesn't own any of the infrastructure, but needs to go buy data from someone else. It's a business that has a lot of high fixed costs. Um, and you're working with really antiquated technology and monopoly kind of markets where you're beholden to people that have deployed cellular towers. But you look at something like Helium, which is a deepen network that um allows carriers to offload, meaning use wireless technology to achieve lower data costs.

Data is 50 60% of the cost structure of a mobile carrier. So, we think that we we're very motivated to buy a mobile carrier. We buy it at the right price because you know it's three and a half, four times ebida da. We can get access to a large user base. We live with that user 24/7.

You want to understand how to onboard a billion users to stable coins? It's with a mobile. It's through mobile and it's by becoming, you know, the mobile is simply a Trojan horse into becoming their bank, which is the way to activate users to stable coins is to incentivize them to on-ramp to receive remittance flows. Um, and you know the interesting thing is when we go out and talk about this, it's it seems abstract, but go talk to a telco executive, he'll validate the offloading piece I just talked about. Go talk to New Bank, which is one of the largest fintex in Latin America, 100 million users.

They're already doing this, you know. Uh, and so I think it pays as an investor, you probably know this better than anyone is it pays to pay attention. So New Bank's a publicly traded company. They um started as a fintech, launched their own MVNO mobile carrier and then they rolled out USDC. Well, guess what?

USDC is the number one asset that their users are buying. It's not Bitcoin. It's not Salana or memecoins. It's USDC. Why?

Because everyone in the world still wants to hold dollars and they can't do it. They can't do it through traditional banking uh channels. And so again, when a lot of people like to talk about how do I onboard a billion users and a skeptic in Silicon Valley rightfully so might say, "Listen guys, if the product is that good, if you're telling me that stable coins are room temperature semiconductors, as a call brother calls them, it's like why haven't there been more users using it?" So I mean, this has always been I I've heard this story replayed and remixed many times in crypto as an investor. I'm sure you have, too.

Um, I remember back in the day there was a story about uh first there was there was kick uh with with their token kin. Then there came mobile coin which was supposed to be on signal. Uh, of course Facebook did Libra which never really saw the light of day. Um, we've had the story many times like okay this is the real world story of normal people particularly in emerging markets that are going to use stable coins going to use crypto and it's never quite happened. So what what's the why now?

Give me the why now. I don't think anyone's adopted this model. Again, I go back to this premise. I never want to build distribution. I want to buy it at the best price possible.

It's a classical inverting sense, which is, you know, building distribution is expensive, time consuming. And so most of the times, most startups will run out of money before they acquire customers. And so, as an investor, you look at the unit economics of most of these crypto companies, crypto native companies, is really high. You're throwing crazy amount of airrops um to convince people to use your product. more more so the only venue that they can come through is an exchange.

So it's purely speculative. When people go to Las Vegas or Macau, they're not thinking about buying a mobile plan or or putting their life savings to work and earning yield. And so it's it's very unrealistic. The CAC the customer acquisition cost is really high. So what why hasn't it worked before?

There's a myriad of reasons company specific regulatory environment. Um but but by and large no one has actually taken this private equity approach which is as a you know buying a company that is not crypto and turning it into crypto enabled. I guess the analogy I'd make is there's this great private equity fund called Silvergate. They did this in the internet. They they came to basically the same fundamental realization which is the internet's going to be huge.

Every business will use the internet. And so they made a ton of money have made for their investors by what they call internet enabled businesses which is the core business doesn't change certain elements of that business do change on the back end. Um, again, our north star is to make crypto invisible. I never want to sell the user on crypto. I'm not selling a deepend back mobile carrier.

It's a carrier. There's no disruption of the service. The customer never sees the crypto backend infrastructure. They don't care. Um, and in a similar matter, when we become their bank, I'm not selling them a stable coin.

I'm selling them a bank account, a US dollar denominated bank account that can earn them some yield. These are two core services and and I think um you know there's a whole host of things that go on the back end of how do we really abstract um the user experience but by and large crypto needs to be invisible. Like I think as an investor you know this really well which is you never want to assume you're going to change consumer behavior. People don't know how to manage their finances. Stable coins are phenomenal products 0ero to one truly because they're fast.

are global, instantly settled and programmable. So the programmable is great because most people don't know how to sweep their savings account and put it in treasuries and earn yield. Stable coins do that for you automatically. And that's when you deliver a very valuable service to the user, improves retention, increases revenue, monetization, LTV to CAC, unit economics, all this stuff. We're not in the business of throwing crazy incentives like every other crypto project.

