Finn 0:42 Hello and welcome to The Ether. Today is Thursday, March 3rd 2022. This episode of The Ether is brought to you by Orbital Command, a community validator on Terra dedicated to educating, expanding, and promoting the LUNAtic community. Visit OC's What We Do page using the link in the show notes to take advantage of some of their other educational resources including weekly meetups to discuss Terra protocols, strategies, and concepts, the Terra Luna Intel Report on Telegram, and YouTube explainer videos on Terra concepts. You can also support their community efforts by considering them next time you're delegating or redelegating your LUNA. Find out more at orbitalcommand.io. This episode of The Ether is also brought to you by talis.art. Talis Protocol is the NFT platform for independent artists on Terra. Talis helps to provide artists with the tools and resources needed to transition from traditional arts into the NFT world. With their V1 launch coming soon, Talis will be the place to see real world art reflected on Terra. Be sure to join their Telegram and follow Talis on Twitter for updates on their roadmap, validator, and other Talis news. Find your next favorite artist on talis.art. TerraSpaces appreciates the support from all our sponsors. Today on The Ether we have the Kado Money AMA hosted by Orbital Command. Let's take a listen. Rebel Defi 2:01 So yeah, I just invited the guys up, and we got Finn from TerraSpaces recording for us. So hi, Finn. Thanks for all your hard work. We've got Dr. Doscoin from Orbital Command, he'll be dropping in as well to potentially lead the questioning. Oh, there he is. And then my role tonight is kind of going to be maybe more of a... I mean, I've certainly got some questions but don't wanna hog the mic, but maybe more of a facilitator type role. And then if people want to get up and ask questions to the Kado Money guys, I'll be bringing you up. So yep, Doctor is here, from Kado is it Vince and JC? Is there anyone else coming in? JC 2:40 This is it. This is the gang. Rebel Defi 2:41 Hi, JC. Well, just to kick this off, then if... I mean, would you like to talk about how you met? I mean, and then maybe how you formed the Kado project and how you decided that this was the project you wanted to work on in Terra? Kado Vince 2:55 Absolutely. Rebel Defi 2:55 Thanks. Kado Vince 2:56 Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And before I jump in, just want to say thanks again for everything you guys are doing over at Orbital Command for the community, the ecosystem, you guys crush it with the content, with educational materials, and doing stuff like this. And shout out to Orbital Command TDX event, the Terra Dapp Expo going on in Austin, Texas over in June. We'll definitely be there, and keep your eyes peeled for possibly a Kado sponsored event there, which might be announced shortly. Rebel Defi 3:26 Yes, yes. [chuckle] Awesome. Kado Vince 3:29 Quick shill for that. Rebel Defi 3:30 What a shoutout. Cheers, Vince. Kado Vince 3:31 Yeah, exactly, always good to meet lunatics in person. But yeah, so coming off on the background, really, how we got started. My background... So I'm the co-founder, along with my co-founder, Emery, KadoMory wasn't able to join today. Jon's on here as well, I'll let him give his background, he's our head of product. Jon's laughing as well, for sure. So glad to have him on this conversation. So, Emory and I were college roommates, actually, about five years ago, we went to Gettysburg College back in the day, and ended up going our different routes after school in the traditional, TradFi as you might say, line of work. Emery went into startups and development work for big brands like AT&T Tempur-Pedic, Shake Shack, also founded his own data privacy startup. And I went into business development in the software space... Loyalty platform startup that powers some of the biggest brands in the world like Starbucks Rewards and a lot of the data incentives that goes behind these programs. We ended up getting acquired by MasterCard at the end of 2019. So diving down traditional payment rabbit hole, right, all the inefficiencies there. And Emery pulled me over into crypto, into LUNA in early 2021. And we ended up diving down that rabbit hole, became a no brainer that this is where things are going, wanted to get involved as much as we could. And we joined forces back together for the hackathon, the Terra Delphi Digital IDEO hackathon back in May. So that was where it all kind of got started. Kado Vince 5:20 And it came from big LUNAtics in the US and having a lot of trouble getting access to UST, right, there was really no way to get access, you had to go through many hoops in terms of going on to Coinbase, and then going to KuCoin and everyone knows that process, right. So getting new folks onto the ecosystem is like a two hour sit down, explaining these kind of things. And then as well, the Terra ecosystem and web3, it's such a great place to invest your money but we still couldn't spend UST in the real world, right. So why do you invest in one currency and spend with another. So that was kind of the impetus and the vision that we saw and started... After the hackathon, put through a community fund proposal to the Terra community, ended up connecting with a lot of folks. And that's how we got started, from the community, and started shipping products that people use in the real world and under six months, and that community fund proposal got us all the way to where we are today. So, that kind of high level, I'm sure we'll get into more, but I'll let Jon jump in, give his background and we'll cover off on some of our mission statement, strategic objectives that he's been working on as head of product. JC 6:37 Yeah. Hey, guys. Hopefully everyone can hear me, I see the closed caption is getting my words. So I assume that works. Hey guys, so I'm Jon. I joined Kado, about couple months, two three months ago. My background is actually in digital strategy management consulting. So I spent a bunch of years in management consulting, a few years in the startup world and a few years in the Fortune 500 world. So kind of been all over the place. But like probably a lot of the Kado guys, and probably a lot of people listening is, the old world, you just kind of have to abandon it, right. The web3 world is just so much more exciting, there's so many more things going on that I had to move in. And so I'm the head of product here at Kado. One of my goals is to help us build things that you guys all want to use, right. And by you guys I mean the end user that's on-ramping and needing fiat to be UST, and also the protocols that actually want on-ramp capabilities and to be able to capture new fiat capital. So that's my role here at Kado. It's great to be here and happy to talk to everybody here. JC 7:53 Like Vince said, in the near future we have really three strategic objectives, right. Number