Stablecoins, Mini Apps, and the Future of Onchain Commerce

Transcript

Bonjour. How's everyone doing? Thanks for coming. So, I'm Tom with Bass. Going to be talking today about the future of commerce, which I believe will be happening more and more on chain. So, what are some signals that we see around commerce and really the rise of e-commerce over the past couple decades? more and more volume going to be projected 4 trillion in the next couple years of commerce is happening online on the internet on the web today though there's you know slow settlement behind the scenes often this doesn't hit us as consumers but as merchants there's difficulties with getting paid quickly and promptly um you know can be high fees and I would say not so global with

how you can connect and sell your products or if any of you have tried to send money from one country to another country it can be very difficult or timeconuming printing out a form faxing it paying a $30 wire fee or not able to send money it can be a challenge and I think the high fees of FX and other things can also impact the ability to move money whether it's peto payments peer-to-peer or buying and selling things on the internet we believe that the future of commerce will be on chain because of some of these core building blocks which we feel are really getting ready in the year 2025 and so we're going to be talking about these today. Blockspace really the chain the foundation the bedrock layer local currency stable coins and then

importantly this new form factor which we're seeing mini apps which is a great way to connect with audiences and buyers and payers all around the world. So, let's jump in and we'll look at a few examples as we go and then have a great ability for y'all at the end, a clear path to start selling your things on chain as you participate in this new global economy that we're all building on top of Ethereum. All right, so the first building block, Blockspace, it's really the fundamental layer that makes this all possible and it has some really unique properties that I want to highlight today. So, you know, in addition to the permissionlessness of block space where anyone can be involved and the composability of all the smart contracts that are on chain, I think there's a few other things that are

really interesting. Blockchains are getting really fast. And so, the ability to have settlement of your transaction in less than 1 second propagated all around the world is very, very compelling. Especially for some of y'all that maybe are experienced with traditional finance, there's like T plus2 settlement. That's two days. you know, things can shut down overnight or over the weekend. And, you know, especially for some of our uh global neighbors in areas like Australia or New Zealand, they're often not having the same business hours at all. And so, the idea of a global 247 worldwide connected blockchain, you know, median transaction fees of less than a cent that we see today on base, and that's for, you know, sending Ether or sending stable coins or

doing a swap or even a multihop swap, less than 1 cent. and really really fast. This is a unique building block, a platform, a protocol if you will, to have more and more commerce happening. So, the second building block that I want to highlight is local currency stable coins. So, you know, I'm sure we're all familiar with USDC, that's USDcoin, or Euro, uh, EURC, that's Eurocoin, but there's many other local currency stable coins. And you know on base we've worked with uh you know uh over a dozen providers now to launch their local currency stable coin on base. And the idea here is sure you know many people around the world do want to hold dollars. There might be inflation in their local currency but also people do want to transact and buy and sell

goods in their local currency. That's what they're comfortable with. And so some of the ones that are having great traction on bass include the Brazilian Heii with BRX and the Indonesian Rupia with IDRX and as everybody here knows Bass Pulmon and of course in Indonesia bass unto Samua. So really base is for everyone and we intend to have a local currency stable coin for the 190 plus countries all around the world. So people consumers builders regular everyday people can transact in the currency that is most valuable to them.

But of course, because it's the blockchain and it's a self- sovereign technology, they can choose to hold whatever they want and transfer it, swap it, do whatever they will with it. And so this is a really important other building block that is enabling commerce to come more and more onchain as it's a 5x 10x better experience than before. And this last building block we're really excited about. Who who here? Let's do a show of hands. Who here has used a mini app or has uh or has even heard of a mini app? What is a mini app? Yeah. So, a mini app basically is an app inside another app. So, you can almost think of this as a way to get distribution and increase your top of funnel if you have an existing app. And

if you don't have an app, this is a great way to learn to get traction and to start finding early product market fit or signals from the market. And so, a couple things about mini apps. You know, they're quite popular in Telegram, in Farcaster, and coming soon to Coinbase wallet. A great part of it, I mentioned distribution, reach, growth, viral loop mechanics. There's a built-in social graph that you automatically can get access to if you build a mini app. And then importantly, really easy onboarding. So, the idea is like, you know, when you go to the app store and you get a new app, you typically have to download something and then there's a whole signin flow, authentication, maybe you have to check your email. The idea behind a mini app when that onboarding is really smooth and frictionless is

