Bob Reid on Everest's financial products and platform growth

0:18everest you can give an overview and the focus of the project sure we designed what looks like a decentralized version of india stack or the government of estonia which comes with some fundamental elements of biometric digital identity a wallet a ledger a regulated stable coin that all fuel allows you to do anything in society from

0:46mass market defy to voting to supply chain to anything wow well yeah we've been working on it for about three years worked with governments digitizing banks and now we're coming out with our first if you'll direct to consumer app ourselves wow that's great bobbin yeah everest has so many different lines of products and just to you know democratize access to all of

1:11these financial services i we i want to touch on each of those products a little bit but maybe you can talk about you know what are the sort of main goals of getting these financial services or what are the main products and who are you delivering those to sure so it's funny you have the grin we've seen a lot which is wow that sounds like the mother of all

1:34chains to re-democratize everything and honestly it's been one of our stumbling blocks like how do you explain something that big totally and what we've done two points we've narrowed it down to a couple of core things that we're starting to go to market one is fiat on reps right so if you want to get as i put it there's like a million folks in d5 right now by wallets if you want to

1:57get to 100 million or 500 million you've got to be able to two clicks from someone's checking account into a wallet into d5 etc so we're doing fiat on-ramps europe australia u.s adding about five or ten other countries around the world so that it doesn't take a massive amount to get there so fiat on-ramps integrating d5 those are the major ones we're going

2:24to market with right now yeah that's great and yeah the on-ramp is going to be super important especially just for on-ramping and off-ramping as well and that accessibility and you're right a million people in d5 is almost nothing compared to what the global financial system needs which is almost everybody in the world right yeah and so one of the major cruxes

2:47of the d5 industry right now is that pretty much all of the products are running on the ethereum blockchain and there's a lot of congestion and transaction fees are not suitable for people that you know are looking for micro services and people in developing countries you're looking at tens to hundreds of dollars i know that you're also developing

3:05ever chain which is going to be solving some of those issues can you just talk about working with the ethereum blockchain other blockchain protocols and then integrating everchain into the platform sure so everchain is a what would be called an l2 solution it's a combination between roll up or full side chain is what it would be relative to ethereum

3:33it processes hundreds of thousands of transactions a second for pennies right so it's essentially free what we do from there is we do a bridge out to mainnet which allows tokens to come in and also transactions to be verified in and out and we're building additional bridges out to some of the other major chains so that it should end up where a user can be on polka dot ethereum

4:01etc etc one of the you know you mentioned with the fiat on wrap and off ramp having like two a two click process or making it easy i'm guessing a layer two solution also adds a little complexity as opposed to just using ethereum you know by itself is that something that you have a trade-off in managing it's interesting it's technically complicated because you're mapping what

4:28happens on mainnet onto everchain and making sure those are synchronized you don't lose anything so in a technical layer to move tokens back and forth across the bridge you have to be careful really careful from a user point of view it'll be seamless they literally like if you're designing it so my mom can do this right literally she won't know that it's

4:50on ethereum or ever chain it's literally going to be oh a couple of clicks she won't understand that it's truly like you're pulling an id token off of mainnet pushing it over to every chain it's getting stored there and synchronized across like not visible there that's good to know and yeah i think the user experience being seamless will definitely is a must-have if you want mainstream

5:11adoption and i'm glad that you mentioned the id token there but i also just want to talk about the ever id and identity portion as a whole you know right now in this centralized finance industry it seems that you know not there's not really any kyc or identity and even sometimes the teams are anonymous and they don't even have their identities out there

5:28so what do you think of this identity part of moving into decentralized finance and then how are you managing that so look there's a bit of heritage i came from bittorrents before this a few years ago and we saw as a protocol maker you can make software and beautiful software and regulators can't say anything or do anything and that's fine yeah when you start becoming an

5:54aggregator or intermediary you absolutely have to play by the rules which are the laws that will literally put someone in jail if you don't right so the way we approached this was we started to your point with we have a product called ever id it's a it's a sort of the base product of our solution it has identity but literally only the user can open it so that means

6:20i have my driver's license passport proof of address all my other credentials that make up my digital identity i can share the bare minimum in order to do a transaction like if i'm doing a 50 transaction there's no kyc required regulator doesn't need to know it's that's anonymous and it should be like caches you're doing a 10 000 transaction as an aggregator we need to go and this gets

6:48we have to do the bare minimum to satisfy the legal requirements what that means like here's your proof of address and your name that's validated you don't get to look at their bank balance you don't get to look at their instagram account you look at like all that other stuff and so we architected so it's massively private even ever can't see it but still transparent enough to do that

7:10social contract of sending money and staying legal so that's literally how we've approached it definitely and i think that's the right approach and right now there's all this discussion about everyone just giving away their information for free on all these social platforms and technocracy using our information to sell it to other people and be making

