On The Brink with Castle Island - Isha Varshney (Celo) on Stablecoin Adoption Across Markets (EP.631)

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Isha Varshney from the Celo Foundation to talk stablecoins. Covered in this episode: Payments in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa Stablecoin usage and USDT The future of non-stable tokens

This is Wyatt, and on today's episode, I was joined by Isha Varshney, head of ecosystem at Selo Foundation. We talked at length about digital money usage in sub-Saharan Africa and global stable coin adoption patterns. I hope you enjoy our conversation. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guests and host may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement

to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to protect. in Zailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Isha, thanks for joining us on the podcast. Excited to talk to you today. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited about our conversation today. I'm excited to deep into a couple of really fun things that we've talked about earlier. Me as well.

If you don't mind, please give a bit of a personal background and talk about what you're doing these days. Happy due. My name is Isha Vashne. I head ecosystem at Sallow Foundation. Sallow for people that are not aware is an EBM layer to blockchain. And I've been head of ecosystem here for two years and then I was hired to be head of DFI. Prior to this, I have a really interesting background. Very not crypto-native. So did traditional finance before this. I'm an accountant by profession. Did MNA at a KPMG for a few years, did an MBA, did what everybody does typically after the MBA, went into traditional finance

of private equity. But the interesting thing about all of this is that I'm actually born and raised in Kenya. After MBA, I went back home for a couple of holidays to see my parents and there was this massive fintech revolution happening on the continent, specifically in that region of the world. I had friends that had never been to Kenya, moving to Kenya to do all of these really cool, interesting fintech jobs. And I was like, oh, shit, I think I'm missing out. And I never done tech before. So I just rolled the dice, took a sabbatical for three months, and I joined a regional bank that was setting up the digital banking unit, and that was my first foray into tech. We set up their digital bank, and the product is still a market leader in that region,

and then did a bunch of Vintech consulting work, you name it, from lending to wealth advisory, to like payments, and that helped me understand what building a product and building a team in the tech space looks like, post to which I had my own startup, obviously, as you do when you working tech, have to do something of your own. So I have a wealth tech robot advisory startup that was successfully bought out in a few years. This was, think of it like the acorn. Those few that are familiar, it was very similar to the acorn, focused in the Indian market. And that did really well. So it did that. And then once I got bought out, it was also COVID, had just moved to America. I wasn't allowed to work because the regulations around re-immigration here. And so had this

period of what am I doing. What is the next iteration of technology? And then all. also, what is the next iteration of finance? Because I went from traditional finance to fintag, and then obviously, Defi was the next obvious move. And so I joined Sullo as head of DFI, like I mentioned, and at that point, we just announced something called DFI for the people. It was a $100 million allocation to liquidity and grants and just encouraging the DFI ecosystem and Sello. And then as luck would have it, FDX happens straight after I joined. And so that $100 million evaporated very, very quickly. But I think in my mind, excellent timing, because I learned how to build in the bear. I've been in the ecosystem during the bear. Oh, we're only going to do defy to,

oh, what is actual utility? What is product market fit for Web 3? And that's been a really interesting journey, especially at Salo, because Salo, we're built for the real world. We're constantly thinking about not only the crypto-native community per se, but we're thinking about how do we onboard users in emerging market. So when our typical user is somebody sitting in Kenya, in Nigeria, and also given my background, it's really interesting to me, because then we're thinking about, oh, what do these people need? How do we bring them on chain? And bring them on chain in a way that we abstract the technology aware. How do we make it easier for them to interact on chain, without them knowing they're interacting on chain and what is product market footprint for

this user-based? And so we'll talk a little bit more around how the ecosystem is built around a couple of things that I'm really passionate about. But yeah, that's a little bit of my background and how I ended up at Salao. You have a very holistic financial markets background, which is helpful for this subject. What did you see in Kenya when you mentioned that financial revolution you talked about. And when was this also? So Kenya has a really interesting market. We're talking about 2016, 2017. M-Pesa is just starting up and it's just proliferating the market. And so you're thinking about in Nairobi, even today, I just carry my phone. And I know it's happening more and more in the U.S. where you use Apple pay everywhere, but in Nairobi, I've been

living this for years. You just take your phone and you have M-PAS on your phone and then that's it. You don't carry your wallet and you can make every single payment through M-Pesa. And in that region, on the M-Pesa app. You have Robo Advisory on the M-Pesa app. You have insurance on the M-Pesa app. Your whole world, it's like a super app. It's become this super-app system. But it just started with payments,

and so all your payments happened through M-Pesa. Can you talk about what M-Pesa is for the audience? M-Pesa is mobile money. It's run by SafariCom. It was essentially started as mobile money. What they saw in Nairobi and in Kenya a couple of different countries was getting access to Fiat was difficult. So people started trading airtime.