that you just tap it, it opens up, it has all your context about who you are, the assets that you hold in your wallet and about your social graph. So, it's a really great way that we're seeing developers overcome the cold start problem and bootstrap their initial users. And again, it can also work well for you if you have an existing app as a way to maybe carve out a certain smaller job to be done of your app and let users interact with that in a really uh accessible way to increase acquisition or top off of funnel metrics all the way down through retention, referral, bringing more people in and monetizing those users. So these building blocks are coming together and I thought what would be cool today is what are people building? So we're talking about, you

know, block space, we're talking about stable coins, we're talking about mini apps. Let's take some examples of builders that are building commerce powering mini apps on base. So we'll look at three that I think are really great. So the first one would be Crowdfund. This is built by Seed Club. This is the number one app right now actually on Farcaster. Number one mini app and it's it's great. It's basically like think like a Kickstarter or GoFundMe style of like, hey, you want to raise money for something. Maybe you have a business venture you're launching or you're a creator creating something on chain. Social built in uh and instant funding. So the way this works is it's USDC. It's available anybody that holds USDC. You know, I saw a stat the other

day. I think there's 45 or $50 million worth of USDC that's held in Farcaster native wallets. And so that's a great big total addressable market I'd say to start bootstrapping your app with, you know, people and liquidity of stable coins to start selling things. Um, it's pretty cool. Here you can see that you can go ahead and kind of have like a standard social feed viral mechanics built in. And I know they're working on a second version of their smart contracts that may even include some other pretty compelling growth mechanics or other types of uh community ownership and tokenization that I'm excited about.

So, this is a great mini app. Uh, a second one I'd highlight is Slice. So, this is kind of an OG commerce project that I think is doing a lot of great buying and selling of things on chain. So, you can see here, oneclick checkout, nice low fees, instant settlement, and you kind of have this familiar storefront interface offered through a mini app for people to come in and sell. And so, Zerox or matcha.xyz, XYZ, they have a storefront here through Slice that you can buy and sell things again right native from the Farcaster feed or the Coinbase wallet feed very soon. Uh, a third one I'd highlight, noise. So, uh, this one made a lot of waves maybe 3 weeks ago and it is continuing to grow.

This is an interesting one though. So, it's not like an app for buying and selling things per se. What it is is an app for growing your social engagement. And so the idea basically is it's like social payments and tipping all built in one. So as you onboard to noise, what you can do is you can set a fee or a payout for hey if somebody recasts your cast or if somebody quote casts and adds more on top or if somebody comments, you can basically put like a little mini bounty. So think of this as like microtransactions or micro finance. And vice versa, you can also put what your price will be if you engage with somebody's content. And it's a great way of basically incentivizing users to

engage with your content to multiply it. And of course, being a open economy, the, you know, creators and people on Farcaster that have bigger social graphs and more engaging social graphs, they will have typically a higher price set for these individual actions as microtransactions. And so it all happens behind the scene. If I see a cast that I think is interesting, I can, you know, quote cast it and add my own POV on top of it and then I automatically get some USDC from their wallet as they've set an approval. And on each of those actions, it all happens behind the scenes. So when we're talking about like more and more of commerce is coming on chain, I don't necessarily mean, hey, I'm going

to go buy my milk or groceries yet, I don't know, onchain. But there's a lot of other things really many or most apps have to buy or sell or have some value transfer that can be either their core mechanic or something that adds value on top of the mechanic and the really the unmet need that they're trying to solve with their app or their mini app. And so we looked at a few mini apps today, but it's not just smaller builders, too. Some of y'all may have heard we announced a partnership between Coinbase and Shopify where we are building commerce onchain for the enterprise. So, this is rolling out to merchants worldwide now, but we partnered closely with them to build a set of smart contracts that are commerce payment

protocol on chain that actually solve a really difficult problem to build on chain. And so, some of y'all may be familiar in the credit card industry. uh when you buy something, it doesn't just come right out of your account or, you know, cut down on the amount of credit you have available. It uses a two-step process called Oth and capture. So, first it authorizes, hey, can this person actually spend $79 for this t-shirt or whatever. Then, a number of things have to happen like tax gets calculated. They like double check the inventory, the shipping price. There's a lot of things that can happen between that phase. Then once it's good to go, then it goes to the capture phase and it actually debits that money from from the account or from the credit card. And so this has been something that Shopify and

really any uh large payment processor has to deal with O and capture. And we built a basically a escrow singleton contract with some really great hooks for these about half a dozen actions. And these are powerful building blocks that again because it's open source, open state and open standard really that we built, anybody can integrate with it if you are either a Shopify merchant or really just trying to build on chain. We have a commerce protocol that is building this next uh wave of commerce. And we're really excited to see what types of merchants are selling things.

