The $40 Trillion Market Bitcoin Just Found | Imo Babics

[00:00:31]Please welcome to the stage, Imo Babics.

[00:00:35]Thank you.

[00:00:41]Hi, everyone.

[00:00:44]Alright, let's start.

[00:00:45]So when people talk about Bitcoin adoption, they usually cover two markets.

[00:00:51]They talk about the US, that's where everything's happening.

[00:00:54]They talk about Asia as the next big thing.

[00:00:57]And nobody mentions Europe.

[00:00:59]In fact, if you go on X, everybody hates on Europe.

[00:01:02]And I think that's a mistake.

[00:01:03]And I'm here to talk about why I believe Europe is actually Bitcoin's biggest opportunity.

[00:01:11]So my name is Imo.

[00:01:13]As I've mentioned, I spent the last eight years getting Bitcoin to the hands of people.

[00:01:17]First at Bitpanda, now at Relai.

[00:01:20]So why am I so bullish on Europe?

[00:01:24]First of all, there's a lot of people in Europe.

[00:01:27]Far more than in the US.

[00:01:30]450 million.

[00:01:31]And all these people have very deep pockets.

[00:01:34]There is around 40 trillion sitting in household assets.

[00:01:39]So this is a lot of people who are very wealthy.

[00:01:42]And also, they are the richest savers in the developed world.

[00:01:46]The savings rate in European households is around 15%.

[00:01:50]In the US, it's only 4%.

[00:01:53]So we actually are very good at saving.

[00:01:56]Compared to the rest of the world.

[00:02:00]This is Stefan.

[00:02:01]Stefan represents every user we at Relai want to go after.

[00:02:07]It's our persona.

[00:02:08]Stefan is a very good saver, but he's a terrible investor.

[00:02:13]All his hard-earned money that he has been working hard for is just sitting in a bank account or some low-yield instrument.

[00:02:21]And it's not doing anything.

[00:02:22]And as you know, it is being eaten by inflation.

[00:02:26]And how much money is not doing anything?

[00:02:28]Around 10 trillion of Europeans' money is just sitting on the sidelines.

[00:02:32]And it's not really doing anything.

[00:02:34]And our savings are being eaten by inflation.

[00:02:38]Our core market is Germany.

[00:02:40]The Germans have saved 3 trillion just in the last 15 years.

[00:02:44]Again, it's not really working for them.

[00:02:50]But the tide is changing, actually.

[00:02:53]Over the last four years, this is how much money has flown into capital markets from Europeans.

[00:03:00]And this number has actually doubled over the last five years.

[00:03:03]So Europeans are waking up to, "I need to actually do something about my finances."

[00:03:09]Inflation is something that people talk about more and more.

[00:03:12]So we can very clearly see that people are really getting into the mindset of being an investor.

[00:03:18]The mindset that the bank account is not good enough anymore, luckily.

[00:03:22]And this shift is being driven by younger people.

[00:03:26]80% of European investors are below the age of 45.

[00:03:30]People like Stefan, they are looking for automated, easy investments.

[00:03:35]Currently, they're looking at the ETFs and all the neo banks and all the neo platforms that offer automated savings are really, really flourishing.

[00:03:44]And I think Bitcoin is actually the next destination for all these people.

[00:03:50]Another reason why I'm bullish on Europe is MiCA.

[00:03:56]And I know that regulation is not a very popular topic here, but bear with me.

[00:03:59]I want to explain what I mean by this.

[00:04:02]So if you are me and you're working at a Bitcoin company and your job is to market your product to the whole of Europe, what you needed to do before MiCA is to get 27 different licenses.

[00:04:14]That's 27 different rule books.

[00:04:17]It's a compliance and it's a marketing nightmare and nobody can do it.

[00:04:21]Certainly not a company of our size.

[00:04:23]That's why it's really only the Bitpandas of this world and the Coinbases that were able to flourish in Europe.

[00:04:29]But that all changed after MiCA.

[00:04:31]Now you can get one license to 30 countries.

[00:04:35]So the whole of EEA basically.

[00:04:37]And now companies like Relai have a chance to reach the whole of Europe without needing to go to each country specifically.

[00:04:46]This is a huge, huge growth unlock for us and for every other Bitcoin company that does have a MiCA license.

[00:04:53]So regulators have essentially opened the whole of Europe to Bitcoin, which is the positive spin I would like you to take away from when you think about MiCA.

[00:05:04]So we have lots of Europeans with deep pockets who are very good savers and now we have a unified market.

[00:05:13]The opportunity actually is in the fact that most Europeans do not own crypto.

[00:05:18]They do not own Bitcoin.

[00:05:19]In fact, the wealthiest, which are the Germans, they only report around 6% of them to owning crypto.

[00:05:27]So it's even lower for Bitcoin.

[00:05:29]This is a huge, huge opportunity for everybody and everybody who's a Bitcoiner should be really excited by what's waiting ahead of us.

[00:05:39]So the question, how do you bring Bitcoin to the masses?

[00:05:43]In my opinion, two ways.

[00:05:45]First, education, lots of education.

[00:05:50]And if you walk around here, there are some great people that you get to meet who are actually helping to educate the masses.

[00:05:56]People like Roman, Niko, Anita.

[00:05:59]We have great books.

[00:06:01]We have great conferences like BTC Prague and we have great companies like Relai.

[00:06:05]They're all trying to educate people.

[00:06:08]The other part of how we can actually grow Bitcoin is to realize that most people who will own Bitcoin 10 years from now will not be Bitcoiners.

