DappCon 2023: Gooddollar: The First 500K Users - Omri Ross

Transcript

hi everybody um welcome today and thanks for organizing a full session on uvi I think this is super cool uh I haven't seen it in many conferences um I'm going to bore you a little bit about our project but I'm also going to make all possible mistakes in this presentation I'm going to focus much more about how we build stuff rather than maybe Focus much about like more personal stories which are often very touching but I'll tell you first of what we been working on and how we sort of reach out so far 500,000 wallet users for for good dollar and a little bit about the vision behind it so this is sort of the main sort of uh in some way the main motivation for us to start a projects right there is

1.7 billion unbank people out of which 1.1 billion have actually access to mobile um and what we sort of believe on in terms of blockchain is that technology is very suitable for for for such that purposes which I'll talk a little bit more about it in a bit uh so what is goodar it's a general Ubi project Universal basic income uh with the idea that sort of any member that is just sign up for for application online in any way will just receive the same Ubi the same basic income as everybody else um this project ex exists for some years I'll tell you a little bit more about it as we go along our main issue is that we have about 60,000 daily users that been extremely consistent uh if you open that

Trader you see us on the top 10 most used desent application over the last years almost every day uh at least as we've seen so what's the idea for us the idea for us is to say that if we want to use blockchain for financial inclusion we need to somehow build a system that people can actually use and for that readers we sort of see it out as a three chair uh that if you take any of the of the legs of it it will totally die out so the first one is to see how can we actually created a permission permissionless banking without actually having any banking infrastructure the the second one is how do you create permissionless uh liquid infrastructure because once people that do not necessarily have access to bank receive

some asset how do they get value for this asset that people actually care about and the third one is how do you actually make decision if everything is permissionless in terms of decentralized organization and I'll touch a little bit about each of these stuffs and then talk specifically about good dollar um and how we kind of try to intervene there so in terms of per Mission L banking infrastructure the idea there is that you can tokenize any assets uh and we take here just one specific example there are many many different ways to do it but we focus a little bit about uh creation of tokens uh and creation of different roles to Mint and P and deal with these tokens as issues happen and not of least important to have some different access rights if you want to sort of WID list it for everybody or

there are any sort of requirements to to Blacklist and to deal with stuff in a more in a more in a more less open ways um I guess by now you can see that I'm able to to bore you very well because apart from working as a sort of cheap blockchain officer atoro I also work as associate professor and a lot of the stuff that we do here and we build here is also based on different research projects that we've been working on throughout the years okay so what do we mean in terms of tokenization and why does it even matters if you tokenize assets or not it's because as we know also from our work in the more traditional Market where we are regulated everywhere you want you can really know that custody and you know how do you actually keep the Assets in

the way that is sort of following different regulation issuance of assets and Reconciliation which means checking out that the books are automatedly correct in everywhere are big businesses and our big businesses that sit under a lot of Regulation and checking out on top of that if you want to lead to settlement there are a lot of rules around settlement a lot of counterparty risk that is involved with settlement and there is the issue of how do you even Define ownership of these assets you know do you require kyc do you require different setup to to build this up and from from our point of view if you tokenize the asset you kind of solve a lot of these problem kind of immediately right you have the ability to create settlements 24/7 uh you don't

deal with the counterparty risk because the settlement is immediate and you don't have to wait two days or three days depending on the different regulations on how you transfer the assets and the trading is automatically operational and the owners full custody of the asset which is both an asset and liability of course because they can also lose that once but I think this is really important for us because that means that we kind of create the idea of ownership without any need for for infrastructures on top of it I guess automated market makers are very common and very known assets for guess everybody that sits here I had personally the the lack or dlck to work from it since 2017 where we worked on the first sort of implementation tion of

this stuff with the banker team uh but in very simple terms when we look into automated Market making we say that if you want to sort of offer liquidity or be part of that asset you just need to somehow pull out a situation where you have a pool with two Assets in both of them you have sort of similar similar ownership of of of the underline so in this case here if we take a value of $100 to Ether you can see that oh sorry I'll come back how do I move back is it the red one okay sorry that if we have a oh okay so if we have these two pools we can have different kind of players all of them sort of not

connected to each other that somehow support liquidity on this pool so in this case here you can see that when the when we start in the pool are somehow reflecting a value of $100 for for each it uh but if for whatever reason uh one of the Traders find this price attract they can bite a little bit of the assets so in this example here the 10 to 10 was changed because one person decided to buy the first ethereum in this case um of course the price of The Ether would change continuously if we sort of uh calculated that but for the sake of their example let's say that they could just buy it for $100 then you can see that the pull afterwards is no more balance or at this is reflecting a different exchange rate which is maybe

