Velo is Changing MILLIONS of Lives (ft. Blackrock)

We never begin videos with apologies, but I do have to apologize to you guys, which is that we kind of forgot about talking about remittance. We're based in Asia. Look at this is the Financial Club of Asia. We're in Hong Kong. There's so many different countries in Asia that need to send money between different places and many people need to do this. Now, this industry itself is worth $738 billion in 2023. It has a hell of a lot of money, and there's one project that is making a major stronghold in the remittance industry, especially in Southeast Asia, which is Velo Labs. So Velo itself, they've been building a huge network of payment gateways that people can use to transfer and send currencies. And one of the reasons why we are doing this video now is because of a few recent big announcements. Velo is recently incorporating BlackRock's tokenized short-term treasury found Buildo into their USDV. So this actually adds additional seamless transactions and yield opportunities for 1 million users in Southeast Asia. On top of that, Velo is working with the Laos Bullion Bank, so government-grade institutions, to integrate gold into the blockchain. So, yes, huge, huge developments happening in Velo recently just popping up, and I feel like there's a lot more to come. So that's why it's a good time to pay attention. To really explain how valuable things are and remittance is, we really need to take a map, look at the map. But before that, Ron, can you hit the switches? Oh. So first, we really have to explain that we're on the other side of the world. So this is where North America is, and Asia, we're kind of here. But what's kind of special about Asia and why remittance is such a big issue here is because Asia is divided into many different smaller countries. So in Southeast Asia, there's 23 million migrant workers. So there's actually, it adds up to be quite a lot because there's just how many different countries there are, and especially because Philippines has a huge migrant working population, people spread out all across Asia, and then you send money between these places. And what's kind of weird and funny, I think this is one thing we don't see in the Western world, it's just like every country has their own map. If I want to send money to Nepal, I can't be like, yo, let's use the same map and send it there. Or if like Martin wants to send to Philippines friends or anything, like it's actually rather difficult to send money. Yeah. Which is why there is a huge remittance industry where you have to kind of go to physical money exchanger, exchange your money, they'll wire them and they take a relatively large fee. Okay. So this is actually where a lot of money can be made. So if this can be done via crypto, right, not only is it going to be cheaper, but it's going to be down fast as well, you know, fractions of pennies, really, because that's really how fast things can work. On top of that, this is the best place to develop DeFi, honestly, right? Because like people need to exchange quickly and they don't really need central figures, right? I mean, that's kind of an issue. So, I mean, if you want to send money, it's just a pain. Yeah. It's just a lot of fragmentation in terms of liquidity and settlement. Yeah, and you just need one app. Technically speaking, like, it's kind of ridiculous because like we're in crypto. Yeah. But, you know, when you want to send money to like say your cousin, you still have to probably use fiat. Yeah. Yeah. Even if you send crypto, you still need to off ramp it to fiat, which is a lot of fees. Yeah. So. Yeah. So that's kind of where the opportunity arises because if you can just directly send and receive and spend, you cut out that middleman, you make a lot of freaking money. Save a lot. Yeah. Or you save a lot of money. Yeah. Okay. There we go. And we're back in the recording studio. I'm a little more comfortable here. Anyways, something I actually want to just note is that we actually talked about Baylor Labs all the way back, like three years away in 2020. That's when they haven't done a lot of stuff yet. You can actually look at my angry face. But anyways, back in the day, around three, four years ago, we talked to economist Goran Desai, and it really explained to us kind of how the system works. And at that time, a lot wasn't really built up. It was really, you know, just like, here's what we're going to do. But now there's actually quite different. You actually see that there's Velo Finance and Universe. Velo Finance being their DeFi applications and then the Universe being their kind of exchange hub, actually. So there's actually a lot of stuff that's done on Baylor Labs. On top of that, they have Nova Chain, which is their chain for working with transactions, and Warp, which is the cross-chain bridge. And the most important thing that I'm excited for personally is Orbit, the Web3 payment app, that can be basically available to everyone to get anyone involved into payments and into crypto. So, yeah, a lot has happened in these last four years. A lot of development has been gone. You know, what you can see and play with already. In fact, there's a lot of offline work that they have to do to convince people to actually use their products. That's a bigger story. But right now, in terms of user acquisition, they have a million users already. And because if you think of it, it's not just about pure users. There's actually, like, larger businesses that need to understand and need to use them. And, of course, by and large, there's also large, medium, and small businesses. And there's a lot of target on the smaller side because of just how Asia works. There's a lot of small money