Ching! Brings DeFi to Memphis
And shows us how we will buy lunch in five years
DeFi, Decentralized Finance, is Blockchain’s killer application. Cryptocurrency, Smart Contracts, and Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are empowering people all over the world to work and profit from ventures in cyberspace, but DeFi is the emergent application of blockchain technology that empowers humans to actually use blockchain to survive.
The things that really matter to humans are the things they can’t survive without: food, drink, shelter, etc. Collectively these things are called essentials. In the developed world we use money as a tool to acquire essentials. Money is one of the very few tools that stops working in different geographies or when it’s over produced.
It’s clear that there is a bug in the Traditional Finance algorithm that the fiat money developers can’t or won’t patch. With DeFi, the user can choose which tools to use to acquire essentials. Cryptocurrency, stable tokens, fiat money, exchanges, bearer notes, and company shares are all tools available to a DeFi user for the purpose of acquiring essentials.
Ching! sponsored two events at the University of Memphis to introduce Memphians to practical DeFi. One was a Pop Up market where users got to experience using DeFi in real life. The other was an introduction to the technology and the teams that are creating it.
The User Experience
At the Pop Up market, we had two different vendors. One was an ABC licensed bartender who was selling Crypto Punch and the other was a purveyor of consumer electronics. Both were able to use Ching! to setup a point of sale with payment processing, inventory management, and sales reporting in just a few minutes. By the end of the event, one vendor had begun selling xDai back into the Pop Up market to customers who valued xDai more than fiat money.
In this video we see two people who have never used crypto before transacting with less friction than if they were using cash and credit. With Burner Wallet, the customer doesn’t have to enter pin numbers or sign receipts. With Ching!, the merchant doesn’t have to worry about card readers or a cash drawer. What’s even cooler is that, since Ching! is a permissionless point of sale system, she doesn’t have to wait for approval from some back office to start running her store AND she doesn’t have to worry about fighting chargebacks at some future date.
In this video we see a peer to peer blockchain transaction happen over cellular infrastructure through the mobile chrome browser. The two big things to notice here are that the transaction is fast and that it runs on software that everyone already has on their phone.
In this video you can see me using my computer to send xDai to a consumer. From my computer, I can use my MetaMask credentials to convert ETH and DAI into xDai from within the same Burner Wallet that everyone else had running on their phone. It doesn’t take any esoteric knowledge to perform the conversion and anyone can do it without permission. The Ching! cashier was able to forward all payments to a MetaMask enabled Burner Wallet and at the end of the event she converted all of her xDai to into USD through Burner and Coinbase and exit DeFi through PayPal.
The Technology
DeFi is a new term to most people because Decentralized Finance is at the bleeding edge of the state of the art. Because of the advancements made in the Ethereum community, cryptocurrency has a slew of new features that enable its use in daily activities.
With Side Chains we get Network Stability, Scalability, and Cost Controls. DApps, Distributed Applications, can leverage purpose built copies of the Ethereum Network to handle transactions for a specific use case. If CryptoKitties clogs up the main network with transactions, a DApp’s side chain is unaffected.
With Stable Tokens we get Price Stability. Prices can be set in a common unit of account and transactions can be completed without capital gains or losses.
Through tools like Burner Wallet and Fortmatic we get Web 2.0 Compatibility. We can use our phones and browsers to interact with DeFi, never having to acquire Web3 specific hardware and software.
Best of all, the resources needed to develop tools in DeFi are all Open Source. Teams all over the world are competing with traditional financial institutions to deliver the best possible user experience to people who use money. Furthermore, they can’t be stopped by the rich, the powerful, or even the ingenious. DeFi is destiny.
Last month, the IMF asked Twitter how people will be paying for lunch in five years. Only 17% of respondents believed traditional finance to be the tool of choice. What is truly significant about this metric is that the people who responded to that poll were a broad cross section of the general public weighted more toward the people who are invested in following the IMF on Twitter (business leaders, policy makers, investors, traders, and bankers).
I was one of the 27% who responded that Mobile Phone would be the tool of choice. Not because I expect people will begin using their Cellular Data Plan as a line of credit, we already do that now. But because people will be leaving wallets and keys at home, where they are safe. Mobile phones will unlock your xDai for lunch and they will unlock your front door when you get home (see BookLocal for an example of physical access control on the blockchain).
Mobile Crypto will be a fact of life in 5 years. In Memphis, most people use Cash App. You can already “buy and sell” Bitcoin on Cash App, you just can’t spend it (they hold it on your behalf until they decide not to). When every restaurant has a free point of sale system that accepts crypto, they will accept fast stable tokens like xDai. Then, Cash App will include that token in their app. And they won’t hold it on your behalf because custodial services will be an unprofitable expense.
The teams that helped us bring DeFi to Memphis are working towards making DeFi globally available. The following is not an exhaustive list of DeFi developers, just the ones without whom we could not have hosted the Pop Up market.
MakerDAO is the Decentralized Organization responsible for maintaining stability of the xDai token. Additionally, they provide funding to other teams to develop DeFi solutions and to host educational events about DeFi. Click here for a short video about MakerDAO.
POA network is a framework for creating Ethereum side chains. One of which is the xDai network which allows us to spend DAI faster than any other stable token. You can learn more about them by clicking here.
Burner Wallet is an ephemeral browser wallet created by Austin Thomas Griffith. You got to see it in action in the Pop Up market videos. If you want to try it out, it’s available at xdai.io.
Ching! is a free point of sale solution for merchants who wish to accept DAI and xDai. It is currently a Proof of Concept and moving towards market viability. If you believe in what we are doing you can contribute code at https://github.com/ChingStore/ching or, if you don’t code, you can reach me directly at aaron@ching.store to discuss other ways to contribute.
Uniswap created the decentralized exchange that we use to convert between ETH and DAI, a key mechanism for getting stability in DeFi. You can convert into a bunch of other tokens at https://uniswap.exchange/swap.
Honorable mention goes to Coinbase for providing our bartender with a way to exit DeFi and return to the world of fiat. I think you may have earned yourselves a new brand ambassador.
