DappCon 2023: How Your Wallet Can Become Your Bank Account - Gísli Kristjánsson

Transcript

hey everyone how are you doing so as he said I'm gesley the CTO and co-founder of monium so what I wanted to talk to you about today is an iban for your wallet or how your wallet becomes your bank account well at least that was my intention when I submitted the subject for the talk a few months back but since then so many things have happened and if I'd known then what I know now the title would probably have been something like why we're not bullish enough on Defi and I going to share some of those insights with you here and why I'm so

excited about the coming months well for those of you who don't know what monium is we are the issuer of the URI it's an authorized stable coin essentially a new category of stable coins and when we were were designing the URI we set out a number of design principles that we really wanted to adhere to and one of them was of course it had to be you know web3 native it had to be controlled by your wallet signatures it had to be defi compliant but the other thing is it had to be the Euro it couldn't be a proxy for something else like the usdc is a proxy

for the dollar so to prove that uh we one of our customers a few uh last month uh actually paid his tax obligations in his home country in Europe with the URI so you really have to think about this as the Euro on chain okay so because we're regulated that gives us a a a way to talk to the trafi systems as peers and when you sign up as a monium customer we give you an iban that is associated with your wallet you probably all know what an iban is that's the

International Bank account number and you've seen it in your Banks now you have one for your wallet I am going to share with you uh our web client uh to demonstrate the flow for how you get an I for your wallet so as any app you're going to start with connecting your wallet and today this can either be a browser injected wallet or wallet connect we do that you get the address you provide the signature which proves that you're the address owner and once you've done that you can request the

Ian there you go so now you have two identifiers to your account number one the ethereum address and number two the iban and what can you do with a web 3 enabled iban let's go through that you can receive money from anyone in the banking system so to demo this I have me here on the right hand side with the monium app and I'm going to log in and add money and you can see this is my personal iban in my name I'm going to introduce my good friend artney on the left hand side he

still isn't onchain so he has an offchain bank account with revolute he is going to take my iban and send a couple of Euros to my personal web3 enabled iban write a memo going on chain and in initiate the payment when he's ready he's going to send it away now this is an actual recording of the time it took for the money to leave his bank account to the onchain euro it's 10 seconds and it's there in my wallet automatic seamless and easy

um so this transaction here you can see that it's augmented with some of the properties from the sepa system you get the name of the center you get the bank account uh you even get the message attached to the payment right and there's a link there to the onchain uh transaction where we mined the2 so why is this important well it never made any sense to us to buy money right it never made sense to go on a centralist exchange to purchase the Euro that's not how it works in the old system the trfy you just move money from one account to the other and that's what

we have you have an offchain euro in the banking system you move it to an onchain euro with monium so what else can you do well you can go the other way around you can send the payment back to the banking system let's see how that works I'm going to send one Euro back to my friend Arne I type in the amount I type in his account details like his ipan at revolute and using my wallet I provide the signature that essentially initiates the burn transaction here's out me again he is um

again a revolute user and the payment is now flowing in the other side right when it lands in his bank account what he sees if you pay close attention is my name not monium but my name because it's your money and it's in your name and if this was a Company the company name would be there recently we introduced the option of going cross chain right now we support ethereum gnosis and uh polygon and you can seamlessly go between those chains in a matter of seconds let's see what that looks

like so again you can see that I'm going to take 1 from nosis chain I'm going to initiate a payment and it's not going back to the banking system but it's going to a destination chain in this case it will be polygon and I can send it to an address that I I have going cross chain sign sign the transaction and we're off the balance on closis chain is zero but let's look at the account balance there it's there it's already there one Euro on polygon so that's going cross chain so what we've essentially done is

that we've interconnected the 11 trillion Euros in the banking system who now can freely flow onto a blockchain and from there onto another one and we support three as I mentioned today but we're going to be adding all of them all the layer ones the layer twos and even the non VMS so you can seamlessly move those money move this money back and forth without any friction what if you're a web 3 company or Dao even and you store your funds in something more than an eoa address of course the safe is the flagship uh wallet for that you can Define your spending limits in this case case we

have a two out of two uh safe wallet uh multi signature and you can use this wallet to manage your crypto assets but until now it's been very hard to manage your fiat currency in the same manner but as the euro is native on chain it's essentially just a stable coin you can think about it like a stable coin but it's so much more that you can now connect your um safe wallet and find the monium application in the save app store open it up and now you have the web client embedded into that wallet and you should

