In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com ,Anna Stone, Web3 at eToro and Director of GoodDollar.org, talks about universal basic income, Web3 Open source code, and the future of financial inclusion.
About Anna Stone
Anna Stone, Web3 at eToro and Director of GoodDollar.org. Anna is an accomplished Web3 innovator and growth leader with a proven track record in building, launching, and scaling inclusive crypto products, made for the masses. At eToro, Stone oversees go-to-market strategy for the company’s NFT business and leads the company’s impact initiatives which focus on leveraging blockchain and #Web3 to democratize finance for all.
Anna Stone gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- Crypto’s reputation and how to repair it/addressing concerns about the future of Web3.
- The need for the crypto industry to redefine community.
- The future of financial inclusion and how to build a more open financial system.
- Crypto being used by real people in the real world to do real things – it is not just a speculative asset.
- Universal basic income and Web3.
- Open source code as public digital goods.
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always and today we have Anna Stone on the show. My guest is coming in hot from beautiful Brooklyn, New York. What a treat of a spot. Cannot wait to get back there. Hopefully this summer. Time for the intro. Anna Stone is the Web3 magician at eToro and Director of gooddollar.org. Cannot wait to get into GoodDollar. Anna is an accomplished Web3 innovator and growth leader with a proven track record in building, launching and scaling inclusive Crypto products made for the masses at eToro and overseas, go-to-market strategy for the company’s NFT business and leads the company’s impact initiatives which focus on leveraging, Blockchain and Web3 to democratize finance for all. Anna is also the Co-Founder of gooddollar.org, a social Impact protocol and DAO that leverages free market incentives to pay for building a more equitable world which eToro sponsored the building of as part of its social responsibility efforts. Anna has more than 12 years experience in the space and also holds a BA from Dartmouth College and a Master’s in Global Political Economy from the Fletcher School at Tufts. Super pumped to have you on, Anna welcome the show.
Anna Stone
Thanks so much Matt, and thanks for the illustrious intro.
Matt Zahab
I mean your team put it on a platter for you there and pumped to have you on. I got to ask, I’ve been to New York since last year. One of my favorite places on the planet where’s the buzz like I heard it’s absolutely back and the city is just an electric factory again.
Anna Stone
I think the city is definitely raring and ready to go. I mean I missed. That I wasn’t here during COVID but even in the year and a half since I’ve moved back in the past nine months, you definitely feel the energy on the street. You know, we’ve got NFT NYC happening in New York next week. Seems like everyone is really getting ready to come in and show what they’ve been working on and show what they’ve got. So great time to be in New York.
Matt Zahab
Such a cool place. Going to NFT NYC and seeing all of Times Square just being taken over by Crypto companies, that was pretty darn cool. Especially during 2021 when I’m sure you were there as well, when it was just the bull market. It was money printing season literally, Coolcats, Apes, Zookeepers, you name it. Everywhere you look. I’ll still never forget that. I don’t know why that moment in particular, but that’s one of the most vivid moments of my Crypto career.
Anna Stone
It was a cultural moment. I’ll tell you why, my opinion, it’s because for so many years, people who joined Crypto when it was really like a fringe industry, right? So I’m talking people who started to come into the industry before 2018, before 2019. It’s like everyone’s been chasing that dApp or that moment where it’s all about mass adoption, and I think for those of us who have been working in this Web3 space or Crypto for so long, no one could have predicted that it would be a bunch of digital images and digital collectibles that would actually drive more than a million people to sign up for MetaMask. But that’s actually what happened. And actually to deal with moving into a noncustodial wallet, getting into Crypto on chain, and executing an on chain transaction. NFTs in 2021 was the crossover moment when you started to actually see cultural figures, artists, musicians, brands, media actually really starting to look at this technology. And it was a moment like all of those projects being displayed in Times Square it was a moment because at least for me, it represented this moment where, okay, if not mass adoption, but at least we’ve crossed over to culture. At least we’ve crossed out of just the realm of finance and technology, which is where Crypto live for so long. And actually into the realm of culture. And that continued embrace by non Crypto native people is what’s actually going to continue to drive our industry. So that’s why it’s still cool.