We're here to make money. Okay. So, let's say let's say I buy the story that you're the Bergkshire Hathway or the Silvergate, obviously no connection to the bank of of crypto and um you're you're going to bring you're going to bring crypto to these traditional businesses the way that once upon a time people brought the internet to traditional businesses. Um so, first and foremost question is okay, how are you going to go about doing this? You've been very publicly supportive of Salana uh but you're not building this on Salana.

No, you're not building this on any other scalable chain. decided to build using an avalanche layer 1, right? Why why why build a new chain and not just adopt what's already there? Why wouldn't I? You tell me.

Again, in the classical inverting sense, it's like if we're going to go and do all this work and do the transformation at the business level and I'm going to bring that all that activity, economic activity on chain, why would I leak that value to another chain? Doesn't make sense. The tech is very much commoditized. It's open source, out of the box. Avalanche has some interesting features that we don't have to get into, but the most important one is look, it's EVM compatible, but having sovereign block space is not a meme.

It's very real. I don't want to be paying for block space more than I need to. And having noisy block space and activity and paying a more so for that I think is is just a leakage. The other one is, you know, how much value do you think sits on treasuries of these foundations? L1's, L2, Salana, Arbitron, Ethereum, billions and billions of dollars.

Candidly, I went to them and said, "Why don't we fix crypto's biggest problem, which is we need to break away from the self-referential aspect that we have as this industry, which is it's all speculation. We have great products. We need to go and buy traditional businesses and bring them on chain. Those users fundamentally will use stable coins, but we can't assume they're going to come through an exchange. They just don't have the competence."

So it was really twofold which is I could only dream to be in a position like some of these foundations where they have 2030 billion. I mean it's just it's just you know this as well. What did AOL do at the peak of the uh of the do bubble where Time Warner they bought a business seven times their size? A real business called Time Warner to grow into the valuation. Can we justify the valuations of these L1's L2s?

I think it's predicated on this rosy picture that we're going to onboard billions and billions of users. Well, guess what? How many active users do we have on chain today? 30 to 60 million based on however you want to slice it. We got to do some work and we don't have 12 years.

Okay. So, you're you're going to actually bring those users on chain, right? You're going to you're going to play back the AOL Time Warner move. Um, so my question for you is, okay, it's a big very ambitious vision. How are you going to finance that?

Where's the money going to come from? Are you gonna are you going to buy these businesses with tokens? Initially, no. Like we we can't contrary to what the industry believes is we can't manufacture value out of thin air. Uh, but markets can be irrational.

Um, you so we have really good uh investors. Uh, not just cryptonative like there's, you know, private equity as an asset class is massive. Uh, and the interesting thing now is that we're getting a lot of reception from people that say, "Hey, I believe in this crypto thing. I believe in the, you know, the blockchain not crypto folks." Um, and they say, "We want to learn how to use crypto in our portfolio to drive operational efficiencies."

And so they see inversion as that way to express that thesis to learn. So we'll initially buy a decently large business. Uh, we're looking at a number in Latin America, which is our first region of focus. Um, we'll buy business like a think of it as like a spag, an SPV of sorts. Um, and then we'll bring and anchor that business to the inversion chain.

And once we do that, the hope is that we'll do things that have never been done in crypto that we've really pressure tested, which is we'll bring a user to our chain that has never existed. It's a user that doesn't care if Bitcoin's at 100K or 20K. Why? Because he doesn't even realize that crypto's on the back end. But there is very very real economic activity being settled on the chain and there's me and there's other type of activity and so I think like look the the narrative has recently has been do we need more IM infra do we need another chain and the and the answer here is very much so because no one's focused on bringing a user that again is is not here for speculation you know the percentage of fees that are derived from speculation in any other chain are twothirds or the bulk majority of it for me a KPI is one it crypto's invisible it's real economic activity core services we're talking about mobile we're talking about banking and and it's bringing a user that is very unsuspecting you know it's it's sort of like you know they're they have they're using a core service of a business that we've bought so the retention is much higher I think Rob one of your partners did a phenomenal analysis uh when Trump launched the memecoin that Friday night you Salana very impressively so was able to handle a ton of volume.

23% of all NASDAQ volume. For anyone out there that's still skeptical that we can't have bring a billion users on chain. You're very wrong. Meme coins are proving that. Uh but here's where it breaks down is the retention is non-existent.

Why? Because vol will continue to be you know very volatile price for crypto assets and that that's a very traumatic experience for users. So yes, we do need a chain that is very much focused on, you know, um, taking traditional businesses and transforming them with, you know, with this strategy of crypto enabled features. Yeah. I mean, to your point, if if right now most of crypto is monetizing off of being a casino, yeah, somebody who comes in and blows all their money on blackjack is not going to retain because they lost all their money.

um the the idea of having these more um sort of normal everyday users who are getting some of their core services on chain, these users are going to have a very different retention profile. They're also going to want very different things, right? So, they're not going to want to, you know, do recursively leverage staking or all this other stuff. So, what what other things are you going to how are you going to monetize these users once they're on chain who want totally different set of products than what crypto offers? Well, I would push back a little bit on that which is uh I think there's a place in this world for digital collectibles.