take note that you know now you see the save logo up where the wallet connection is the green light indicates that this wallet is now connected to your onchain Fiat you now have all the capabilities that I showed you earlier sending money across chain going to a bank account receiving money into your ipan and this becomes the easiest way to pay salaries for web3 companies right because now you can just essentially use the same signature scheme and whenever somebody wants to initiate a payout in this case both of the parties defined by this policy need to sign off and you can use all of the spending modules and everything all the capabilities and this

is the way we extend the capabilities onto the banking system like this is hard in trfy now we just take whatever the community has built and we plug it in with Fiat and of course the asset page of of the save wallet is going to show the balance here because this is all natively uh embedded I we have seen that it takes some time for users to fully grasp what we built but I think it's well summarized by a happy monium customer who said the safe and actually any

wallet now becomes your self soverign bank account and I think that is the way to think about it your wallet becomes your bank account and actually on my site I only keep my old bank account to be able to demonstrate the power of monium so to summarize what I've said the URI is efficient you can you can go from any bank account to a blockchain instantly 24 hours 24/7 and oh yes I probably forgot to mention that it's free it's completely free of charts there no fees you can use any wallet that you'd

like be it a smart account wallet an eoa wallet you choose you can use it on all the supported chains and we're going to be con constantly adding more and it's definative so it swaps into other currencies and and is a um def5 participant security is of course uh an important topic so in addition to being authorized and regulated it's 102% over collateralized in FIA terms as dictated by by our license and the smart contracts have been audited by Aki who have audited many of the industry's um

smart contracts including uh the safe uh one in to name a couple what I've said so far is to give you an idea into the powers of this infrastructure which we call onchain Fiat what I'm about to tell you now is that as a good web three participant we don't really want to be locking and siloing the user experience to our own web client right we expose all of the functionality that I've shown you so far as an API and we've even wrapped it as an SDK for a couple of

languages so when you have all of this power we can start to ask the questions what can you start to build and here's a great example that uh an external team to monium the bootn team they decided to dedicate two Developers for a month to come up with an idea how you can use this infrastructure and what they came up with was brilliant in my mind so the idea is that you are Dow contributor and you get your salaries paid in you know a

treasury token on any chain and you need to be be able to pay your landlord right and today if you think about the steps that you need to take it's a hassle it's just a mess so let's look at how this would work I'm going to show you a demo how this works With Ur ramp you start by connecting your wallet boom and then you authorize the application to connect to your monium iban account and remember one of the requirements for boot noote was that must not be no extra API for the backend so this is simply a web client it could

be hosted you know on GitHub or something else and here the user is explicitly authorizing Ur ramp to take action on their behalf with a wallet signature so now that's done so we go from let's say a Matic on polygon and I'm going to type in two I get a quote and it says 1.38 and then I type in the destination in in the offchain banking system and it's going to be me but this could be the landlord and now you sent it away this requires two transactions you go into

bridge and Swap and with that done you're going to want to initiate the payout into the banking system the offchain banking system now let's do that there's another signature here authorizing that transaction 10 seconds later it's done imagine what this saves imagine what you can the experience that this unlocks and what did I see when I when I saw this in my revolute bank account number one 1.38 number two payment coming from GLE not monium and number three the

reference there using amp right so and this actually solves a lot of problems for web 3 native individuals or or companies because you know if you go through something like kren you know payments get stopped because it originates in defi we are here to abstract that complexity away for you because what the receiving Bank only sees is my name and nothing else recently the safe SDK was launched and it's essentially a Powerhouse of

services that have been wrapped up and encapsulate it in a single API and an SDK and using this SDK you can start to leverage the powers of account obstruction to create gasless payments to have seamless onboarding and we're of course very thankful and humbled by the fact that the court uh SDK team chose monium to be the onchain Fiat and now with this stack what can we start to build so I

think you probably you heard about you know in the previous talk uh theosis pay card uh these are the kind of applications that we're seeing right now I think this is the next generation of D apps right and uh there was a big announcement at ECC you of course had to talk about it uh Under The Hoots how does it work so you have the cart and the cart is associated with a safe the guys from diagnosis uh pay actually told you earlier how this works and whenever you touch on a POS system using that card what actually

happens is that the card is instructing that save to move that money using the monium iban and because we're authorized because we're regulate it we can settle with the VISA system and in this case pay the merchant or or settle with the VISA so that the the merchant in this case the owner of the cafe gets paid so in this sense every C holder becomes a monium customer and gets an iPad and right now every transaction that happens is actually a u transaction so what am I trying to say I think we as an industry as an

