On September 7, Zebec founder Sam visited the community and conducted an AMA interview on the theme of "Nautilus Chain and the future of $ZBC". In this interview, Sam explained the value capture of the Nautilus Chain ecosystem, Zebec's ecological layout planning, and the possible launch of the Nautilus Chain governance token NAUT. This article will review and summarize this AMA.
Moderator: The community is full of expectations for the release of the new Nautilus Chain, and now it is finally here. How can Nautilus Chain capture value in the development of the Zebec Protocol ecosystem?
Sam: One of the key points we've been talking about is how the decentralized world will work, and when you look at payments as an industry, it is a multi-trillion dollar industry with potential, and we are approaching it from multiple areas. Payment layout. Including salary payment based on flow payment, cross-border payment, etc.
Zebec has been positioning itself on how to lead the payment and decentralized world. We will first focus on the field of salary payment based on stream payment. Then, we also studied how to enable merchants to accept streaming payments through Zebec Card, so that users can use Zebec Card as a carrier of crypto assets and also use Zebec Card for payment.
On this basis, what we are considering is how to further simplify the payment environment for streaming payments. We hope to create a system that can enable all our products to operate efficiently, securely and at low cost, and allow users, merchants and every stakeholder to Everyone can get a good experience environment. Therefore, one of the purposes of Nautilus Chain is to help the Zebec ecosystem expand and bring more utility to the ecosystem and be owned by the Zebec community. We are working hard to involve our community users in building a larger ecosystem that will be built by a series of developers rather than a single application, and they will all use Nautilus Chain for payment stack support.
Moderator: Recently we saw that Zebec was a partner of the Africa Libya exhibition. Is this a sign of our push to get the unbanked people access to bank accounts? If so, how will Nautilus Chain accelerate this process in the future?
Sam: If you look at it from an economic perspective, the world will be divided into two or three parts, namely the first world, the second world and the third world. But if you look at it from a blockchain perspective, the world is only divided into two parts. One is for people who already have a bank account and the other is for people who don’t have a bank account.
In fact, people who already have a bank account can deposit money wherever a bank exists and have access to banking services. Yet there are still many people who have no idea what a bank is. The most important thing I realized is that when people don't have the concept of saving, their lives will become overly dependent on work, and this is what we are seeing.
In fact, 60% of people in the United States rely on wages to make ends meet. Imagine other parts of the world where many more people are completely dependent on their employers. The world has given people freedom, but it has turned them into indentured slaves. So we think the way to change is to give people financial power. When they can take control of their own destiny, when they can take advantage of the idea of investing, even if it's just a dollar or two a day.
If you can invest one dollar a day, if you can invest continuously for 40 years, a family can escape poverty. Not only poverty, but also a class leap. So it's really possible and I think one of the growth frontiers over the next 20 to 30 years will be the African continent. If you look at the GDP forecasts that Goldman Sachs and others are talking about. One of the biggest drivers of the next round of growth will be India, Indonesia, Brazil, and then regions like Nigeria, which are future trillion-dollar economies, and India, Indonesia, etc. have already demonstrated this potential.
So we can see that these economies are in a period of growth and we want to make sure that these economies don't fall victim to traditional finance, where these big banks typically control 10 to 20 percent of these economies at any given time. liquidity. Therefore, if we can intervene early and give the power of DeFi, so that users or ordinary people can have greater control over their finances and no longer rely on the traditional financial system, this is the purpose of our sponsorship of conferences in Africa.
In fact, we're driving this very hard in certain parts of Africa, Latin America, India and Southeast Asia because we think that's going to be the frontier of growth. These are countries that are going to be trillion-dollar economies, and we all know that the banking sector typically controls 10 to 20 percent of liquidity in these economies at all times. So if we move early, if we can steer these growth paths and be able to capture value at a much greater scale, that will be supported by the Nautilus Chain and all the infrastructure that we've built.
Host: In the cryptocurrency space, a lot of people are looking for the next big payments killer app. We know that historically Ripple (XRP) reached a market capitalization of $300 billion at one point; so how is the Zebec ecosystem and Zebec payments different from these traditional payment projects? In your opinion, what changes have occurred in the crypto payments field since the days of XLM and XRP?
Sam: Cryptocurrency is a very interesting ecosystem where a lot of things are promised but not delivered, which can be attributed to regulatory issues or lack of infrastructure on the part of some companies, etc. But we see that many organizations that do nothing and have no real progress can claim to have extremely high valuations. The irony is that companies with valuations of billions of dollars like these can only make a profit every month. A few hundred dollars. It's clear to us that these companies are overvalued because of hype and promises of unrealistic goals.
We can give examples of these payment companies that are not really payment companies in nature. They just built payment infrastructure but never really gained adoption. Some of them were also extremely centralized and conducted large-scale ICOs that attracted all the attention. These invested capital but were never really committed to advancing the payments ecosystem, instead focusing more on selling their tokens to the community.
So what has changed since 2017 when the likes of XRP and Stellar raised all this money? First, the community is smarter. Secondly, there are teams like ours that are actively building, not just selling tokens. One thing we're really focused on is how to build a stable ecosystem where people don't just show that they're building something, but actually drive adoption. These companies, like Stellar, have raised billions of dollars, and they are solely focused on payments. Instead Zebec has had payments from the beginning, we have focused on payroll payments, which is the largest vertical, and we are expanding into international payments. If measured in US dollars, the payment volume processed by these companies after six years will not even be one-tenth of the volume processed by the Zebec Protocol system. We are relatively small and nimble in the areas we focus on.
