Stablecoin Technicalities: Innovations, Challenges, and Opportunities by Edwin Aoki | Devcon SEA

[Music] good afternoon can you hear me back there all good you know when we at PayPal started thinking about building a stable coin that was going to form the basis of a new way to pay it was obvious to us that it was going to launch as an erc20 because after all the programmability the ubiquity the strength of the developer community and the breadth and the commitment to continual Innovation and evolution of the core made it an obvious choice for us to launch for a token that we knew was going to become a global Mass Market adopted activity we had this hypothesis that by combining the combining the structural advantages of a open-source distributed decentralized network with the kinds of innovations that can run on top of a foundation of of uh fast secure lowcost transparent transactions would be a game Cher for financial services and how we move money around the world because most of the time that money moves today using Technologies and systems like a networks correspondent Banking and wire transfer systems that are literally over 150 years old and when we actually launched in August of 2023 with PUSD we were pleased and actually somewhat relieved to find out that that hypothesis was correct the ink was barely dry on the virtual sort of press release that we did before we started hearing from Regulators from crypto enthusiasts from press from media uh and from uh uh normal customers and and Merchants that we were on to something and that was especially interesting because these are not audiences that typically tend to agree especially when it comes to things like crypto what we found at the time was that the uh promise of what we were trying to offer through that was actually quite interesting and the community started to follow shortly thereafter and that was particularly noteworthy for us because actually the road to launching PUSD for us was a little bit Rocky at least in The Last Mile because you see PUSD as a token is regulated and green lit green listed by the New York Department of Financial Services the reserves that we have are held bankruptcy remote in a limited purpose trust in the name of token holders and both PayPal and paxos our issuing partner are regulated financial services companies in the US and elsewhere and what that meant was that before we could launch we actually had to seek a lot of regulatory approvals and what that meant in turn was that even though it was widely speculated that PayPal was working on a stable coin for some time we couldn't actually talk about it to anyone until literally the day before we launched which is not great from a product launch perspective fortunately the community all of you delivered and within a few hours after launch you could move your py USD from your PayPal wallet to your metamask wallet you could explore transactions using your favorite blockchain Explorer you can embed PUSD into your existing environments and daps our friends over at yellow card integrated py USD pretty quickly and they allowed for the movement of funds from a venmo wallet for example to Yellow Card in Africa where the cost of moving money from 100 sorry the cost of moving $100 from venmo in the United States to Malawi was 40% less than the equivalent operation through traditional payments rails uh fire blocks integrated it for businesses so that businesses that wanted to take advantage of digital asset payments but we waiting for a trusted well-known and well understood Financial brand to be able to get on the bandwagon could finally do so in fact in the few weeks after launch over 150 countries had access to PUSD through dozens and dozens of Market participants in exchanges but of course ethereum isn't perfect yet anyway right gas fees can be unpredictable and are known to spike from time to time the transparency that we love about ethereum makes it difficult to perform certain kinds of uh sensitive Financial transactions like like payroll or businessto business where you don't necessarily want to expose the salaries of all of your team members or your intimate business records to the public internet and of course the ease of use that we talked about in terms of being able to bring PUSD online for us meant that it was easy for scammers to go and create impostor coins or other kinds of fake airdrops that would attempt to separate people from their hard-earned money and that comes back to all of you because you are the lifeblood and the power that actually drives Innovation and why we are particularly interested in tracking the eips around things like extending account abstraction around faster times to settlement and new capabilities that are bringing online in core the things that we need to extend py USD for payments we're excited by what's going on the L2 space that allows us to address some of the scalability and Performance challenges that I mentioned earlier and bring new kinds of tokens uh to light and we're excited in particular about being able to partner with the daps the defi applications and also more importantly for us the trafi companies that are really uh like sap and ey that are really set up to create Market fit for the entirety of global Commerce and that's one of the reasons why we are committed to and being proud to be part of this environment uh we have announced recently that as part of that commitment that we've just launched in conjunction with uh our friends at paxos and layer zero a bridge that will allow for the interoperability of py USD on ethereum to salana uh you can get that on Galaxy today and we think that that is going to extend and further expand the utility and the interoperability of py USD for both Commerce and defi we're just getting started so we invite you to join us in going and and revolutionizing digital Commerce through digital uh assets and and defi thank you very much thank you Edwin we probably have time for one to two questions right now anyone with any question this is fascinating sharing any audience one gentleman over there okay let's let's try this please catch uhoh this is the most entertaining part he watching I know hi um you were mentioning like uh like business transactions payroll where privacy is important uh what's what's your path what's your road map with pay or USD what where direct which direction you see or what you working on to to help for that yeah so we're working with the various protocols including um uh the folks that uh are are part of the ecosystem to incorporate more of the Privacy preserving Technologies into the substrate of both the core and the application layer of what we're doing one example of that um I know this is an ethereum conference one example of that is that salana has recently implemented a confidential transfers token extension which allows for amounts to be masked on chain and that is actually really important because that means that although you can still have the transparency of seeing that transactions are occurring things like amounts and and certain other details are encrypted and kept uh all away from prying eyes so that's an example of the kinds of things that we're working with the rest of the community and that we invite all of you to help us support as we really try to uh optimize these uh protocols for payments great one last question one last question anyone in the audience one over here I was hoping to have to throw the box like into the back yeah no one raised their hand all right um so just um you mentioned sap um earlier I couldn't quite get that can you maybe speak or elaborate a bit more their position what you think that's interesting yeah so sap uh announced uh a couple of weeks ago maybe about a month ago that uh PUSD is now a invoiceable currency in their uh digital Hub and what that means is that any of the Fortune 1,000 companies that are using sap zrp system today can without changing their back end start to invoice their customers uh with PUSD and collect that in through um us or coinbase or other uh interactions that they may be uh connected to now what's really interesting about that is that you know when we talk about being able to reach the next billion or two users um habits die hard and that's especially true in large Enterprise and so the more that we can plug into existing systems and existing ways that CFOs and corporate treasuries and accountants are working today the more that we can get that in there and as an example uh PayPal is now starting to pay its invoices to companies like ey with pyd oh suddenly we have two over there but we're actually I'm okay let's take one more uh the gentleman a blue shirt last one last one it's going to be a quick one um where are our box it's over there yay thank you if you can rate from 1 to 10 how decentralized the token well as a reserve back token where there is a single store of value and a trust uh and as I said a trust account that's there it's you know that aspect of it is not decentralized obviously the uh base level protocols which allow for the movement on chain are you can move py USD into you know your own personal wallets you can uh use them in defi so on that standpoint um there is decentralization there but when you get a reserve back stable coin um there's always some comp component of centralization to that thank you thank you and that a round of applause for Edwin