Why NEPRIDAO?

N.B: You do not have to read this section to understand NEPRIDAO, do so only if you feel the need to understand the vision behind NEPRIDAO.

Why did we create NEPRIDAO?

We believe that the current banking infrastructure is outdated and that open-source technology is the future of money. We also believe that the ability to build financial tools should be way more open and inclusive. We’re putting tools in the hands of innovators so that more people can take part in the process of transforming money and finance!

The promise of the internet was to connect billions of people through information and data. And it’s been successful at that: We can access a website around the world in seconds, share content, and interact with each other through emails, messages, photos, blogs, videos, and more.

But while the internet of information has succeeded, we’re still missing the internet of value.

Shouldn’t we be able to transfer value, just like we transfer a photo or the contents of an email around the world — seamlessly and in seconds with direct real-time settlement and direct clearing? Right now, when you send “money” via a financial application like Venmo or PayPal, you’re not really sending money but rather a digital IOU.

That’s where crypto comes in. For the first time, it gives an internet or mobile phone user the ability to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another internet or mobile user. The users can verify that the transfer has taken place, and that transfer can happen independently of any central party. The fundamental shift with crypto is that after clicking “send” the recipient — whether on the other side of town or the other side of the world — possesses the actual value. It is like cash in this way but is also digitally native-like an image or email.

One of the most frequent questions we get is “Why is this all needed?” Aren’t current financial and payment systems — whether credit cards or apps like Apple Pay, PayPal, or Venmo — working just fine? The answer depends on where you’re sitting: if you live somewhere with a developed financial ecosystem and reliable socio-economic institutions, they’re working well enough. But these applications only work when both the sender and receiver have basic financial infrastructures already in place, like a bank account to which their app is linked.

But nearly two billion people in the world, despite having access to a smartphone, lack bank accounts or even identity documents. In fact, over half of Argentina is unbanked despite the high penetration of mobile phones. The situation is worse in Africa where an even higher percentage of the population lacks a bank account. Without basic financial services, people don’t have a straightforward way to receive or store value or easily pay for things, let alone establish assets, build credit history, invest, raise funds, finance their business or get a loan. As a result, this massive segment of the population is excluded from the global economy.

And even for those of us who do have financial apps and payment systems that function “well enough” there’s still plenty of room for improvement. Making an international payment or wire isn’t instant. Even the simplest credit card transaction involves half a dozen intermediaries: payment gateways, processors, credit card associations, issuing, and merchant banks. Behind the scenes, all these middlemen must still provide settlement services, which not only takes time but also results in fees of roughly two to three percent in the developed world. Elsewhere, rates are much higher.

People have talked about crypto addressing inefficient payment mechanisms and the unbanked for some time. But volatility has plagued the space. And what actually exists today are technical, often disjointed solutions that not everyone is able (or willing) to put together to make a simple transaction. This is one reason mainstream adoption hasn’t yet happened. And until a working and smooth user experience takes hold and volatility is solved for, it may not.

Just as user experience and a user-friendly interface made the internet go mainstream, we believe a similar focus on usability in crypto could unlock the promise of internet money.

But why is it still not simple to send money across borders instantly with real-time settlement and direct clearing? Shouldn’t we be able to transfer value like we send a picture or the contents of an email around the world? While the internet of information has succeeded, we’re still missing the internet of value. For many people around the world, basic financial services are still out of reach: about 1.7 billion adults globally remain unbanked. The cost of that exclusion is significant — $25 billion is lost by migrants every year through remittance fees. Why is it not simple for ordinary people in frontier and emerging markets to access funding, business, or personal loans without collateral to launch or grow their business, solve an emergency or unexpected problem? Why is it not simple and safe for ordinary people to access high yield savings to help them achieve their personal or professional dreams? Why is it difficult for ordinary people to invest and increase their money? Why Initial Coin Offering, Initial Exchange Offering sometimes full of scams, fraud, dumps, pumps, and Security Token Offering are not designed to also benefit non-Blockchain related enterprises and used to finance “unsexy businesses” or real-world business in EMDEs? What if we made money, access to funding, loans, investment, business education, passion economy, and savings truly simple, global, stable, and secure? What if everyone was invited to the global economy with access to the same financial opportunities? Introducing NEPRI Community, a new DeFi and Open Finance platform designed for the digital and real-world, backed by the belief that money, payment, saving, loan, attention & engagement Economy, investment and Passion Economy should be fast, accessible, cheap, inclusive for Oga in Lagos, Khoza in South Africa, Uhuro in Kenya, Vadesh in India, Clara in Mexico, Ninho in Brazil. Simple to access funding and raise funds for Saul's family business in Manila, Helene's SME in Douala, Sandra’s enterprise in Botswana, Tshwane’s business in Tanzania and Uganda, Nabila' family Company in Cairo, Barbara in Sao Paulo, Leon in Mexico City. And secure for Jimenez, Okafor, Mohamed, when sending money home to Mexico City, Accra, or Alexandria. It's powered by Blockchain, making it safe and accessible no matter who you are or where you're from....

