Richard Muirhead - Fabric Ventures Flash Talk

all right now we have a flash talk with Richard of fabric Ventures let's give him a round of applause woo there's a little bit more room at the back there if you want to kind of just squeeze in everybody kind of come to the front um we can probably get a couple more people in here um so I have seven minutes apparently um so I better get to it um yeah I'm rich from from fabric uh we've been around about 10 years backing uh Founders and projects in the space and um we're kind about 25 people and I'm probably the worst person to be talking to you uh about this particular uh topic uh about uh payments uh because I I generally find it extremely boring um and that's even not withstanding the fact that I've actually been involved in trying to build some stuff in this space and obviously it's a very critical part of the whole original uh Bitcoin thesis um so I couldn't resist putting this in here uh because this is about payments and it's May to be seven minutes and this is the cold cut remix of uh paon full who know this knows this track anyone come on you're not that young 1988 7 Minutes of manness p in full I expect you all to go and look it up immediately after this um here we go so nobody wakes up in the morning thinking uh you know nobody says you know wake up and smell the um the Bitcoin they say wake up and smell the coffee you get up in the morning and you want to go do things you want to pay pay for stuff you want to Li live your life um but it's not about the payments it's about the actions you want to take and if you take those actions and you come from a good context and you work real hard and perhaps you can get a little bit of credit for all of that uh that can lead to great things it can lead to houses in Malibu on the sea um these things that great cup of coffee I had a kind of not so great cup of coffee just now but then great houses by the Sea this is what it's all about it's not about Finance itself but Finance uh has become an absolute baroth over the over the years uh this is actually a slide that I presented about seven years ago about the transition of the kind of most valuable companies in the world from the kind of Oil Barons and the banks to you know the New Kids on the Block from from Silicon Valley um and I guess you could say that was the beginning of the shift to kind of wrapping um trafi got a click in the right direction trafi um which to some degree had us in a state of uh slavery uh the institutions were the ones in power not the individuals um and it but it was really just neobanks with a bit of a wrapper around tradire they're nothing revolutionary def I has given us something truly of a breakthrough nature it's given us something that is making that pendulum swing back from the institution to the individual and from my perspective this is kind of little micro thesis here the direction of travel of that is to move Beyond defi to what we call noi the idea is that you know Finance payments credit and so forth should just be fully in service of what you're looking to achieve as an individual and individuals within a collective not a kind of an industry in and of itself um I'll try and explain what I mean by that you like the picture of radical Freedom up there it's not me um so why are we not there yet with kind of this shift towards from from defi which is still kind of you know nent to to noi well it's still too costly uh we would argue uh the the Integrations to really make sure it's interwoven uh within all of the applications that are being built today as software continues to romp through the the world and eat it up uh are not quite ready um and uh critically the data that surrounds your transactions and your and your everyday activity uh the metadata is still not there um so let's look at it uh we've got a benchmark here for TPS from Visa the only one I'm wearing my near kit my near swag right now as well as uh being managing partner of fabric I'm also the council at near it's the only one there that has broken through that can of Visa threshold in terms of TPS and so whether it be the the transaction throughput or the cost we're not there yet with what is demanded uh from people primarily transacting let alone obviously in this uh World we're moving to where it's mainly machines that are transacting with each other so still a ways to go the second bit and I'll start with kind of a quick anecdote about stripe um anyone here worked for stripe that's good so you can't fact check me too much but bottom line is when people were looking to invest in stripe uh a lot of VC said this is a terrible idea payments you know basically work they're basically pretty cheap and that's a business model which is just a race to the bottom so uh why invest in that and it turns out that actually it wasn't about just reducing the cost that was my point one it's actually about how you could you know use apis and embed it into better user experiences and workflows within e-commerce and marketplaces and so forth and actually so that was the point in value of stripe and we're al already seeing in the defi world and there's a an app called Cosmos on the near blockchain actually where which is outstripping stripe it's got 125th of the cost of stripe transactions that's good and can be embedded programmatically into other apps and hopefully they'll improve over time um but by and large all of these different types of Integrations uh even though there are so many major players who've delivered some of them you can see the names of salana circle and nosis and so forth up there there's still a mature and they're still being rolled out and there's still bits missing um the third area I mentioned was Data um at the end of the day you want the transactions you want the kind of question of someone giving you credit to disappear into the background and you can you you can do that on the basis that you're willing to give up the data um about what you're looking to buy I heard a little chat earlier on about stable coins and talking about different uh credit profiles for an an an individual us user who's pursuing two different activities it there's a lot of complexity to understanding the the credit risk attached to a certain person but there's a lot of data that is available and so we're seeing on this slide what it's meant to represent we're starting to see a shift of a lot of opportunities to capture data on chain through the some of these burgeoning you know onchain social networks which is great and then gradually we're seeing um a shift to uh in some sense harness some of the Frameworks of gdpr out of Europe um to give people comfort about how data is going to be used and definitely harness the power of different forms of encryption to give people comfort in sharing that data and and I think if we're going to make these very complex inter mesh networks of data operate um both to support to give us comfort with what data we're sharing how those networks are governed and indeed how to how we're going to take that data and use it to deliver um meaningful credit scores or other applications we're going to use see a lot of um agents that are going to be distributed bit across these these environments going forward so all of that is you know still a problem and still to come so um so where we think it's a shifting is to Subzero costs for for transactions because you'll effectively be paid to transact because you're actually giving uh up your your data um you know infinite Co composability I mean we I've gone here for as much hyperbole as possible um but that there are many many running you know live um uh pool of user liquidity and and user data appropriately anonymized that can be brought together to compound each other's value in the way in which they're integrated um and uh but you know what we've listed a little bit here from sort of Fabric's perspective of the some of the things that are coming down the track and some of the things that are still yet to be built uh we're still waiting for predo Dan sh sharting down there we're still waiting for really um effective orchestration layers for these different bits of defi application capability um and as I said we're still waiting for things like properly kyc um uh and identified users within the defi environment uh so that we all comfortable giving out the data and doing credit scoring um so it really was never about the payments um it really was only ever about the data in in our view that that gradually the whole notion of just Finance itself will hopefully thankfully sink into the to the background um and where where we think this takes you is on another step on the path to um you know not extreme sort of financialization but tokenization of all of the assets that are out there um you know in that direction of real world assets being brought on chain uh and the ability to continuously auction them set price in an increasingly uh perfect Market um and marketplaces that um will essentially instantiate sort of on the fly as a as needed um and marketplaces that are uh and people have been describing these in different ways they're kind of headless um or leaderless U marketplaces and platforms because actually the platforms um are formed from the people operating uh between themselves um you know as I said kind of spontaneously so it's kind of inverts the whole model from where it was was before So Meta is not the platform Amazon is not the platform the people are the platform um and then who's heard of Glen Bar's book radical markets um so I think we think it takes us you know another step in that direction which is pretty obviously a pretty fundamental shift um and then we think it's a fundamentally good shift that if we get closer to that perfect Market closer to the ubiquity of the Invisible Hand sort of gently kind of cradling the the world uh we can have a kind of a a more Equitable inclusive and prosperous and open economy um for the planet thanks very much