closer to to sort of higher than $100 cuz if it was $100 it would be 900 it's about 120 and in this case here you can actually say that the the market has changed and now if you assume that both pools have the same sort of the same price and if there is a third person that RS Arbitrage on this pool let's call her Denise they can kind of see that now the price of it is sort of at least this pool is paying you a good price it was about 120 so she will sell back to the pool until it sits Balan again uh so what I was actually trying to focus is maybe not so much how this works as much as the fact that now you can actually create price Discovery and you can create the ability to actually

find the assets without necessarily a need for a centralized player to R it and what we do see sort of empirically a lot of correlation between automated market makers in this case we compare the daily volume between coinbase and Unis Swap and we see both the high correlation as well as that they both have daily billions of dollars traded in each of them so we can actually at First State toonize and achieve a way for people to have ownership of assets without banks and then we can actually exchange them the third thing which I'm not going to talk about by the way all of this sort of stuff that is presented here is somewhat related to different research that we've sort of published or other people have uh is really looking into how how do you actually deal with

voting into Dows uh won't getting too much into in into that but often Dows have the concept of one vote equal one token uh and of course because of concentration with a lot of this asset that can lead for a bunch of different challenges with approving of different uh of different governments decision uh I'll just focus a little bit that you can actually move a bit from this concept to try and create more Community B uh backed governments or decision uh for example uh if you still want to keep s of the one token to one vote voting you can create more Social Capital by Distributing in different ways uh the funds that are voted uh we've seen some cases where you have

still the possibility to delegate it which means I've given someone else here the right to do that and if I and then if I can revoke it immediately then of course maybe someone have given the the right to vote uh may be very compliant to what I want because I can just replace them uh but at a given case where you kind of have some some problems in revoking the delegation you may expect the social Community to in a nicer way another dimension you can go for is something more similar to quadring voting like the stuff that um that we've seen in some projects you will actually see the possibility of different projects to actually extend exchange also the value in the amounts

of user that actually voted and not just the total Capital that has been used for the voting uh and we've seen some cases of reputation voting where your reputation will have a bit larger effect on how much you will vote and then you get a little bit of both I won't get much into that but I said that there is still a lot of challenges with how we actually try to to work with communities and open sort of voting and decision to be much more sort of open for everybody but I think it's fair to say that we would like to achieve a way where there is much more mer meritocratic and Democratic ways and the people that own and choose it are actually the people who use it rather than sort of necessarily the people that have already just sort of invested from it only from a financial

purpose moving on I'll talk a little bit more about good dollar uh and how we kind of use these three flags in our sort of project to really support it so first of about going back to where we started we've seen a very large amount of people in this world that may actually benefit from Universal basic income right whether we talk about people that are on bank and cannot even sort of use sort of some of the benefits we all receive directly from being able to transact uh and also we've seen the people that actually just need need money you know regardless if it's banked or not and we see that about half of the world population live in less than $5.5 a day so maybe we can try and help a little bit there so how do we let the

money flow that way so first I wanted to mention that a lot of the people in this room and also two of the people here in this room unlike me many of them are staying here in burning and I would highly recommend you to talk to them if you're staying here as well and Mary and Johannes uh are are working on these projects as well uh and andoro contributed early to fund some of the research that has been done of that as well as the project already from 2018 um but we also know that you know okay I'm talking a little bit about Ubi whatever but you know people will have to create their own web through wallet that doesn't sound really fun uh and also buying crypto is not super fun and how do you actually do that and and how

do you even consider doing Ubi on scale so before kind of mentioning more of that we have actually managed to get quite a lot of people interested in the project and actually taking part in the project specifically while the slide is not updated there are more than half a million wallet that actually been claiming some of our Ubi we try to keep it very simple so we know that some projects uh or recent projects using some eye identification or so but we just use a very simple uh way to kind of check your face which is it's kind of difficult to try and cheat I'm guess it's not impossible to cheat but we were taking the pragmatic approach that if it will be very very difficult at least

most the vast majority of whatever is distributed going to be Distributing the right persons uh we had some money that has been staked and we so far distributed about $400,000 to different users um we also checked actually empirically that a lot of these users are actually coming from uh from some more developed countries we have uh almost 100,000 user in Nigeria and Indonesia and quite a few in Via and Vietnam actually if you come to our web page you can see some more live checks from the last 30 days of who use it wherever and this is sort of change life um there are different stuff you can actually look into the statistics here but I want to focus only on two the

