William Duran, Minteo: From Fintech to ‘Finchain’- The key role of stablecoins in LATAM

next up we have from fintech to fin chain the key role of stable coins and latam and we have on William Duron the co-founder of mono let's give him a round of applause thank you hello hello hi guys how you doing how's how's Bangkok how's the how's the jet lag I got in yesterday like 1:00 a.m. so I'm super [ __ ] tired um but uh my name is William I'm co-founder and chief commercial officer at minil we're a stable coin insurer for Latin America so you can kind of think of us as like a circle or like a tether for L time um obviously you know we're not printing the money that's tether's printing right now but hopefully at some point we will um and I want to talk to you guys about the key role of stable coins in latam Okay so I think that by 2030 stable coins will be the dominant form of money uh in Emerging Markets um so I think I mean I think it's a pretty big statement but we've seen the type of adoption uh the last couple years with stable coins you know they're probably one of the few products that have really found huge pmf in crypto and I think that's only going to continue increasing um but I think you know to really understand um you know why stable coins make a lot of sense going forward I think we have to look at some of the use cases and we have to see you know kind of kind of those pH of stable coin adoption right so I think the first phase that we had was stable coins as a store of value uh so when you look at for example usdt usdc die um they were a game changer for a lot of Latin American economies right if you look at inflation Argentina if you look at inflation in places like Venezuela um actually being able to hold US Dollars uh you know changed a lot of people's lives right um so I think you know in most of these countries you can't even have US dollar denominated accounts uh by actually being able to hold dollars um um you can do much better for yourself right so I think you know this is a quote from kiao from Alliance Dao basically saying that it's easier for people in developing countries to get access to usdc or USD than it is to get actual dollars um and I really do think that helped a lot of adoption in Latin America it was like that first big kind of game Cher of stable coin adoption it still is um then we had kind of like the second phase of stable coin adoption which is stable coins as a investment product right so you look at for example um you know us like U uh Mountain protocol Rondo ortha that actually allow you to invest in us treasuries um something that's like you know like previously was absolutely impossible uh here I have an example of like a Charles Schwabs brokerage account that requires you to um you know put in at least a $225,000 deposit I mean $25,000 for someone in latam where you know minimum wage is 300 bucks uh basically takes you like eight years to open an investment account right it's if you save every single dollar uh for eight years so it's it's basically impossible and I think you know that's a really novel use case of of stable coins is actually allowing people in these Emerging Markets to invest uh to invest in in us treasuries um so I guess the question is like okay you know there's a lot of hype there's a lot of talk about stable coins this year and it's like what's that next phase what's the next phase of adoption so we have it as a store value we have it as an investment product um the way I see it is that we're going to start using them as Financial infrastructure um so stable coins do not equal US dollars right I think um so far we've seen that's been really the only um you know kind of like the only currency to have some sort of pmf or to find adoption um but I think what we're going to start seeing is that we're going to start seeing local economies operate with local currencies um for example in Colombia 97% of all transactions outside of like oil and gas happen in Colombian pesos right um so I think in a way what I see happening is that there's a bunch of like dollar liquidity and a lot of that is going to start kind of moving into some of these um specific countries right so you know you can think of it as kind of like Last Mile like Capital delivery into a lot of these economies uh where you're going to actually be able to start using these onchain currencies for credit for payments uh for a lot of like the everyday stuff um and actually one of the things that's important to understand is that we have really [ __ ] Financial rails in latam so you know we don't have uh you know yeah I mean we don't we we basically have like you know shitty um shitty banking infrastructure so like for example one of our biggest banks was down for like three or four days this year like imagine not having access to a bank for three or four days uh a is down all the time banks have like broken apis or no apis so it's like so if you're actually a build and you're Building Products that have to connect with banks it's extremely difficult and cumbersome and then you have huge cost so you know Swift is expensive a is annoying um and transfers of money even between Banks can take a day two days sometimes three days right so um so actually that's that's one of the biggest factors and that's one of the biggest limiting factors to build actually next Generation Financial products um and you know basically we don't have venmo we don't have Robin Hood we don't have cash app we don't have bism we don't have seba we don't have any decent Financial products in Latin America um and it's basically because it's building Financial products is super difficult um so I think one of the cool things that we're starting to see with blockchain with crypto with stable coins um and we have a term that we actually recently coined uh it's called fin chain and it's basically companies building financial services and consumer apps on top of public blockchains and stable coins um and we think really that's kind of the direction where we're we're we're heading um and just to give you guys kind of a better understanding like the way we see it is like you had fintex which built you know kind of better consumer products but on top of shitty Legacy systems um and they did you know they did a really good job kind of building um and like you know kind of connecting all these all these kind of broken systems together to offer a better experience and then you have crypto companies that from day one um actually built on crypto right so they offer better products um but they're still very nent and really where we think it all converges is in fin chains so it's basically fexs are going to use blockchains and stable coins to enhance their products and crypto companies are going to use them from day one because it's just better infrastructure um so I think in the future all fex companies are going to become fin chains and all crypto companies are going to become fin chains so you know these are a couple examples of like clients that work with us that actually use uh you know tokenized pesos so litio they actually you know they're a Neo bank and they have over 200,000 users that have cop and back debit cards so you can actually save in usdc but you can spend in uh Colombian pesos um you can invest in Colombian pesos or you can you know basically it's like a multi-currency wallet uh so you can use it basically anywhere in the world we have ANC which does like credit the fall guarantees um and I think you know credit is a very obvious one as to why you need local currencies on chain you're not going to take out a loan in dollars and then you know have to pay back in pesos because then if the dollar strengthens you're basically screwed uh you can't pay back your loan right so there's a lot of things that are very obvious like anything that has to do with credit uh obviously you have to do it with local currencies um and then we have uny which basically uh is a fractionized solar energy platform and allows people to be able to invest with dollars into local energy projects um and they deploy a lot of that Capital as well using uh onchain uh local currencies so um you know there's a ton of examples where this comes from but actually anything that has to do as well with like for example like um real world assets I think it makes sense to tokenize in local currency uh if you're going to tokenize a building if you're going to tokenize credit um and this is really kind of the problem that we're solving so I think you know regardless of uh you know what you think is going to happen next I think at least for me it's very obvious that um stable coins are going to replace banking as a service infrastructure they're going to be huge in payments I mean we saw with the with the stripe acquiring Bridge um and we what I really do think is going to be the future is going to be um basically at least in Latin America all these new companies building on public blockchains um and using stable coin so I think it's going to be a matter of um time right because there's a lot of Regulation uh there's a lot of um I think people have to get used to uh realizing that like at some point we're gonna have everything on chain but I think I think it goes by faces so I think right now we're seeing like um you know the need for like on- ramping and off- ramping but the the way I see the future is that we don't really have to do a bunch of on- ramping and off- ramping because you have local currencies on chain so at at the end of the day everything just moves from dollars on chain to peses on chain and then from peses on chain to Dollars on chain right and I think that's ultimately how you close the loop you need to be able to have local currencies on chain thank you guys [Applause]