literally airtime minutes on their phone. Mostly people in the US and developed world have plans and you don't think about minutes on your phone or data minutes. But people started trading data minutes and they were like, oh, wow, this is interesting. We can make this into a currency. It's the literal utility token. Literally the utility tokens. So they made it into a currency and they got nominated into the dollar into the Kenya shillings. It's literally mobile money. So I can send you mobile money as actual currency. It started with airtime. It went into digitization of their So that's M-Pesa and it started with just a payment system. And then I think the beauty of this system was why it really shot up was you have

this mobile money on your phone, but if you want cash for it, there's little vendors, little stalls everywhere that you can go. And it's similar to the off-ramping problem that we have currently in Web3. You can go to these kiosks, they're called there. Every little shop is a kiosk. And you can go to the kiosk and say, hey, I have this much M-Pesa, can you give me cash? There's obviously a spread for it. And so most people don't want to off-ramp into actual cash.

But you can do it if you want. And then even to on ramp, you can go give them cash and then they can give you impasse. And how much do you need cash, given that impasse is in the system? Today, zero. Every single person takes cash. When you think about micropayments in Kenya, at least the way I think about micro payments in Kenya, I'm not talking about the coffees and the food and stuff like that. I'm thinking about the guy that is taking money for parking.

And so it's not ticketed like this. There's an actual person that's taking money for parking. It's 10 or 20 shillings. It's very minimal amount. 120 shillings is $1. So I'm talking about 10 or 20 shillings. It's nothing. It's fractions of the dollar.

And then even that person will take impasse. So every single person you interact with will take M-Pesa. The guy who's selling you tea and tea there is in a little stall on the road, selling it on a little stool and sitting on another little stool. Even he'll take M-Pesa. So I don't remember the last time I saw the shilling as a note, but that's just me. And so ubiquitous in that region. With that, because you digitize this, you digitize money.

with that came so many interesting use cases. With that, the fact that you could scan your phone records, scan your SMS, and every time you do an M-Pesa transaction, you get an SMS saying, oh, 100-chilling deposited or 200-chilling taken out of your account. I could then, as a fintech, just ask you for the digital records of your messages and understand your entire financial history.

I'm not asking a bank for your financial state, but I'm literally asking you for messages. And so it opens up so many different use cases. For instance, lending became really popular. Peer-to-peer lending? Fintech lending. For a retail user, money in that region is really, really expensive. I remember there was a period of time where I've seen with my own self,

20% per month is the rate of interest that you're paying and it accumulates. So you can imagine what that number becomes. On an annualized basis, it's a ridiculous number. If you're paying 20% interest per month. But this allowed other players to go in and say, oh, actually, we can lend money to you. And the rates at which they were lending money wasn't competitive to what you get money at from a bank in the U.S.

But to the public in general on the ground over there, they were like, oh, wow, this is so much cheaper. And that's why fintech lending became so big there because you could do impasseur transactions. Even e-commerce became a thing there because you've digitized money. And the minute you digitized money, and we all were talking about this in the word crypto ecosystem, but the minute you digitized money so much more is possible. And I'm talking like 2050 and 10 years from today. So it was a really interesting period to see that transition. Another thing to maybe mention for your audience, and I'm sure they're not aware of this.

In the US, you can go into any bank and say, I want a retail banking account. Most can kind of go in and say, hey, I want a retail banking account. In some parts of the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, retail banking is not a profitable business. So even to get a bank account is really, really difficult. So what are you loved with and you're hoarding cash in your house and crime levels are so high? That's why M-Pesa was so revolutionary because you're like, oh, now I get access to banking without actually having to go to a bank.