[00:06:19]Now I want to talk a little bit about email.

[00:06:22]Email actually has a lot in common with Bitcoin, maybe more than you realize.

[00:06:27]For example, in the 80s, email had protocol wars and email has second layers, just like Bitcoin.

[00:06:38]And this is how email actually works.

[00:06:40]It's a quite complex process.

[00:06:43]And as you know, if you're a Bitcoiner, Bitcoin is also quite complex once you're looking under the hood.

[00:06:52]But the question is, have you ever thought about any of that when you send an email?

[00:06:57]You do not.

[00:06:58]You just open your email clients, you type the message and you press send.

[00:07:04]That's what people care about.

[00:07:05]People don't care about what's happening in the background.

[00:07:08]They just want to send email.

[00:07:09]They just want to get to Bitcoin.

[00:07:12]In fact, 43% of people who have been asked about why they don't own Bitcoin, they said that it's too complex.

[00:07:19]I don't understand it.

[00:07:20]It scares me.

[00:07:25]The reasonable man adapts himself to the world.

[00:07:28]The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

[00:07:32]Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

[00:07:35]I really like that quote because it would be easy to be reasonable and just say, well, that's how Bitcoin is.

[00:07:42]Everybody should learn and then Bitcoin will grow.

[00:07:46]But I actually think that it's better to be unreasonable.

[00:07:49]And I have a few examples of other industries and other companies that have been unreasonable and they have managed to transform the whole industry.

[00:07:57]And I do believe that that's what's waiting for Bitcoin as well.

[00:08:03]As I look around, most of you are a little bit older as well, just as I am.

[00:08:07]I'm 41.

[00:08:08]So you might remember how it used to be to go to a bank.

[00:08:11]First of all, you had to actually physically walk into a building, actually queue up behind several people and then talk to a person just because you want to send money.

[00:08:23]Now you just open your app.

[00:08:26]You select the person you want to send money to and it's done in just a few taps.

[00:08:30]That's what the neo banks have done.

[00:08:31]They have changed something that's really complex, really cumbersome and really not user friendly.

[00:08:37]And they created N26, Revolut, Monzo and all the other neo banks that everybody's using.

[00:08:45]Also, if you're old enough like me, you probably know that digital music was not really great at the early stages.

[00:08:54]I, for example, had to often on my Pentium 166 megahertz computer with my dial up connection, go to torrent, try to download the album that I wanted, wait for a whole night and then pray that I didn't download the virus.

[00:09:09]And hopefully, and hopefully it was the song that I wanted.

[00:09:13]Then later you were able to rip CDs and then you can walk around with your iPod or your MP3 player.

[00:09:20]But that's really complex.

[00:09:22]Now you just open an app, you play whatever song you want, whatever podcast you want to.

[00:09:26]It's all in your pocket and it's super simple.

[00:09:29]Nobody has to do any of the steps that I described before.

[00:09:34]A final walk down memory lane, Nokia phones and all the all the phones basically 20 years ago.

[00:09:42]They were all pretty much the same.

[00:09:44]They were all a keyboard and a screen.

[00:09:47]The only thing that was really changing is the shape.

[00:09:50]It was changing how the buttons are laid out, how you can access the buttons.

[00:09:54]Some phones you could directly access the buttons straight away.

[00:09:57]Some you had to flip.

[00:09:58]Some you had to open some other ways.

[00:10:00]But they were just all trying to do the same thing over and over and over again until a guy came who said, fuck that.

[00:10:07]How about there is no buttons?

[00:10:08]There is no keyboard.

[00:10:10]How about it's just a screen?

[00:10:12]Nothing else.

[00:10:13]And Steve Jobs and Apple have transformed the whole industry, much like the neo banks have done, much like Spotify has done and countless of other companies that have really changed how you think about technology.

[00:10:26]But Bitcoin is harder than banking, music or phones.

[00:10:30]In fact, John Oliver had a perfect quote.

[00:10:33]Bitcoin is everything you don't understand about money combined with everything you don't understand about computers.

[00:10:40]And when it comes to Bitcoin and I think about a newcomer, a newbie who has no interest in technology, who has no interest in any of the stuff that I talked about when it comes to the email, for example, what they really see when they enter the world of Bitcoin is this.

[00:10:55]It's super confusing.

[00:10:57]It's super scary.

[00:10:58]And this is why people don't want to use Bitcoin.

[00:11:00]This is what's holding them back.

[00:11:02]And if you speak to your friends who are no-coiners, they will tell you that I don't know how that works. I'm really, really uncomfortable with this.

[00:11:10]I have been in Bitcoin for several years, but my wife is actually scared by all this.

[00:11:14]It doesn't matter how many times I explain to her how to make a transaction, how to send money to a hardware wallet.

[00:11:20]It just does not click.

[00:11:21]And there's countless, countless millions of people like that.

[00:11:26]So all this, this is the complexity that I believe if you want to succeed in Bitcoin world, if you are building a Bitcoin product, you need to hide it because that is our burden as Bitcoin builders, not Stefan's, not my wife's.

[00:11:42]So what I want you to be if you are building a Bitcoin product is to be unreasonable because I do believe that whoever makes Bitcoin the easiest and as easy as Spotify or ordering a pizza, that's the company that's going to win.

[00:11:57]And I do believe that we at Relai are doing just that.

[00:12:02]That's it from me.

[00:12:03]Thank you very much, Prague.

[00:12:05]And have a good day.