Payy Network aims to make cross-border payments private

0:01I'm Ashen Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews we have Sid Gandhi the CEO of pay Sid welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time cool excited to be here definitely uh I'm excited to dive into the Privacy aspect of blockchain I feel like uh it's becoming ever more important to know about it I would love to start first of all with a little bit

0:21on yourself and business blockchain privacy your background how that led you to founding pay then we can dive into all the details yeah cool uh I guess my crypto Journey started in 2012 um I read the Bitcoin white paper got really excited about the possibilities of of decentralized uh Financial networks um and kind of followed the variety of different uh Trends and and cool things

0:46that have been built since then uh early in 2022 uh my co-founder and I got really excited about building infrastructure to solve the scalability cost and uh privacy problems that we still crypto that we felt were like kind of keeping crypto for Mass adoption um so we started poly based Labs uh we built a bunch of cool stuff since then we built poly based database which was a

1:12decentralized database uh used by over 4,000 developers we built ZK um bench which was a ZK Frameworks benchmarking tool it's probably the the top most used benchmarking tool today uh we looked at risk zero we looked at Noir uh we looked at polygon miden um and we Benchmark those in a way that's repeatable by anyone that's all open source and we also built poly Lang

1:38which was a which is a typescript to ZK bite code compiler and so if you know how to write typescript or JavaScript it's really easy to write ZK circuits with that um what we started working on at the end of last year was a consumer application because we really felt strongly that like there's been a lot of advancements in ZK and privacy from an infrastructure perspective but really

2:03getting that into people's hands has been a huge challenge um if you ask people like do they use privacy Tech and crypto today the you answer is usually no or we've tried but it's like really hard um and there's a bunch of examples out there you know either it's like really expensive on gas it's really slow you have to take a bunch of different steps to wrap and unwrap and shield and

2:23unshield and we said can we actually simplify that for people and build something that is private is self- custodial is decentralized but feels like you know just another app that's really easy to use on your phone wow very cool I'm excited to hear more about that because I have personally tried um some different privacy networks privacy coins and yeah

2:46you're right there's always extra steps or it's just you know way too much effort for the the value that you're trying to get um so how exactly has your team sort of lowered those barriers to entry with pay Network um to allow more people to have access to these privacy functionalities yeah there's basically three main areas that we've worked on to improve that experience the first one is

3:10um the Privacy itself and so what does privacy mean so on pay Network and and in the pay wallet privacy means your sender the receiver the token and the amount those are all completely private and only stored on the user's device and they're encrypted and backed up now what gets sent to the network every time you make a transaction is a ZK proof and a

3:34hash and that's all handled automatically in a self self custodial way um the second main area is kind of abstracting away all those like really crypto things about doing crypto payments so things like addresses uh Keys seed phrases tokens um gas fees or gas tokens we've abstracted all that away from the user so what you see in Pay wallet is your usdc balance and to

4:04send a payment you uh generate an ephemeral wallet which is just like generating a link so you just type in I want to send $5 you hit next the app automatically generates an ephemeral wallet stores that $5 in that wallet and then generates a link and then you can send that link to anyone so we pull up like the share sheet you can send it via iMessage or or telegram or

4:25signal um and when the receiver gets that link they can just click that link and if they don't have pay wallet it'll prompt them to download it if they do it'll open directly in Pay wallet um and it'll just allow them to redeem uh into their balance and so we've we've kind of like you don't have to think about like what chain you're on and and wrapping

4:45and unwrapping and any of that it's it's all kind of done for you uh and the last part is that the the ramps on and off uh whether through Fiat or existing crypto networks have to be really seamless um and they have to be really fast and so what we've done is we've integrated um a variety of different ramps so right now we have Robin Hood connect we have

5:10coinbase we have binance we have other exchanges um you can obviously deposit funds using uh a deposit wallet address we give you um so that's available on polygon right now that will be available on ethereum and other evm chains as well um and then the last thing we're enabling is direct Fiat ramps so you will be able to connect your bank account obviously like you can purchase

5:34uh crypto through your credit card but all of that is seamless and fast um and lands within a couple minutes into your pay wallet um automatically without you having to go through extra ST steps like bridging or swapping um or or or wrapping so we we kind of do all of that for you wow that's really cool and I feel like the Fiat on and off ramp is of

5:56course very important especially for people that 99% % that they they're looking for a better alternative to the traditional systems to send money cross border payments of um the transfer wise or or um going to the ATM and there's so many fees but that's all they know and when you add a too many technological steps it's like uh I don't want to do it