And it's funny, when I was working at the bank, I was like, oh, wow, we're going to set up a retail banking unit. So now we're providing access to retail banking to a large part of the population. And where we saw your salary would sweep into your account. And there was an instant sweep out, literally instant, where they'd sweep the entire monthly salary out into the M-Pesa wallet. So even when you gave them a bank account, because it had been so many years without banking, they were like, okay, we prefer the M-Pesa system.

So it's an interesting part of the world. So I'm going to play this skeptic for a second, which is if impesa works, why does currency need to be on chain? Because Mpesa is not on chain. Mpeza works, yes, but it works only in Kenya. And people try to replicate the Mpeza use case across even African countries and it hasn't picked up for many different reasons. Mpeza works because you have this massive Kios system that are on and off-round providers. That system isn't there anywhere else in the world. It's like Binance P2P.

Exactly like Binance. Why is Binance so prolifer in one specific region and not the others? It's because of the PDP. You have to know that you have access to your money and that they've given point in time and that's why MPesa works. Why are we digitizing? So even with MPesa and we're seeing a lot of stable coin usage in Kenya, and we can talk about that a little bit more. But we're seeing a lot of stable coin usage in Kenya is because the MPSA's pegged to the shilling and the shilling as a currency against the dollar is not necessarily the strongest currency. And that's why you need to digitize and getting access to dollars is more important in a lot of the world than most of us understand. So given that M-PACE has worked because of those vendors who will offer redemption, do you think that is the unlock to mobile money systems, whether on-chain or otherwise, in other markets, or do you think there will be institutionalized on ramping off-ramping, which will happen first? That's a really good question. Depends on which markets.

You think it'll be different in each one? I think it'll depend on every market. Also, I think we were talking about 2015. Technologies move so much. I want to say 70% of my personal financial transactions happen online now, as opposed to actually physical interactions. So if you don't have off-ramping in the physical world, not so critical now. But again, it depends on which country and which region. I'm sure some of the emerging markets having vendors and off-run providers on the ground, little kiosks everywhere will be critical for mass adoption. But that's just my take. Who knows? Yeah, it's interesting because it's always hard to imagine here in the U.S.

And I guess the reason for that is because each leg of our transaction is handled. We have Venmo for peer to peer and we have payment at a storefront. But getting cash is still arguably a bit more of a pain than it should be in my life, for example. I don't know if you've the same experience. I don't remember the last time I used cash, to be honest. But again, I mean, you're removing cash from your financial transactions completely in the U.S. and in some of the more developed world.

but cash is king in a lot of countries even now. And so in those countries where cash is king and where you're actually doing a lot of daily transactions in cash, you still need offer-run providers that will go from any web-free currency or even stable coin to cash so that at least having that as an option is important to onboard users. And then eventually when all your transactions and all your financial transactions go online or on chain,

then it won't matter. I've also learned that consumer behavior changes very quickly if it's convenient and inexpensive. If it reduces cost, time, effort, consumer behavior is easier to change than you would think. Definitely, especially if there's not a great alternative. So given that experience set, did Selo find you, or did you find Sello? Or how did that come about? I tell people this job was made for me. So I was exploring Web3 and I did this fellowship program that Getscoin used to run called Kernel. And one of the co-founders of Sello came to give an intro to Sello, just what he thought about

Web3. He wasn't even talking about Selle. He was talking about Sully. He was talking talking about Robf 3A and the Mycelium Network and things like that. If you've ever heard Sebs, he's one of the co-founders of Sello. If you've ever heard any of his talks, you will have heard mycelium and how everything is interconnected and how financial systems are all interconnected and how we need to generate this whole new world where we think differently from the existing structures. And so he came on and I was like, oh, that's a really good way to think about financial systems and how we can reimagine financial systems. And the Sullo team was also doing this kernel cohort. And so I reached out to them once he came on and I was like, oh, I'd love to

learn more and they were like, oh, cool, that we've fatted it. They were like, oh, you have a bunch of developing country experience and we're looking for someone. Would you consider interviewing? And the rest, as I say, is history. It's a great fit. I know the regions that we target really well and work in those regions. So it's like a really great fit. My mycelium exposure is the extent of a Netflix documentary called Fantastic Fungi, but I'll have to get up to speed on the financial network side of it. He describes it similar to how financial networks could be like, Fuggeri network, how it's all data connected. Yeah, I buy that.