one is we want to try and standardize and remove the friction for existing web two merchants and businesses to fully adopt stable coins, right. You see all these studies about your web2 merchants in the next three years, everyone wants to start accepting stablecoins. But that's a pretty high friction, high complicated, pretty complex thing to do for someone that hasn't done it before, and hasn't been in the space, right. And so we want to break that down and actually standardize this experience. The second one is we also want to be the enabling infrastructure for web three protocol builders. And really, that's to capture that new fiat capital and non-Terra capital into their protocol, right. So that's a really big thing that we're working on, we do want to be enabling infrastructure. And Vince will talk about some some of our differentiators from... There's a lot of debit cards and stuff coming up, and there's overlapping use cases, but we see ourselves as differentiated from the primary use case here. And then the third strategic objective really, is to try and drive adoption of stablecoins across chains, right. So those are our sort of three strategic objectives in the near future. But that's a little bit... I'll turn it back to the Orbital Command guys, if you guys have some questions or anything like that, Dr. Doscoin 9:25 I'm not sure if Rebel's still here. You still there, Rebel? Rebel Defi 9:27 I'm still here, are you going to kick off with what you've got? Dr. Doscoin 9:30 Sure. Obviously, very excited to chat with you guys, very excited to chat over the next hour about Kado. I'm one of the research relationship guys at Orbital Command, and I obviously do a lot of Twitter Spaces with protocols such as yourselves. As far as getting the ball rolling with questions and things of that nature, guys, I guess... Well first, I just wanna say congratulations on getting the ramp up and running. But guess the first question is which country did you first get it up and running in? JC 10:01 Yeah. It's a good question. So if we're talking about ramp, we launched everywhere all at once, except for the sort of the countries and New York State... Except for the countries that we actually can't run in. And so we actually released everywhere all at once, including US, UK, Australia, just everywhere. I think at the moment, we're probably up to something like 70 onboarding countries, it's great. We love the traffic, we love the adoption. We love how much... We had a hypothesis of how much this was needed in the community. And I think it's pretty backed up with how many different places around the world have on-boarded onto Kado. So yeah, that's great. Dr. Doscoin 10:46 That's incredible, 70 countries immediately. I imagine it was a bit of work to make that happen, how do you execute something like that? Obviously, there's lots of regulations in different countries, lots of conversations that would need to be had, what was that process like? JC 11:00 Yeah, and Vince, I'll let Vince talk about this a little bit more if he wants to, on the back side. But we're trying to basically pass through the transaction, right. So we work with our banking partner, they have a lot of existing... Break down their barriers as much as they can. And so, from a regulation standpoint we've done as much as we can to sort of just pass through the transaction, and then make that easy for a user to pass through. Like you alluded to, there's a lot of regulation in the space, right. And there's a lot of different banks and different policies and different rules. And so it is a tricky space, but we're doing what we can to navigate a pretty tricky area. Kado Vince 11:44 Yeah. And like Jon said, going global, going international, it's been our focus from day one, especially with the ramp, if you think about our vision of enabling really easy access into these web3 ecosystems, into these protocols. Web3 is global, the future of payments is global, and that's what we're building towards. Important to call out that the US has big transfers via ACH, and as well as credit and debit cards, International has credit and debit cards today without the bank transfers. So something that we're incredibly focused on is getting more payment capabilities internationally, in terms of bank transfers, and wires, as well as the off-ramp that I know that everyone's now dying for. So just to let you guys know that that's kind of where things stand globally with the different payment methods, but a real big books for us to continue to drive these capabilities. But yeah, also like Jon said, it's really kudos to our banking relationships, our banking partners, they've done a lot of great work and have been really great partners to help us spin this stuff up. Dr. Doscoin 12:50 Yeah. Fantastic. And so, when it comes to... Obviously got 70 countries that are already on board, as far as who's next in line, what countries are you looking at and sort of what are the barriers to entry in those countries? JC 13:07 Good question. There's actually... We'll flip the question around, right. So it's not so much a matter of what country's next, we basically... We're everywhere. So if you're in a country that's not the 70, give it a shot. We basically have a list of countries we can't operate in and that's what is not available. Everything else is already available. It's just whether someone has tried to sign up or not. And so if there's a country that's... If you're in a country that isn't the 70 that we already have, give it a shot. If it's not on the sort of no go list, then it will probably work. I hope that answers the question. Yeah. Kado Vince 13:46 If you wanna know where that no go list is, it's on our FAQ page, we've got a handful of frequently asked questions that we've put up there, it's faq.kado.money. You can also find it on our support page on the main website. But it's got all those labeled out there. Dr. Doscoin 14:02 That's good to know because I'm currently... I've been trying to jump on and of course... I'm from Australia, and I'm not sure if we've got access yet, but I can't seem to get on to it. And I'm not sure if that's an Australia thing, or if that's me being an idiot thing. Kado Vince 14:15 [chuckle] No, I mean, you should have access, we've been working with a fair amount of Australian folks over... The Loop guys are over there too. Dr. Doscoin 14:22 Okay, so I'm an idiot. Thank you for confirming. [chuckle] I'll have a look at it now. Rebel Defi 14:32 Doctor, can I just jump in with a question? We had a comment, and I don't have the Twitter user's name in front of me, I'm afraid, so if it was you that made this comment, or made me aware of this, thank you very much. But one thing that was brought to my attention is that there are more fees than the Kado $2 fee. And this guy was saying this and I was like, "What are you talking about? It's $2, that's the fee." But it turns, in the UK