[BUIDL Asia 2023] Buidling Web3 Applications for Everyone by Marek Olszewski

Transcript

[Music] amazing thank you so much uh everyone my name is Mary koshepsky I'm one of the co-founders of cello it's really wonderful to be here um and today I'm going to be talking about biddling or building uh web3 applications for everyone and I wanted to start with a question I like to start these things on the interactive side and so I wanted to ask each of you to raise your hands if you think that web3 today is now accessible to everyone who thinks that you know we've mostly done you know all the hard work that web3 is ready for the masses all that we

have to do is Market it to everyone do we have a single person willing to raise their hand not a single person um and I agree um and I think it would make Satoshi very sad shown here in the form of a cat Emoji because you know why not uh and it makes me sad right because I think you know uh we're 15 years in uh from the original Bitcoin white paper uh and and we still haven't cracked this nut we still haven't made web 3 accessible for everyone uh and that's a real shame and it's a real shame because there's a lot of people out there um and all of these talks could be

rushing into the house of web 3 if we could build products that could Target them in a better way and instead uh it's just you know folks like us who are here who get to have all the fun right um we're here we're building and using these amazing daps these are truly revolutionary New pieces of technology that are also a lot of fun to use and we get to have all the fun but sadly these folks they're not here yet um and so why is it why do we think that web3 is still too difficult for the Masters to adopt

um and I would argue it's primarily because it's still quite difficult to build web 3 experiences as a developer that are easy enough for everyone to use [Music] um however I'm here today to say that actually um we are now at the point where we can build really easy to use uh web 3 applications um because with cello we've actually have a platform that unlocks this capability for developers to build those really easy delightful and just amazing experiences for everyone in the world and so I'm going to talk a little bit

about why that is today but before I get there you know for folks who are new to cello I just wanted to give a very you know quick uh Emoji based of course introduction to cello and so first and foremost stello is an evm compatible proof-of-stake network it's actually among one of the first evm compatible proof of stake networks to have launched it's been live now for three years and it is also the first chain to be carbon negative so three years ago the community voted to offset the carbon that the chain emits and it's been

running and buying programmatically carbon officer credits ever since um and we're going to talk a little bit about that in the next session so if you're interested definitely stick around but for this talk I want to focus more on the ease of use side of things and on that front the key really is uh that seller was built with Mobile in mind if we're trying to build for everyone we need to Target the devices that everyone is using and mobile you know naturally is where you're going to find the majority of people and critically um you know there's some additional features on top of the evm that we've

added that make it particularly easy to build just easy to use applications for end users and so you might be asking what are these features um so we're going to go through them there's about three that I'd like to kind of point out and this was the best emoji I could find for the number three shown with a hand so bear with me but let's start with reason number one so reason number one is we have spent countless hours thinking about gas ux thinking about how to make it so that it is just very easy for users to sign transactions and to never be shocked by the price of those transactions a lot of

effort has gone into this and so first and foremost to do that you know we have to create a very scalable proof of State consensus protocol um we devoted uh countless hours um this was actually four years ago when we we created the first um again evm compatible proof of stake Network and we invested a lot into creating a very scalable consensus protocol that can actually execute upwards of a thousand transactions per second which is no um which is not an easy feat for an evm compatible chain and first and so first and foremost it's scalable

it also offers one block finality which is absolutely critical right if you're signing a transaction and if you're then told that it was validated and included in a block you can't expect your typical consumer to be able to then not be surprised when they're told later oh actually there was a chain reorg and your transaction that you thought was part of the blockchain was actually removed we worked really hard to eliminate that possibility and so we have one block finality or one slot finality once a transaction is mined it is there forever it cannot be rolled back

okay and with a scalable blockchain of course you get low gas fees and there's really been a commitment from developers in this LOE system to work really hard to keep gas fees at less than one cent per erc20 transfer this is a commitment that the ecosystem the developers in the ecosystem have made and so far we've been able to accommodate it and we're really proud about that but more importantly I would say than scalability um oh and forgot about that slide um and so um wise you know low gas important you know I think it's pretty obvious but you know

um I don't know if in the in the last bull market you had this reaction when trying to sign a new transaction I certainly have on other networks and clearly if you're building for everyone this is something that we want to avoid you're if you generate that reaction when getting someone to sign a transaction um you know where they're freaking out because it's become quite expensive you're almost certainly going to lose them and so again we worked really hard to avoid this but more important than this I would say is sellers ability to pay for gas with tokens um so in Sello you can pay for gas with

uh erc20 tokens that have been added through on-chain governance to and to an allow list right now there are three tokens that are listed all stable coins pegged to the US dollar to the euro and to the Brazilian real and on seller you can actually pay for transactions with these tokens and this works without account abstraction you can do this with an eoa wallet um which is just really wonderful for payment use cases because you can just um you know send the stablecoin to your friend and that friend can then send a stablecoin onwards to someone else we're in the process of also adding WEP as a gas currency which will also be pretty

