Building Bridges Between Traditional Financial Systems and Crypto - TOKEN2049 London 2022

um so I'll be talking about Building Bridges between traditional Financial systems and crypto more specifically when I'm talking about traditional Finance I refer more into Banking and Fiat rails and when I talk about crypto I want to go more into detail of the current status and I'm pretty sure it's quite relevant we're talking about exchanges and how we interact on a day-to-day basis when we're speaking about scalability and reaching to new audiences um so yeah a little bit about myself I have been with Amber group for over a year um before that I was actually I have been in the space of crypto for the last six years so it's not the first time I have been waving through the bird market and prices being depressed as they are right now uh previous to that I was in a CVP of growth in Latin borrow and lender based out of Canada and before that I was leading markets in bitso where I got a lot of experience Building Bridges to actually enable use cases and enable retail to actually interact with crypto directly from their bank accounts into buying purchasing crypto and also remittances which is something that I like to focus today speaking um so why it matters um and especially right now with the latest events where we have two of the main exchanges uh going face to Feast why it matters the connection between banking systems and crypto as a whole right so if you see how many exchanges they have been in the game they have been operating for the last three to five years they're the same recurrent names so they enter barriers are quite high for for new players to come in which prevents a lot of robustness competition per game price Discovery right so why it matters we're preventing from this to happen we're also preventing for to have accessibility right like when you're thinking about your money diversification accessibility you want to have it in your phone you want to make sure like if the market is going sideways you can buy and sell directly right like you don't have Gatekeepers um at any moment and it also makes it efficient then another thing why it matters is that the more we enable these breaches and the more we give access to everyone retail institutional clients Etc it makes us uh it makes crypto actually useful right it's not only a speculative tool it's not only for financial companies to diversify it actually makes us the use cases so here in this conference we'll hear a lot about stable coins that are quite particularly interesting when you're talking about uh currencies and inflation and a way to protect your your value there's so many use cases as well when it comes to cross-border transactions for meetings Etc so if we don't eliminate the enter barriers and we don't create more efficient Bridges we're preventing all of this to actually happen on a day-to-day so um speaking about what is the current stage of these Bridges Fiat crypto D5 nfts there's not a it I can barely count with my hands or with one finger um the the projects the V5 projects and nfts that do not go from a payment aggregator to that they go directly right so what's happening if I have Fiat if I have dollars you have a Swiss Francs Etc I have to go first to a wallet to go to a C5 to go to an exchange to exchange to crypto to then interact with defy to then interact with nfts it's not very user friendly it's very fragmented right like I have to go through several stages before I go to do whatever I was meant to do with the token whatever I was meant to do with that crypto um so as a user whatever that user is um it's not very intuitive it probably if you're talking about funnels if you're talking about product it's not the best experience then what happens as well discrete a lot of black holes for intermediaries right like payment aggregators payment processors exchanges to play a role here what does that happen is that you're aggregating fees for whoever has to use it right when you're aggregating news uh fees you're not really giving the best pricing the best experience you're not being competitive so I think all of these um together what they're doing is that they are impeding uh scalability they are really one of the main reasons why we cannot just go to the mainstream and say like hey buy crypto hold it actually pay remittance is what I'd go and pay for whatever you're paying abroad with it right like that is preventing a lot of that to happen and therefore what was crypto created as a system of our peer-to-peer is really not to the level of which it was intended so here I go a little bit more to the ethers of crypto and enable in peer-to-peer um so when we're talking about like moving from what it's currently like to how it should look like then I'm thinking about some key attributes right so I'm talking about seamless liquid fast and organic so seamless right I want to make sure I always refer to the PayPal experience you're purchasing something and instead of having to go logging out to your PayPal and then having to pay with it and then come back with it there's an in-app experience where you don't have to go forward to get to where you want to go right so that's a seamless experience digitally nated then liquid then obviously this becomes a bigger issue when we're moving away from the main currencies if I'm not speaking only Bitcoin USC ether USC right like if we go to Emerging Markets where actually there's a lot of traction and usability for crypto the the liquidity is very scarce and then therefore you're relying again once more in effects you're relying on outside systems where you're topping up uh fees you're topping up experience that also prevents for its to be fast if you want to convert if you think your price is going down you want to make sure like it's in your hands you're actually able to buy purchase sent forward and organic I'm referring to uh the digital area where everybody is on their phone everybody has accessibility to it and make sure it's something that it becomes more of a day-to-day basis so that speaks about the in-app experiences that feel natural do not have to go through so many stages to to achieve transactions um and then today the functionality I refer a lot to the real use cases and there has been a lot of pushing the media of