6:19through the app um but if you can really lower those barriers to entry I feel like that's a multi-billion dollar market that uh crypto has yet to sort of break into yeah very cool and with the wallet so the Z there you mentioned at the beginning about the ZK technology the Privacy technology all of that people don't really need to understand the technicalities behind it

6:47um is there a way that you can you can explain the benefits to the people that why this is needed or how it benefits them um besides the fact that you know if you're a crypto person you're you're looking at the blockchain Explorer and you're like okay there's less information uh but if you're coming from uh the the Western Union world is that stuff really important to them as well

7:13yeah it's kind of funny because I think a lot of people don't realize when they come from trafi to crypto that all of the transactions they're doing are fully public forever MH and yeah if you're coming from Western Union and you know someone gives you a crypto payments app you there's there's dozens of crypto payments apps now that all use stable coin and you know they're built on Bas

7:35or arbitrum or or polygon or whatever um most people don't realize that those are fully public and if you pay at a store with crypto which is obviously still really hard even 15 years on from Bitcoin if you pay at a store with crypto uh and you walk out of that store everyone knows that what like that person that walked out what their onchain activity has been so how much

7:57money you have on there you know what defi protocols you use what nfts you own and I think a lot of people think that by using like ephemeral wallets and multiple different addresses uh that that kind of keeps you private turns out over the last like six to seven years um all the blockchain analysis firms so if you think about chainalysis Arkham intelligence trm Labs they've all been

8:25doing tremendous work to allow people to discover connections between different wallets M and they use that they use behavioral analysis they use Big Data they use Ai and today the technology is so good that they're able to do clustering analysis uh around times of day and location and all these different signals that they have and bring all that together um it turns out sodonomy

8:50is pretty much dead um unless you're really really really good at it and you use vpns and you uh you know you kind of remember to shuffle around your your wallets and and you don't use the same centralized exchange deposit address every time like it's really hard to actually M maintain proper privacy in in in crypto all of this to say the regular consumer today probably doesn't

9:14understand this but I would say in the medium term like crypto is going to have a Cambridge analytica type moment where some kind of inflection point happens uh and just like with Facebook and camage analytica like no one really cares about putting all their stuff on Facebook right like remember we used to just put any everything every personal like thing

9:36on Facebook right relationship status like wow um that was a big thing and then we all realized that was being used by random companies to do data analysis and and being shared and so I think crypto is gon to end up having the same thing we see the very beginnings of this right Google recently started indexing Bitcoin transactions I think this was last month um and so now you can go and

10:00type in a Bitcoin address and you can see the balance and you can see transactions and obviously you can see where that's going Google's going to use that for their advertising product I me that's just that's obvious um and now you see like stripe accepting usdc on a couple different blockchains like every time you make a stripe payment now that's going to be public for anyone to

10:20view uh and they can try to use different techniques to to get around that but at the end of the day it's it's not going to work on a public network no it's a it's a great point and I feel like we're already seeing a lot of privacy related news um crackdowns more so in in news recently of Technology um perhaps there's a lot of people that are they're doing nothing

10:43wrong they're just looking for a technology that is going to protect their personal information um and then there's the the samurai wallet news or other privacy technology that also could be abused by elicit uh actors I I feel like any technology could be abused you know Google search could be abused by elicit actors um what do you think about what's happening in the news uh towards

11:07the perspective of privacy technology uh are they trying to portray that it's bad or that it could be used for both bad and good yeah um privacy has had a lot of regulatory challenges I think all the way if you go back to zcash which was basically a progression of Bitcoin into into a private Network it was the first popular privacy protocol still exists

11:30today obviously but has gotten in tons of trouble bunch of exchanges have delisted it now it's really hard to use after that we had Monero then in most recent times we had uh Aztec connect that got shut down we had rail gun which is like nice but is really really really hard to use and very expensive uh we had tornado cach of course um and now we have a couple new you know privacy

11:55protocols Aztec uh their final version hopefully Alo you know whenever they come out of testnet or or whatever they're working on I think um the when we looked at each of these what we looked at was not absolute privacy but how much privacy we could give users while still maintaining a service that you know wouldn't get shut down and through that we've actually

12:23solved the Privacy compliance tradeoff really cleverly with this thing we call ZK compliance m now traditionally in compliance what happens you have a regulator or you have an exchange that wants to apply a set of rules to a bunch of transactions to say whether you're a good person or not right have you interacted with any OFA sanctioned wallets uh have you traded

12:46with any other risky protocols or risky wallets Etc now to do that what they do is they take all of the data which is available publicly on chain and they take your address and then they run their rules over that and then they get their answer and then either they allow you to off ramp or not or you know they come and um try to find you for for doing bad things or not we've completely