first one is that a bit less than half of the people that use it have the less than $5,000 annual income so it's actually somehow seem to be fitting people that actually are in need for that and that uh we also seen a bunch of adoptions um so let's talk a little bit about how we building it and who are the people that we see as the real change maker in these regards so we've seen a lot of community members that are using it uh I'm going to do the UN advising and talk very little about personal choice personal stories there are other presentation which are of much better presented me within a community that can show you very very beautiful stories but I'm actually going to very quick focus

on more statistics and more scale information because I think that's more interesting for me okay not more interesting but at least it's more giving you a rate of what is actually happening so we have some Cameron Union technologies that has organized different Community Savings that are based on good dollar and we've seen a Brazilian entrepreneur that opened the secondhand shop which accepts and sells pre-owned Goods with good dollar and we've seen sort of in this case an airtime shop that was built and is used with good dollar and we also wanted to mention as less a Nigerian student that actually work actively on helping people raising money and get about $3,000 to share using good doar uh we have a bunch of more examples there are quite a few

but uh I'm not going to focus so much on that in this talk at least today I want to speak a little bit about how it works because that's maybe also a bit interesting and and actually we try to keep things extremely simple so our our idea has been that in in in principle there could come different supporters that will be willing to similar to a previous talk to contribute some of the interest that they could receive on defi assets uh to to to good other users and there could be plenty different reason for people to do it from the obvious ones people want to help people are willing to to share with social responsibility to maybe people that are not even able to use dii because because of different regulatory uh environments

on top of them that prevent them to use it and anyway have to all the assets without necessarily receiving interest so all of these could actually access supporters and just provide some of their assets and allow the interest received by that go to others so they still keep the value that they had beforeand at the same time the interest is then used to to sort of be distributed L at at Ubi and support the reserve as we have a very predictable amount of users we can actually check the amount of users that have done it daily we can have a pretty good estimation of how much we will actually be using every day for Ubi and if we suddenly be lucky enough to have this dumbbell triplate or quadrate we'll found ways to actually support it

further ourself because this will be fantastic news for us to suddenly move for say 60,000 a day to half a million a day so we'll actually support it for a short period of time and then later on customers can claim it with a Dap and this apps is very general so we actually have a mobile application that you can download yourself on your application if you use uh if you use Android or if you use apple uh and you can start claiming it yourself it's super simple to do we're working now on integration to much more places where these things are come and we want to offer also people that are using it much more direct access in different places they can exchange their value directly on different networks but they can also move it between networks so again just to kind of

summarize a little bit about the community in more General ways we have more than 183 countries that actually have people claiming from and we have support for it in 17 languages and we have a bunch of communities again please SP speak to Mary here she's around here and she will tell you much more stuff than me about actually working with these communities so it's super exciting uh getting in touch you know the project has been just to mention again constantly on the top 10 most used apps by user on on that price you can check it as we speak and if you want to help in touch please get in touch there are many ways you can be involved from helping different communities from contribute directly as a supporters or from being a foundation that want to

potentially upload many of this users directly to your foundation because we have the ability to support it currently we support two Network we run it on fuse and cell uh but it's easily integrated to new networks and can be also allowing the foundation that want to maybe also enjoy having U 60,000 daily users at at the same time actually support for something good just integrate to it easily and support a little bit with some of the funds there to their interest to actually move forward thank you very much I'm [Applause] done thank you um we have about 7 Minute for questions see the first

one uh thank you very much uh great presentation um I was wondering if you can go a bit into detail how the monetary mechanics work if I understood it correctly um you donate interest this is like one side and then you claim good dollars which is not connected and good dollar is the the supply is just growing so maybe you can yeah I would love to explain it okay I I'll explain it in your in your 99% correct not like 100% but just to make it very explainable but there is a lot of supporting information both white paper and others on on the web page but to just simplify it let's imagine to

start with we have 50,000 uses right and we receive in one day $500 to share okay why did we receive $500 because we have an interest we have an outstanding balance of people that supported a project and have staked and they received $500 in that day at interest right so say on whatever a couple of million dollars may receive that interest on daily basis so if you have $500 and say you have 5,000 users that access our system one day before then we can say that each of these users will receive about 10 cent a day right so we can calculate that amount and distribute it to them on good order I want to make a couple of comments here as well just

