DappCon 2023: Unlocking Web3 Growth In Africa - Rene Reinsberg

Transcript

great to be here hello Decon um uh and thank you to our friends from noses for for hosting it's always it's always a great conference I'm here today with uh a special announcement so stay tuned for that but I wanted to share some of uh our journey with c and for those of you who've um been following the space you will have seen that cell recently um put forward the proposal that then passed to become a layer uh to ethereum uh really exciting time for us lots of momentum you know we as a chain have always been from the early days very focused on Real World Adoption and um you know as as you all know here you

all Builders uh this stuff is hard um and it it sometimes takes multiple years to figure out all the pieces that are required uh to actually get that flywheel started um but for us this year has been has been really great last six months active addresses have grown over 500% um and a lot of that comes from Real World Adoption and so for for this talk today I wanted to start just by sharing um some of the things that we we have learned over the years and sort of have built into cell that we feel even though there are kind of maybe smaller tweaks uh to compared to other protocols have really unlocked uh that real world adoption and giving regular people access to uh to web stream um and then you know give a really great

example something that's uh that's happening today and that's that's the special announcement so yeah so maybe jumping right in here um I think when you and all of you are dap Builders so you've you've probably uh seen this first tent yourself when you when you launch kind of a new feature or launch your app and you see where some of the friction comes in and with cell we've uh from the very early days have been very focused on trying to remove some of that friction directly um at the protocol level and of course we're talking about Africa here today and uh you know when you look at many of the use cases that that we're that we're seeing micro payments micr credit um having super low fees obviously is

non-negotiable right you can't um enable use cases where you know there's payments sort of in sort of sense equivalent being exchanged and uh you know saying oh you know it's fine to have a one even one cent uh fee on those so that's that's the first one obviously High throughput is important at the chain level fast finality right anything where you are you're trying to kind of have people make make peer-to-peer payments or Merchant payments right you you absolutely need that fast finality to enable that use case um a very human- centered approach which you know I think many of us here are very comfortable maybe not at this point you know kind of juggling uh public keys for payments or

ens names but most of us you know have a phone in our pocket and that number um you know or an email address um is a much better way right to kind of der risk sort of that that user experience and that kind of at the time of a transfer sort of you know people getting a little worried that is the money really going to get there um and so sell among other things has a protocol built in called social connect that uh trustly see and there a sort of privacy first approach Maps phone numbers to public keys and allows sending um any token uh yeah just to a phone number which which is really a GameChanger in terms of adoption Gas payable and tokens something that when we first um started

working on that was a novelty now we're seeing it adopted in more and more places but obviously really makes the user experience a lot easier as well when you don't have to um you know say someone sends you some stable coin and now you have to figure out where do I get eth right to um to make a payment to a friend the last one I'll touch on is the easy on and off ramping and this is one where if you had asked me six seven years ago hey what are the hardest things about you know building the stuff that you're looking to build um I would have talked about you know like ultr light clients and ZK stuff but I would have totally assumed that by now we would have completely as an industry solved on and off Rams uh we haven't uh We've made some good progress in many

markets now you're able to cash in cash out even from mobile money seamlessly and at um almost near uh near zero cost um C has open sourced and kind of release an open standard called Fiat connect which really aimed to Aims to kind of um yeah minimize the complexity that comes with just having all these different Iron offer providers and all these different markets and anyone here who's you know used the wallet or has been building wallets right will will know that pinpoint um so so definitely I feel across those things these have all been factors that I think have contributed uh towards seeing that kind of Real World Adoption regular people

being able to use uh wallets and then daps built um built on top of protocols and so yeah so we um yesterday we sort of uh put this up on Twitter and it is really big news and I'm usually not someone who uses euphemisms a lot but um I was just last night rereading uh the early white paper uh that we that we wrote for C and you know what we're announcing here is really to me is uh is a massive Milestone because it really takes a lot of these Concepts and some of the things I've shared here that we've seen actually work at smaller scale and brings brings it to a massive scale um and so I'm super excited here

to announce today uh that the Opera team who I now asked to come up on stage is launching uh a product called mini pay um that we're excited to tell you more about it's coming up I'll play this little clip while you guys come up let's see ah [Music] [Music] see

[Music] awesome yeah thanks thanks guys super excited to be here uh very glad to uh to come back we've been here before some years ago but uh thanks for the intro Renee uh I think you talked about a lot of the good things that uh that sell foundation and uh and you guys bring to uh uh to uh to this collaboration that we've been uh partnering on now for for a long time we're going to show you a little bit of a demo sneak peek on uh on uh this mini pay app in a second but just quickly on

Opera in case you don't know uh much about us uh uh we have been present in in Africa for many many years I think close to 20 years we built this uh very popular browser called Opa mini uh that uh is addressing some of the fundamental challenges uh on the continent and now we hope and think and believe that we're going to take this a step further with the with this mini pay app of uh bringing even more people uh online um allowing people to participate in the financial system with with all the good Tech that uh that is brought into into the app so without that I'll I'll pass it on to the guys here but uh so I'm I'm uran Arn I'm based in the

alsoo office uh of of Opera been with Opera for many years and been yeah uh active on uh African continent for for many many years so Charles I'll pass it over to you yeah I have I'm miked up so can you is it on yeah okay um yeah so I'm Charles I'm the head of product for minay uh super excited to be here with you today and really you know show the world what what we've been up to with zto uh over the past few months um you know with minay we're really trying to build a wallet that that just works right a stable coin wallet that you can use just as the cash wallet in your back pocket um something that we hope um