anyway, there's a 3% foreign currency transaction fee, which I mean, I 100% appreciate that you're not getting any money out of that, or that's not going towards Kado. But firstly, are you are you aware of that? Well, you're aware of it now, but have you been aware of it? And secondly, do you have a sort of suggested workflow? People are suggesting using something called Revolute, which I've never heard of. I think I've heard of it, but I've never used it. Yeah, kind of throw that out there, Vince. JC 15:36 I'll take that one. So it's a really good question. So that does come up sometimes. And so I want to clarify in a couple different places, is we don't actually charge that fee, right. So our fee right now is the $2 flat fee. And we have various places within the Kado Ramp experience, where if you hover... We'll tell you that... Again, it's a tricky space, there's a lot of banks, a lot of policies, a lot of different payment methods, everyone has their own rules, everyone has their own risk tolerance. And so it's a tricky area to navigate. Sometimes, and this is a pretty small proportion of times this comes up, is sometimes the bank itself will charge a conversion fee, because we process everything in USD at the moment. So depending on your bank, they might hit you with a conversion fee. And so we do try to make that as obvious as possible. But it is a sort of a less frequent use case for us. So we don't want to blast everyone with that possibility. But it is possible. And it's just because everyone has their own rules, every bank, every card issuer has their own sort of risk tolerance and what they code the transaction as. It gets pretty complicated. So I think that answers your first question is that we don't actually charge that fee, from the back end from your bank or your card issuer, they may charge you a conversion fee and that's entirely up to them. But typically, I'd say the majority of the time, that does not happen. So it is by far not a primary... Something that could happen. What I'll add to your second question is, what do we do to get around that is if you do get hit with something like that, we're trying to add local currencies soon. So there's a couple things on our plate, which is new types of payment methods. So for example, if you have a card that always gets hit with a conversion fee, we're trying to add new payment methods, so you can not have to use that card. And then we're also going to try and add local currencies. So rather than processing it in US dollars, maybe we'll process it in GBP, or AUD or something like that. Rebel Defi 17:54 Epic. Thank you very much for that, Jonathan. 100%. I certainly wasn't suggesting that this was some sort of Kado fee. Definitely no, it's my bank, to say that they want to try and skim something off the top. I mean, even with... I mean, I did £500 the other day. And it was just under 3% they charged. But I mean even with that, what I really appreciate about what you guys do is that without naming names of other on-borders that do kind of diddle you on the rate, the conversion, or... Yeah, the rate I get from pounds to dollars on Kado seems to be the spot rate, which I think is great. So the literally the only fee that you guys charge is the $2. And then even with a 3% charge on my bank, I still think is the best way to do it. Rebel Defi 18:42 Yeah, and right, we did a bunch of polls, and by far what everyone wanted was lower fees. So yeah, we're not gonna... As you put it, we're not gonna diddle anyone on the fees. We're not going to try and skim any off the top, we're trying to make this accessible and easy for everyone and everyone on this call. It's going to make sense to for the most part, but if you think about the person that is just on-boarding, right, they're not used to all kinds of fees with their bank, sometimes. So we also want to make it somewhat frictionless for them. So they're not going to be hit with large fees randomly, called different things that they have to dive into. Rebel Defi 19:23 Most definitely. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, Rebel Defi here, I mean my mission on Terra really is just to help new people get started. So it makes my job a lot easier having something that I can recommend to people like Kado, just to help them get that money in so they've got money in their UST Terra Station Wallet. So like what you were saying about maybe doing something in local currencies that would help even more. Rebel Defi 19:52 Yeah, absolutely. That's on the roadmap, trying to get to that as soon as we can. Rebel Defi 19:58 Awesome. Well, I look forward to, yeah, future updates. Thank you. Dr. Doscoin 20:02 Fantastic. I have a question for you guys, I was having a look through some of your recent posts, and I'm noticing there's lots of traction, a lot of people are commenting, and that's always a good sign. And lots of it means lots of people testing it out as well. I'm noticing a bit of... Let's call it a pushback, for want of a better word, people that have an aversion to providing a social security number. And just wondering if there's an option where potentially they can only provide a driver's license or something like what Kraken does with a license and a utility bill, is that something that we might see from Kado in the near future? JC 20:38 Good question. At the moment, that is not possible. And to clarify, that's from most banking partners that you're going to deal with, any kind of like direct KYC usually needs some... Sorry, direct on-ramp usually need some kind of KYC. And ours happens to need your tax ID number. So in the US, it's Social Security, elsewhere it's NIN, elsewhere it's EIN, or something like that. So we do require that at the moment maybe sometime in the future, that might change, but I would say, if you're trying to on-ramp, expect that sort of information. Now, I think the main concern there is, well how are you protecting it? Where's it being stored? Is it encrypted? Dr. Doscoin 21:24 Absolutely. JC 21:25 Right, and who is it going to, right? And so part of that, understand the underlying reason for that question is can you trust us with it? So if you want to see more documentation, or the long form answer to that again, like Vince said, faq.kado.money, that will answer the "how are you protecting my information" question? Dr. Doscoin 21:46 Gotcha. Okay. Is there anything that you can... Obviously, I know that we've got a few people on this call here and probably not everyone wants to jump onto the net, or doesn't have access to a browser right this second, is there a TL;DR of the privacy security insurance measures that you guys have in place? JC 22:03 Yeah, sure. So on this, specifically, is we don't store that information. We pass it directly through to our banking partner, Prime Trust, so they're actually dealing with it, we don't store that at all. I think all we store is something like email, country code