I think you know NFTTS prices have come down but it's a very powerful value proposition like you know having digital scarce items will be very real. I think gaming is very real. Like there's there's some experiments that have been discounted because prices go down but that doesn't mean that the that it won't work. The problem that we've had as an industry is that we've built for a very limited user base. And most companies have built really good products.

Like, you know, I've invested in 300 startups since I left Parfy. They're really good. The highest reason why these companies fail is because there's no users. Most of the users that are on chain are not your core user. They're not your gamer, right?

You know, it's it's it's it's a user that is speculating on an airdrop. And so it's it's very hard to build for the current user base. Um so so again, how do we monetize? You know, you can think of it as it's a permissionless chain like no other, but it's it's very much the Apple model which is a very curated experience for our user because I want to deliver extreme value to the consumer and in a very curated manner which is again in this it it starts and ends with mobile which is a very walled garden of apps that we feel that the user will benefit from but it starts with mobile it starts with banking. Now, why mobile?

Just going back to that for a minute. Um, not only can you buy business at a right at a really interesting price, uh, with terrible margins and high fixed structures that you can really optimize with crypto rails, but also you have immense amount of data on that user that is topping up and prepaying data, right? You want to do credit in places that don't have social security systems, you do it like that. There's a reason why New Bank got to 100 million users. They were giving out Brazilian users a dollar credit lines and credit cards.

So again, you have I love this business because you have also if you have a SIM, you've had the KYC. You want to be compliant with regulators, you want to do anti-moneyaundering, you know, fraud detection, you you basically have identity profiles on all these users, you can extend credit, you can extend other products. Um, and the you know, it's no different than Tencent. I I draw inspiration. You mentioned Bergkshire Hathaway obviously instrumental in in why it's a chain because I want to build a vehicle that I never have to sell the these businesses.

I want to continuously buy more and more of these businesses and onboard more users. Right? You know success for us is one proof of the world that crypto is vastly more interesting technology to optimize costs in the same way that AI will be able to deliver efficiencies. Um but more so to to become the largest bank and mobile carrier in the world like like that's what we're going after. It's the two largest I think markets, one of the two largest markets in the world.

Everything is going to come on chain. You either believe it or you don't. I'm not here to try to convince you by pontificating in this panel. Hopefully, when we're here next year, we would have bought the first business and proved to, you know, the telco executives and the analysts at JP Morgan that are covering telecom and we said, "Yeah, guys, we took a business with 8% ebida margin and the entire industry is sub 10% ebida margin and we took it to 20." And they're all going to be sitting there and saying, "Wait a minute.

What have you just done? Surely it must have been AI." You're like, "No, it was one thing. We deployed hotspots and we offloaded and we double margins. Oh, by the way, we then increase that by becoming their bank."

And it sounds like very abstract and I appreciate that. Not everyone believes it. But I'll tell you in in this journey, what's been most interesting is, you know, I obsess about downside and all the risks. Um, I've really pressure tested the thesis of can we actually cut down costs? Are these uh hotspots that helium uses, can they be deployed in a place like Mexico or Brazil?

Is the reliability there? Uh, because you never want to disrupt the mobile experience for users. Um, what's the conversion rate on stable coins? Well, let's look at new bank. Let's look at telos that already do offloading in a private context.

So, I think it's, you know, I've had this view that like incredible infra has been built. I think stitching together certain elements is where a lot of value will be created and you know uh transformational technology I'm not I'm not here to design beautiful pro products that the consumer never thinks he wants like an iPad or a smartphone. I think the the it sounds a simple strategy. I don't mean as oversimplified, but I do think that we have enough proof points in the industry um to suggest that the timing is correct um and the implementation of course is where where this will either work or not work. But I'm very motivated because I just candidly I'm tired of just trying to tell people that this can work.

I just want to do it and want to solve the problem that you probably have too, which is you go to your dinner and non-crypto people and they're like, "Oh, right. Here comes the crypto guy. Yeah, we got to make this technology relatable and this I think is the best way to do it. Look, I think the problem you're trying to solve is very core at the heart of crypto, which is how do you actually put this into more people's hands? I think what you're doing is very ambitious.

Obviously, it's very risky, but it's incredibly heartening to see somebody who came from the investing side and decided, you know what, [ __ ] it. This is such a big like just painful problem that I want to go solve it. And I have all the respect in the world for you for doing that. So, we're at time. We got a wrap.

But um thank you for presenting what you're working on. It's very exciting. Thanks. Appreciate it.