Calanthia Mei on digital identity for DeFi lending

0:00I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on blockchain interviews we have calanthia May the co-founder of NASA Finance kalanthia welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time thanks for having me here Ashton you're very welcome I'm really excited to dive into massive Finance defy and soul bound tokens I would love to kick off our

0:23conversation by just hearing a little bit about your background in the blockchain space and how that led up to you getting involved with NASA and then we'll dive into all the details yeah absolutely so personally I am a first generation immigrant here in the US moved to the country when I was a teenager when I first moved here I had no knowledge about how the financial

0:43system worked in the U.S for example I had to rebuild my credit score from the scratch I probably hit overdrafts more time than I'd like to admit because of the various heat and fee structures or banking system has imposed on us that's the reason why part of my personal missions is to build a more open and transparent and democratized financial system that not only benefits a group of

1:07people but mostly benefits all and this is reflected in my professional Journey as well fun fact when I first started my professional Journey it was in traffic but it was a very interesting period of time when the phrase too big to fail was literally going to describe the bank I was working at needless to say I saw the good but mostly the Bad and the Ugly

1:30when it comes to how how difficult our financial system was and that inspired me to use technology to really solve for that I moved over to California and decided to use technology to solve a lot of deficiencies I saw in the financial system hop onto the fintech trend at the early wave of this generation of fintag became a funding team member of paper

1:52house Venture Capital arm and that's where I got my first exposure into crypto as well a lot of people didn't know this but people actually experimented with using cryptocurrency as a form of payment at a Braintree which is a payment processing arm at PayPal in 2014. back then I don't think the adoption was significant that's the reason why the project got sunseted up

2:17to a couple years but then later on people also tried to use a paper wallet to trade crypto integrating with coinbase and other larger crypto companies to do funds and then plans out helping with the on-ramp problem and I was a part of the worst group solving someone challenges wow incredible background and I hear this often where it's you know the personal and

2:38entrepreneurial entrepreneurial Journey where you you get into you know traditional Finance you see all the things wrong with it and then you're like you know what this is my personal mission to fix this and not just a better myself to help everybody fix all these problems so that's great to hear and you know I I am familiar with sort of a little bit on the history of PayPal

2:58and uh some they were definitely a little early uh but now it looks like you know they have put Bitcoin in there and and maybe now is the right time and I A lot has happened in in crypto since then um and there's so much to talk about with defy and nfts and and there's much more to come still we're still very early but a lot more since 2014. now with all of that said in your journey

3:28getting into massive Finance can you talk about about what the main mission is of NASA and how you're looking at solving those problems you talked about yeah so at Masa we're trying to bring the next billion users into web 3. it sounds like a very ambitious goal and we're indeed very ambitious so how do we do that we're trying to deliver real world utility to the next billion people

3:52and we don't have one billion web3 natives yet that's reason why we're trying to expand the scope of our real world utility to also include people who may not even know how blockchain works we want to be able to provide utility to them and exactly what is that real world utility we're trying to provide it is very similar to my co-founder Brendan and my personal story we want to provide

4:17access to Capital to the people across the world by creating a financial identity on Chang that it's fair or transparent and more democratized so that's what we do here at muscle Finance we're trying to be web Freeze first sober identity protocol by giving people access to Identity T online on Chang but also giving developer an opportunity to build sober identity in the blockchain

4:44world as well amazing and I've seen a few different companies sort of working on a decentralized web through identity I feel like there's a lot to go to sort of make it mainstream and but there's a lot of issues with sort of web 2 identities and how identity works on the internet right now so I feel like there's a lot to improve on where do you start with

5:07you know do you start with you know these are the worst you know identity fraud and these sort of issues or do you just start from scratch and like let's build this into a decentralized protocol and and sort of 10x how identity Works in web 2. yeah you are absolutely right Ashley when it comes to your identity being such an abstract concept I think as a

5:29developer you'll be so drawn to the concept of identity because it is a really hard problem to solve for but in order for identity to have adoption you have to be very very smart in exactly what kind of utility you provide and what kind of use cases you go to market with first that's exactly the reason why my co-founder Brandon and I chose um lending as the first used case giving

5:54people across the globe access to Capital in a more fair and democratized way I'll give you an example here we're still on the test net and having lunch on the main net yet but we have close to 70 000 users they were attracted to master Finance because they want to get access to D5 loans simple asset access to Capital at the global scale scale it is still a very hard to solve problem

6:20and it has real demand that's reason why we decided to launch that as a very first use case of Masa sober identity however when we were building the muscles of identity in The Lending use case we realized that the picks and shovels the infrastructure was really missing there was no identity management layer that allows developer to build the mass of silver Identity or whatever the

6:44action so long identity on Chang that's the reason why we are in the process of externalizing our sobound identity infrastructure so that action you'll be able to build your actions about identity unche and then Rachel will be able to build hers and Clinton I will be able to build mine we're trying to offer that as a developer program it's part of Masa contributing to the publicly good

7:08in web3 wow that's incredible to hear about the 70 000 people already getting on board and you know as you mentioned there's so much you could do with decentralized identity you have to start somewhere with a good use case you know I feel like having you know way down the road decades down will have digital passports and driver's license and government will

7:28be involved but like that's way down the road you know that's not the first use case but getting access to Capital in in the same way that you know Bitcoin had its early use cases in in gaming and commerce and not for sort of every day I feel like people that are unbanked or underbanked that need to get access to Capital using defy having a web through identity to sort of build

7:52credit or have other uh you know benefits beyond that I feel like that's a great use case um especially in you know developing countries is that sort of where you're targeting you know in in underdeveloped countries um to to start building a credit for loans so that's where we started we offered Masa in developing countries where emerging economies and we've got a lot