We are demonstrating practically how Open Finance and DeFi can touch billions of end-users beyond speculation use cases.

Within the crypto community, we don't think it is controversial to point out that Open Finance and DeFi are primarily used by insiders and enthusiasts, and mostly for speculation on crypto itself.

We say this without negative judgment. In fact, speculation is productive as it allows this nascent category to bootstrap something far more consequential. And yes, the next big thing usually starts out looking like a toy.

So far, DeFi has given us:

• Developers building multi-billion-dollar systems from which they don’t benefit.

• Developers submarining their communities to cash out early.

• Liquidity providers pulling the rug from the system.

• Fans FOMOing profits on tokens with endless inflation.

• Governance tokens that don’t govern and only serve as rewards.

• Voting that is nothing more than a poll that project developers may choose to execute — or not.

• Big sacks of tokens pre-mined by founders at the expense of the community.

• DeFi platforms that fail to meaningfully incentivize many of their stakeholders.

• DeFi platforms built on smart contract platforms with fees so high that only large traders can hope to profit.

The crypto community can demand better by only supporting projects that truly live up to their touted virtues and values. This requires more critical thinking and a set of clear guidelines that serve as a minimum requirement for an investable project. The cost of the nascent DeFi industry failing to promote such a set of requirements is that DeFi projects will follow ever-shortening cycles of fork, launch, mine, and dump until it becomes patently clear that there’s no future to these projects. At that point, we are likely to see general interest in blockchain and cryptocurrency wane again until some future cycle when the industry offers real value instead of schemes to get rich at the expense of others.

Still, this imposes the question, how will DeFi cross the chasm?

DeFi needs to solve a real problem and do so 10x better than alternatives in order to get mainstream users engaged.

For us, the most important is A "Real" Crypto Economy: financial and non-financial consumer apps leading the way. To us, the most exciting path to mainstream adoption follows from a "real" economy built on crypto rails. That is an economy that is not in service of crypto speculation itself, but rather related to concrete goods and practical services whose economic layer is coordinated on-chain.

Our view is that DeFi gets a lot more interesting once there are mainstream users conducting real economic activity on-chain, beyond crypto speculation. How that might materialize is the challenge we are solving.

But one extension of this line of thinking maybe that the most general DeFi protocols (e.g. stablecoins, money markets, exchange) may be the best positioned to benefit from composability with non-financial apps. The simpler and more general the protocol, the easier to integrate across new verticals. More complex financial products, like specialized derivatives, may see greater tailwinds from the later arrival of institutional capital, whenever Wall St. wakes up to see the size of the opportunity has grown beyond their wildest expectations.

One of the benefits of decentralized finance is accessibility. However, we find it hard to imagine the average retail investor (let alone a seasoned investor) understanding how to use many of the existing decentralized finance applications that exist today. Even if user experience challenges are addressed, it is questionable whether some applications (like flash loans, staking, yield farming, or derivatives) will actually be used by the masses with low financial literacy in emerging and developing markets.

We are shamed and deceived, with how our society functions, how wealth is controlled, how politicians lie to our face, how financial institutions run our government, and criminals run our banks. We waited and waited hoping someone will fix all these, but it is only getting worse.

Something needs to change and we have to do it now!!!