to make it a little bit clearer so we are not sure that exactly 5,000 uses will come from dayto day right but we can make minor balances to make this sort of oil work and more importantly than that is that if suddenly we are moving on to have I mean Itor is generously supported this project for a very long period of time and work very hard on also making it available for people and know people to know about it if suddenly the amount of Triple Eight or not this daily amount are still ones that we can actually work with and we'll be able to sort of receive it some help to support the numbers and in any way in the worst case it may be that the daily distribution will be a little bit too high and maybe there will be a very very minor unbalance that can be fixed very

shortly so that's about the Distribution on the next stage if you remember my three arm chair or if it's even call arm you have seen that you receive it but what do you do with that then we support amm on Fast networks like fuse cell that are sort of quick and not necessarily very expensive that you can transact on there directly and sort of receive inste of it dollars or usdc or whatever you want to use to be able to actually benefit from that is that answer a question it does to some extent I will think a little bit more about it and maybe come back to you it does to some extent I will think a little bit more about it and then come back thank you very much of course um I'm interested in a collateral

that you accept um which collateral do you accept right now and what's on the road map yeah um so that's a very good question so we we mostly accept right now sort of different sort of stable coins that are used in a def application have and and compound uh is to sort of receive some sort of Define interests uh we looking into different ways of extending some of that and we also looking a little bit about how it will work across blockchains because currently we have it in two different blockchains so that's also one way to sort of separate some of the security risk of each of them okay

how are people in Africa and Southeast Asia spending good dollar can they spend it from their wallet in store or is there a mechanism of yeah I mean I wish I could now connect my phone and just show you how it works but unfortunately it's not but first I highly recommend you to download the app and start claiming because you can see it but in the app we made it very playful because one of the key point for us has been to prevent people trying to find addresses and start working with addresses so there are different ways to sort of uh to somehow hide it and connect with it very easily in a very friendly way but in very simple way you can transfer sort of funds to a friend if you want to keep it directly in good dollar at the app or if you need to settle it in asset like

usdc because you don't necessarily accept it directly you can directly on the networks which are sort of a not expensive Network as I mentioned before like Fus cell and we somehow fund a little bit of the Native token to the app so they can exchange directly without necessarily needing to to get that sort of asset to hold and then you can you can exchange it with usdc if needed but or but in often you can just directly do it in goodar in the app and just transfer to someone there different play around with QR codes and other that you can make it a bit more easy so check it out answer your question I thought I understood good dollar until I heard you talk okay oh

I'm sorry that's totally my fault okay so I read your first white paper and it came across as Rothchild kind of trying to create the new dollar and uh it was all built on the notion of building a reserve that would back a floating currency called good dollar that's as simple as it as it was it was straightforward and understood now I don't understand why you brought up the da here how is that connecting to U Ubi and then I saw you uh presenting examples of being people financing projects as opposed to having Ubi on monthly basis so that kind of also going all over the map so I you lost me there

um so I still don't understand um is it still a floating currency or is a stable coin and what is what is your reserve okay a lot of questions I hope I remember all of them but let's start with the end the reserve is simple the reserve is some different donators you know a very large one of them is of course itoro are putting some sort of stable coin receiving some interest on that and that interest is is given daily to the people that claim daily right with the approximation I mentioned before in terms of the floating rate because we wanted to support a sort of an amm like asset there is a little bit of a bankor

like mechanism on how the price change with that I will not explain it now because it's will make it a little bit even more Technical and confusing for most people I mean we can check it out in the break if you want uh but but the idea is the price could change a bit but it's fairly stable so it could change but there is a mechanism to describe the change because the first idea was there we were really really trying to avoid the prospect of that becoming speculative coin so there is a lot of let's call it mechanism inside it to prevent you from making money on it a little bit which may sound weird for people that are working within this space but it's more about sort of supporting people to support it and provide it and and do for that space and

I think you had another question of where I confused you but I can't remember that what was it a the da yes so I mean this is a project about communities right and you also talked about in some of the stories that I mentioned we mentioned communities so of course using it as a transactional currency is very important because that's the big thing in ter of people and in and adoption but at the same time if you want to create this community I don't want to um who am I but I'm saying why should you tell people how to use it you know you just want to tell them hey there is free money you can get and receive okay I think I was told to to cut it off so so maybe I confuse Everybody by now but I'm used for that um thank you very much we

unfortunately all of time