Empowering Cities with Stablecoins: Localised Payment Networks for Economic Revitalisation

all right everyone wow it's full house so I don't know if if anyone is interested in how we actually use table coins in the real world come have a seat I don't bite it's going to be fun all right anyway so it's recorded so uh people are going to catch up online uh it's a bit noisy so I hope you'll understand me so uh first about me I'm Xavier I'm a local I live here not so far uh but I lived in the state for 10 years I'm an entrepreneur I'm a dad I'm a citizen and um always been driven by using technology to empower our citizens to do things that they couldn't do before um so long story short um yeah I believe that you know it's time to change the way we organize as Citizens and so that's how I created open Collective to enable groups of people communities to create a new form of organization to receive money to sustain their Community project uh and so now more recently D Brussels United on wallet I'll talk more about that today uh so two main takeaways that I want you to leave this uh talk with today is that every city is a da it's a decentralized autonomous organization they might just don't know it yet and the second is that eventually every city will have its own stable coin so right now more than 89% of people uh pay with their mobile phones right or with their touchless card and so all of those transactions are digital it means that all of those transactions are taxed by the Global Financial system for a city like Brussels that has about 25,000 shops that represents at least million EUR every single month so that's money is basically leaving the local economy I mean what the heck why do we have this taxs right now um especially today where we have access to new technology that opens new possibilities so you already know we went from web one to web two to web three uh web 2 enabled us to move information without intermediaries at a fraction of the cost web free does the same but for moving money and so now that we can move money at a fraction of the cost uh maybe we can create our own solution our own payment RS for our local communities so today we have Apple pay Google pay Samsung pay why don't we have also Brussels pay right or New York pay San Francisco pay Madrid pay like every city could have its own payments system how would that basically work well you can think of it a bit like a festival when you go to a festival and there is one here the Brussels Summer Festival uh every year here in Brussels you basically get a wristband and then you can top it up and within that Festival you can just pay and there is no transaction fees well the idea is the same except that it will be like a year-long festival not only during the summer but all time so this this is in more details I'm not going to go through every single step here feel free to reach out to me if you want to find out more uh but the main idea really is that there is a Cooperative a digital Cooperative a Dao owned by the shops and their customers uh of brers and every time there is a transaction that dowo is basically issuing tokens to the customer and the shop owner um as a result you end up with a digit Cooperative a that is made of all of the people who participate in the local economy and then the transaction fee instead of going to Visa Mastercard Apple pay Google pay goes into that Dow and citizens can make proposals to get funding from the Dow and was just talking about that with Marina a bit earlier like in a world right now we in Europe and across the world the far right is becoming more and more in power and the first thing they do is they cut off subsidies to Art to freedom to various different initiatives social Society is going to become really important that we develop more and more alternative systems citizen budgeting participative participative budgets that we can keep funding what we care about as Citizens so every city is a DA and this is a way to basically fund the Dow create the race create the payment system that citizens can use to have economic activity the transaction fee feeds that participatory budgeting um now underlying that there will be every city will have its own stable coin so the world of stable coins today like any new technology first focus on the existing players existing currencies right so we are in the stage a bit like worldpress with the first CMS content management system where the first ones were really for existing Publishers for the CNN New York Times of the world but then it grew exponentially once they basically realized that the potential was about enabling new Publishers new players to be able to start publishing content I think it's the same for stable coins right now the focus is on existing currencies but stable coins open a new CMS as in currency management system and the real potential is going to be about enabling not only existing currencies to go on chain but enabling new currency issuers so web 2 was all about print your own stories web three is about to print your own money stable coin is actually not new right the future is already present it's just not evenly distributed yet it's been actually decades that people have been doing local Curren in fact I have with me here a couple of them those are local currencies from Brussels feel free to uh to pass them around so so this is a real this is called the Zin it's the real local currency of Brussels uh it's been existing for five years now and uh but I also have other currencies here is one in the south of Belgium for example another one um here is one in France um turns out there is more than 5,000 of those local currencies um and so yeah so people have been doing those local currencies for for various different reasons um one of it is that the