Matt Zahab
I know you’re bang on. That’s exactly what we need for the non Web3 folks we need some stuff that they can relate to.
Anna Stone
That they want, that’s going to make it worth signing up for the MetaMask and buying the Ether and having to deal with all of the pain in the ass of the user experience of Crypto, right? You need the demand.
Matt Zahab
It’s craziness. Anna I’d love if you could let’s go back a couple of years, walk me through your Crypto inception story because you did a hell of a lot and we’re very early in the game before you started moving and grooving at eToro and of course, GoodDollar. So give me sort of back when you were on the batter’s box before you rounded 1st, 2nd and 3rd.
Anna Stone
So I’ve always been interested in the questions of money and what the role that it plays in our lives, not just on a global macroeconomic level, but what it really means for each one of us personally, individually, I’ve always been interested in understanding financial inequality and why it exists and that’s been true of me since I’ve been a very young person and why I studied economics and why I started my career actually working in economic development in a traditional nonprofit model. So I’ve always been, let’s say, at least intellectually interested in this area and passionate about this area. And really coming to this question of wealth and equality and lack of access has always been something that’s been true to my heart. Having said that, I’m definitely a recovering idealist, right? So I kicked off my career working in the traditional nonprofit model, in economic development microfinance, and was very quickly this is a long time ago, over ten years ago already, and just really disillusioned by the philanthropic model and how unscalable it fundamentally was and became much more interested. And I want to say what was at that point in time emerging fintech solutions that were being brought to market by private companies that actually seemed like a much more reasonable way to give people buying power. So we’re talking about Visa and Mastercard moving into the favelas in Brazil or actually really looking at mobile money for West African countries where it had been so successful in East Africa, and this is in 2012, 2013, and the bricks are rising. I don’t know if everyone remembers this term, but the goal at that time was actually to Bank the Unbanked. That was what we were talking about, was that there’s over 2 billion people in the world that are unbanked and fintech and financial technology is going to help us actually bank the unbanked if you will, right?
Matt Zahab
“Bank the Unbanked” was the term.
Anna Stone
That was the term, that was the goal that was the slogan. It was part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals actually was if you want to address poverty. If you actually want to address inequality, then it means that you actually have to deal with these fundamental infrastructure failures that people don’t have access to basic savings, basic payments, let alone the tools that you need to invest and start to create and build wealth, right? So this was the time where banking the unbanked was the way to actually start to for these problems, if you will. And I’ll skip over a little bit, but long story short, I realized that I wanted to work in technology. I decided to move to Israel, which had a startup nation, which had a proliferation of really interesting technology companies there. I actually ended up starting my career moving away from fintech. But in around 2017 I started to look up from my enterprise software perch and started to read about this thing called Ethereum and started to read about Blockchain and fell down the rabbit hole, right? As so many people do at that early stage in their Crypto journey and their discovery journey. And realizing for me that this technology was going to be a very meaty area, that I would be able to really work on the issues that I’ve cared about my whole life ever since I was a young person. But to think about how we could use technology to solve these old problems in completely and totally new ways if you will, and so that’s what motivated me to move out of, let’s say, Web2, and actually move into working in Web3 and around 2017, I fell in love with the potential, the transformational potential of the technology, as so many people did, from my own personal perspective, which was always around, how can we actually meaningfully bring financial services to more people as part of a larger mission to hopefully make a dent in inequality in the world, right? I’m not saying eliminate inequality. I think it’s important to speak about this directly to a Crypto audience. We’re not saying that inequality doesn’t have a place. We’re not advocating for sameness, let’s put it that way. But I think from my perspective, in a world where we have so much, this concept that there are people who go without at all is a design choice. It’s actually a feature of the system and not a bug. And at that point in time, there was a lot of discussion around how Crypto was, at a minimum, going to provide, if not revolutionize, the existing financial system, at a minimum provide an alternative that would enable people to really begin to access new digital assets and potentially create and own wealth in new ways, and so I was just hooked. I forgot my first job, though, which was I was in Israel at that period of time, and there was an amazing team of real Crypto pioneers there that launched the Bancorp Protocol that I was privileged enough to join forces and to work with, and your memory in Crypto is short, but Bancorp was an incredible protocol because it was the first decentralized exchange protocol that launched on Ethereum, of which now there’s a multitude, right, of different protocols that are transacting hundreds of billions of dollars of value every day in decentralized exchange. But Bancorp was a true pioneer and a true innovator in actually creating automated market makers and this concept of trading against a smart contract. And we had one of the first retail facing DeFi exchanges on Ethereum. We launched some really interesting pioneer cross chain tech and wallet tech. And it was an incredible crash course in school of actually what it is to operate, product and operate a business in Web3. But at this point in time, DeFi was very fringe and still is extremely fringe, right? Just because more people now know what it is, doesn’t mean more people use it. right? And so I think for myself, given my motivation to work in Crypto, driven from a position of mission of how do we actually use this technology to address this big challenge that there are 1.7 billion people unbanked in the world and most people don’t have money, right? So over 50% of the world’s population lives on $5.50 a day. I think it’s really easy for us to forget this. Most people don’t have access and they don’t have money.