ecosystem are at the point where all those components are coming together to create the next level user experience and I think it's no secret it's not you know unique to me but I think web 3 hasn't succeeded so far because of the terrible user experience for most it's just way too hard for regular users but now that is changing and what I'm predicting is that in the coming months and this is why I'm so excited in the coming months we'll start to see web 3 applications coming together that exceed the user experience of their you know web to Darling Rivals like the

likes of revolute and others so that's what gets me so excited and that's what I wanted to share with you and with all of this in place the only question that remains for me what are you going to build with it thank [Music] you okay so let's open it up for questions we have one question right here thank you so much and congratulations I have two questions um the first one is how do you make uh Revenue as monium and the second one is

a bit more uh on the actual monetary structures that are happening behind the scenes so as you said it's 102% collateral so I wonder what's the process here so you are sending people are sending utos uh somewhere and then the Udo e is minted so what happens in the back end if you could speak a bit about that okay very good questions so I think the first question is actually important because it shows how we're aligned with the ecosystem right so we can offer those transactions for free because of our business model we don't even talk about on and off ramping anymore because it's just that native transfer between the two worlds right if

you're an onramp or an off-ramp your business model has to be to take a transaction of those uh transactions however as we are built with you know we are fully grounded in on chain so we make our money uh by the safeguarded user funds uh that we store on your behalf so I can go a little bit into detail there because I think it's important when we receive money from the banking system and this goes into your second question we Safeguard the user funds so we're not like a Bank we don't even have the authorization from the regular to do it our only purpose is to safeguard the user funds right you know

segregated ring fenced accounts away from the from our accounts right and we do it in two ways we can Safeguard with custodial bank accounts with another banking institution and most importantly we can Safeguard them with in high quality liquid assets uh and you can think about those as government nodes with short duration which is exactly the the the the most secure of uh secure kind of money that there is exists and most people actually don't get access to this kind of money but now we're kind of democratizing access to that kind of money we are 102% collateralized which means that we

Safeguard the user funds on your behalf and then we provide even 2% of our own capital on top uh as a as a buffer did that answer the question I can go into more detail if you'd like but let's take another question was another right there gentleman sitting down um can you hear me yeah so um is this limited to the European Union or can I can everybody in the world now make a iban connected to the wallet exactly so we have passported the license successfully throughout all the EA member states and uh the European you know the the EU plus the European

economic area so all European individuals and companies can apply for for an iban uh that's what our license says uh so right now you have to be a European yes so we have a question up there gentlemen standing yeah as far as I know Malia has Emi license uh which is actually e money institution and now um so I missed first half but now you are talking about issuing card if I understand correctly uh does it involve another kind of license like isue isue license uh which you need to apply

to great question so yes we are the first authorized Emi in the world to issue tokens on a public blockchain we received that license in 2019 we spent the first two years of Our Lives educating The Regulators about that money could also live on chain the e-money license it probably doesn't tell you a lot but number one the likes of PayPal revolute and others use this license for two decades now um and uh so so we and number two we're future compliant with Micah to your question does the issuance of the card

change anything for us no because we are work doing this in partnership with gnosis pay we're actually issuing the cards we are just using this infrastructure or they are essentially using the API and the sdks uh to power the settlements for the underlying uh transactions so nothing changes on our behalf we have a question right there and then another one here the the front thank you super interesting um in your presentation I didn't see the point where you do kyc at which point in the in the chain do you do that yeah that's a very good question so we actually had a long conversation with

the regulators and one of them being we were pretty hard on the stance that we wouldn't be WID listing token holders on chain right so that would kind of kill the comp posability of those applications so no wh listing you can if you have u in your wallet you can send it to any other address uh out there however we have to be compliant we are you know we have the same AML conditions as the banks PayPal and others so we have to know our customers so when you apply for an ipan a prequisite is to have kyc right so we're actually like not

even we're the only Emi in the world that doesn't have a payment service license associated with it because Emy allows you to issue money but payment services allow you to make account uh transactions our argument was that the blockchain actually does that and we can take our Systems off chain uh offline sorry and all the issued money would actually flow right so we we're not um participating in that so um the we we are policing let's say money moving between the two worlds cool okay uh guys unfortunately we are out of time so thanks gizle if

you have if you have any more question where can you be found uh probably around I'll be here uh you can will be around so uh