Of course, the impact mentioned earlier is that the community is now smarter. Really anyone who says they're building a payments system is going to be looking at the product, they want to see numbers, they want to see adoption, and that's what we're trying to achieve.
Finally, what we are really focused on is the Zebec ecosystem. The Zebec ecosystem is a set of applications built on three factors: decentralization, usability, and scalable adoption. And these payment dinosaurs really aren’t focused on any of those three factors. They kept changing themselves, and first of all, their systems were not EVM compatible, which meant they were never really able to attract developers. Second, they have never really focused on driving DeFi adoption, but only on listing their tokens on centralized exchanges to increase trading volume. Third, the technology of these companies is very average. If you really look into it, you will find that their technical level is not high, but they have unrealistic capital. In contrast, despite our relatively small capital, we have consistently positioned ourselves in the right position and our application adoption rate is five times higher than theirs at this stage.
Moderator: Let us end this conversation with the last question. The question that the community is most concerned about is, if the $NAUT token is issued, what will the future value of $ZBC be? What is the relationship between $NAUT and $ZBC?
Sam: We need to think about the $ZBC token, which is a wrapper token that has three characteristics.
One is that it is easy to deploy, and the other is that you do not need to make any contract changes, which means that no new $ZBC can be issued, the total amount is 10 billion US dollars, and it can become a deflationary token. The third most important part is that it allows us to integrate it into our ecosystem faster.
But it also brings problems, first of all, because it is a wrapped token and not a native token on the Nautilus Chain, it always has some form of security risk. Second, oracles may not report prices correctly, which means there are always problems with the DeFi ecosystem. This is why we have had problems bringing many DeFi applications into our ecosystem, and while our ecosystem adoption has been pretty good, we could actually be doing better.
Third, it allows $ZBC to be added to the many interesting DeFi applications within the ecosystem. So once we start thinking about fully adopting $ZBC on-chain and gaining widespread adoption, a lot of $ZBC will start to be burned, which means it will be very deflationary. One of our most important concerns about the blockchain is that the $ZBC transaction price itself cannot be too high, which will directly increase the user's on-chain transaction costs. However, as deflation occurs, the token price will begin to rise. This would change the argument.
So if you think about both, long term, we need to find a way for $ZBC to migrate smoothly to Nautilus Chain. Of course, this does not mean that we will have two sets of token systems, but it means that under the same value system, a new token will continue to capture value. This token is more secure and can be integrated into a larger ecosystem. . Most importantly, it allows for variable gas prices so that people can use Nautilus Chain without having to worry about gas tokens. Again, the value of $ZBC has not changed. They still come from the same system and capture value. They just changed the token’s logo or contract. Since the $ZBC contract is immutable, that's why we had to make this migration.
Another thing to consider is what is $ZBC? Because of the chain, because of our payment products, Zebec Protocol is now a brand new system, and a lot of value is pouring in. This means that the price of $ZBC will increase, and as the adoption of the chain increases, we want to look at the problem from the perspective of chain availability. We don't want to be the next Ethereum, paying $3 or $4 for every transaction. I remember there was a time when the price of Ethereum was only $1 and transaction costs were pennies, but as the price of Ethereum increased to $2,000, it became unaffordable. So we don't want to face a similar situation. When the token is issued, any $ZBC can be exchanged for $NAUT, and users will have a convenient interface to achieve this.
For fuel tokens, before $ZBC is fully migrated to Nautilus, we will have a dual fuel system where users will be able to use the encapsulated tokens $ZBC and $NAUT to pay for fuel. We also have to look at it from the perspective of how to obtain and adopt it. Look at the problem.
Moderator: What impact will the launch of Zebec’s payroll, payment cards and debit cards have on the future payment field and the adoption rate of crypto payments?
Sam: Most importantly, we have to consider Zebec’s growing ecosystem. One of the things we started to consider is to build the Zebec ecosystem into a stable currency system on the Internet. This means that when you think about payments, it is used for settlement; secondly, when you want to use payment applications, it will serve as a completely new payment method; and thirdly, it will become the endpoint for users to use within the ecosystem. The source of end-to-end transactions.
The way you have to think about it is, these big companies, they grow over 10 to 15 years, they start with something tiny and they grow, and the starting point for us is payroll.
The Zebec payments stack is now being used by approximately 30,000 people across our ecosystem, and we process nearly $5 billion in payroll. This number will increase, and following this trend, the Zebec Card and Zebec Wage link programs will be adopted, and as these things happen, value will begin to accumulate into our ecosystem. This means that our concept of Zebec as a stable currency system on the Internet will begin to be realized.
With the emergence of these applications, the Nautilus ecosystem brings a series of applications, whether it is in the GameFi ecosystem, the DeFi ecosystem or various other payment applications, whether it is people working together or outsourcing, $ZBC It is used as the basic currency, or the GameFi ecosystem, $ZBC is used as the basic token of the game, or the DeFi ecosystem, $ZBC is used for lending. So, $ZBC is no longer just a token for a simple dapp on Solana, but a token that allows you to use multiple different applications and multiple different use cases, all the value will accumulate and from The chain flows from payment cards to salary payment applications to our DeFi ecosystem.
So we have to think about it this way, you shouldn't just look at what Zebec is now, but what Zebec will be in the future as these adoptions proceed and new applications will be built. So our job as a foundation is to bring these new developers on board, inspire them to build these interesting applications, and support them along the way.
Our mission is to introduce millions of people to this ecosystem and change people's lives in the process, and we won't stop until we reach that goal.