Matt Zahab
That’s insane.
Anna Stone
And this is where Blockchain can make the real impact, right? And so, for all that we’ve seen and talking about, you and I started this podcast talking about mass adoption, right? Where is the use case? Where is the use case that’s actually going to bring these big numbers and bring people into Crypto? Well, I’ll tell you, it turns out that there are lots and lots of people around the world who really need access to basic financial services and really need access to Crypto. And this is an incredible application of the technology. And it’s a great example of what we’ve worked on at GoodDollar is actually looking to use Blockchain as a solution to solve the problem of the fact that people don’t have access to basic financial services tools and they of assets. Hard stop.
Matt Zahab
Crazy. Anna what a rip that was lot to unpack there. Couple of things I want to go over. One thing that you mentioned that I’ve never heard of before, and this is probably not probably, this is definitely my own fault and my own ignorance. You brought up Eastern Africa being technologized before Western Africa perhaps may have misheard you, but can you explain more about that?
Anna Stone
Sure. So what I was referring to there is actually the phenomenon of M-Pesa in Kenya. And M-Pesa is a mobile money provider that actually, I think, is one of the most widely accepted and known examples of value being stored not in FIAT currency, but instead being stored in mobile minutes. Okay, so M-Pesa is a very interesting example, I think, for people who work in Crypto to look at, because M-Pesa is built on a centralized system. It’s not decentralized, it’s all traditional Web2 technology. But it’s one of the most compelling examples of how in a particular country in Kenya, and M-Pesa’s rise, I think, was around 2009 and the ten years following that. Do you remember this now?
Matt Zahab
No, while you’re talking, I’m looking at a little notes about it, and just for the listeners at home, if you want to research this while Anna is talking about it, it’s M-Pesa. M-Pesa mobile phone-based money transfer service. Launched in 2007, took off in 2009, just like you said, available to transfer mobile wallets in 20 plus countries in Africa. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of this, but keep going.
