Saruni Maina & Yele Bademosi Fireside Chat - ETHSafari 2023: The Conference Highlights

Transcript

welcome to the stage from uh all over uh from both sides of the continent we have seron Mina from flutter wave and we have y badamosi of too many projects uh historically uh sort of man after my own heart uh Nest coin uh what's the wallet on board that's right on board thanks so this was going to be a panel discussion but you know kifi happens to people and somehow they just become ghosts so uh there's actually two other panelists there you can't see them uh but they're there I promise list trust trust me uh so we're going to have a Fireside talk

between these gentlemen uh I'm equally as excited uh it's going to we're going to cover real world assets it's called tokens from the tropics so I'm going to hand it over to the guys all right thank you hey good morning everyone hey come on this is a group that didn't drink too much last night so I need some energy from you good morning everyone all right so I'm serun Mina um a Tei at heart but I don't write code so uh I always R like to rough up uh coders because they hate it when non-coders call themselves Takis but here's the thing you can't just build by writing

code right you know you need to sell it you need customers you need all of those other things so the other thing that I like to fight is the term that n Tech in Tech I think anyone who understands Tech even if they don't write it is a techy so the lawyers in Tech uh the people in accounts Finance the businessmen and everything I believe they're all techies so um I currently work at flatter wave uh I run our crypto arm so it's a onean team uh but our team is a team yeah yeah so this is a secret between us you know it's just one person but if you ever meet outside there and you hear me say my team and I you know it's me and ghost that Jason was talking about all

right so uh I give you a chance to introduce yourself and then we'll get going okay um hi guys name is y b um good to be here all the way from West Africa Nigeria um I'm the I think like Jason said I have I've been involved in a lot of projects um but uh right now I'm the CEO of NCoin um we're building on board uh which is a wallet and a uh on and offramp protocol that allows you go from stable coins or digital Assets in the self costy wallet like you know trust askk coinbase wallet um directly to your impesa wallet or um bank account

without having to go through an exchange on M man um so happy to be here and I've been doing a lot of stuff so I was first hired for binance on the continent launched binance in in Africa um also founded bondle Africa that was incubated by binance that skilled about 1.4 million uh sort of users in about 12 months and on the side I run a fund called microt track that has about 60 portfolio companies across 10 African markets um so yeah looking forward to our conversation right great um so um before we get going uh I had planned this out you know I was really trying to make it cool you know be that cool uh uh host who will make this really

interesting but since we have ghosts who can't answer I'm sorry I'm going to dump everything on you because I'm not changing my plan oh let's let's do it let's do it all right so um the way I wanted to do the introduction was okay You' given us introduction now I want you to tell me one thing that you genuinely fear and not that BS of I fear poverty we all fear poverty so don't be smart just tell us it's something that you genuinely fear even if it's insect so I'm going to start so I fear crawling insects like so you see the way there those memes whereby they say pillar of your strength and then he's literally running away from a spider I'm sorry but that's me you know and I'm not ashamed

about it I just just don't like insects uh so your turn huh what do I fear that's actually a very difficult question um so I don't think I'm scared of heights but whenever I go to any place that has like really low railings because I'm tall I always just feel like now you're showing off okay let's let's try this again I said what do you fear what do you fear I'm I'm scared of falling over a realing cuz you're tall no I didn't say that you said that not so all right let's let's get things started so um assuming we have no idea what real world assets are how would you

describe it yourself yeah you know crypto and our words right we like to try to reinvent the will yeah someone said that that's a way of a form of get keeping I think it is actually yeah have you heard the term tokenize deposits oh my God that's that's what they're calling stable coins now by the way wow that's what the bankers are calling stable coins tokenized deposits so um okay so to answer your question right uh real world assets generally I think it's any asset in the real world or offchain um that is being tokenized and the value is now represented onchain right um and I think

it's a it's a buzzword but it's probably something that I'm most excited about because it's it's how you move kind of like the world on chain yeah and create like the more transparent open kind of you know Financial system so that's kind of like how I think of real world assets okay so in respect to what you're currently doing at Nest coin um how do you feel about you know the aspect of tokenizing African currencies because one thing so let me give you a bit of a back background in terms of what I think do you know uh what I believe is the reason why a lot of African countries basically all of them

still rely on the dollar is because we don't trust each other's currencies so if I want to trade with Nigeria for instance um I'm I'm going to offer you Kenya Shillings you're probably goingon to say no what do I do with Kenya Shillings same thing if you come to me with naira I'm going to be like hell no what I do what do I do with naira and it's so amazing because now even our neighbors here in Tanzania don't want to touch our currency either they're like okay we also don't want Tanzania we don't want Kenya Shillings we don't want Tanzania Shillings everyone wants to deal with the dollar so do you think that tokenization could actually solve this yeah so it's interesting you said that um recently wrote white paper um on sort of what African stable coin will