and phone number. I think even something like a payment method, we don't even store. So everything actually is passed through directly to the giant banking partner that we have, rather than housed within our systems. So if you're a small company, if you're curious about that, you don't want to provide that kind of thing, we don't hold it anyway. Dr. Doscoin 22:42 Gotcha. And I think from memory, I was chatting with Outlet Finance a couple of weeks ago, and I have a feeling they run through Prime Trust as well. So they must be the main point for any on-ramp platform, will that be a fair assumption? JC 22:57 They're certainly one of the bigger players at the moment. Dr. Doscoin 23:01 Got it. Rebel? Rebel Defi 23:02 Hey, guys. Yeah, I mean, I've got a few things coming up. And if anyone on the call has got questions for Vince, or Jonathan, that'd be cool. Just wondering about the limit at the moment, as far as I'm aware it's a $1,000 worth... Or is that 1,000... Could I do £1,000? I'm not sure, I didn't try that much. But is that daily limit going to be lifted at any stage soonish? Or, what's the rationale behind that limit? Kado Vince 23:31 Yeah, no, it's a good question, obviously, something that we get a lot. That's probably one of the bigger blockers is that people just want higher limits. So we hear that loud and clear, I'm also screaming at the top of rooftops to raise the limits as is everyone else here. So it's really just about going back to what we can control, what we can't control, right. We're navigating an interesting space. And when you set up these banking rails connecting to these to these rails, and the web3 ecosystem, there's certain trial periods, right, to basically prove that the rails are strong and specifically really strong fraud protection, right. There's going to be inevitably cases where, folks... Imagine a world where we said, "Hey, the first tier limit's 50k," out of the gate, and then someone immediately on-ramps, 50k, they get through the instant settlement, which is one of our best features, they get back 50k instantly in their wallet, which the power of Terra, the power of decentralized money, we can't get access to that back, that UST is in that person's control, which is how it's designed, right, which is great. But also it leaves the opportunity for someone to then claw back to their bank and say, "Hey, I didn't go through that transaction with Kado, send me my funds back." And then, there's fraud there, right. So it's about having these protection tiers in place. As we get ramped up going through these kind of early days with the banking partners, and then as we show that fraud is below certain limits, then we'll raise them as soon as possible. There's definitely a big demand there. And something that we're certainly focused on when it comes to this easy access, easy onboarding, especially if you think about these use cases direct into protocols, there's going to be so many use cases where you're going to need more than $1,000, right, to buy an NFT, or to participate in Kujira liquidations, other strategies and use cases that will continue to run on, so definitely something we're focused on. It's just where we're at today in the early days getting started. JC 25:42 So if you have a friend that's thinking about messing with cado, tell them not to, because everyone needs higher limits. [chuckle] Kado Vince 25:50 Yeah, this is why we can't have nice things. [chuckle] Rebel Defi 25:53 Awesome. Well, certainly, I mean, just looking at Vince's Punk there, I love that Neptune assassin. And that's certainly worth a lot more than $1,000 no doubt. Kado Vince 26:03 Yeah man, assassin gang. Rebel Defi 26:05 And danku, he's got a couple of those bad boys, I believe. I've got one kind of massive question, but I'm sure some of the audience probably have the same question. So we might just open it up now, unless Doctor, have you got anything? We've got Frugal up with a question, can I just go straight to him? Dr. Doscoin 26:21 Yeah, let's go to Frugal and hear what Frugal's got there. Rebel Defi 26:24 Sure, Frugal, you're up. Frugal Lunatic 26:25 I have a question that was more personal in the sense that I would benefit if it worked. So I have these crypto.com cards that give me cashback whenever I spend something. And when I was trying to use these on Kado, it said that I wasn't... It didn't accept any prepaid credit cards. So I just want to know whether is there any plan in the future to remove that or is only debit cards accepted, like how it is right now? JC 27:00 So prepaid cards are not accepted. I don't see that changing really anytime soon. And that, again, is a banking partner... I think it's a fraud prevention thing, right. I think prepaid cards, you get to do all kinds of... If you wanted to, you could do all kinds of weird things with a prepaid card. So I think as a baseline rule, prepaid cards are not available, which is for a lot of crypto cards, they are these prepaid... You have to load the card to be able to use and so a lot of those are not possible right now. Frugal Lunatic 27:37 Okay. That's just a small question that I had. Thank you again. JC 27:42 Yeah. Dr. Doscoin 27:43 Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for that one Frugal. I've got... And while we're waiting for other people to maybe jump up and have their say, I do still have a few questions here. And one of the main ones that I've noticed as well, and this is coming from the people, I'm just giving the people what they want here, is wen off-ramp? JC 28:02 Yeah. [chuckle] So I have a sheet here that I've like prepped with content. And on this sheet, it literally says "wen off-ramp" and what my answer should be. So that tracks. So the answer to that is weeks, not months. We released a post recently, that was like... Again, we do this thing, we want to put into our products what you guys want out of the product, it doesn't make sense for us to build something you guys are not going to use. And so in that post, I think we said something like off-ramp, new payment methods, and a interesting thing called auto ramping. So for off-ramp, weeks, not months, it's something we're working very hard to right now. It will likely be ACH, US bank first, just because of the infrastructure that's available to us, but soon. Dr. Doscoin 28:56 Awesome. Thank you for clearing that out, that's really exciting that it's just a few weeks away. That's great. It brings me to probably a pretty important question too, because obviously we're talking about getting access to a decentralized algorithmic stablecoin. We all believe in it and we all want it to succeed and af course we're all holding LUNA so that we can benefit from the success of it. But of course, this interactions with TradFi, we're obviously working with banks and so if anyone's paying attention to things that are happening over in Canada with the bank freezes, if they're paying attention