It's an interesting conversation. So what was Sellow's mission when you joined? And how has it evolved or stayed the same? So we're very mission-focused chain, and our mission is prosperity for all. And I don't think we've changed the mission. So when you think about prosperity for all, everybody has a different take on this. And you could have prosperity for all. The way I kind of understand it is prosperity for all translates into financial inclusion.

Just because I'm a finance background. To me, I take it in it from a financial perspective. But prosperity for all from a different perspective is also very refy. And so the solo mission is essentially built and design for real world adoption of Web 3 that unlocks this mission, prosperity for all. And when you think about real world adoption, because the chain, we thought about emerging markets as a really big part of the world, the chain is built in a way that is focused on inclusivity. So we're very mobile first.

So all applications in Salo are mobile focused. We have things such as fee abstraction. So gas in the ecosystem can be paid in stable coins because we understand. My first crypto transaction didn't go through and I was sweating because I was like, oh, why is this not going through? And then I realized, oh, I need another token for gas. But if you are in this ecosystem or when you're onboarding to this ecosystem, let's suppose you have only one wallet and there's stable coin on that wallet.

You should be able to do the transaction with just a stable coin. And that's the thought behind seller. Okay, you can have one wallet with just a USDT or a USDC. and then the transaction will go through because you can pay for gas. So pre-extractions are a really big thing. There's ultra-green money, which is inbuilt into the chain, which is essentially like portion allocation of the gas fee goes towards carbon offsetting. Like I mentioned, phone number mapping is really important

because we think most of the world interacts with technology through their mobile phone as opposed to like a browser or laptop. The chain is built for, like I said, everyday use, everyday user, but also the technology is really frontier. We were the first POS chain, and we're at this really cool intersection. of frontier tech and real-world use case. And I think that's where Salo will always remain. I'm curious how you guys look at the balance, given you're in the stable coin space at a global level between trying to provide better native systems for people globally versus some would say

there's value to offering dollars to people globally as an alternative to their local financial systems. So how do you strike the balance and which if one of the two is more mission aligned with what you guys are doing? That's a really good question. I don't think we are picking a side because I don't think there's a side to be picked. You need dollars in the world, and access to dollars is really important for users in specific countries. Nigeria, for instance, is a really good example for that where your currency kind of fluctuates on a weekly basis. It's a 20, 30 percent fluctuation on a weekly basis. All of us talk about Bitcoin to be the store of value, but actually for some people in the world, dollars their store

of value. So having nominated stablecoins is really important in an ecosystem. And so like I mentioned, we have NATO USDC and USDT and CUSD as dollar denominated stable coins that are all gas currencies in the ecosystem. But it's interesting when you provide access to dollars, then a lot of really interesting cool applications get built on top of it. And then users then want to go, okay, so if dollars is store of value, but we actually need to do everyday transactions. And so you need their local currencies for everyday transactions. So currently in the ecosystem, we have, I think, 22 plus native stable coins. And then I think that's between 12 to 14 different. currencies. And so a user can store value in dollar, but then can move that to their local currency

and then use it for everyday transactions. And then the other thing that I think most of us don't think about is if you just have dollars in any ecosystem, then how does lending happen? Because if you're in markets where your local currency devaluates on a regular basis, then not only are you paying interest on that loan, you're also playing currency fluctuation, which becomes really expensive sometimes. So definitely no local currencies for some of these interesting use cases. is like lending. Have you historically faced any pushback from nations or local regulators when you're potentially offering dollars to people globally? Not yet. We're also committed to working with jurisdictions in every region that we operate and we prioritize for compliance and benefits of

users. But to be honest, we are not a stable coin issuer per se. We're just an ecosystem where stablecoin that are issued by other entities live within our ecosystem. Yeah, it makes sense. We're also really committed to making sure that we do our due diligence when anything launches in the ecosystem to make sure that they're talking at regulators are in specific conversations with them. Why do you think non-USD stable coins haven't emerged at broader scale yet? Depends on what you think is broader scale.