what are the real real but like real use cases of crypto one of them that I really love the narrative is it's borderless right like if I am Mexican and I've developed a lot of my time in Latin America and the currencies they don't travel as well as dollar travels right so when you talk about that and if you want to send money to your friends just to pay for something money doesn't travel as as fast as it should so when you think about currencies and just interacting from wallet to wallet then that's where it becomes very very important to have that accessibility that liquidity and remembering that the liquidity is just the ability to convert some thing to something else right so what does that happen is that we have these massive monopolies as well with remittances that they could be a hundred percent more efficient If instead of going through the middleman you're you have your crypto you have your stable coins and you go through these vendors where you can just sell peer-to-peer and cash out in your your preferred store so that's what I'm talking about like the real usability of cryptocurrencies they're real organicness on it that you don't even have to know how Wi-Fi works to actually be connected to it you don't have to understand that there's gonna be like some uh transactions being happening on the blockchain for you just to go and interact in your preferred app for for these two to come to life so this is where I want to wrap it up a little bit on what how does it look like right now what are the entry of barriers and what is preventing scalability I believe that there's a lot of use cases still to be explored I think one of the and this is why we're all reunited here because we'll have a very interesting take on the market there's definitely something uh happening I believe that the experience right now the fragmentation of it and the lack of communication and interpolability from like Fiat to crypto definitely presents the biggest challenge and even going forward to defy and nfts right and nfts as well I haven't really like typed so much into it but they have presented a day-to-day case where ownership royalty is giving back artists the right to earn right um so even so if you have Gatekeepers like whatever platform they are if they decide to change the games of the the rules of the game then um you're not preventing for them to feel at home feel comfortable to continue to produce that's why um having more marketplaces having more use cases having more uh dispersed liquidity prevents us from going to the traditional systems and continue to work in them so I think there's an interesting space for for crypto to happen to grow to feel a very day-to-day experience without feeling that you're doing something that feels complicated or complex I think there's a lot of off-road there's a lot of opportunity there um just wrapping up a little bit in Amber we have been working from the most retail experience to providing services to institutional clients we have products that go into like Minto token share it with someone just for the grasp of getting to that first interaction for you to feel more natural something that doesn't have to scare you because you're going to lose money to also creating Structured Products so I think that's where we want to get there to make sure when us as well as something that we have developed a lot of time building is our apis connectivity that allows you to pay with credit card with cards with different currencies so in all like one product that allows you to have that native interaction whether if it's because you want to diversify whether if you want to send money abroad whether if you want to transact a payment or if you want to have your collectible in your wallet I think that's the the the end game here and kind of Landing it with within all the items that I mentioned and I I actually very excited about what happened when building with Amber in our app wealthin and I also encourage everyone not only to look into wealthing but also like consider when you're thinking about building and when you're thinking about what is the real issue and how you solve it and not create a problem to then solve it with something else um so this is something I encourage everyone to think about to also explore our app and thank you so much for listening to me today I don't know if anyone has a question or Shane will thank you very much is there any questions uh the Amber group are an awesome awesome platform and happy to go anywhere that you want how are you doing how are you keeping what's it been like for you over the last 24 hours with everything going on um I think it's very unfortunate that these Cycles have happened in such a short spam of time especially I feel like the ones who ultimately get the bad side of it is retail so it's already been very beaten up by the macroeconomics and then having your exposure your portfolio down because someone else was doing something that was not properly due diligence I think that's very unfortunate uh for the people who were just recovering from Terra Luna or from the crashes of any others it's just very unfortunate I feel like whenever I have been since 2016 right so I have been telling like yeah crypto it's it's it's okay you can buy it you can hold it you can experiment a little bit and then you have all of these adversities that really prevent from people to even trying to be more open about it right like the whole narrative about decentralization and ownership how can that be so strong when you have such bad actors um more recurrently yeah I'm really looking for oversight crypto overflow side and also oversight at a corporate level which should be embedded into any of these businesses at scale and I think also the responsibility of the businesses which have raised a lot of money is also on them but also look at all the Venture funds that are invested in where was the due diligence on that certainly a Swissport Adventures when we deploy capital and certainly if we have a meaningful amount of capital we're always looking to have a board seat and to be involved in that compliance and oversight it's our responsibility to deploy capital on our investors to make sure that's there big round of applause thank you so much for coming lovely to see you thanks Nicole thank you [Applause]