All roads lead to Defi - Talal Tabbaa aka @tabbaa4 from Coinmena at @ETHDubaiConf

Transcript

hello everyone um so my name is uh i'm the ceo one of the founders of coin mena we're a centralized exchange uh regulated by the central bank of bahrain i guess prior to coinmina i used to build products on ethereum built a wallet block explorer and a d5 product called tranche finance but the reality is in the middle east all people wanted to do was buy eighth buy bitcoin and basically speculate on coins uh no one really was interested in in in d5 services or like d5 products in general um so we decided to i guess follow the product market fit and build what people want

as kind of a trojan horse into d5 and that's why my title today is all roads lead to defy because the reality is people sitting in this room won't have an issue storing their private key or paying gas for a transaction but the reality is if you ask any retail user the reality is very different from the world that we live in um people basically don't want accountability they don't want to be liable for possibly losing their funds no matter how efficient um those d5 services is whether it's lending borrowing trading or or any other feature

so as you can clearly tell presentation is not ready but we'll wing it um i guess one of the biggest differences is it's so much more efficient than centralized applications and i think this example is is definitely overused but it's it's super relevant um if you think of like we're comparing uniswap to coinbase which is technically a crypto company if you wanted to compare uniswap to something like the dubai financial markets when you actually like i tried to buy a stock in dubai and i was shocked that was like two years ago i had to fill out like a freaking physical application and they had to mail me something

here this comparison shows unit swap versus coinbase but if you try to compare it with traditional stock markets it is insanely different but i guess one one of the topics that that i like to talk about often is something called technology infrastructure inversion and that's basically when a new technology comes out um it uses infrastructure that was there from the technology before it in order to reach people and then once that new technology becomes important enough you see that flip in technology infrastructure so maybe what i said is a bit vague so i'll give a couple of analogies to give it some context um internet i'm sure here everyone

remembers when we used to use landlines to basically get internet across like you if someone picked up the phone at your house your internet connection would drop it was a way of getting internet across but everyone had land lines so like okay how do we get internet to everyone yeah we used outdated infrastructure to get this new technology across that's why people use centralized exchanges today most people have bank accounts debit cards outdated financial infrastructure but that's what's going to allow us to bring 100 200 500 million people into crypto and then once you realize that okay why am i using that outdated infrastructure in the first place then you'll see the infrastructure inversion

so i think cars is also a good example when cars were first made when they exported cars from the us to the uk the uk had a requirement that someone um had to like carry a red flag and walk in front of the car because the car was seen as a death machine like it could kill people and then slowly but surely people realized okay cars are actually useful you could can get you from point a to point b way better than walking or a horse then we started seeing asphalt roads and yeah i guess the point that i'm trying to make here is in five years time we will drop the outdated infrastructure like as a centralized exchange we have

very high dependencies on outdated systems like swift for us like someone deposits uh money in the uae in durham's and we need to sell them east where the hell are we going to get that east we need to get it from one of the liquidity providers who has accounts either in silvergate or some other web 2 slash traditional uh infrastructure so we have to depend on the swift system and sometimes wires get lost for days or weeks so yeah i guess going forward you'll start sourcing that eth or bitcoin or other crypto locally um yeah don't worry i won't stay longer and i'm not going to keep everyone away from lunch because i i know that's

that's ready um i am not going to talk about defy applications i think everyone here is quite familiar with it so how can i get involved i guess one of the things that we're we're looking to do at coin mena is allowing people to stake their ease you know this is for me one of the most uh win-win situations out there if you don't need liquidity actually even if you need it to be liquid you can still do it but it's the equivalent of putting dollars in your bank and not putting them to work because by holding ethereum you technically have the credit risk of ethereum itself so if ethereum 2 doesn't really work out then you're screwed anyway or we're all screwed anyway so i guess the point that i'm trying to make here

is you should definitely stake your eth um and at coinmina we're planning on on making that process extremely simple where you can go from a dirham wire transfer into staked eth cool if any of you are uae residents or live in the gcc sign up on coinmina and feel free to pass by our booth if you have any questions on how to get your money from the rest of the world into somewhere safe like dubai thank you thank you very much you