dollar has only one value um and um but the community currencies has many different values I I need them back yes thank you um so yeah so the idea of local currency is that you can have you can print your own values in it right so if you basically use the local currency of the Zin it can only be spent in shops that are locals that are not multinationals that are not mass-produced products that are much more sustainable and so on and so on um whereas with the dollars you you basically have no idea what are the values of the users um and to me that's a concept that is very important because in a world where only have a few local a few multinational currencies like the dollars and the Euro um it's kind of the monoculture a monoculture of the one size fits all a monoculture of where it doesn't matter how you create value in the world as long as GDP increases it it's good um and so whenever you contribute to GDP you receive this coin and that gives you access to mass-produced products right things that are so less things that are not sacred things that are the same everywhere you go the same Starbucks everywhere but if you go in a world of many different currencies this gives you access to Unique secret goods and services produced by your local community right you belong in a community that is not anymore one size fits all it's a community where you feel like you belong you're not just a number um and that's basically to me like the world of permaculture a human permaculture an economic Pac culture that we need to go to the other thing is the dollar can fly anywhere right whereas your community currency stays in your community if I give you a dollar you can go spend it on Amazon if I give you a local currency you can only spend it in the local economy and research has shown that for example like uh the new economics Foundation did a research on one pound uh if your local currency will generate about 1.76 uh pound of local economic activity compared to 36 Cents when it's spending non-local businesses um and then here in Germany a local another local currency show that there are each currency would be generating 2.5 to three times more economic value now in terms of a legal implication because we have some lawyers in the room um in France they actually made into uh they recognize the existence of local currencies since 2014 um it comes with a couple of uh conditions the issue of local currency need to be transparent about the operation and financial management and that's why I believe that blockchain can really help because if everything on the blockchain is transparent um it has to operate within a specific boundaries U and used to promote local activity uh and sustainability and thank you and it must be issued by nonprofit or cooperatives so here's the bad news though most of them actually are not working right they are a bit like card surfing before Airbnb so you basically have community of activists that really love those ideas of local currencies that's why you have more than 5,000 of them but then as soon as the initial people you know have their motivation and and they're kind of running out of energy the currency dies out it's really hard to get going um and yeah the other problem is that they usually lack technical abilities most of them are paper only and nobody wants to use paper anymore and when they use software they use this 19y old piece of software called cyclos uh and so the user interface of course has been updated over the years but it's still very very not at the level that people could expect today on the other side we the crypto Community have developed a lot of great interfaces a lot of new mobile apps but all those crypto wallets are for Traders right they all take the assumption that you're in crypto to invest money to exchange to make money on money and and that's cool that's fine but that's a very different Focus right my mom is not going to download this type of app and most people out there just want to receive their currency and be able to spend it they are not interested in knowing uh what's the value in Petr dollar of the local currency and so that's why we created the citizen wallet so the citizen wallet is an open source wallet that any Community can use for their local currency and so this is how it looks um the old point is really to abstract away web three nobody needs to know that it's web 3 behind the scene right people just care about receiving the token sending them so you can print a voucher and if you scan it you can redeem it you don't need to download any app you can but you also don't need to enter any phone number any email address you just have it straight up in your device so it's Vally scan and play right which is the way it should be because if I give you this piece of paper I'm not asking you for your email I'm not asking you to download an app you put it in your pocket and you can straight away give it as a tip to the Bender or something right so this is the digital equivalent of that but we also have a native app so you can try to scan it actually this is a real Euro I'm kidding you not this is a real Euro that you can spend uh if you scan it but of course there is only one because that's the whole point there is no double spending so the first one to redeem it we actually get it so it's also embracing account abstractions there is no gas fees right because that's a massive ux issue if I give you a token on your metamask you cannot do anything if you don't have e to pay for gas right so that's a big noo so here we solve that when you deploy the C wallet for your community you can have a sponsor a pay master and you can sponsor the gas fees for all of your users and then also realize that the best interface actually is no interface so we've been playing recently