So firstly, there were not so many non-USD stable coins a year ago. I think a lot more issuers are issuing non-USD stable coins. Within the last six to 12 months, I've seen a lot more non-USD stable coin. I also think that what is the product market fit for non-USD stable coins is lending and the FX markets. And for some of this to be true, it becomes a world in which you have to make sure that there's a lot of depth of liquidity for this to make sense at all.

And you have to explain to the world what the use cases for this are. So when you think about FX, when I used to live in, for instance, Africa when I was working in Africa, if you needed to go from the shilling to the Ghani and CD, you had to go a shilling dollar, and then you would spread there and then dollars Ghani and CD. But now there's on chainstable coins where you can go directly. Mentor Protocol is in protocol in the ecosystem, which is doing a lot of FX. They were on the podcast last week. That's perfect. I love that team.

They're a really great team, and I'm sure they talked about how you can go from one currency to the other without going through the dollar and things like that. I think are revolutionary. I just don't think the world's caught on yet. I think with some of this, patience is important. We're a little bit ahead of what people are thinking about long term. And again, depth of liquidity is really important. So for this to be relevant and true, you would need institutional capital providers to come in

and deepen liquidity. And I don't think that's happened yet. And I think they're coming slowly, slowly. they're looking at all of those slowly. Yeah, I agree. I think it'll be lucrative. It's so great. It's all on chain. Cost of transacting is what nothing. Gas is nothing. And products are incredible. And it's also 24-7. The FX markets on chain are 24-7. Imagine trading that can happen. Do you guys have an interest in also pursuing non-fiat-dominated stable coins or stable-coin like products that might be tied to real estate or equities or other asset classes like that?

I think those are really interesting. I remember the promise of RWA's early days of all of this, tokenization of their assets. Again, for some of this, I really believe truly that liquidity is a key driver. Am I going to tokenize a random mining asset and I'm expecting retail to buy it? Not really. I think retail will buy a small slice in that whole fire. So with the institutional capital providers looking at Web 3,

more scrutiny here and Web 3, more liquidity coming to Web 3, I think, could all of these things interesting. Like I said, on-chain markets are 24-7, which is not the case in any other markets. So I think it'll be good to have tokenized versions of these assets, but who's buying these assets is a really important to look at. From what we're seeing, it feels like the remittance apps will be an early catalyst in that all of a sudden you'll have real inflections and volume of different stable coins. And once you have that, that starts to tease in the liquidity providers because they're like, okay, it's going to be lucrative if I can take the other side of this very hefty trade, and then maybe they'll stick around and start to stand up

other markets. Because the point you made, you can literally stand up FX markets, which will be high volume relative to an amount of liquidity provided and should be a higher return. Absolutely. Just speaking of Remedance, I want to say remitence is a use case in my mind is the perfect product market fit for Web 3, where we are right now and steal the coins for where we are right now. To give you an example, we talked about Africa focus for sellout for so much, and we haven't talked about one of our main products, which is Opera MiniPay. It's a collaboration with Opera, which is a browser product. We integrated a stablecoin wallet into the browser, and we've onboarded 7 million plus users on that browser product. It's a stablecoin only

wallet. So you can only have USDC, USDT, and CUSD on that wallet. Seven million plus people have onboarded to it. And then recently we went and made it into a standalone app. So it's currently available to all of you on Android or iOS and you can download it. And in my mind, that will be the biggest catalyst for crosswater remittance. I mean, to be honest, the other day I sent my mom just on Mother's Day. I couldn't find flowers online, and it was really late at night that I forgot Mother's Day. I'm not great. And daughter, just sent her some money saying, hey, can you please buy yourselves flowers today?