to the request from governments to freeze accounts for exchanges over in Russia, dealing with those traditional systems lends itself to a certain risk. Is that sort of risk present here? Is it possible that there could be freezes or shutdowns if something's not, I don't know, being received well by the banks? Kado Vince 29:58 Yeah, I think it's certainly an interesting time, right, and something where crypto and self-custody becomes front and center. I think that that's really why we're building these non-custodial solutions. If you think about on-ramping directly to your wallet, is this kind of open ended modular use case, versus on-ramping directly into an app that is custodying in your funds, or an exchange that's custodying your funds. We're big believers in self-custody as the future, self-sovereignty, it's going to continue to trend where people are going to realize that if your money's in a bank, if your money is on an exchange, then it's not completely your money, right, you don't have full control over it. Obviously, like you said, seeing that in Canada. So I've obviously seen that too in my time at MasterCard, and in the TradFi space, another one of the things that really opens up my eyes and makes me realize that this is where things are going. So I mean, there's that initial banking connection layer that it's necessary, right. It's necessary today, there's no way around it to get into stablecoin, to get into web3, you need to go through that KYC. So there's the potential limitation on regions, right, the OFAC sanctions list, people are adding Russia and Ukraine to that list. Kado Vince 31:27 So there's risks there. But other than that, trying to make sure that we're building solutions to on-board folks into these noncustodial solutions as much as possible, right, not just consumers, but also merchants. So going back to the MasterCard days, right, you think about the issues, not only with being on these traditional payment rails as a merchant, with these kind of things like custody, but also issues around inefficiencies in the TradFi payment rails, right, current issues with settlement times where you got to wait for funds to settle five to seven days, there's the interchange fees that the MasterCard and Visas are taking from the merchants every transaction from 1%-3%. And there's just many, many ways that if they ran on self-custody stablecoin rails, it becomes a no brainer. So this is part of what we're building in terms of enabling a merchant to onboard into web3 in a noncustodial multi-chain wallet, except stablecoin payments from every blockchain, every stablecoin, and then have the ability to easily on and off ramp, because you're going to need... As a merchant you need to be able to off-ramp as soon as possible whenever you need to be able to pay for things with your fiat when it's necessary, as well as on-ramp your sales volume into stablecoins, and through that multi chain wallet, having that one click access into high yield savings, like Anchor Protocol, like Circle Yield, and these kind of things. So that's kind of where we see it heading from a merchant point of view and self-custody, as well as obviously consumers' self-custody wallets, Terra Station, we're all familiar with that process. And we're gonna continue to build these non-custodial solutions where the user and the merchant is in full control. Dr. Doscoin 33:32 Totally makes sense. And you've actually opened up a couple of questions here. Rebel, you cool if I ask another one or two questions here, mate? Rebel Defi 33:42 Yeah, man, help yourself. I was really excited by what Vince was seeing there. So yes, just keep going. It's awesome. Dr. Doscoin 33:47 Yeah, fantastic. So a couple of questions that just popped up in my mind, as you were talking was about... I wasn't even thinking of it before from the merchants' perspective. Of course, we know that as a general user, there's a flat fee of $2 to do the conversion, does it work the same way on the reverse? So as the merchant who receives the payments when I convert back from UST to my fiat currency, is that the same thing that happens there or is there a different structure for the merchants? Kado Vince 34:15 Yeah, it's part of what we're building out right now, basically. So I don't want to just promise that there's going to be a $2 flat fee forever for both the on and off ramp for merchants and consumers. So it's really not set in stone completely, but it goes back to our vision of... Like Jon was talking about earlier on the $2 fee to get folks into the system, we're not trying to monetize this and profit and diddle you at every step of the way, right. That's how the MasterCard and Visas work today, and that's the method that we're trying to ultimately improve, right, if you think about where things are going. So yeah, the easy on-ramp, and easy off-ramp, they should both be easy, they should both be instant. Folks and merchants both need a very simple and cheap and quick way to get in and out of stablecoins, so yeah. Dr. Doscoin 35:15 Couldn't agree more... The easier you can make it for merchants. I'm thinking straight away, my mind goes to Shopify plugins, things like that, it goes to... When you mentioned before multi-chain as well. And I'd love to have a conversation around how Kado works multi-chain, but the other ways that I see it being adopted a lot more seamlessly if you've got, I don't even know the number, there's like over 1.7 million businesses on Shopify, I think, they would show. And so if they have access to Kado Pay on a platform that they're already using, I feel like that sort of thing would drive awareness and adoption. What are your thoughts around that? Kado Vince 36:01 Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's where it's going. So if you think about Solana Pay, I don't know if you guys caught it, but it was announced about a month ago, that made a pretty big splash in terms of this kind of visibility into merchants accepting Solana on USDC and getting people excited about where the future of these kind of stablecoin payments are going. We always say that Solana is about 25% of the equation. So it's one payment method on one blockchain with one stablecoin. We we're big believers in the multi-chain future. Obviously, we're fans of UST and multi-stablecoins as well. So looking at where that's going, as well as merchants need an easy way, not only to accept payments, but like I was saying before, on and off-ramp, easy access to high yield savings across these stablecoins, across these blockchains in obfuscating all the complexities, really just showing their total dollar balance and swap in, swap back to your bank account. And yeah, like you said, Kado Pay will probably ultimately evolve into this kind of Google Pay, Apple Pay plugin on these sites directly. Dr. Doscoin 37:13 Yeah, that's super exciting. Very exciting. Rebel. Rebel Defi 37:17 Are you guys okay if we