13:09in like flipped the model in our model you have the data right so I mentioned before that all the transaction metadata is actually the user owns it on their device now what you can do is actually take someone else's rule set that rule set could be as simple as uh have you interacted with anyone on the ofac SDM list you can run that rule set as a function on your own device and then you

13:34can send back a proof to whoever needs that now that's something that hasn't been done before it's similar to the Privacy pools concept that got popular uh last year ear earlier this year um but we've actually implemented that all of all the way and we've made it programmable and we're starting to work with a couple different partners uh on the exchange side so that they can

13:58Implement these kind of uh Frameworks into their off- ramping and so they won't have to delist uh you know a privacy protocol just because some you know some government agency tells them to they're able to actually prove that the users off ramping um from that protocol are actually clean or or abide by a certain set of rules yeah that's great to hear the the

14:21ZK technology is really beautiful in being able to prove something without uh showing too much information so that's really cool uh I'm curious in the in the pay uh wallet when you're sending uh value are you using a stable coin is there and is there actually also a privacy coin that the pay wallet has created um or can you send any currency how exactly does that work yeah so today

14:47uh we allow usdc to be on- ramped into the pay Network and so that's a traditional like lockin mint bridge that we've deployed um and so you lock your usdc uh on the public network and it's uh Minted as WRA usdc uh on pay we are planning on adding other tokens as well starting with stable coins uh and then expanding into others we do not have our own uh privacy token or anything like

15:16that we find those to be very unusable um I mean who wants to accept you know Z or or or Monero right like no one um and so we we think stable coins are the way to go here um now the the reason we've done that is because pay is currently uh the the key use cases only for payments we are planning on adding future use cases whether that's being able to earn

15:43interest invest things like that um but that's coming in the future yeah no that's great to hear and I think the payments uh problem worldwide is is a a big issue to solve in the first place so I feel like you have a lot on your hands um and you know a lot of the people who are trying to send money uh to different countries or overseas back to their

16:06family they're in a lot of different countries um are there any restrictions or uh is it available to most of the people you know the popular countries that are seeing uh remittances to back to their families yeah so pay pay is available in any country that has app store or Google Play available in those countries so if you can download an app you can you can

16:30use pay now um pay is self- custodial which means uh it's it's kind of like metamask or trust wallet or or coinbase wallet um we don't custody any of the funds um and it's fully on uh built on the decentralized pay Network that rolls up uh to evm chains and so yes anyone in any country that can download an app uh can use pay now the real challenge is

16:57around how you on and off ramp Fiat M and So currently we allow uh kind of like I was mentioning before we allow uh on and off ramping through exchanges so that's really easy most countries around the world have an exchange um so you connect your bank account to The Exchange um or whatever method domestic payment method you have um you on ramp funds you buy usdc and then you send it

17:22over to pay we're actually going to be bundling that um those ramps directly into pay so you actually can skip skip that Exchange stu um and then that will make it actually even easier for for folks to to send money from one country to another that's great um and you know you hinted at some other functionality uh in the future looking towards the the

17:44road map um in terms of the Privacy side and the payment side is there any more that needs to be done um you know there's still so many people that are yet to on board or is it just aware of this technology exists hey we need more people to to start using it to reap the benefits yeah I mean pay is in main net right so the network is in main net it's

18:07it's been audited um the ZK circuits as well as smart contracts um the bridge and the rollup contracts have been audited um and it's ready to use and we have about we have a couple thousand users already using Pay um now the pay wallet is in beta right now um what that means is it's using real usdc but there's still a few features we want to add into pay wallet to make it more

18:31usable like the on andof ramps improve some of the ux U you know small things like that and so that's why we haven't um you know fully gone into customer acquisition mode uh just yet um and so that will be like later this summer um and so but I would suggest like if you're if you use crypto payments today if you use usdc to pay people um pay wallet is probably the easiest payments

18:58app in crypto today um you can go from downloading the app to paying someone within like 5 Seconds uh as long as your app download is is fast there's no like setup there's no um you know additional work that needs to be done in fact if you go to pay. link PA yy. link right now um You can actually try out uh what I just said and see for yourself that

19:22it's insanely fast very cool Sid I'm definitely going to check it out I I'll put that link uh in the show notes and also Al just a link to the apps if people want to download it um this is something that I think is very needed um and not just for people that are already in crypto that are looking to pay easily U but the people that aren't aren't yet

19:40and we need an app like this to go viral so that people can understand uh the benefits of you know moving crypto instead of Fiat and and how they're really getting ripped off from transferring Fiat especially internationally um and I think this is something that that could do very well um so looking forward to following up uh as this continues to grow I would love

20:01to have you back on the show and and discuss more around uh privacy and and just how people need easy payments yeah definitely awesome thank you so much Sid