7:28us the product right so sort of flipping that on its head i think that's a good approach for everest yeah i would say like what you'll see from us later this year is literally how you monetize yourself this is my data that's what dorsey talks about when he talks about i want to do twitter you have to start where the user owns the database user owns their own thing

7:49nobody in the world can open it's all their data and i will share my gps history to someone who wants to pay for it if not they don't get it definitely that's that's the right approach to it now bob you mentioned that you've been working on this for a few years can you just give a scope of you know where you're at right now what's launched absolutely so

8:12we started a few years ago and we had to build out different components of a platform and prove them in the field which were how do you do biometric identity attached to a wallet how do you then do programmable stable coins right so we like did a bunch of that in indonesia bri bank we then did kyc for central bank we started doing a few a bunch of proofs

8:39of concept that would show those four or five elements and now we're at the point where we're literally going direct to consumer we're launching that here shortly where it's here's a consumer-facing app and web where you can go my data connect fiat plug into d5 plug into centralized finance move money and if you'll manage your life accordingly that's great

9:04that's great and you did mention the id token previously here and i want to touch on that and you know how the id token has actually involved in the ecosystem and does it create a sustainable ecosystem for the end users that when they're using it in the platform sure so the id token is most easily thought of like a software seat right it's access

9:27right so if you will the bank comes to us and says we want to onboard 100 000 users and we want to have you create accounts and do complicated smart contracts with certain level of reporting that requires a certain amount of id tokens to be bought and staked and held it's different than if for example and end users in california and they go like i want to

9:52join the remittance club here i want to buy five id tokens because i'm going to send money once a month to mom in mexico or the philippines and so what happens with the id token in addition to access different levels of access gets you different levels of functionality for different levels of time right so it's pretty much software it also gets into governance right so we will have

10:19part of our treasury that's allocated where the community can vote like we think the philippines is important we think mexico is important let's go ahead and allocate some of those tokens and go incentivize more network usage that's great and you were talking about how you're working on the you know the end user part right now and that you need to stake id tokens for access

10:40is that already live or is that just coming in the near future here it's we're testing it right now so like it works it's not live to the public yet okay great to know and i was also reading that there is a credit a crdt token that's a stable coin it's almost like a two token system within everest maybe you could touch on that why it's in there and what are the benefits of

11:04having a stable coin as well sure so the id token if you will metaphorically it looks a little bit like a bond in a way right it will reflect the underlying economy that happens with all those different functions right okay right the credit token is programmable fiat right so it is i can take euros dollars pesos krona in

11:33and program them to be worth eath btc or pay mom's bills in manila right whatever it is and so what we you know again going back full circle of how do you represent a real economy real economy has you have to have a stable currency yeah you have to you can't have a massively fluctuating thing and yet you still need to have some representation of the value of that

12:01total economy so that's why we ended up with a two two token solution and the credit token like i said it's regulatory approved which means as like you'll see european central bank is now talking about stable coins that aren't based on real assets that right you they'll at scale they displace the credit market they just place the euro and that won't

12:27be accepted so again like going through the two years of regulatory hurdles is paying off definitely and yeah and i want to ask you about that but speaking of credit i wanted to ask you in terms of decentralized finance you know being able to build credit and if you're doing micro services and loans and things like that and you have a minimal amount of id or

12:50in some cases in d5 platforms it's anonymous is there a credit aspect where you're sort of building a reputation is that something that everest has considered and has in the platform yes so by default a user has all of their transaction history that they can share here's a it's a fun metaphor most people like here's my real wallet when they say

13:16a digital wallet they really mean one loop right it's like one of these cards whenever it says ever wallet it's this whole thing right so it literally is my identity card all of my loops my insurance cards and all of my transactions on my receipts and so i can share the receipts like oh you want to see all of my transaction history that's my credit score you can see that

13:40i'm credit worthy at this point so think of this which by the way on a ux level is hard to represent but definitely it's massively important if you want to get into sharing your credit stuff definitely and yeah great metaphor and now in terms of building out all these products for you know more on the end consumer side what do you think will be one of the key

14:02factors to success that you will need to have this mainstream adoption in the long term for everest so we've done the hard work already which was getting the regulatory approval for the credit and what that opens up for us and the way we designed the issuing and the redemption of it is getting fiat on ramps right and so what we're doing right that's the critical feature in order to

14:25get mass market adoption we can now go into almost any country it's everyone i know of without a secondary license and actually get fiat on-ramps so singapore manila sorry philippines mexico argentina brazil like above all of them that's gonna be the critical piece and that's literally just a matter of at this point wiring up the apis

14:54great and we're running out of time but how can the viewers learn more information and get involved in the community for everest everest.org is our website from there you can reach if you will telegram or just generally everest great thank you so much bob it's been a pleasure speaking to you all the best with this project moving forward i will definitely be following

15:19along and let's follow up in the near future awesome thanks ashton you