look like um and actually the our old premise is like can we mint on chain African stable coins that are backed by usdc now one would say why don't we do something that is similar to Circle but given how you know African governments are if you have a bank account that is hello you have a bank account that holding you know Kenyan chills in the billions or Nigerian na or like the government like shut that down right so it's like how do you create how do you bring African currencies on chain

to make it easier for Africans to transact um but still keep it cly decentralized and sort of sorry I think my mic is cutting in and out but yeah okay all right so um still on that do you think that governments and Regulators should actually be involved in the tokenization of real world Assets in this case just the currencies themselves so I'm speaking about cbdcs do you think it's the right direction for regulators and governments to actually go and get themselves on the blockchain so I've seen fears just before you go I've seen

people making jokes that apparently if we adopt cbdcs uh the regulator will wake up one day and delete you know um your bank account to zero because it's essentially just a spreadsheet so yeah yeah I mean I think like you asked me this question maybe you know two years ago or 18 months ago I was definitely on the side of like unregulated crypto but I think what last 18 months or 24 months has shown is that as human beings even if you have in you have people who would always take advantage of those good intentions right so

I think for the adoption of of sort of crypto and it going mainstream we do need Regulators right um so I think regulate regulation for crypto is good and is what allows us to cross the chasm from kind of just being innovators or early adopters to something that you know the average woman on the street can use right um in terms of cbdcs like Nigeria recently launched the inira um and it's definitely not you know a success and I have like some thoughts about that you know um but we can talk about that later yeah off the Record yeah off the Record all right great um

so I'd also like to keep this interactive so to the audience uh if you feel like you have a question that can't wait until the end just feel free to be like yo I want to ask a question so uh I just love to get you involved in this conversation as well so as we okay question already all right let's go okay so I'm going to sort of rephrase the the question and was was asking about you know what do I think um went wrong with the Ina um so I think like

the first thing is that we have to also accept that the Ina even though it's n it's still the new currency right so when Bitcoin started there very few people that were using this thing um so I think like long term I still think it has potential to be successful but the big difference between kind of like what the Central Bank done and what they should do is that right now it's very banking l right and the banks have no incentive to make the in successful right if you look at Innovation that is happening across the continent it's very startup driven

you really see Bank of start or lead any innovation in financial services because they're making money and they're happy to stus SC right so when you have companies like like you know MFS Africa thr away pay stack um these are young startups that identify opportunity and then you know build platforms for to do interesting things so if start going to build something for the en today they can't right and so I think like the first thing the government or the CBN should do is to figure out how to open up the in almost like an open banking platform and then let startups inovate let startups build applications and S of

use cases that is not to down but it's B and that's something that we're beginning to see it's not yet public but it looks like you know in the next let's say 6 to 12 months you know we begin to move in that direction I think like you know you will see the utility and use case begin to to I would love to tokenize the in because right now the in is not right so I would love to tokenize the Ina you know put it on an L2 and then let's you wait um you know that would be really cool IM going from a usdc back NG stable Point directly into and getting people like access to credit

I yeah I agree with you all right second question [Music] okay so my here's here's my one of my key thoughts when it comes to crypto oring um again right yeah we need to keep Reinventing words so that when you

go to Central Bank that they don't think about like prev page but the first thing is that you know develop we need Global Capital to come into right there is no country or continent that has developed and didn't have Capital come from exal sour like China got money from the US got from Europe right now the problem is if you're going to invest you're also taking you're also taking on with current serious right and so if I have

let's say $10,000 I to give it to a Kenyan um small business if I give you $10,000 at the beginning of the year and then you con that into KY Shi when you want to pay me back the challenges that you're going to be paying me back with the exchange rate that is probably worth so I'm not sure like what was the exchange between dollar and Shing last last year anyone remember um around 115 118 yeah and what is it now uh 148 148 so if I give you a loan of like let's say8

of% in USD right because you're pending like earning 10 Insurance like you're going to need to pay me back like 35% or something from currency loss alone right so that's kind of like we toing like African currencies with stable CS coming it allows you to kind of separate B this as well right so if you had USD go to a bank the bank would take the USD and then loan you you know the African currency using the USD as a collateral right and that's kind of like how majority of capital comes try so that's of like one new St and

then obviously that expands access to toedit like I always talk about the fact that we as Africans are actually more liquid than people in the west right because if you if the West had to pay for the tuition of they couldn't get student loan to get a car have to buy the car up front to get a phone have to pay for the phone up front you can't pay installments like you want to go to the hospital pay everything up front like most people survive but as Africans this is our reality right and so we need to figure out how to create more liquidity on the continent I think like the reason why I'm so bullish on credit