Anna Stone
M-Pesa are really interesting. Was a transformational technology in terms of how we think about what is the role that the smartphone plays in actually providing more financial access and more financial services and products to people who typically weren’t served, right? M-Pesa in Kenya was the first example of how there are more people who have cell phones than have bank accounts. Bank accounts as an extension of that’s a parallel or a metaphor for financial services, right? But there are more people in the world that have cell phones and smartphones than they do bank accounts. And M-Pesa was one of the first examples of where people actually started to transact value, conduct commerce, conduct remittances using mobile minutes, which were digital, and anyone could send peer to peer to any other member in the M-Pesa network, right? And so for people who didn’t have bank accounts and again, this is pre Venmo, pre PayPal, pre everything, right? If you don’t have a bank account and you don’t have cash, you can transact safely, securely across the country through sending cell phone minutes to people, right? It’s a great example and one of the most compelling use cases that show that, value transfer between people and value transfer peer to peer does not need to happen through FIAT currency. It can happen through other forms of digital value, right? It doesn’t have to be the Kenyan shilling, right? You can actually send someone 20 minutes of airtime and there’s a price associated with it and a known value and accepted value, and then you can sell it to someone else. And therefore it actually meets one of the definitions of money, right, which is to function as a store of value and a medium of exchange. If you guys don’t have a development background, I really encourage you to read some of the stories about M-Pesa and how it swept across Kenya and how quickly it was adopted. Because I think it shows the fact that many places where you lack traditional existing infrastructure, these are the populations and the geographies that hold the potential to experience leapfrog innovation. And so when we think of leapfrog innovation, many places, we’re talking about West Africa and emerging markets, these are places that never actually got telecom infrastructure. Everyone leapfrogged directly to the mobile phone. And that has a number of 2nd, 3rd, 4th order effects around the digital literacy, digital connectivity of those populations, et cetera. And so I think of decentralized finance and open finance. From my perspective, this is a leapfrog technology. This is going to be adopted more rapidly in places where there are less barriers to entry because people don’t have bank accounts, because people don’t have Venmo, because they don’t have PayPal. So going through the user experience pain of operating in Web3 or dealing with digital assets is worth it because you have a lower barrier to entry.
Matt Zahab
Well said. What made you so passionate about this? You can hear it in your voice. You truly do give a shit. You do care, and I feel like that’s rare. I feel like a lot of people are just chasing money in this space. What makes Anna so passionate and fire up about fixing these real life issues and creating actual use cases for Crypto being used by real people in the real world to do real things?
Anna Stone
So I think for everyone, it’s like a personal story, right? I think for myself personally, I have a grandfather who has long since passed, but he was early on to Wall Street and he always talked about Wall Street. It’s so interesting to think about this in retrospect, but like Wall Street and the public markets of the stock exchange actually democratizing wealth creation for the little guy. And that that was one of the things that set America apart from every other country was that because of this robust capital markets infrastructure that we had within our country, that you actually had a market where a real individual person can access it. They can access that information fairly. They can access assets fairly, that they can actually begin to participate in capital markets. And the contrast with that with so much of the rest of the world. So, first of all, I always thought of the markets as actually a democratizing force that makes wealth creation more accessible for people. I think it was only when I started to, let’s say, grow up and learn more about the world that I began to understand how even though that might be true in theory, the practical, let’s say, how it actually worked on the ground was that most people in this country, particularly in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, it was not easy for people to actually begin to access markets and to onboard. I think that’s actually since really changed with the creation of companies like eToro, right? That makes it really easy for anyone. Any American at least, or anyone in advanced capital market country to log in, create an account, upload your driver’s license, buy $20 worth of Apple stock. That’s an amazing innovation in terms of financial access and financial inclusion and giving real people the access to better their own standing in life through capitalism. So say that’s one element for it. I’d say the second element for me is actually focused off of the disc. I studied economics when I was in college, and I felt like as I got older, there was this huge disconnect between how you learn about the economy versus the reality that the economy is just us. It’s us as people behaving and acting out behaving due to our fears, our hopes, our dreams, and that money is actually, like, the most personal technology. It’s the most personal technology. Money is actually, like, one of the few things that we all have in common, right? It’s one of the few technologies that we all use that we all are familiar with. It is so integral to how we think about ourselves and our relationship to the world and our opportunities. And I felt that there was this great lie almost between how you were taught about economics as this science or this discipline which is disconnected from human behavior, and that just couldn’t be further from the truth, right? And that actually money is deeply personal. It’s extremely creative. It’s extremely subjective. It’s all based upon how we interact with one another and perceive each other and perceive our own optimism or pessimism about our shared future, right?
Matt Zahab
It’s a reflection of us. You want to see who and what someone does, who they are. Look at their credit cards, look at their bank account. For the few people who still use cash, what do you spend on a day to day? Me, for example. I know it cost me X amount of dollars to just wake up every day and have a condo in Toronto that I rent, I don’t own. And then I usually eat twice a day. I’ll have a protein shake a day, the gym membership, the bike members, the whole nine yards. That’s what life’s about. It’s truly a treat.