nice for users coming from ethereum and so this is great this helps us avoid you know this scenario um curious if anybody here if this resonates with anybody here I've certainly sent usdc to an address on ethereum before and then realize oh crap I don't have gas currency to send that on to someone else that's a really really frustrating experience it's clearly not one that we can present to the masses and so again we worked really really hard to eliminate this you can send the stablecoin to your friend and that friend can then send it on to someone else because they can use that stable coin to pay for the transaction fee

so that was reason number one reason number two and that's the mobile first Focus so I alluded to this earlier on you know cello was built uh really um with this incredible mobile first focus and it comes from this from the origin story which is one where we initially before we even thought about building cello we initially wanted to build a really easy to use mobile wallet on top of ethereum that people could use like a global venmo wallet so in the US we have venmo it allows you to send money really easily to anyone in your contact list we wanted to recreate this but using crypto

at a global scale and we tried to do this five years ago on top of ethereum and we couldn't create the experience that we wanted um and so that ultimately took us down the path of building cello an evm chain that uh has all of those features and many of those features not surprisingly because we were starting with a mobile wallet were mobile features and so these include a phone number identity system which has evolved over the years to something that we're calling social connect which allows you to effectively verify your phone number in a privacy preserving Manner and map it to a wallet

address in a way that allows anybody in the ecosystem to send value to your phone number and not have to think about using public key derived addresses because if you're building for everyone public key derived addresses are just way too intimidating and people already have addresses phone numbers are really great addresses they exist in people's contact lists if you use them as identifiers then you can allow people to send tokens or crypto to people in their contact list and with a social connect you can actually do that not just in one wallet but across all of the wallets in the solo ecosystem and so this was the first Major mobile

feature that we built and it's now being implemented by the following wallets which again makes it really nice to when sending value between these wallets you can use phone numbers instead of these public key derived addresses and critically this can work even before the recipient installs the wallet which is really nice you know you can introduce someone to crypto by sending some value to them that value can live in a smart contract but then they can redeem once they sign up create a wallet and verify that wallet the other feature that we built was a ZK snark based like client called plumo

this was honestly a huge undertaking relaunched this a year ago we built this with some of the earlier zika snark proving Primitives you know way before Planck came out um and this is really important if you want to sync with the chain using really minimal amounts of data from your mobile phone um in a fully decentralized way and so we worked long and hard on this and it launched last year and it's really quite wonderful with just a few kilobytes of data you can actually be convinced that a particular header is part of the chain allowing you in effect

to do a like client sync with very very little data so we're really really proud about that okay reason number three once again we're back to the funny emoji reason number three is around on and off ramping so if you talk to a lot of users today and you ask them you know what is it that is really holding back most users from being able to use crypto today frequently on and off ramping comes in and you know it's um something that I think if we can solve I think we can really make a lot of progress towards building the apps

that everyone in the world can use and what we would like really is a way for wallets to offer native Cash In and Out experiences that are available in every Market in the world right like if you had to just wave a magic wand what would you want you would probably say something to the effect of this um and if we could do that then something pretty exciting would happen we would get to live in a world where you could send value to anyone in the world in in a way we already live in that world right you can send crypto to anyone in the world and they can use a self-custodial wallet to receive it so we have this first part but once we have

native on and off ramps integrated into every wallet in the world then that value will be immediately useful for the the recipient the second they get in right and if we can pull this off then we'll be in a I would say really exciting uh place right like there was a time when you couldn't send a text message really easily to anyone in the world especially not for free and with the invention of WhatsApp and many other messaging services we've kind of moved past that era and it really wasn't that long ago when you you know had to when it was quite difficult to send these messages and the world really changed really quite rapidly when that happened and we

suspect the same thing will happen when you can send value to anyone in the world and have it be immediately useful so how do we get there well we need to have every wallet integrate with every on and off ramp company out there when I say on an off-ramp company I mean something like transact or ramp or moonpay there's increasingly a lot of these and increasingly those ones that are forming in each market in the world that have the local licenses and the local banking relationships with the local Financial rails and if you want to integrate with all of them you need to every wallet needs to

put some engineering effort in and kind of connect with that on an off ramp and if each of these wallets were to do that with each on and off ramp you would end up with what I like to call you know this something that starts to look like a spaghetti mess right it's a many-to-many integration nightmare where everyone has to do a lot of work and that is not very efficient and so it would be a lot nicer if we could replace this with something in the Middle where we move to a hub and spoke model where everyone only has to do the work once and so that is something that we're

calling FIA connect which we launched last year and Fiat connect you can think of it as a as the wallet connect of the on and off ramping world so just like wallet connect makes it a lot easier for every wallet to connect with every dap using a standardized API Fiat connect is that standardized API that lets you connect your wallet or your dap with every on and off ramp out there it's an open source project it's it's a backend API which means that wallets can implement the whole front-end experience enabling this really nice native experience and critically once a wallet or adapt has

implemented one of these then adding a new on and off ramp becomes as easy as just making a configuration change and so that is really nice because it allows wallets to potentially integrate you know hundreds of on and off ramps in the future as they pop up in every Market in the world and I'm super excited to share that earlier this year um you know the standard went out last year but when it came to uh on and off ramps actually implementing it that happened this year uh at the beginning of this year velora implemented via connect and a bunch of on and off ramps um also implemented it and it went live in Nigeria Kenya and the Philippines and

