DAPPCON 2025: From a Sovereign Internet to Fartcoin, and Back Again - Julian Nesk

Transcript

Wait sorry. Hi everyone. I'm uh Julian Nesk. I'm Nosis D5 VD and I'm going to speak about uh how everything started about creating a centralized financial system and somehow in the rails we went on to do and trade uh farts theme coins and what are we doing at Nosis to bring it back to where it was. So let's start in the beginning. Um no started in 2017. We launched uh the first decentralized prediction market platform and it proved to be one decade too early. Um turns out that neither the

UX nor the infra was ready back then to mass adoption and poly market success proves that we were too early. So we had to pivot and we pivoted. We've built uh we became a cornerstone of Ethereum infrastructure. We built cow. We built the safe mood sig. We acquired and kept building nosis chain. And now I think things are finally becoming ready for achieving mass adoption. But what started as uh cyberpunk dream of bank Indian bank of exiting the system of creating a decentralized censorship

resistant finance financial system became into either an unregulated uh decentralized casino where people are just talking and smuggling with insiders to launch an exit coin to dump on retail or uh a bunch of centralized services that do provide value but do not really care about uh our values. So let's get back to basics. Let's bank the unbanked. And stable coins are actually providing massive value right now and they do serve two different use cases. In the global north, stable coins are an a UX

improvement. They really improve they are acting as programmable money. They really improve the UX. They are much easier to integrate. They facilitate access to a global liquidity layer. And in the end, they they do provide access to a fin to a pretty neutral financial settlement layer. In the global south, stable coins are actually providing another use case and they are um giving access to users or or people from censored countries or without with very unstable economies to stable value. And this is

really valuable too. But the problem is that all of these users are using services of that that are really centralized. There's a lot of teams that are building without really thinking about our values. Um, and they are gaining a lot of traction. And then there are also a lot of teams that are building thinking about our values but they are not really gaining much traction. So we should really think about how do we balance principles and usability and one of the things that we cannot really compromise on is self- custody.

So let's take one step back and let's talk about what the UX was like in 2021. Let's say you were uh having a drinks having a few drinks with with a friend on a Friday night in 2021 and you told him about the shitcoin that you bought in 20 and that did like a 5x overnight and you got him excited and now he wants to play in the casino too. So you schedule a call in order to help them with the on boarding. So you call him and then you tell them, "All right, first you need to go into this website and then you have to download this Chrome extension with a fox on it." Yes,

you are going to store your money in a Chrome extension. Now you have to write down these 12 words in a piece of paper. Yes. Do not store it digitally. Don't store it on your phone. Don't store it on Google Drive. Don't store it on a password manager. you're going to get hacked. It has to be on a piece of paper and you have to hide it like a treasure. And also do not watch porn on your computer because you're going to get hacked and download that game through this catchy torrent because you're also going to get hacked. Every time that you want to ape into a shitcoin, you will see a popup in your browser. That's when you are signing a transaction. And if you sign

the wrong thing, your wallet is going to get drained. So be very careful uh what you sign and how you do that. Yeah. Well, you really need to learn a lot because there are like some numbers and um yeah um how about gas fees? What are gas fees? How about crosschain? It just it didn't scale. This was not the way to on board a billion users. This was not the way to solve and create a a really inclusive financial system. Fast forward to 2025.

And now we have baskets. We have wallets that you just download on your phone. You put your face and then you have a wallet which is really soft custodial. These wallets are actually built thinking about the UX. They abstract away the problems of paying gas especially with account obstruction. They're safer by default. they are abstracting away all of the complexities surrounding crypto and they are mainly built for humans. They're not built for devs. So it's pretty much web 2 UX with crypto values and benefits.

So the answer now is why why could a user want to use this? And I could say that uh there are many reasons, but first of all, let's talk about the fact that new users, they don't want to listen. They don't want to listen to the word crypto. They don't they're already full of with the crypto friends shilling the coins on Friday night with a few beers. They maybe had money on FDX or in any of the exchange that went broke in 2022 and they don't want to know anything with it. They are sick of president launching coins that are going to go to zero within a week. They are sick of all the scammers. They don't want to do anything

with that. But they do want access to digital dollars. They do want access to a global liquidity layer. They do want supercharged DeFi yields. And they especially will want censorship resistance when they need it. So what are we doing at Nosis to make this happen? Well, we are creating circles. Users can now create their own money. Users will be able to have a universal basic income. And who doesn't want free money?

Users will be able to receive crossber payments powered by Nosis Pay. Say you are an Argentinian freelancer. You need to receive your payment on the US. Well, we provide a US bank account. Within minutes, you get USDC in your wallet and users will just see a dollar there, a dollar sign. They don't really need to know that it's crypto in the back. It's a dollar in the end. And what can users do with these dollars? They kind of ramp it in Argentina. They can of ramp it in Europe. They can pay with picss in Brazil. But they can also access DeFi ys. They can also borrow against it.

They can order the Nosis pay card and pay directly from their wallet without paying these abusive fees that they are currently paying on centralized services. You are a Brazilian living in Portugal like 20% of Portuguese population. You wants to send money to your family. You download picnic. You on board on Monarium. You just do an Ivan transfer through Monarium. You swap to VLA and then you do a Pix transaction and that's it. You send money to your family just five six clicks few minutes away moving money from Portugal to Brazil.

You are a Brazilian that wants to pay abroad like J was just explaining. You download Picnic. You order the card and you will get an FX rate on boarding on US dollars with just a pix transfer. And this FX rate is almost 5% cheaper than what you could get currently with by for example. It's the best effects on the market. And we can do this because of stable coins. Do you want to earn higher than five yields while still being able to pay with your assets? You can access these yields through seal. You download the wallet, you put your face on it, and that's it. You can earn RAM through

Monarium which is a traditional normal event transfer. Then you have Euroe. You can earn 3.6% on a or 5.4 in SDI. And you can have your funds earning a yield until the moment that you spend. They have this feature that is called recharge. You set up how much funds you want to have in your card and then you have everything else in your earning a yield on a Every time you tap with your card, you pay your 20 V in the grocery shop, it redeems 20 20 euros from A and sends back to the card. So, you're always earning yield up until the moment that you spend. And you, if you have not, I

really recommend that you guys should try it because the experience is is really great. You can also order Denos's pay card from there and also start getting cash back. And finally, if you want to have the first uh decentralized protocol, decentralized lending protocol powered crypto credit card, just use a you can deposit some ETH on a borrow euro and even get paid for borrowing on a ones chain. So if you're a dev, if you're a founder, if you're building products that will facilitate real world finance, reach out to me. And if you still want

to ape into the ultimate memecoin, join circles. Thank you. [Applause] Thank you, Julian. Uh let's move on to questions. Do we have questions? All right. Well, all right. Thanks everyone. It's good. Thank you so much, Julian.