So, I don't know if any of y'all have used Shopay recently or Shopify, but you can go there now, select pay with USDC, and there's an option to use wallets, including Coinbase wallet, but really any wallet to pay with your USDC balance on base to buy things from Shopify merchants. So, we're really excited about this one, too. again small builders but even the enterprise is starting to adopt stable coins blockchains and these form factors that help make commerce more accessible more borderless and more 24/7 really I think is a big component of this okay so just to recap fast cheap global block space available 247 worldwide local currency stable coins so that people can transact in the

currency of their choice and of course mini apps as a new form factor as like a force multiplier to help you in the app you're building overcome the cold start problem or if you're an established app to go ahead and get more users, retain those users, get front and center in the Farcaster social graph in Coinbase wallet where there's a lot of distribution for you to come and connect with people. So I wonder and ask everybody here, what will you build or sell onchain? And yes, LFB. So if you want to get started building on base with these building blocks, you can go to bass.dev dev or scan this QR code and we're really excited to see what you build and I would love to see uh that.

So feel free to hit me up. I'm tom.bass on Twitter and on Farcaster Coinbase Wallet. So hit me up to Tom.base and uh I'd love to connect. Cheers everybody. Have a great conference. Yeah, we have time for questions. Uh thanks. Just wondering about the local stable coins growth piece. I noticed the graph seem to be heavy on probably Euro C and the rest uh seems to be just a couple hundredk for the

Brazilian real stuff. How do you think about growing the the supply of these that they actually become more useful, more liquidity? Totally. You know, there's a couple different angles here from what growth means. If you're thinking about them as like FX markets and like uh currency trading around the world, that's a different kind of growth, I'd say, versus more bottom up like how many people are holding this in their wallet and using that to transact in a given week. And so the topline numbers might not look amazing in that case in terms of abs like raw assets on platform or total value secured total value locked but the people and the activity I think is a really great metric to also see. Um so just to set what does growth mean you know really we

want to help bring 1 billion people on chain and to do that we think we we we have high conviction that local currency stable coins are a big part of that story. uh from a growth uh perspective, one of the things that we're doing at Bass is hiring base country leads. So we have over a dozen of these now where they're essentially um community stewards and um uh community stewards in each region. And so you know we have someone in Brazil, we have somebody in uh South Korea, we have people all around the world and we're going to be hiring more this quarter. Their goal is really, you know, to both bring people on chain and to evangelize and not tell, but show the power of some of these things. You know, crossber remittances, sending home money, these types of

things. Um, and then also activate builders. So, find builders that are maybe not even building in crypto yet and they have a problem. Maybe they're building something with AI or agents and basically say, "Hey, if you're moving money around, this is a great opportunity for you to do it more effectively, to do it more cheaply, and to do it more globally and 24/7." And so a great way to track some of this growth is at stablecoins.ear. This is a community website that shows the dozen or so stable coins on base right now outside of like USDcoin which is obviously the largest supply. But um growth from both a bottom up perspective and a top down perspective. Partnerships with large uh providers of payment services in each country is also part of

our strategy. And so kind of a meeting in the middle eventually where these based country leads can grow great boots on the ground growth and scaled partnerships at the top and uh yeah excited to talk more about how we think about that if you'd like to. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the talk. Um I was wondering what kind of support do you provide builders especially related for the local stable coin initiative for example like I'm looking at uh at central Asia and just to get a license to issue uh stable coin there we're talking about at least 200k in legal fees. So do what kind of support can you provide for builders? And you're saying specifically to help launch your own local currency stable coin? Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I can say that most, you know, when I talk, when I think about builders, often we're working with builder teams that might be an early app or a very established app and they want to, you know, build their app. They want to grow their app and get more users and they want to monetize those users and earn a sustainable business or a living from their app and, you know, grow and get funding. That's one type of support that we're providing and that's both, you know, teaching builders how to build, helping them be successful, helping them grow with distribution and then helping, you know, connect them with um different types of people in the ecosystem, but that sounds like a little bit of different support than what you're speaking of. I think there would be people on our ecosystem team that could share more about that. And I think

part of what we've done is it's a totally open and permissionless place. So it's not like base is saying, "Oh, these are the only people that can launch stable coins." anybody can deploy their ERC20, but what you're talking about is the regulatory environment and navigating a lot of that from like a legal and compliance standpoint which is very very important. Uh I'd love to connect you with somebody on our ecosystem team that could talk more about some opportunities there because I know it is an important part of what we're doing also. Thank you. Yeah, you got it. We've got uh maybe a minute or two more. We're good. Okay, cool. Hey, find me afterwards and we can we can talk more.

Thanks so much. Thanks everybody for coming and uh I'm excited to see what you build. Cheers.