Anna Stone
Yeah, exactly, and so I think at the same point, money is so universal. And I think also we are all so much more than the money that we have in our bank accounts. When I think about our work at GoodDollar and what we’ve built, this is a very fundamental principle that informs our work, which is that you, me, but billions and billions of people all around this world. We are all more than the amount of wealth that we have or the money that we have in our bank account. We have more to offer to the world than just the things that we can pay for and afford. And I think that is more the further down the pyramid you go right? The more and more true that is. The 50% of the population, of the global population that is living on $5.50 a day are more than the daily income that they live on, and they have more to offer to the world than just their purchasing power. And I think this is why people talk about that there’s so much untapped latent potential, economic potential out there in developing economies and emerging market economies. It’s because there is a tremendous amount of human capital and human potential that is waiting to be unlocked. And one of the things that Crypto is really good at is actually getting money to people at scale in a global way. And if the problem that you’re looking to solve is how do we actually get money to flow to the places where it’s the most expensive, where it’s the least accessible, where banks are the least willing to go, where the cost of capital is worth, is completely and totally inaccessible for people, right? These are problems where Crypto actually is a great solution and Blockchain is a great solution. And I think for not every problem that Crypto is trying to solve, is that the case? But when you look at these types of problems of how do we actually give financial tools to people and how do we get assets to people, Crypto is a great solution.
Matt Zahab
It is the best we have right now. Anna, you’re on a roll. We got to take a quick break, though, and give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show that is PrimeXBT. They’ve been longtime friends of Cryptonews and the Cryptonews Podcast. We love their team, incredible people, very switched on as well, who have built a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Anna. Anna, let’s get into some eToro action and some GoodDollar action. Let’s start with GoodDollar. I love the name, by the way. gooddollar.org super simple. Has a nice ring to it. Makes you wonder, what the heck is this as well? Checks off all my boxes. Let’s jump into it right away. Tell me what GoodDollar is, what you and the team are doing, why you started it, and what is on the agenda for the next couple of years.
Anna Stone
Sure. Great. So GoodDollar and eToro actually share the same founder, if you will. So the original idea behind GoodDollar was brought to the world, a long standing concept that the founder and CEO of eToro, Yoni Assia, had been thinking about since really the earliest days following the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. And Yoni, I would say, is a great entrepreneur, and he’s built eToro into be a great company. But while he’s built out, let’s say, eToro is a regulated broker dealer, that’s a regulated company. Yoni is also an avid Bitcoiner and a true believer in the power of Web3 to really shift the paradigm of digital assets in this world. And so as eToro grew up looking at Bitcoin and basically, what this open source technology contribution, the impact of It on the world and the ability for it to really create a whole new market category of digital assets very much informed Yoni’s approach to the type of corporate social responsibility projects that eToro wanted to support and wanted to build. The thinking behind GoodDollar was actually based off of how do we meaningfully use Blockchain to address inequality through getting more assets to the people that need it, right? And how can we actually build this in such a way so that what we’re doing is building something, an open source software network that outlives us, that other people can build on top of, that enables other people to create their own opportunities through contributing to it or through building their own businesses, and so GoodDollar is really meant to be a public network for the public good that’s able to give free money to whoever wants it at scale. This is the concept behind GoodDollar. And so we actually originally started as a research project, really researching this topic of could you use public Blockchain networks to distribute some sort of global, universal basic income. And so we started to ship away that question. The solution that we came up with was going to be very hard. But if we’re going to do it, we’re going to need to create a protocol that creates a standard for free money as a public good that would actually enable us to take all of the leverages, the power and the features of the Blockchain in a way for us to solve this old problem in fundamentally new ways. So there’s plenty of money out there, right? This is something I mentioned earlier in the podcast. It’s like there’s plenty of wealth out there. The question is actually how are we directing that wealth into which places in such a way that it’s actually used the most productively. GoodDollar is actually an open source standard for free money as a public good that is designed to basically enable the funding of GoodDollar from any source in open finance. Your yield earnings from