bring up some of the people? We've got ALi K who's been waiting for a little while. So ALi, have you got a question or comment? JC 37:24 Yeah, maybe let me add real quick to the merchant thing. And Vince, this is this was Vince's world for a long time, right, from the MasterCard side. On your topic of merchants, decentralized blockchain stables, right, they bring a tremendous amount of value to a merchant beyond do they have to pay $2 or more, or a little bit more. We're talking like giant percentage based fees that they have to pay, we're talking like waiting for some reason for their funds to settle through traditional payment methods. Using the blockchain to deliver value to merchants is... Basically blows traditional payment rails out of the water, right. And so we're trying to bring that value and make it really easy for a merchant to be able to tap into that value, as well as the value that doesn't even exist in traditional payment rails which is DeFi. So it goes way beyond a numerical fee, it goes quite a bit beyond that. If you think about if you're a merchant that does a lot of business, right, a percentage point of that business, that's a lot of money that they're paying and it's just worlds apart from crypto. Kado Vince 38:38 Yeah, and I just wanted to add, while we're on the topic of Kado Pay, these merchant payment solutions, I wanted to dive in a little bit and clear up how Kado is different from these projects like Alice, like Kash, like Outlet, Seashell. We see all the time on Twitter, the LUNAtics are fired up about these projects that are driving real world adoption of UST, making it able to spend in the real world. And Kado oftentimes is just thrown into that list. But I wanted to make sure that it's cleared up and Kado Pay was a consumer facing solution to start and today, and by design, right, that's kind of how we're building it, push it out into the wild, same as Kado Ramp, to just solve that immediate gap for the ecosystem today, but then build on this kind of B2B architecture. So obviously, we're big fans of Outlet, all these guys, close with them, everyone's fighting the same fight and we create positive feedback loops between our projects. So Kado's not trying to be a consumer facing debit card for normies connected to Anchor, these kind of things, really trying to differentiate. And as these projects bring new folks into the ecosystem make it really easy to get access to Anchor, they're going to become more knowledgeable on web3, inevitably. They're going to get more interested. And things like katoh will be there for them to directly on-ramp into these web3 protocols and you can have full control of your money. Kado Vince 40:13 So we do overlap in terms of these things like real world adoption of stablecoins and payments and the ability to on and off-ramp between fiat and stablecoins as well as Anchor yield. But definitely some key differences if you think about Kado, like I said, we're going B to B to C, now, as a protocol infrastructure, where you build with us, you let us help users on-ramp into your protocol, versus the B to C approach of these debit card projects. We're going multi-stablecoin, multi-chain, international. A lot of these guys are focusing on UST on Terra, and a certain regional payment methods with debit cards, which again, like I said, it's great, it's a solution that is going to be successful in the space, it's just a different approach than what we're doing. Like I said, full direct access to your self custody wallet, where you have full control of your funds in all of DeFi, versus on-ramping funds into the proprietary third party app, where then you would have to remove these funds from that app to your wallet, creating that extra stuff for users. So there's a lot of exciting things that they're going to be launching and doing and we as well are going to do exciting stuff. And as we all build, the different trajectories will become a lot more clear. But I wanted to... We're going to be pushing some materials about this too, just to continue to help the community understand where these different solutions lie and how they're all fighting in the fight together. Dr. Doscoin 41:53 Yeah, thanks for differentiating there and highlighting the points of difference. That's was actually gonna be sort of one of my next questions so you got to that ahead of me. And I agree with you, this is one of the things I love about crypto and this space is that it is much more collaborative and complimentary than competitive in a lot of areas. And it really does carry that sort of wagmi ethos, that wagmi attitude. And I know that as time goes on, and as the Terra ecosystem evolves, there's just gonna be so much more synergy between payment gateway such as yourself, and then other on-boarding tools, whether it's Outlet with their debit cards, or wherever it ends up being, I just know that it's going to be very complimentary. So thank you for highlighting that. I've got... Oh, yeah, go on. Kado Vince 42:38 No, yeah, I was just gonna say, just to reiterate your point, the positive feedback loops in web3 are like none other coming from web2. Not only broadly web3, we're talking with folks across different ecosystems, not just Terra, but specifically on Terra, as you know, we're probably a Terra group here right now on the phone, not only is there the positive feedback loop of web3 in the money Lego mentality in general, but the alignment around UST adoption, is something that makes it like positive feedback loops on steroids. So it's a really fun place to be building. And if you're on the phone now, and you're thinking about jumping in, now's the time. Dr. Doscoin 43:20 Yeah, well... Are you going, Reb? Rebel Defi 43:22 I was just gonna say we're talking of collaboration, let's collaborate with the people. Shall we get ALi up for his comment? Dr. Doscoin 43:30 100%. ALi K 43:30 Oh, hi, guys. I'm a huge fan of Kado. And I was really curious how you guys enable this? How do you guys acquire the UST and offer to people at basically a one to one rate? I know you guys mentioned the $2 fee is not permanent. But still, to me it seems like you guys are just burning money, how do you get... It just... It's hard for me to see how you can offer this one to one rates where basically, if you go to any exchange, UST tends to have a bit of a premium, right. So I was just wondering how you guys make that happen. Kado Vince 44:06 Yeah, man, good question, appreciate your support too. It's always fun to hear from the community, straight from the horse's mouth. So yeah, on the $2 fee, so without going into details on baking partner, agreements, and things like this, we benefit from these kind of partnerships where part of the process is this kind of $1 to $1 relationships, as well as the $2 fee structure, that's going back to what we're talking about earlier, not trying to monetize, not trying to profit every transaction every