with uh NFC rband that I have here and so the idea is that you can basically turn any of those NFC tags whether on a RIS band on a keychain and use that as a crypto wallet and so you can tap to pay and then you will see directly on the blockchain the transaction happening this is a really fantastic use case because then you can just give to to anyone you don't need to have a smartphone uh even if you are running out of battery you can still have some pocket money on your wristband or on your keychain I actually have a my keychain here and so I have a real kind of physical representation of the communities I'm part of so these are real coins and each of them have an NFC tag and so here's my keychain for the Dow brers Community where I have some euros to pay at the B but then you can also do it in reverse where you can do tap to pay but also tap to earn and that enls great new use case where you can develop your own economy and try to get people at your conference or in your community to do actions that going to be good for the community like cleaning the public park or contributing to the conference in some ways participating in Workshop or whatnot and then they receive tokens and they can spend them to receive some swags or things like that so all next week we invite you to experience that at the region Village uh that is happening at the common sub it's literally just 100 meters away from here that direction and so the full week every day is going to be different different program but you can also have a weekly pass and then you get this really nice wiist band that I have here that is an NFC wallet and you will also be able to do different actions receive regen token and use that to get some swags and other things so what now so we just got a grant from the region of Brussels uh to develop further Brussels pay so we we put together this uh this board of advisers people running local shops um people also running different stable coin or system for stable coins and um so together we're going to basically uh create that Cooperative at Dow um and bring together Dow brel um a Euro B the local currency of Brussels on chain for the purpose of Brussels pay uh and start implementing that so this what's going to happen we do all of that in open source in open data so everyone is is invited to contribute we are also operating ourself as a dow so this is all the people who've contributed so far um and we are basically funded right now through various different grants so thank you already to all the people who contributed uh on gitcoin and uh the different people who contribute to our to our budget couple of Inspirations um if you are into reading those books I highly recommend those uh they really opened my my mind on all of those different topics um so so yeah um or if you're more into movies um there was those two stories um Shillings from heaven based on a true story in Austria in 1932 after the economic crisis where the local mayor who was an engineer decided to print his own local currency with demage with basically a tax on the money that doesn't move because money is like blood in an organism if it doesn't move it becomes a blood clout and that's dangerous right so it's important to create incentives for the money to keep moving and go and allocate resources allocate the capital wherever it's needed in the community and I was so successful in 1932 after the Deep economic crisis that cities around waral in Austria that it's copying it and it spread so much that the Central Bank eventually shut it down because it became of course an alternative and a threat to the existing power in place if only back then they had access to a technology that would be unstoppable and then Bank of Dave it's another uh uh funny story uh after the financial crisis of 2008 in England they created a bank um and it has been more than 100 years that no bank had been created and so it shows really how the existing Financial system is really locked down and doesn't really enable new players to come in so once again that's why I feel like I'm so excited by the potential of crypto because it really give us this new permissionless world where we can start experimenting without having to wait for the incumbents to give us their green light we can start experimenting using our own sandbox and only once we find out how to swim in that swimming pool we can go into the ocean and invite others to join and so that's basically um what we are up to um maybe as a closing thought I would love really to invite everyone to think about what could the world look like if instead of all of those few Global currencies few Global stable coins we could have a permac culture A diversity of many many many different stable coins in different communities what if every city will have its own currency but will all be connected through the open source and open data of the blockchain I think this really has the potential to unite civilization and create a new step forward for a new sustainable and regenerative future that's what I have for you today folks any questions how do you enable liquidity outside of the uh the ecosystem how do you enable liquidity outside of the ecosystem like can I swap this currency into usdc or us so how do we play with hello yeah how do we play with the rest of the ecosystem um yeah I mean that's the thing because everything is on the blockchain uh anyone can create a Unis swap pool with the local currency and another currency right so um right now the the euro is on theosis chain um and um and so yeah we the community is free to do whatever they want right um thank you more questions any other question from the audience sir you can also catch up afterwards after sa thank you very much for this presentation please big a give a big Applause