It's super simple. It settled in one second. It was great. And I'm talking about a really trivial use case. But remitants just in and out of Africa is double-digit million on an annual basis. And so if you can capture even a slice of this market, that's big money. We've done cross-border remitants of the traditional sons. In an out of Africa, it takes seven days sometimes through the banking network,

and the spreads are ridiculous. And if you're doing this on stable coins, you have no spreads. It's cents on the dollar for gas, and then you're done. So I'm really excited about the mini-pay standalone app. I would imagine a lot of the remitence piece gets captured in there. I was going to touch on opera. So you brought it up in timely fashion. With your business background, do you think adoption will be more so,

through an opera or a finance or yellow card product that to some degree are accounts that are a little bit more freeform where they give you access and it's a little bit of do what you like with it or more of the transfer wise felix type experience where it's a purpose-built remittance product that links with existing accounts so it's funny you've mentioned opera finance and yellow card is competitors but it's interesting that opera actually uses yellow card and finance for on and all about. I meant a group, though. I shouldn't say I don't think they're competitors. I think they have parallels. They're all like bundled into one product for some of your audience that may not be familiar. In some of the markets that we're talking about, when you show somebody a dollar,

when you show them a dollar of fiat currency, they don't know what that is. For them, dollar is USDT. Really, in Nigeria, there's some areas where they think of dollar as USDT. In these areas, do I think the transfer wise will come on top? Maybe not. Do I think products like, Opera will come on top? Absolutely. So it depends market to market. But I also think that this market is so big, there is space for everybody to play. It's also just a world in which a lot of this money movement, it's a bunch of trust. So opera specifically, I think they're well positioned because they have trust with the users from their browser product already. It's not a brand new branding going into the market and saying, hey, use us for cross-border remittance. People trust them. So I think

we have a really good finding chance. But I also think that there's space for everybody to play. This is a big market. I think if transfer wise comes up tomorrow, and I don't know if they're already doing it, I'm sure they're looking at this already, but if transfer wise comes up tomorrow and says, hey, we'll do cross-border remittance through stable coins, I think there's a one which everybody plays in this market. Different markets, I think will have different people, different products being taken up. In Kenya and Nigeria and some of these markets, are you seeing a lot of business USDT accounts? Yeah. It's not us. There's just so much. Already, sub-Saharan Africa, I will club. Sub-Saharva and Africa does so much cross-border settlement with Asia and a lot.

I want to say 70% of that settlement happens in USDT. If I don't have my facts right and again, it's not official numbers that I'm getting. But just based what I know, 70% of that settlement happens in USDT. So it's funny you say this. We had launched MiniPay as a retail product and what we learned was some of these people that were settling B2B settlements used to come and park some of their USDT on MiniPay when it was just a product in the browser, in Africa only, because the yield on USD on MiniPay was really high.

What was the yield? It was a ridiculous amount just to be onboard. And we were, again, for context, the average balance on MiniPay wallet in Africa is between $10 plus minus. So these balances aren't very high. So when you give them like a yield of hypothetically, a 25% per annum or more, that yield is not too much for the retail user.

But when you look at it from a commercial perspective, if you're getting 25% on a dollar denominated stable coin, that's a lot. Nobody's giving you 25% yield on the dollar. And so we saw a bunch of people parked their money. Like the B2B settlers and cross-border payments guys, some of their money into the mini-pay accounts. Then we were like, oh, we're going to have cap upper limits to balances for this yield activity. But it was great to see. People found it very organically. And are you seeing financial products come on chain in those local economies? Yeah. So I'll give you an example. We have a protocol in the ecosystem called Haraka that does. So again, I'm a really big proponent of meet users where they're at and not give them like, hey, this is a solution we've come up with. You're going to have to fit your behavior to this solution. And so in these regions, for instance, Sarko's or savings and lending groups are very popular.

And they're called different things. In India, they're called kitties. in Kenya they're called Sarkos, and these groups are very prevalent across emerging markets. And so we have a protocol in the ecosystem called Heraka, which does microloans, and then now starting savings.

So essentially, it's just like a savings and lending group where you save and lend within a specific user group. So you, me, and three of our friends, form a group, and we save and lend within each other. And that's how it's done. It's behavioral that's happened

across generations in these regions. And so when you bring that behavior on chain, it becomes really easy. Then you can do settlement You can do accounting. Everything is on change. So Heraka, I think, is a really good example of that. We're seeing people do employee payments. There's a protocol called Franklin that is doing stable coin payments for payroll. One of my favorite examples that just came online in the ecosystem is this protocol called Bando. And you can buy gift cards to places like Target, Chipotle, Starbucks in the U.S., but very specific to even the regions that we service.