compound, a fee from your NFT sale, a fraction of your liquidity pool fees, right? Like you name it, there are tons and tons of sources of capital in DeFi? And how can we actually build a model that encourages people to say, donate fractions of a cent or earned interest or whatever the case may be and to do that at scale in such a way that all of those microtransactions are actually channeled productively towards one source and that is GoodDollar. And GoodDollar actually then is one productive source that distributes this as a universal basic income fairly to all members of the world. We’re giving small amounts of money. So the concept here is actually to enable money to flow very freely to places where it’s the most expensive and therefore there’s the most laden untapped human potential out there. In my perspective these are also the places that are most in need of decentralized finance, right? Where people don’t actually places where capital is expensive, where there’s not enough opportunity. These are the places you end up with massive billions and billions of people who are under banked and underinvested, right? So GoodDollar is there are a few components to it that make it work. I’d say the primary components are the protocol which actually issues the token, which is also GoodDollar G dollar sign, right? So this is the UBI token. This is the token that we distribute as UBI every day and we use it for a butt to create that flywheel and incentive effect within the community. And we’ve built a few interfaces that enable people to non financial, non technical people to actually be able to sign up, get into a noncustodial wallet and begin to claim their daily UBI and practice sending it, using it and using it to explore dApps, right?
Matt Zahab
Is there a cost for people to claim? Do they just go in and claim and boom, you’re off to the races.
Anna Stone
So, of course there’s gas, right? But we subsidize that. That’s part of the protocol model is that actually so I’d say we confronted that challenge in two ways. One is that we do the UBI distribution on side chains of Ethereum. So GoodDollar currently is a multi chain protocol. We distribute the GoodDollar UBI every day to users on Fuse and on Sello, okay? So that’s one way that we came about it. The other, I guess, product design decision that we made was actually to have the protocol subsidize gas fees. So because most people don’t, how are you going to have Fuse, Sello or Ethereum to pay for gas, right? If this is your first experience with Web3, you’re not and you’re going to have no idea where to go and get in, in order to claim your UBI, right? So that’s actually a core part of the protocol, is subsidization of the gas price that enables people to really easily claim microtransactions every single day. It actually blows my mind that gas subsidy hasn’t become a standard in dApp design in Crypto, because it seems to me so obvious as a way to encourage to onboard people to use your dApps. But that’s one way that we confronted the cost issue.
Matt Zahab
Love that I’m on the website right now. It’s hella clean. It makes a whole lot of sense. I’ll play devil’s advocate here. My thing with you, and again, I feel like when you’re discussing UBI, you’re talking about people who are incredibly impoverished and who don’t live in rural parts of North America like you and I do. But I just think of even the city of Toronto, and I look around and go on walks and I just feel like UBI would be abused, like there would be no tomorrow. And even just the service and all the things that have changed since COVID-19 happened, 2020. I look at how much more difficult it is for processes just to be efficient in life, I just feel like we’ve taken multiple steps back in regards to in person physical efficiency, and a lot of that comes down to workers who are helping move the needle. Again, I could go on and on, but what’s your take on UBI as a whole? I’m talking global. Sam Altman, the I believe co founder, maybe not co founder, but current CEO of OpenAI. Feel like you’re a big fan of him too. How could you not be? The guy’s absolutely brilliant. He’s creating incredible stuff for humanity. He’s also a big UBI guy as well. But I’d love if you could just tell me more about it and why you think it’d be good for humanity.
Anna Stone
So I think universal basic income is not a new concept. UBI has been around since the 16 hundreds as a concept right. And has gone through many iterations, as society has changed, as labor has changed, as the economy has changed, and I think as a concept, UBI is here to stay. I definitely think that within the United States, you see UBI being looked at really seriously as, let’s say, the next generation of the social services system. I think with all of the trends of impending AI and impending mass unemployment as a real motivation behind that, right? So. Even in the US. You have the coalition of the Mayors for Guaranteed Income. This is actually a project that’s designed to test UBI in I think now it’s in over 100 American cities, and it’s being administered through the mayor’s office. And it’s really designed, I think, to address what you were referring to, Matt, which is like this crisis in our cities and this crisis within our communities that is actually not only driving isolation and this stress that I think everyone feels, but also, I would say, like the problems that are in your face on the street, right? Homelessness, drug addiction, mental health crises, etcetera. right?
