Thread by @benskuhn

People sometimes ask me whether Wave has any plans involving crypto, presumably because of the narrative that crypto is supposed to help with financial inclusion.

Unfortunately, in reality it doesn’t and we don’t. Crypto does not solve any hard financial inclusion problems.

Wave needs to solve, roughly, 3 problems in order to financially include someone:
1. track their balance
2. comply with regulations
3. convert balance to/from cash

Crypto is a very exciting solution to 1, but Postgres is a boring solution to 1 that is much faster.

People sometimes think crypto helps with 2, because it’s *technically* not currency. This is... not a great assumption about how governments/regulators work. It turns out that if you follow the letter but not the spirit of the rules, people eventually notice and tell you to stop.

Meanwhile, 3 (conversion to/from cash) is the most difficult part, which crypto partisans typically completely ignore, probably because most haven’t thought very hard about what it’s like to be a member of “financial inclusion’s” target demographic.

Let’s say you’re a typical Wave user, a fisherman in Senegal.

You make ~$5/day. Are you going to keep part of your ~$0 net worth in a separate crypto balance? Hell no.

Your reading level is “kinda.” Are you happy to do exchange rate math every time you touch crypto? Hell no.

If you’re going to use a digital currency, exchanging for cash needs to be seamless. That’s why a key part of Wave is our massive network of agents—so that most people are a <1km walk from their cash. Those agents would be... not pumped about being crypto exchangers instead.

In other words: accessibility is the hardest part of improving financial inclusion, and crypto makes that way *harder,* not easier!

If you want to improve financial inclusion, do it by working backwards from the end state + tackling the biggest problems head-on, not by throwing your favorite shiny tech at it.