#JoeyAlarillaLive: How Tailored Web3 On-Ramps Amplify Adoption
In an episode of #JoeyAlarillaLive, Gabby joined Bernie of Stables, Michael Mislos of BitPinas, and mom-ager of NFT artist SeviLovesArt, April Agregado, to discuss web3 adoption in the Philippines.
In a recent episode of his X Spaces series, author and Playfix.io Head of Content Joey Alarilla reflected on his experience working in the banking industry in 2017. Believing that his line of work aligned with his earliest foray into crypto at that time, Joey thought his co-workers would be receptive to this revolutionary new financial technology. Instead, they were openly skeptical of it, demonstrating resistance to change.
Years later, support for web3 in the Philippines is growing by the day. The YGG Pilipinas Roadtrip, a nationwide event spearheaded by YGG’s regional guild partner in the Philippines, has traveled across the country to educate Filipinos about web3 gaming and the opportunities it presents. The event has brought media attention to the resurgent popularity of web3 technologies in the country since the Axie Infinity craze of 2021.
To explore the factors that have contributed to web3 adoption in the Philippines over the years, YGG co-founder Gabby Dizon joined Stables co-founder Bernie, BitPinas Editor-in-Chief and founder Michael Mislos, and NFT artist SeviLovesArt’s mom-ager April Agregado for an X Spaces chat with Joey Alarilla. They discussed how crypto’s potential for banking the unbanked is a significant contributor to the popularity of web3 in the Philippines. Paired with a strong gaming culture that has thrived across the country’s many internet cafes for decades, this made the Philippines particularly receptive to web3 gaming at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Crypto has also gained widespread support in neighboring countries Vietnam and Indonesia, which have similarly large segments of their populations unbanked.
Aside from environmental factors, good UX has also gone a long way in driving web3 adoption in the Philippines. For Filipinos looking to facilitate simple remittance transfers or deposit and cash out their rewards from web3 games, Coins.ph has served as a bridge between web3 and the real world. For a cash-based economy like the Philippines, initiatives such as Coins.ph’s continued partnership with 7-Eleven have provided millions of users easier access to participate in web3 virtual economies.
The following is an excerpt from Joey’s recent X Spaces session, partially translated from Filipino. Here, Joey talks about the skepticism toward blockchain technology that he observed while working in the banking industry. Bernie also shares the origins of Stables, and Gabby gives an overview of how YGG’s founding contributed to web3 adoption in the Philippines.
Listen to the full recording on X.
#JoeyAlarillaLive: Web3 Adoption in PH
Joey (20:16): What year did you first get into crypto?
Gabby (20:17): 2017, actually.
Joey (20:20): Same thing for me, and you know how? That was the year I was already in banking, and I found out you could buy Bitcoin at 7-Eleven. My fellow bankers would say, “Bitcoin? Why are you such a nerd? What is this Bitcoin?” So, of course, I explained it to them. That’s why I’m so sentimental, my wallet was Coins.ph. So you’d just walk up and pay at 7-Eleven, then they’d give you Bitcoin.
And the bankers were so unthreatened. “Bitcoin? Stupid piece of…” Before, of course, we had all these scams happening. Netflix even had this stuff about Bitcoin and all that. Obviously, we've moved far beyond Bitcoin. But it was really frustrating because that's precisely why crypto started, right? Because of SWIFT, and up to now I don’t understand how Western Union justifies remittance. Why am I not allowed to withdraw my own money?
So I found it funny that it was the banking industry, which should’ve been disrupted, that was dismissing it, and they did not realize the power of blockchain. Of course, it used to be about DeFi, like, “What’s DeFi?” but here we are now. Everybody wants to be a digital bank. E-wallets are disrupting. So my next question is for Bernie. What's the Stables story?
Bernie (23:11): We started Stables in 2021. My background before Stables has always been in building consumer finance applications, like in payments. Buy Now, Pay Later, personal management finance. And this is like a product with like tens of millions of customers interacting and using these platforms. Big focus on user experience and how to make complex things simple.
As I mentioned before, I was in crypto on the side, so you can almost picture a younger Bernie with less gray hairs just thinking about crypto with a consumer lens. I was like, “Hey, if we really want to go to the next level and make sure that this type of technology gets adopted, we need somebody to come and make all these very complicated things simple and usable for everyday people.”
The way that we started was really, “How can we make this type of technology that we’re very excited about — stablecoins — the next layer of settlement when it comes to money transfer and payments?” So our thesis when we started was, we can really make stablecoins mainstream if we solve for user experience. So we combined our knowledge of blockchain, traditional payments, and user experience together to come up with what we were calling at the time a concept of what Stables was, V1. That was enough for us to go and raise a seed round at the end of December 2021, and we’ve been building since. So now we’ve been in the market for a year. We started in Australia and we quickly expanded into the Philippines.
So right now we only have the payouts function in the Philippines. But as of yesterday we received the good news that we’re going to be able to bring the pay-in function here. We should be able to allow the Filipino community to on-ramp, for instance, at 7-Eleven, with cash, buy stablecoins, for people who want to go and play web3 games or go into DeFi.
Joey (28:13): For Gabby, what’s the YGG story?
Gabby (28:21): By the time I met Mike in 2018, I was already part of the Axie Infinity community. This was very early on, not a lot of people knew what NFTs were. But, if you remember, during the start of the pandemic, a lot of people from the Philippines started playing Axie, probably even some of the people here in this audience right now, because people were looking for a way to make money during the pandemic, a lot of them were stuck at home looking for a way to make money.
And we had some really great community leaders, people like Kookoo, people like Nate, to help onboard a lot of Filipinos. And yeah, the story snowballed from there. We had Leah of Emfarsis, helping to tell the story, we had Mike helping to tell the story. And that's really what led to a lot of people in the Philippines then being onboarded into Axie and into web3 in general. And we saw an opportunity for us to help automate the lending of Axies or what was known then as the scholarship program, and yeah, that's how we started YGG.
You can listen to the full recording on X.
Follow Joey, Michael, and April to learn more about the development of the Filipino web3 community.
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