Matt Zahab
Maybe give them a chance to get on the right foot as well.
Anna Stone
So I think UBI is like every UBI pilot that’s been done so far. Whether we’re talking about something that happening in Stockton or in Kenya, it proves the same things right. That people, when given a small amount of financial security, it improves people’s performance outcomes across a range of different factors. right? It has been proven to not result in people don’t go and take their UBI and spend it on drugs. People don’t take their UBI and then quit their jobs. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s that with a little bit of financial security, the idea is that people are able to breathe for half a second and spend their UBI on investing in an education instead of just staying afloat for the month, right? And I think as we see these pilots in the US and in more advanced economies, the human stories of them prove out over the next year or so, I hope that we’re going to be able to move away from this stigma of, well, UBI is just contemporary communism and it’s just going to be like it’s going to destroy capitalism and productive society. I think that there’s going to be enough data out there and enough examples out there that prove that that’s not the case. Having said that, I don’t think UBI in the United States is politically viable. And I’m saying that as a result of seeing what’s going on. right? I don’t really see a pathway where, within this country we see UBI on the ballot in a realistic it’s certainly on a national level in the next 20 years, potentially not even in my lifetime, right? I don’t see that happening, but what makes our work interesting and what keeps me motivated. UBI whether we’re talking like five cents a day or $0.50 or $50 a day or $5,000 a year or a month, whatever, the whole premise here is actually to enable people to create their own opportunities. And I think giving people enough belief that there’s someone out there who’s even rooting for you, right? That you feel the encouragement to create your own opportunities. And I think that’s what makes what GoodDollar has done it’s an interesting contribution to the universal basic income category. Because even though we’re distributing cents on the dollar, right? If you claim every day for a month you’ll have around fifty cents, fifty US cents, right? That’s a small amount of money, right? Really small amount of money, particularly from a western context. But the important thing is that we need to remember that GoodDollar is actually for people who are looking to create their own opportunities, who otherwise have no other on ramp to create their own opportunities. And we actually see this happening, right? So that even in places like Cameroon, for example, where they’re really used to operating, there’s no credit, right? There’s very limited. Most people can’t just go to a bank and get credit. So what do they do there as actually community savings groups and tauntings, where people are saving together and then within a social group of around 20 people, they’re able to take loans from one another, right?
Matt Zahab
Interesting.
Anna Stone
So like using GoodDollar, people are now actually saving together in a group in GoodDollar, and within a few months you actually end up with around $100 to actually deploy and to begin to use in DeFi and experiment together as a group, right? And so we have amazing examples of hundreds of young micro entrepreneurs that have opened up GoodDollar for mobile minute airtime shops. right? So we talked about M-Pesa on this podcast. GoodDollar has been used actually for mobile minutes, right? So people will sell their GoodDollars for mobile minutes and use it actually on Data real world, someone who is creating their own opportunities for themselves and also for the people around them through this disintermediated Crypto infrastructure. We have amazing examples of people setting up second. Using GoodDollar is a peer to peer complementary currency, right? And setting up secondhand shops for preowned goods or for homemade goods or handymade goods. We have examples of people connecting cross borders. So, graphic designer in Venezuela selling their services to an aspiring entrepreneur in Kenya. And how are these people transacting? They’re transacting in GoodDollars in Microsense, right? But like I said, people have so much more to offer than the amount of money that they have in their bank account. And this is the further down the pyramid you go, the smaller amount of daily income that people are living on. The truer that actually is the more people have to offer than just their spending power. And so I think this is what GoodDollar is testing, right? How can you use these small amounts of money, these micro transactions, to actually unlock the human potential of people who have a lot to offer, but are looking for the platform and the assets upon which to build themselves and hopefully Web3 is that.