since then more on and off ramps have popped up that have implemented it in more markets and now Fiat connect is available in 12 markets where you can send money send the stable coin to people in these markets and you know those people can now cash out into either mobile money or into bank account using a licensed on an off-ramp experience that is fully native to the wallet and so it's very easy for the user to do this it feels 100 native and the money is instantly available you don't have to go through an exchange you don't have to go through a PDP um service it's just built directly into

the wallet and the experience is really quite lovely and so this is what uh the word looks like right now right we have these 12 markets uh that are supported by FIA connect um and there are a lot of companies now that are actively building against the standard and so it won't be long before the world will look like this where once again you'll be able to send and receive money from these folks in these markets and those folks will be able to freely move back and forth between Fiat and crypto really easily using again these licensed regulated services that are natively integrated in in these wallets awesome so

those are the I would say the three really big enablers that collectively allow you to build really easy to use mobile experiences that Target normies that anyone really in the world can use and if you want to check some of these out some of them are available for you today the first one is one that you know I talked about earlier and that's velora valora is this really easy to use P2P payments product uh it is a crypto wallet it's a self-custodial crypto wallet but if you look at the bottom you'll see that the primary actions that we're

encouraging people to perform are sending uh um stable coins to people in in their contact lists where really are encouraging people to use this as a P2P payment wallet um and it works quite well in this capacity because with cello you can send money to phone numbers you can pay for gas with these stable coins and so you can actually the send flow just lets you search through your contact list find someone that you want to search for using their name that you want to that you want to pay using their name and again you can pay for that transaction fee in the asset that you're sending but velora is more than just a PDP wallet it's also a signing wallet

with adapt browser and there have been a number of dapps that have popped up in the Solar ecosystem that you can now access through velora and obviously through metamask and a lot of other wallets these include uniswab V3 we're really humbled that uniswap is on cello we're one of the few chains I think five chains that they support um curve is also available on cello and available in velora as is pulled together and a bunch of other saving protocols and what's really cool when talking to these protocols is that when you observe that or when they observe the traffic that they receive on the seller Chain versus other

chains they frequently find that it is much composed of a much higher percentage of Mobile Traffic than on other chains and that tells us that we're on the right track we're attracting developers that are building for mobile we're attracting users who are on mobile and and those folks are using these dapps using all of this nice functionality that makes it really easy for them to do so and once you can send stable value really easily to anyone in the world and once it's easy for folks to cash out that value then you can start doing some

really cool applications that were quite expensive to do before and one of these is impact Market that has launched a universal basic income program on top of cello um impact Market is just one of a few Universal basic income projects in cello good dollar is another really popular one um and impact market now operates throughout the world in a number of communities and they've raised you know over three million dollars in donations so not in Investments but actual donations that they've then dispersed to around 60 000 beneficiaries on the order of 50 cents a

day yeah and these folks receive this Ubi in a stable coin usually a US dollar pegged stablecoin and they can choose to cash it out and many of them do the first time they receive it but what we've seen um that I think is really exciting is we've seen folks stop cashing it out the second they know that they can cash it out reliably suddenly they get excited about spending it and saving it instead and so here's an example of a community in Brazil where uh Emmanuel in this case saved up his Ubi over the course of a

week and then went to a local store that started accepting [Music] um um cusd using velora and then actually bought some groceries at the end of the week using their Ubi and transacted using crypto the whole transaction was settled on a blockchain and what we're seeing now is in these communities the money starts circulating as a medium of exchange on public blockchains which makes me really excited because it shows again that we've built something that's easy enough for regular consumers to use they can use it for payments um and you know that's definitely a very Universal use case another really exciting protocol is

Sylvie that is incentivizing tree reforestation um uh initially starting in Kenya Sylvie has a really wonderful protocol and a really nice mobile app that incentivizes people to go and plant a tree and then others to go and verify that the tree is in fact where it's said to be and they are now reforesting a rainforest in Kenya right adjacent to a national park that was heavily deforested in the past and what we're seeing there is the same thing that happened with those impact Market communities these farmers who have taken to planting these trees have gotten excited about the these new

crypto tokens and have started to actually spend them in their local communities and again the money has started circulating in these communities as a medium Exchange and there's many other daps I don't have time to go into all of them but uh one thing that we're particularly excited about in the community is the fact that adoption has been growing so over the last few months we've seen an uptick in the number of addresses that are using the platform and now we're at over twice the monthly active users of the last Peak that happened in in the bull market

over a year ago and so we think that this is again representative of the fact that we're we've created something that that many users can use and we're seeing increasingly more and more users come in and start actually taking advantage of this wonderful platform so that's it um let's battle for everyone we have the platform now that makes it possible I hope you enjoyed this talk and um I just wanted to end with a quick plug for the next session so we just talked a little bit about using cello for building really easy to use mobile applications but there's a whole particello that's focused on the

regenerative economy on refi as it's called and if you're interested in hearing a little bit more about that join me in the next session thank you very much [Applause]