step of the way. Right now, we're in user growth mode, as is the whole ecosystem really. So trying to create the lowest barrier to entry is our focus. We're big believers that focus on growth now, and revenue will come as we continue to build and as we continue to grow. And while the $2 fee might not be set in stone forever, we're going to be really creative about the other products that we're launching, and how are monetizing them to provide as well as funds that are sitting idle, right, being creative about using these funds in web3, in things like Anchor, while they're just sitting there to then help frontrun fees to users and keep this low fee structure. So it's not going away anytime soon. ALi K 45:29 So cool. Just curious, because I know right now it's more US focused, ACH, even though any Visa debit credit should work. But I noticed some countries they just couldn't get it to work. Do you guys have any plans to have any country specific payment solutions in the future? Any country specific plans? JC 45:57 So on the payment method, I think the answer there is we're exploring a bunch of different payment methods. I don't think there's anything that's country specific yet. But a lot of the solutions that we're exploring are sort of just available to all, so keep an eye out for those things. Again, that sort of "wen" question is weeks, not months, it's one of our top priorities. We'll touch upon it more specifically, is that some of these... Depending on the place that you're in, depending on the bank, their risk tolerance, depending on the the issuing card payment provider, they may just sort of deny all crypto transactions because of their risk aversion. So that's typically what happens. Otherwise, things will get flagged if something is suspicious, like if your a card doesn't match your signup name, if you're using someone else's card, if you're using a card that's far away from where the billing address is, there's all kinds of... Then we move on to the realm of what is considered a card fraud. And that's a nasty tricky world. But that's the realm that we enter into. So more payment methods, weeks, not months, coming soon. ALi K 47:16 Cool. Thanks. Rebel Defi 47:17 Thanks for questions ALi. BNardo, have you got a question or comment? BNardo 47:23 Yeah, absolutely. First of all, thanks to Orbital Command for hosting this Space. And definitely thanks to Kado, it's a lifesaver. I mean, I've had to go through so many hoops just to get some UST and I mean, literally, maybe 10 minutes between linking up my bank account and actually sending UST to my Terra Station... Hey, can you hear me? Rebel Defi 47:50 I can hear you BNardo. I think Doctor maybe forgot to mute. Yep. BNardo 47:56 Sorry, I was steadily talking. So I don't know what happened there. But hopefully, I'm not repeating myself. But first of all, Kado's super easy. Took me maybe 10 minutes to get it set up and literally link my bank account and get UST to Terra Station Wallet. So thanks, guys, that's is huge. A lot of my questions have actually been answered. But as you guys were talking, I was on the website just kind of looking at news and looking at sort of your journey to date. And it's exciting. I'm in the DC area. And so I'm really excited that the Nationals have the partnership with Terra. And look, I'm multi-chain as well but pretty much all of my stablecoins are UST. So I'm really kind of curious, just to hear your journey in terms of what was the tipping point with many of your merchants, as well as what are some of this still existing hurdles, and then maybe some of the pain points that you see as you move forward and really try to continue with merchant adoption and just overall adoption. Kado Vince 49:03 Yeah, no, great question and appreciate the support, BNardo. Excited for the Nationals this year. We're all National fans this year. [chuckle] So, yeah, in terms of the business development side for protocols and merchants, the protocol side from the community has been an outrageous kind of inbound request scenario, where I think that the tipping point was putting some of these materials out on Twitter, getting some of that exposure early on. And then we've been having a fair amount of conversations over the past four or five months with these protocols kind of laying the groundwork of like, "Okay, here's what we're building. Here are ways where we think that you guys are going to need fiat to the stablecoin connectivity," and there's so many use cases where that's the reality because of the nature of Terra, right. Terra kind of builds outward looking, trying to create real world adoption, real world use cases. So the value of Kado being that layer to help all these protocols connect to the real world, yeah, it's been... So many projects reaching out directly. So I think that that's... Once the community started posting about how easy it was to get from their bank account into UST in your Terra Wallet in one transaction, their mind starts running wild in terms of, "Okay, maybe if we integrate the API of Kado Ramp into my protocol, what are different things that we could do from this fiat direct into protocol connectivity?" Kado Vince 50:42 On the merchant side, it's definitely more of a long tail solution. You mentioned hurdles, what are the kind of hurdles that are there, it's education right now. It's about showing merchants that leaning into the benefits of running on stablecoin rails, right, there's going to be some conversations that happen this year, we're talking, a lot of the big brands are getting these conversations started. And if you start laying out the numbers of the amount of money that they're losing from the inefficiencies of traditional payment rails, in terms of interchange fees every transaction, in terms of funds sitting idle for 5-7 days, and you could show them what they're getting on instant settlement, no interchange fees, immediately their sales volume can get access to 10%, 15% lift on the APY, right, from just one quick access. So, right now, I don't think... I think merchants are interested in it. But they almost don't really even know that these solutions are going to be available yet, right. So they see things like USDC on Ethereum. They see the Solana Pay thing come out recently. But like I said, it's still 20%, 25% of the puzzle for them. So they're like, "Oh, okay, it's great, but we need a full integrated solution." So that's really a part of what we're building and part of the long tail solution, right. We're not going to get the biggest brands and merchants spun up tomorrow, but they're coming, so it's about creating solutions to make it as easy as possible for them. BNardo 52:14 That makes sense. Thanks a lot. And then one last thing, more just, again, looking at the roadmap, I see that there are a lot of Amazon gift cards for USDC, DT and DAI. Is that coming pretty soon? You have a timetable for UST? And are there other gift