So in Kenya and South Africa, you can get a gift card to ShopRite, which is the table. target of that region. And they have similar things than South America. So really interesting products are coming on chain. Some of them financial, some of them non-financial. I'm going to give a shout out of one specific product that is non-financial that I'm very fond of in the ecosystem. It's a music streaming app called a Mundo. So think of it like Spotify. The reason it's on mini pay right now is because you can pay on a daily basis. You can take a daily subscription. And again, for you and me, this seems ridiculous. Like, why would I want a daily subscription to a music streaming app? But for some of regions that we're talking about, the monthly music streaming subscription is really expensive.

So there's some days you can afford it and some days you can't afford it. And so the fact that you can break it down to such minute levels and do it on chain with a little bit of a stable coin is really interesting. And in Bundo, if you guys are listening, has excellent music. It's Afrobeat. I love it. It's what's playing in the background when I'm doing deep focused work. But really great. We're constantly thinking about on chain financial. But like when some of these use cases come online where you're like, hey, there's a music streaming app that I could pay with stable coins. That's cool. I want to ask you one more question as we close out here, which was given all this framing you've offered, I'm a major believer that where we'll see value in this

on-chain economy is in these real use cases, real assets. Do you think blockchain platforms applications need to have native tokens or tokens for themselves? Do you think that we need to have these, I would call them internet money tokens that the industry has been known for for a long time? Or do you think eventually that fades into the background? Funny you call them internet money. My mom calls that magic bean money. So I don't know whether we should have them or not. I know that in my ecosystem, this seller token is there for decentralized governance. And I think that's really, really critical. I think one of the things that we're trying to do in some form or the other and whether you explicitly say it or not,

is rebuild how any organization works or how financial systems work. That's why we're all in Web3. We're trying to reimagine some of this. I think decentralized governance is one of those areas, but I'm really like, this is a really cool thing. I believe in collective intelligence. And so decentralized governance is a really good example

of collective intelligence. So the seller's token, honestly, one of the primary reasons to have the seller token is decentralized governance, where the ecosystem and everybody in the community decides what is the future for the chain. So, for instance, to give you a really good example, we went from a layer one blockchain to a layer of two blockchain. We successfully migrated to a layer of two blockchain. But every single decision for the infrastructure was done in public to decentralized government. And so every stack

put out massive forum proposals on the seller forum to say, hey, this is why you should pick us. So we had proposals from OB stack, from Arbitrum, from Polygon ZK, from Matters, from Matters, labs and things like that. And there was such an incredible healthy discussion in the community around which stack we should pick. So it wasn't centralized decision. It wasn't SELO Foundation or SELA LAP taking the decisions. It's the community came together. And I think some of the things that came up in some of those community decisions, I was like, oh, wow, we weren't even thinking about this. And so I think collective intelligence is really, really interesting. Also, what it did was we've heard from different sources. If you're picking a Lair 2 stack, Sallow forum is like Wikipedia.

Yeah. People actually go into the best cellar form to look at, oh, when they're doing a stacking decision, they go into the cellarum and look at, oh, these are the things that were discussed. This is what the answers were. So I think decentralized governance is a really good example of why you need native tokens or magic bean money to buy thing we need as many as we have right now. I think there will be a world of consolidation, but I don't know what that world will be, but it's interesting. We were talking about collective intelligence. I think one of the reasons we specifically have been successful as an ecosystem is because we have regional, Tao's also. So we have a Tao in Africa, we have a Latam Dow, we have a Thailand Dao, we have a

Philippines Dow. And because we think that every region should have a say in how we represent in that region, and these Tao communities have been incredible and also very active in our governance process. And so as we're thinking about how do we do a go-to-market strategy for that specific Dow, it's been really helpful to have the communities in there have a massive say in some of those decision-making. I'm big proponent, again, of decentralized governance. I know. it has some flaws. We've all experienced some flaws at decentralized governance, but I think overall, if you're able to manage it, I think incredible concepts up and excited to see where it evolves in the next five years. I guess if you're going to have a digital financial

system or monetary system, you should have some form of democratic monetary decision making. A hundred percent. We're 100% aligned on that. Well, Eisha, thank you for coming on. I hope you come back to chat with us again soon. Thank you, Wight, for having me. This was a lovely conversation. I'm excited to see where this podcast grows and scales. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island.vc.

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