DAPPCON 2025: Defi Is Easy to Use - Now What? - Joao

Transcript

Hello everyone. Um it's a pleasure to be here. Um I think we are at a very exciting time uh where DeFi is becoming accessible to a much wider audience. It was not very long ago. Um but okay. So the first thing I would like to gajge is how many people here agree with the statement that defy accessible. So like uh your brother that's not on crypto or your mom some someone like that can use a D5 product.

Could you give me a show of hands just so I get a sense? Okay. So like 20ish% um I have the very strong opinion now that we have u accessible D5 products. So you can actually on board people that are that know don't know anything about crypto, don't know anything about web app, don't understand a wallet, don't understand a single concept. And I'll try to to give you the sense on why I have come to believe that and what I have been seeing in the field. Uh for context, uh I have been working uh full-time in making DeFi easier and more accessible to use for the past four

years. uh have been building picnic uh which is the product I'll showcase here. Uh so the very basic flow our our users see when they use picnic is you log in and you can use a wallet but most of the users like 90% are using email uh you deposit money via monerium or a stable coin partner and you have uh euro stable coins or Brazilian rail stable coins and you can swap that to any token you want. So basically you don't need to know what is a seed phrase uh on and off ramp and getting the right exchange to support the right network. All those things are

pretty abstracted and the flow is super easy to use and you don't need to know which chain you are on like you don't need to know about gas. In this example you're paying gas with uh eur and you don't need to like know that you need to approve a token to swap. So basically every little complexity of the flow is pretty much solved I would say. And the the main reason that makes me believe we got there is because we have some testimonials that I think are quite insane. I would not expect those sorts of testimonials to be were happening if like two years ago or something like that. Uh so for context most of our

users are Brazilians. Uh a lot of them are not very sophisticated and we have been talking with a few users and getting stories like this one which is a person that his main occupation is being a fisherman. He's not very educated and in his own words he can barely use a cell phone but he can buy tokens on picnic. Um we have another one which is um some 64 year old lady that is not very tax savvy and can also use picnic and she was really happy because she bought Bitcoin for the first time. Um so

the UX is is not too unsimilar to what we have been seeing in terms of web two products. you can get normal people to use it and that changed the game quite a bit. Um, and given the context that UX now is is pretty good, the main thing I have in my mind now is how do we build use cases that are 10x better? Uh, so if you're just thinking about custody, um, like you have options. If you're more sophisticated, you're probably using safe ledger. There's not a whole lot of reason to use a a solution that

depends on the email security to custody your funds. And if you're less sophisticated, centralized exchanges might be a good option as well. Like they have a bunch of uh layers of security and things like that. Um so I understand it's not 10x better than the existing solution. So that's not a super strong driver of growth. Um same thing to buy bitcoin to on ramp and to get yield on defy products. Uh you have tools like defy yama for super advanced users that will do a a better job.

Uh so the the result of this is that just good UX is not enough to grow. Like I think UX got to a point that you can actually use D5 products but why will they use it? What is the the super strong benefit you're getting on using it? UX is not enough. Um, and the thing that I'm actually very excited about this moment, I think we found a a very clear use case that is super appealing to a lot more people.

So, I'm Brazilian. Uh, we have been super focused in the Brazilian market and in the past three weeks, we got a recent law uh that increased taxes on USD purchases uh by 3.5%. So now picnic is 4.5 or 4% cheaper than lies and that does a rag arb. So any stable coins allow you to do that. So for example a,000 ris are getting you $179 on picnic and the same amount gets you $172 on wise. Um and the really cool thing about this uh

still very early but these are nosis pay transactions uh across uh all chains. Picnic is the yellow one. It has been oh the the orange one sorry and it has been growing uh like last week we grew 50% a week prior to that it grew 70%. And every time we talk with users the market pool is super strong. Um so crypto users are using this a lot. But the thing that's surprising me is friends that are coming to Europe to travel. They are telling me man like how do I get this card? the car is taking

too long. I'm getting a lot of uh inbound interest and it has been a different thing to watch. Um and the experience it is super straightforward. Uh so in Brazil we have something called pix which is a payment QR code and once you pay that you get Brazilian rice stable coins and you have USDC in the card that's ready to spend. So it it feels like a lot like web two. you don't need to know anything about web tree which makes me think like when I see this product and and I look at matrix it feels a lot like the time I work at a

B2C product um which is basically looking at conversion funnels so you're looking at every step what's the users doing how conversion is going uh and like how how do you make the card order faster? Um how do you make the user retain? So we have been thinking a lot about adding mobile app uh diminishing uh flow times and the market changes a lot. Um so right now we have been really focused in getting users out of Binance, getting users out of MetaMask. Uh but with this

card, which is the by far the cheapest way to spend in dollars for Brazilian users, you start competing against Wise, you start competing against local banks um that have USD offerings and you have a really compelling product for people that just want to travel. Um so now I think uh we have the the tools and the setup ready. I think web three has the UX that is good enough to be useful for non-crypto people and the the big question for me is like how do we

operationalize that and how do we optimize those products to actually be useful. So any Brazilian that's traveling now, their best option financially wise is to use a product like this that is fully built on DeFi and is saving you 4% or four or 4.5% of everything you spend internationally. Um that's it. Thank you. [Applause] Thank you so much, Rome. Uh, let's open it for questions.

There's one. Is it? No. Okay. Questions? Questions? No. Uh, okay. There's one here. So why do you think it's so hard in crypto to get good UX? I think it's a hard technology to build on like uh we spent like a lot of time just building custom things to make it work.

So in fact we were the first safe ERC 4327 integration I know of and we needed to build a lot of custom infrastructure just to make it work and then you get the edge cases and different chains different things. I think it's it's just hard and uh things are new so you cannot reuse a lot of uh strong stuff that has been built and you also don't have that many references to copy. So you need to think through a lot of things. But thank you for the question.

Anyone else? Uh any other questions? Cool. Um thank you for listening. Uh thank you so much. [Applause]