and like reward assets is it changes the way central banks and the average person thinks about crypto because most people think about crypto today it's very like scamming token goow up trading but they can't talk about how it's useful for the average person imagine the future we by as an African you know you don't need to worry about like where you're from what you do because you're building like onch reputation and so someone I don't know in the west or in Asia can be able to give you a loan at 8% you know and you can have access to like way more stuff so I'm I'm actually really excited about like that that that

future for sure yeah great and to add on top of that I think it's also a matter of like you said um all of this tokenization especially of the African currencies is still very new and it's very easy for us to get disappointed that oh the in is not getting picked up uh we heard that the cbk in Kenya also wanted to tokenize the kenyaan Shilling and then people will be like okay it's also not going to pick up so it's very easy for us to feel like oh this is not working just because things didn't pick up within the first year yet we've been at this for how many years now close to a decade probably more it Tak time right like I saw people tweeting about like Ai and the fact that

AI has been around for two years and is so useful and hasn't done anything in 10 years and I'm like excuse my friend that's sorry because if you think about it like the first time like people started investing in AI was like in the 50s 60s I think Microsoft's clip paperclip thing was a form of AI I don't know if you remember that there was that what was it called clippy yes had like it was like you the history of AI there's been like like two or three AI leers right so it takes takes time and the fact that we're able to get to where we are without like any government support is crazy like when I got into to crypto he oneone told me 5 years later

like the biggest challenge to Africans will be like the regulatory space you know I would have been I have been very surprised so in a way crypto is where it is today despite the lack of support from through play all right yeah let's move on a bit um to something that should be fun to everyone so speaking of real world assets and tokenization of African currencies so how do we build wealth on the blockchain aside from you know um holding our crypto in terms of Bitcoin and ethereum and hoping that things don't crash now let's let's bring it down to the real world assets you know that person who does doesn't care anything at all about uh you know what

Bitcoin is what e e is and all of those things they just want to know okay how do I leverage this platform to build some wealth yeah so in my opinion is actually are pretty simple right average person actually has a fear of losing their current like value one has $100 and that's like the life you don't want to wake up one morning and like 35% is yeah yeah right so I think people should more African should hold St point and then more Africans should look into um Y St Point that's one of the things I'm most excited about they have companies like H that essentially toiz US Treasury

and regardless of where you are the same you can buy usdc you can buy USD treas and then you can earn 5 to 7% um annually um without like Rising your all right speaking of uh and still touching on that as we wrap up um let's talk about real estate and organization right um it's one of the things that are now coming up it's becoming the bzw word for you know uh real world assets within the blockchain Comm Community right so how exactly do we ensure that uh so I'll give you an example of a Kenyan context for you to buy land in Kenya there's a lot of huddles that you have to go through even if you have the funds it's

still very easy for you to lose your funds because someone might come and tell you that hey I'm going to sell you this piece of land and all of these cows here you'll get everything including the shed and all that yet they don't actually own that piece of land and because of corruption you might even go to the government and do a search and that piece of land will show that it's owned by seroni today however once you give me the money you go tomorrow and it's joku who actually owns that piece of land and you can't figure out who joku is or where to get him now I have your money and now you do don't have a piece of land so how exactly do we bring a sense of security when it comes to tokenizing these kind of assets that are very high risk quote unquote in terms of

uh it's very easy for you to lose it if you're not careful and also still maintain it on the blockchain mind you the blockchain is still a very skeptical idea to a lot of people so my response that I think that the only way you're going to have of land and property on change in a way that is going to be trusted is going to be similar to like CC okay it has to that okay right so the same way governments are say want to create um you know the E it needs to be the same thing whereby Ministry is

tokenizing yeah because you need a single source of truth right so I'm actually more and unfortunately I think this is again I said contr it's probably easier toize property and real estate globally and provide that access to Africans Lo okay that's because you have like more trusted institutions and things like that but then you know if you're going to do it locally as well I would just look and say okay which local Partners have been doing this for a while yeah right so developers have been around for like 10 20 years and then how do you take what they're doing toce put on CH

more right so those are the three kind of like vectors that one can think about either it's going to be like government or Global assets avable to Africans yeah right or you find local partners that been around like 20 30 years and then the blockchain company is a blockchain platform well established kind of multi decade really trusted local players I agree with you on two things yeah like such such kind of things actually need to be government L and also we really need need to have regulation within the space so that at least we're able to really move forward you know stop behaving like we are we are walking

behind a certain wall in a gray area whereby you're afraid that tomorrow morning the banks will be blocking all your accounts especially for those who own wallets and do onr and offr you know there's always that fear you're like okay will empa shut me down tomorrow and all of those things so as much as uh at the beginning of things uh we used to fear regulation and be like no no no it has to be decentralized we don't want this right now I think for this to really scale to the masses we need to have regulation