Venga Keynote: Riding the Next Wave of Crypto Adoption | EBC11

Transcript

Hey guys, welcome to the European Blockchain Convention and I'm Michael Strife and I'm the co-founder and CEO at Wenger. >> But what is Venga? Venga is an app that makes crypto accessible and easy for people who are new to the space. Very simple. We seek to empower everyone. And when I mean everyone, I mean the masses to discover, invest, and navigate the world of web 3. Over the past few months, we've seen a significant increase in volume, over 250% month over month. And by 2026, early 2026, we forecast to reach over

100,000 users. Before continuing, I want to ask a few questions to the crowd. So, can you please show your hands if you recognize any of the following? Show your hands. Show your hands. Show your hands. Okay, great. Thank God. This is the Sagat Familia. We're in Barcelona. What about this one? A little bit more complicated. All right. A bit less hands, but still good. Kakato. Why am I showing all this? Because all of these things are local. All of these things are Catalan. And today, I'm very proud to say that Venga is the first Catalan crypto app.

But why is this important? This is important because my approach is that we need to think local before going global. Elephant in the room. I am not Catalan. But ever since I moved to Barcelona, it has been my dream to build a startup that feels truly local and that serves the local community. And that's exactly what we're doing at Wenger. Our mission is to onboard the next 500 million people to crypto or facilitate and we're starting to do that here in Catalunia, then in Spain and then in Europe.

We're targeting the third wave of crypto adoption. So it's people who are joining the space right now, people who have not been part of blockchain at all. This third wave of adoption is built on trust. It's built on regulation and it's built on Mika. And all of these waves, one thing that they need is simplicity. Since 2016 all the way to 2025, everyone needed simplicity. And this is still the case. And this is exactly what we're doing at Venga. Our team, we're over 20 people in Barcelona. We're over 70 people globally. Most of the team comes from crypto. And today, I want to say that without the team, we wouldn't be here today. Without the team, we wouldn't be

able to deliver such an amazing product to our users. So, big round of applause to my team. And I want to take this opportunity to invite my team to the stage because who best to tell you about Venga than the people in the trenches actually building it. So, please welcome to the stage my head of product, Dario. And by the way, he's Catalan. Good morning, everyone. When people listen something about crypto, the first impression that they get there is something difficult, something complex, something that they don't understand.

But despite of this, some of them want to jump into this world, download an app and play with it. But again, they have the same feeling. They have a lot of different options. There are a lot of complex. They have to learn something, lot of different things before they start investing on it. For that reason, we built Benga, an intuitive and userfriendly crypto app where people can deposit euro change and stake their assets because our main mission is make crypto space crypto world accessible and understandable for everyone. And for the following year, we have planned to continue adding new coins and blockchains. Also enhance our current capabilities in our exchange. add the possibility to pay directly using crypto

with a card and also facilitate because this is very cool and very important for Catalan and Spanish people the tax submission and much more for the following year and why not the thank you >> thank you Dario most important one thing I want to say is that our product roadmap until the end of 20 26 is not focused on new products and features and services. It's focused on two things. Making everything that we're working on right now even better. User experience and design. And the second thing is education through user experience and design. And to tell you more about that, here's Julian, our UXY designer.

>> Thank you, Michael. Yeah, as you just said, as you just said, um it was all about creating a clean and sleek product that is easy to use and adopt. In one word simplicity. Um, we are not happy not only because it looks super cool, but also because everything that we build inside has been following good UXUI principles. Uh, this is a strong foundation for us to keep perfecting our game in the future, improving and building more. I'm not going to lie, we're not reinventing any wheel here, but we want to. In the future, we're going to look at the market out there and see what's missing. We're going to question the industry standards. As Michael often says, if everybody's going left, we go right. If everybody's going right, we go

left. And for the second part, it's all about education. How we going to adopt this new wave? Education has to go through UX UI. Um, that means for the newcomers in crypto, we want them to learn in an engaging, fun, and inapp way. We're going to teach them in a seamless way. That means introducing to new products step by step and only if you need to, we're gonna offer you blockchain tokens, any information that you need. Thank you. Gracias.

Thank you, Julian. I've been an advocate of education to user experience design for a very long time. But there's much more than that. If you want, we have more education. A lot more education. And to tell you all about that, here's Ivan, our marketing manager. >> Mercy, Michael. Yeah, we want to make users comfortable both within the app but also within the crypto space. And to do that, we need to educate further. But let's not doing in a boring way. We need to address the people the way they speak and where they are. So we first launch a blog. That's the first step. But we did it in a cool design and easy to read way deep dive content for both the beginners and more advanced audience. It's already available in English and we are also

launching it in Spanish and Catalan today. On the other side, we have a weekly newsletter. One that we spend quite some time building to be straight to the point to let the people keep up with what's happening in the crypto space in an easy and fun way. Most importantly, it's made by us, by the team, by crypto enthusiast for crypto enthusiast. Obviously, we're not stopping there, right? We have way bigger plans for the blog, for the newsletter, for our socials, and much more. So on one side we educate through content but we also do it face to face right as Michael mentioned we have an amazing team here of crypto professionals and this team is part of the of the education but we want to to become real thought leaders real ones

not just the sea levels but everyone at Venga. So we go and share insights to the students to the general audience and to the industry professionals we are doing here in Barcelona in Catalonia but also in Europe. So yeah we want to be interesting but interesting to everyone. Thank you. >> Thank you Ivan. Yes we want to become thought leaders but to be true thought leaders we need two things. We need trust and we need compliance. And to tell you about that here's Barbara our MLRO.

Guys, microphone. Microphone. >> Good morning, everybody. So, Michael left the boring part to me. Thank you, Michael. But let's start from where we began. In early 2024, we secured two bus registrations, one in Spain and one in Poland. This wasn't just a checkbox. This this was a huh our culture compliance first since day one. This mindset brought us straight into our Mika journey. Last few months it's been a companywide push to get Mika ready.

And I'm proud to say our application is officially submitted. It was not easy. It was hard. We went through a real transformation across all Venga teams. But it wasn't just about transforming and adapting to Mika. We had a significant advantage being a startup. We were able to build everything from the ground up having Mika compliance in mind and we did it. It was a real teamwork. But what next? We aim to uh keep uh building local trust while staying Mika compliant. Mika is a is a a door to also bring the same trust across Europe. But because Mika

doesn't cover everything we want to offer, we are already preparing for further licensing processes like PSP and more to stay ahead to evolving regulatory expectation. Thank you. >> Thank you, Barbara. So to finish up our goals, first goal to become the number one crypto app in Catalunia. Second goal to be one of the top apps in Spain. And third goal to be one of the top crypto apps in the whole of Europe. And with all of this, I want to say ready, set, venga. And I want to invite my whole team on stage for a quick photo. Guys, we don't have much time.

Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. Let's go. >> And we're going to do a ready set. Vango. All of us. What? Oh, sit down. Let's go. >> All right. One, two, three. READY, SET, BANG. >> Thank you. Thank you so much, guys. Come see us at our booth. Uh, come see us at our official EBC closing at our booth tomorrow and download our app. Thank you.

>> And stay for Michael's panel.