cards, like Visa gift cards, AmEx, or whatever, are you guys working on that as well? Kado Vince 52:43 Yeah, so that was like one of our first articles that we did, kind of looking at the early days of the hackathon, kind of being creative around ways we can have folks spend their UST in the real world. And the gift card was the first obvious low hanging fruit solution. We've pivoted and reiterated a lot through this process as crypto moves so fast and we like to move fast too and stay on our toes, we realized that the gift card solution's not the future of France, right. It's a short term solution but we really wanted to get to this place where consumers can spend directly from their wallet on brands. So that's where Kado Pay marketplace kind of evolved to, but it's still gonna be evolving, like I said, kind of going towards this merchant plugin for accepting payments as an Apple Pay, Google Pay situation. But yeah, no plans for gift cards today. BNardo 53:43 Got it. Awesome. Thanks a lot. Rebel Defi 53:46 Thanks for your contribution BNardo. I think we've only got time for one final audience contribution, and then we can maybe wrap this thing up. So is it Towqeer? Is that how to pronounce it? Towqeer Gilkar 53:57 Yes. That's... Hi, guys. Hi, Kado. It's Towqeer. Rebel Defi 54:02 Towqeer. Towqeer Gilkar 54:02 Yep. Yep. So I just have a couple of quick questions, actually. Are the tokens out yet? And also, is it like... Obviously, you mentioned before that there won't be any card out yet, so it will be only online based payment transaction in multiple brands, as I was reading from the Kado website that have 500 or more brands where you can spend, right? Kado Vince 54:31 Yeah, that's correct. Towqeer Gilkar 54:32 Yeah. And has Kado launched a token yet? I'm really sorry. I really don't have the information about it but I just heard from a friend so I just came on the AMA. Kado Vince 54:42 Good question. No token, no plans right now. We're really focused on product market fit, bringing something, a product, to the ecosystem that everyone can use and wants to use. But like I said, no plans yet. I think we kind of have the point of view that it's one of the problems we think in web3 that a fair amount of projects, not all of them, there's really amazing projects, but also there are some that start with the token, versus starting with product market fit. And sometimes it's about putting the horse before the buggy and can kind of misaligned incentives, especially when you're not sure what your product market fit is. And using the token as another growth hack to... Once you have product market fit, if there's an opportunity, and a token makes sense, it can really be an explosion of growth. But that's kind of where we look at it today. Towqeer Gilkar 55:41 Okay, so obviously, there is a transaction fee attached to it. And is it something that is predictable, or that will be decided depends on the, I mean, like the volume and flow and gas fee system or something? Kado Vince 55:56 The sort of fee is a $2 flat fee for the on and off-ramp. Or for the on-ramp today. So a typical flat fee. Towqeer Gilkar 56:04 Perfect, perfect. All right. And if anybody has to reach out for any business proposal to Kado, how do we do that? Kado Vince 56:10 Yeah, you can totally feel free to email us at partners@kado.money. We have our support email, support@kado.money. Shout out to Snoop, I see him in the call now. He's been crushing our support game. And he's there too to help facilitate some introductions. And I'm always available on Twitter and on Telegram to DM @KadoVince on both platforms. Towqeer Gilkar 56:34 Thank you so much. Thank you, Vince, pleasure speaking to you. That's it. Kado Vince 56:38 You too. Rebel Defi 56:39 Awesome. Thanks for your contribution, Towqeer. On a personal level, I just think it's brilliant how Kado seems to be making things simple for particularly new users. And I hadn't even thought of it until Towqeer mentioned that that the you're not even bothering with a token for the time being. And I think that's really refreshing as well, just focusing on, as you said, your product. Doctor, do you want to say any final words before we close this thing off? Dr. Doscoin 57:06 Final words would be thank you for jumping on, really appreciate your time and your wisdom, and looking forward to seeing how this all grows and evolves over time. Of course, we always want to be of assistance where we can, so please don't hesitate to let us know if there's anything we can do to help you guys out. And right now, I know that you've given some details where we can contact you with business proposals. Just saying if you've got any job offerings that you want to put forward or anything like that, also just let people know while you've got them on the call, there might be some talent in the audience. JC 57:37 I mean, talent is always appreciated. Engineering is great. So if you're interested, reach out. Dr. Doscoin 57:45 Fantastic. That's all for me, Rebel. Bring it home, brother. Rebel Defi 57:48 Well, yeah, I just like to shout out to Vince and JC for jumping on this call with us this evening and explaining even more about the Kado products that you're offering. And shoutout also to Finn at TerraSpaces, who's been recording for us. So there's a permanent record of this. And yeah, I look forward to talking to you guys again. Thanks very much. Good night. Kado Vince 58:09 Appreciate it, guys. JC 58:10 Thanks, everyone. Appreciate it. Finn 58:11 Thanks for checking out another episode of The Ether. That was the Kado Money AMA hosted by Orbital Command. Recorded on Thursday, March 3rd 2022. This episode of The Ether was brought to you by WeFund. WeFund is a community crowdfunding cross-chain incubator on Terra, and it's the first launchpad that implements a milestone funding release system to protect investors. All money raised for projects is deposited in Anchor Protocol and it's refundable, and all decisions are based on community voting power. WeFund is community focused and designed to be a user friendly experience for both project creators and investors. Be sure to follow them on Twitter and join the Telegram for more information. Links are in the show notes and check them out online at wefund.app. This episode of The Ether was also brought to you by Luart. Luart is the first gamified NFT platform built on the Terra network. Luart provides a seamless minting and trading experience all while earning you rewards just for being a user. Be sure to follow them on Twitter and join the community in the Discord server for the most up to date news and announcements regarding all the hot new NFT launches, platform upgrades, and new projects hitting the secondary marketplace. Are you ready to #PutYourHelmetOn and join the movement? Find out more luart.io. TerraSpaces appreciates the support from all our sponsors. For terraspaces.org, I'm Finn. Thanks for listening.