drastically reduces what you need to understand to use a crypto wallet that you don't even have have to think about that this is a crypto wallet and um we really wanted to build something for Africa where we have a huge user base and um make this integrated in our most popular browser um so I'll pass this to Rosie yeah yeah okay hi hey everyone uh my name is Rosette short Rosie um I'm product marketing director at Opera actually so I'm working on all of our mobile browsers so it's very exciting for us to yeah launch mini pay together with the cell team I think over the past months there's been a lot of research

going into this also from our side talking to our users seeing what kind of pain points that they're having and it's exciting to see that this is actually Something That We're addressing with mini pay now so yeah um let's see how it will go I'm very excited about it so I'm passing it on to our colleague toen who is um the product marketing manager for mini pay hi everyone um I'm toen and I'm product marketing manager for web 3 products at oppra and um I've been working on Mini I'm actually here today all the way from Lagos Nigeria and as you can imagine this product is very close to home because we've putting a lot of effort to make sure that you know

the features that we're rolling out with this product are tied directly into the actual circumstances the actual pain points problems that people um in the region people in this markets where upper mini is um is active have and to try to use use um web 3 to solve real world problems real problems that people have that are pling them every day and um to try to kind of bridge that gap between that exists between the people and access to financial products thank you thank you guys yeah and this is really um a very special moment and you know usually with these things there's an announcement and then it's like okay when is this thing going to launch um

and the great news here it went it went live this week uh so it's live right now and Nigeria and it's going to roll out uh to the rest of the African uh continent in the coming months and uh we wanted to give you a quick taste for what the experience looks and and feels like so I'll I'll pass it over to Charles to yeah uh before you play Ono sorry this one yeah how do I go to next y m yeah um so before we I show you a demo of what it looks like because this is a real life product again in Nigeria that we're um starting to roll out um just as this is a a rather developer centered conference just to give you a bit of a a technical background as to

what this product is in nature um it is a full non-custodial wallet um that has the convenience of web to but really the full power of web 3 and we're we really tried to address three key problems when we started to build this one is Key Management second is addressing and how people discover each other and send payments to each other um and then lastly you know making sure that users only have to deal with one currency right the idea that you have to get a network uh currency to to pay for payments was out of the question um so we build this with these three things in mind and the good thing is with especially when building for Africa is that the dollar itself has a huge appeal

people actually want access to Dollars and dollars on the blockchain are something that people actually um quite interested in because it allows them to access something that they couldn't in the traditional system um so minay is is really a P2P payment oriented wallet that is fully non-al non-custodial and runs on a solo blockchain and uses a lot of um well everything that Rene has mentioned um at the start so social connect for um mapping phone numbers to addresses in a privacy preserving way Fiat connect to really amplify the the coverage um of for adding cash and with drawing cash with local providers and of

course super fast block times super cheap fees right A lot of people talk about low fees being around 5 cents but you know if you're transacting with a dollar um you know 5 cents is 5% right so with with mini pay you're seeing somewhere in the tenth of a cent uh range of fees um so we think that's a really attractive proposition uh for our users in Africa so I'll start yeah with the demo on the you have a phone that's in um Kenya and the one on the right is in Nigeria so the one on the left is just reinstalling the app and going through the onboarding right really simple language send and receive instantly with phone numbers powered by USD stable coin in this case cell

dollars and really try to give this um a friendly Vibe right we like to think of minay as sending a paper plane with a dollar bill and whether or not you're an existing user or a new user you're presented with this signin with Google Experience um and we do that because we are an Android app that's already well distributed and we can leverage a lot of that functionality so in this case I'm an existing user I'm I'm uh restoring my wallet with one click I secure it the same way I um lock my phone with my fingerprint or face ID and then even though this is a stable coin wallet users sometimes prefer to to see the amounts uh in their local currency so we

try to make a best guess there so this is the main interface um and let's say I want to send 10 bucks to my buddy Renee here of course we integrate with the contacts I pick him there we use social connect to resolve that to a wallet address not showing it to users and boom with one click we send the paper plane and it arrives on the other end within 5 Seconds um than you so that was a bit too fast so we'll do it again uh again I'm I'm generous to Renee I'm going to send him 10 bucks again um and you know from from opening the app to sending a dollar like you could literally do this under 10 15 seconds um picking the contact and everything so

it's really quick and it has this magic feel to it and again full noncustodial user own their keys um of course you can expose your QR code uh if you're next to that person um here you see your transaction history and we have an ad C button where we partner with both Global and local Partners to enable cash in and cash out this is an example of a local partner in in Kenya in Nigeria called Fun bank and a key part here is that the minimums are very low right so someone can go in and buy a dollar uh with their stable coin with with their local fiat currency um so it's really appropriate for for that kind of uh user base and also you know

we are browser and a wallet which means means that this opens up opportunities for for dap developers to integrate with minay and there we really want to elevate the experience by having automatic connection again fees paid in cusd so that users don't have to deal with more than one currency um so if you're a developer building on cell or want to be curious about building on Cell then please come talk to us and we'll uh we'll help you out amazing wow awesome yeah let's see how do I get to the next one um all right yeah and you know we have toen Rosie yoran Charles here with us today so don't be shy come up after

and uh talk talk to the team we also we're hosting a workshop and happy hour later today um at the factory goreta park at our community space uh so yeah I think if you're if you're building if you're building daps if you're thinking about how to reach um you know that a big audience and you know Opera has over 100 million users across the African continent then definitely um make make sure to take a photo of that QR code right now and join us later um this is was really exciting and I think it's really going to um bring a lot more adapts uh to to regular people and starting with the African continent but from there obviously expanding to the world so thank you everyone for for

coming thanks Opera team for being here with us today for this exciting announcement and yeah thanks Decon