8:20of demand we got a lot of traction on the waiting list people want to get access to Capital but that is a global problem it is a way bigger problem than most of people realize across the globe they're 3.3 billion people who are credit invisible and what does that mean that being said you are credit worthy however because of the lack of financial infrastructure in the jurisdiction you

8:43live in you do not have a good way to represent your credit worthiness and as a result you are not able to get access to Capital as your credit worthiness would actually demand that's the reason why I find D5 to be fascinating right because you're essentially creating a global debt Capital Market whereby lenders spores and liquidity providers can truly participate from everywhere

9:10and they can be reached how they can be institutional Capital efficiency is being optimized and then access is being opened up to people across the globe if you have a financial identity that can represent your credit worthiness that is yeah I know I can see how having global access and you know retail institution all sort of in one spot would make the capital so

9:37much more efficient and you know break down the barriers of of countries and in jurisdictions I'm sort of having individual jurisdiction over certain areas so I'm really excited to see this grow out now I saw through massive finance's platform something about uh Soul bound nfts and I've heard the term a few times where you know you sort of tie something to to

10:03oneself that's untradable and obviously identity is is a great example of that is this the new technology that you're utilizing to create the web through identities yeah 100 so actually you may recall in May vitalik published a paper called decentralized society in which he championed the concept of a sobam token and sobon identity so that's exactly the

10:28core technical concept where building Masa sobang identity upon and I'll give you a super non-technical uh explanation of that imagine you're building an onion and then there are different layers to an ani and and each layer of onion would represent a data attribute it can be your credit score credit worthiness it can be your personal address your anching activity in certain

10:54decentralized exchanges and then adding all the layers together of the onion that represents your own chain identity so that's exactly what we're building here at Masa sober identity each layer can be permission to be viewed by whoever requested for instance let's say Ashton your blender and you want to check out my web free credit score which is one layer of the audience here you'll

11:20be able to request to see one layer of onion I'll be able to sign my wallet to permission you to see my financial score in web 3 and then you'll be able to view it we find this non-transport preferable nft in the format of a cell Bond identity to be the future of unchain identity wow incredible and from what I understand it is like a an nft and when people hear nfts they think

11:49you know board ape crypto punks digital digital art but this is totally different yeah um are they using the same underlying technology or like how you know it can get confusing for people when they hear like oh it's an nft you're like well I thought that was Art what do you mean my identity is an nft as well um do you think that's a barrier to to overcome

12:12um I actually I'm super bullish on expanding the use case of nft as well I'm very grateful for the artists and the creators who brought the name nft into the mainstream conscious right now everyone knows about nft knows about the board a the famous artists who are trying to leverage blockchain to engage creative activities however I do think that in order to inspire the next bull

12:35market in crypto we need to extend use cases of not only nft but other crypto technology to deliver real world utility and using non-transferable verbal nft as it's a good way to represent your on-chain identity to me that is a really really good way to expand the use cases of nft and um we are also uh I'm giving you a quick sneak peek here uh we did

13:04something quite clever a couple months a couple months ago if you recall the ens domain names I'm sure you remember it's still pre-fresh on everyone's memory um for those audience members who do not recall in this domain name um imagine six months ago when you're on Twitter when everyone changed their Twitter handle to clientia.e that's the next domain name I

13:28thought it was super clever to use a very easy to understand and very portable phrase to represent your ethereum wallet address what we did here at Masa is that we allow you to create a simple Sone to represent your Masa sobang identity for instance in this case I'll be clampia doso which would point to my master server identity and you'll be Ashen Darcel and you can of

13:53course have your fun internet name as well so that is actually a nft that we have linked into quite heavily in the past couple weeks and the Library community absolutely loved it uh people love getting a special uh unique and rare uh Sony and we plan to do some fun airdrop very soon too wow very cool I'm looking forward to seeing that and it's great to add a little more Soul into uh

14:21into the blockchain world and into Finance as well I feel like traditional Finance some might say it's soulless so um you know I think this will really help with that now you mentioned you had a lot of people on the wait list and you're in the test net phase can you talk a little bit more exactly about where massive Finance is at right now and sort of what are the

14:43next steps in in getting to that next stage of the launch yeah absolutely so so far we have launched on silos test net and they you're in Gurley tests that we have around 70 uh thousand users mostly got attracted to our community because they're excited by uh the aspect of access to Capital but also building your identity on Chang in the next couple

15:07weeks we are launching on the ethereum mainnet which is the biggest launch we have for this year that will be tremendously exciting we have a lot of marketing activities planned around it including the surname airdrops I mentioned earlier that is going to be major and then next up uh towards the end of this year we're going to formally launch our developer program which is

15:28equally exciting again we're trying to externalize our SVT infrastructure to allow developed person projects to build their own sobone identity it is fascinating how many ways an identity can be used in the web 3 world and we want to be able to support that kind of momentum we are in the process of integrating with first cohort of developers and partners cannot share

15:51more but please do stay tuned very cool and for those people that sort of want to stay tuned and hear about this upcoming airdrop as well is it still possible to get onto that extensive wait list or how else can they follow along with the updates for Masa yeah absolutely they can follow us on get mafai on Twitter you can follow us and join our Discord Community we have a very vibrant

16:20and Global dysport community of a few thousand members which shift daily updates we have very fun memes so please be part of it you can also go to our website masa.finance to learn more amazing thank you so much kalanthia I will leave those links in the description box below as well all the best with shaping the future of web3 identities with soul bound tokens and

16:41helping out the defy industry and just helping out people get involved in finance that are they're unbanked and underbanked around the whole world I really do appreciate this initiative and let's follow up in the near future thank you so much Ashton uh thanks for having me here