Understanding and building on Polkadot - Bekka

All right, please a round of applause for Becca as she comes off. Thank you so much. Hi everyone. My name is Becca Lee Dero Polka Dot Africa and I know some of you have met me probably from the Abig from Ross class. Uh a little bit about me, I am a developer.

I have five years of experience. Started as a front- end developer. Started writing ROSS. Started writing as a technical writer. Also built communities.

are currently core team Ross Nigeria and we are actually backed by the foundation Ross Foundation and yeah it's been a good journey and my Rust experience and my passion for building led me to polka dots as you all know or maybe you don't know Rust is uh a key uh programming language in polka dots it's actually like polka dot's runtime is built built with rust. Okay. So, I'll be I will be giving you the talk you might have expected which is building on Bados doing all like giving you all the whole technical um deep dive. Instead, we'll be taking a different approach. Uh so my talk is from local to global building real use cases on polka dot turning daily frictions like payments uh ids uh governance gaming different kind of things into real use cases.

Next next slide please. So what has web 3 got wrong? And if you listen to the uh previous panel session uh they were like there's some kind of misconceptions also going on. And to be honest it's actually a general problem with web 3. There are some misconceptions.

Even polka dot itself is facing a misconception currently. So like there is a lot of misconceptions and I'm just going to name a few. Many projects prioritize tokens. They prioritize speculative investments. You know, they want you to they just want to drop that TGE and you start trading and then the money just the whole market cap just goes down.

The market made makers or some people they just there just so many conspiracy that oh some people pull money some whales put money. All these are all speculations right and they are always building all these speculative stuffs instead of actually creating value uh utility establishing experiences new experiences. So moving next one, web three still struggles struggles with NFTs um con um perception. It could be NFTs. So many people it's still NFTs.

It's still trading which is still something that they they spoke about uh and scams because we haven't shown enough usefulness. We actually haven't spoken about the reason why you should keep your data to yourself. We I don't think it has been spoken enough out there. And another theme that we get wrong is that we do not connect with the decision makers in the country in your region. Currently we have Madagascar and other different countries and like we have so many countries like doing stuff.

I think there's a country that actually has its own treasury in Bitcoin and this is the thing. This is what we want as decision makers to be part of. We want them to hedge and store their value in stable tokens either stable coins either you know uh gold which is X AU um or BTC or you know polka dots uh Paraguay just also launched tokenized assets on polka dots. So this is the kind of things we want to do. Connect with the big guns.

Connect with the big guys. Because the truth is the world is being run by men, not machines. Okay, next slide. So what problems can web 3 um actually solve? We have cross border payments which are still a problem.

I can't send money to anyone in Kenya without using my address. In fact, if anybody's asking me if I'm actually trying to like do any um work or business with anyone, if you don't have your address, I didn't even stress my head. In fact, I faced an issue. It was so problematic for me. I went to Instab and I had some um transactions I that we agreed that we're going to complete after.

I couldn't send that money for a very long time. I couldn't send that money and the transaction was already halfway done. So I had to now get someone who was now in Instaboo to now collect and that person was now a web three um user and that was how I was able to send via addresses with only paying gas fees or transaction fees. people still uh people can hedge against inflation by saving in different tokens currencies which we've already spoken about. Nigeria currently struggles with an identity system where we have too many databases.

We have NIN, we have BVN, we have so many databases for different kind of things. Driver's license, voters card, NEPA bill, so many things, right? Web 3 can also solve uh machines that's peer-to-peer and which is an interesting thing. You can actually automate EV charging stations like electronic charging stations and this is already happening in peak. We have peak.

It's a blockchain. I'll be using power chain interchangeably and we can use we actually have automated charging stations in Germany working currently and it uses a peer-to-peer system on machines right and now machines can actually earn automate and list themselves by themselves and the humans do not need to really do too much just they just need to set up the infrastructure Next slide. So a common um problem that we see is the inflation use case, the currency inflation. So here you can see uh the econ normal economic phenomenon. This is Nigeria.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Nigeria and Argentina. And you can see the years in which the inflation, you know, skyrocketed.

I think you can see Nigeria's own um Nigeria's own was uh you can see it was still very low at first Argentina was already even showing signs already but immediately 2022 finished and 2023 where there was you know some some phenomenums the currency exploded the inflation exploded right and this is just my own like based on research from different sources. This is how I was able to get the graph and this the this other axis is actually like in percentages. So you can see this is it has crossed Argentina has crossed 300% in inflation while Nigeria has crossed over 100% in inflation. So this is a common use case to show how much inflation and what web 3 can also like the opportunities that you can actually do here. Oops, sorry.

How do I Okay. Sorry, I'm still trying to get to know this. Understand the remote. Okay. Okay.

So now, what is Polka Dot? To so many people, people think it's just a blockchain. It probably has smart contracts. It's just this, it's just that, but they don't really actually understand what it is, right? Polka dot is a multi-chain network for real use cases.

It's a multi-chain network. It's a layer zero that allows other people to host their blockchains, which are layer ones. At its core, it was designed to power a network of purposebuilt chains called power chains. Over time, it has now evolved to a flexible infrastructure that now supports a wide range of developers, smart contracts, specialized developers, and even communities like Polka Dot Africa, Open Guild, and of course, you know about the DAO, which is a treasury. Okay.

We have different use cases currently and when I say use cases they are basically blockchains that are built for different use cases. We have trustless bridges. You've already seen one of the founder hyperbridge. We actually also have snow bridge. We have the machine economy which is for peak energy web.

We have defi liquid staking through by frost. You can also use liquid staking for pudgy whatever games you want to do. We also have hydration for trading, lending, liquidity. We have stable coins and our transactions are very affordable as low as 0.06 cents.

And if you now want to come to the local now, so building local for the global economy, you can actually build use cases B for bridging. You can do swaps, you can do bridging, you can do conversions, you can do crosschain messaging, you can issue stable coins, you can do transfers for the machine economy. There's already a product which is the machine EV charging networks. You can also build your own communityowned Wi-Fi that is wrypt. Wrypt is built on peak and peak is built on polka dots.

So you can see the uh abstraction coming in from the layer zero. Of course, we have DeFi. Under Defi, we have uh you can do prediction markets and you know also stable coins, other stable coins use cases. I'm rushing now. I'm rushing now.

So now the builder's path people ask me, how do I start? Typically, you need to learn Rust or Solidity. Now it's no longer Rust. We now support EVM and we'll be officially launching in our sister chain Kusama already. You can already test smart contracts on passio passet hub and you can actually check and deploy on the test net.

You can learn that for six weeks and then you write your solidity smart contract. You can use two two weeks either ink our ink smart contract now compiles to risk v and of course solidity uh will be native EVM. You can build your front end using papy that is the polka dot API and you can also build mobile apps using the Pluto framework. Out of the box what do you get for developers? You get cross uh crossplatform messaging.

We already have 50 power chains on polka dots. Uh you get code templates based on these power chains because this is open source. So you can now use some of their logic and build your own custom chain. You have developer support and you have polka dot Africa. You can join our developer community and multi-chain smart contracts built with different languages.

You have front end uh templates and SDKs. Thank you.

And a lot more. And yeah, you can connect with me. Thank you.

All right. Thank you so much. Please a round of applause for her. Thank you.