Matt Zahab
I’d love that. That was another great rip. I think you and I are in the same yacht here, Anna. I would love for a lot of our impoverished and less fortunate countries in the world to have access to UBI. But again, I can’t speak for USA because I don’t spend enough time there. But Canada in particular, I bet the house that UBI would not work. I honestly, truly would. We’ll get into that when you come on for round two. And heck, you and I could go for a couple of hours here. We might next time we might have to pull a Joe Rogan pod and do a good old three hour sesh. But again, we’ll get to that. Anna, what a treat. Thank you so much for coming on. We got to do the hot take factory before you go. I know you got a couple. Heck, I bet you got more than a couple. Give me a couple of Anna Stone hot takes before you go. Something that only Anna believes in, whereas most other people do not.
Anna Stone
Wow. I said I would think about this during the podcast, but I didn’t. I was too busy talking. Listen, it’s pretty radical to think that Crypto will be the most impactful in the poorest countries. Like I’ve spoken to enough. This is actually a hot take for Crypto. That Crypto is interesting for poor people, right? It’s the most interesting when it comes to poor people. And that’s the long game that we should all be thinking about and all playing, whether or not we see it as linked to our immediate interest or not. I think that working in the Crypto socialimpact space, as you mentioned, Matt, most people are here for the money, right? That’s the reality. So when you work in the Crypto and social impact space, it’s really a niche area, if you will, that I’d say, for the most part, is really dominated by true idealists. I think that the number of people who are like I will say there’s many more builders now than there ever was before. But it’s incredibly tough because you need a lot of money in order to build Blockchain products. It’s expensive, actually, to launch Crypto projects, to build Blockchain projects. And there’s been very little capital that loads towards thinking about how do we solve big problems using new technology. I’ve heard enough time from people who are billionaires many times over, like Crypto. We don’t really care about poor people, I hate to say it, but I’ve heard it so many times from many people and I think that attitude is actually what is keeping us from, as an industry, like getting to those use cases that actually changes the brand of Crypto and why it matters, right? So I think as long as we continue to think of creating this same financial, the same products, but just in undecentralized rails, is that really what we’re doing? Are we actually trying to tokenize the stock market? Is that solving a problem that we have or not, right? And so I think with technology, it’s all about first principles, it’s all about what problems are you trying to solve? In my mind, it’s the big global problems that are experienced by our shared humanity that have to deal with climate, that have to do with basically inequality, which is a huge burning problem in our world, right? So both climate and inequality are two areas where you hope that if you can change the incentive system, you can actually begin to solve those problems. And Crypto is all about incentives design. So if we don’t use this technology to actually tackle the big problems, I think that it’s just not that interesting. And that’s my own take on it.
Matt Zahab
Anna, you’re on a roll. Got to have you on for round two. We barely scratched the surface here, but we are getting very tight for time, so we got to wrap up. What a treat. Thank you so much for coming on. Huge shout out to your team, my team. Well, both of your teams. GoodDollar and eToro, hooking this up. Huge shout out to everyone involved. Anna before you go, can you please let our listeners know where everyone can find you? eToro and gooddollar.org online and on socials.
Anna Stone
So myself, I’m @TheRealStone, primarily on Twitter. GoodDollar is @gooddollarorg and eToro, you can find our global account @eToro and us @eToroUS, we are sharing all sorts of cool stuff on all those channels around how we’re making capital markets more accessible for more people, both for GoodDollar and from eToro and hope you’ll follow us and find us there. Thank you so much Matt, for having me on. It’s been really fun.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Anna Stone. Can’t wait to have her on for round two. If you guys enjoyed this one, I hope you did, please do subscribe it would mean the world to my team and I as always, I will include everything Anna, eToro and gooddollar.org related in the show notes, all of their websites, social profiles, you name it, it will be there. Go check it out. And we’ll also have some other snippets and surprises as well in the show notes. Huge shout out to my team love you guys thank you so much for everything. Justas, my amazing sound editor appreciate you as always, you are the best. And to the listeners, love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
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