vendors. And which is where the value is at, which is where the stronghold is at. Now let's move on to the juice yourself, which is the recent developments that are happening. So 13 hours ago, Velo announced a new integration of BlackRock's tokenized short-term treasury fund into their USDV. Now, this is actually a really huge move because it signals a big change in how things are progressing. First and foremost, BlackRock is a huge name, institutional capital. It's bringing that legitimacy into the crypto space. You can see where the direction of where everything is going. Because, first and foremost, this partnership between Velo and Securitize is a big undertaking. Because the problem is, of course, for these big things to happen, it needs a lot of legitimacy. And Velo is going that direction. Legitimacy, connection with real world, traditional world traders and money merchants. And that functionality is becoming this core pillar of global trade. And that's pushing Velo to become this way to transfer funds all across Southeast Asia. So this partnership itself is a direction into legitimacy, making sure that people have additional access. And their end goal is so that Southeast Asian customers can enjoy bank-free transactions, move money around borders, across borders, and even store value. Now, the goal is to allow users to enjoy bank-free access to bank-free transactions, cross-border money transfers, and even store value, plus DeFi yields. All right. But I think this is quite core in Southeast Asia because of just the fragmented banking systems. Every country's got their own banking system. So a bank-free version, a DeFi, decentralized finance version, becomes core and important. The biggest issue, of course, is that right now transferring between countries is just extremely expensive. So if you can kind of break across those borders, break down the barriers of entries. Right now, for example, because they have access to securitize this Build-O-Fund or the integration of the Build-O-Fund into the USDV, it gives people greater access to, I guess, institutional-grade capital, but in a bank-free way. So I think this is kind of a very big development for us in Asia because at the end of the day, that's exactly what the situation needs. The other thing that Velo is doing right now that is very, very important is what they're doing with digital gold. So this is actually done in conjunction with the Laos government. So the Laos Boolean Bank, it began operating in November. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to directly tokenize digital gold or make digital gold tokens. And then again, you can see that this interplay of physical plus kind of what we have in terms of DeFi exchanges and applications with remittance. This is the infrastructure that Velo provides. I mean, if you think about it, Velo already has the infrastructure to make everything work. They have a DEX already built and they can start interchanging and start people can buy in and buy out different assets and putting a physical asset on the blockchain is basically the next logical step. So this is where they kind of launched a new digital white paper. So what essentially you can do is buy PLG tokens and PLG tokens directly correspond to physical gold bars secured and stored. Now, what's interesting, of course, is that this targets Asia in particular. So the gold is actually being held in Laos. So I see this as a huge step forward in terms of adoption, really. I think like back four or five years ago, we never thought that we'll get integration on this level. We've seen people try to digital gold, but it was without government backing. But now there's a lot more government players involved. And I see this growth across Asia where digital ownership of assets are going to become a lot larger. So I feel like this is just Asia trying to leapfrog technology in many ways. Like, OK, cool, you can have paper gold. Cool. Now you have blockchain asset gold. And in many ways, it's just a huge leap forward in terms of I'll feel like government involvement would be probably the word I will say here. It's a demonstration that they have the strings to pull to get everything working. And I feel like this is the next step for almost everything here in terms of every single project is to just get things applied in the real world, solving problems in the real world, and then making money in the real world. And that translates directly into the digital world, too. All right. So all in all, what I feel like what Velo Labs is doing is they've been doing a lot of work from not just wallets and apps, but also decentralized exchanges to just help this whole ecosystem work. Working with their partners, I think this is the key. By applying all the infrastructure they have and then working with their partners to deliver that into the hands of users, I think this is the next big step forward, which is in many ways why I think they didn't really get super noticed in the crypto community. I think they've been building a lot and then they weren't super noticed, but BlackRock noticed. Because BlackRock knows that the next final step is not just tech, but that integration, that those deep connections for people to make all these partners work together to make a final product that really can solve world challenges. And then by solving world challenges, by changing how the world works, making it faster, easier, cheaper for everyone to send money, you not only do you get adoption, but you get a huge value play out of it as well. Anyways, that's my take on things. Thank you guys so much for watching today's video. I hope you learned something here about how Remittance works. And with that guys, see you next video.