Alberto Romero is an enthusiast of open-source projects and in recent years, blockchain ones. He is undoubtedly a proactive advocate of the Stellar Network (@StellarOrg), thus even though he does not work directly for Stellar, he set up the community’s 1st meetup in London on 7th of November, cooperating with Keybox (@TheKeybox), which, has been running a series of popular monthly meetups.

Payments utilising blockchain, no matter in what aspect, have become a wide-spread idea ever since Bitcoin’s hype in 2017. Albeit the first well-known payment use case of blockchain, Bitcoin is notorious for its low speed and high transaction fees. Lots of startups then started to improve this “tps (transaction per second)” performance as well as the unpredictable costs for transactions. Stellar claims to be the best framework for blockchain-based payments — HubrisOne (@HubrisOne) is a good example of a platform using their tech.

Seeing the technology as nascent and early-stage, Keybox applied DLT in a different way — mainly for its security, immutability, territoriality and anonymity.

Alberto Romero presenting the Stellar Network.

Alberto started with his presentation on Stellar, by emphasising their strength in terms of speed and cost: Transactions are typically confirmed in 3–5 seconds, and 1 cent will pay for 50,000 transactions. He also listed the diverse asset types that can be issued on Stellar; namely fiat (‘stable coins’), rewards, fixed income, STOs and ICOs, utilities and commodities. Alberto ended the presentation with the historical image below that he saw on a recent trip to Malta:

Alberto Romero sharing image of ancient coins he saw in Malta.

“Non Aes, Sed Fides” was written on the coin, which means “It’s not the metal, but the trust.”

Ivan Gyimah (@IvanGyimah1) is an ex-Thomson Reuters analyst covering financial and risk sectors. Interestingly, he was also an early investor in Bitcoin. Gyimah co-founded HubrisOne, a payment platform with his brother Tony Gyimah. Ivan explained how the Stellar blockchain works on the HubrisOne’s platform: Instead of waiting days for international transactions through banks, by exchanging through the Stellar network, one can easily send money abroad to a friend within 3~5 seconds. Gyimah showed a demonstration video of the HubrisOne mobile app, which includes other features and products like cryptocurrency-backed loans.

Ivan Gyimah played the HubrisOne demonstration video.

After two presentations came the well-anticipated panel hosted by highly experienced Fintech and Blockchain enthusiast Eric Van der Kleij (@ericvanderkleij), who is also the Chairman of Keybox. Having founded a credit card fraud prevention platform himself back in 1996, Eric has seen the entire payment technology evolution. (He co-founded Adeptra with Martyn Walker, now the CEO of Activeledger (@TheActiveledger), and sold the company to FICO in 2012.)

Apart from Alberto and Ivan, Keybox Group VP, Michael DaCosta Babb (@michaeldacosta) and Founder and CEO of The Law Boutique (@law_boutique), Electra Japonas also sat on the panel.

From left to right: Eric van der Kleij, Michael DaCosta Babb, Electra Japonas, Alberto Romero and Ivan Gyimah.

Eric started with some questions about the technology behind HubrisOne — It turned out that the platform actually used three different technologies combined: Stellar, Ethereum and OmiseGo. “Stellar is a B2B version of Ripple. When we read their whitepaper and powerpoint, it was about consumer and financial inclusion,” said Ivan. Michael from Keybox added: “It’s all about people. At Keybox we care a lot about including people who don’t have a bank account, who are open to the inconvenience and disadvantages of cash, to the digital cash system.”

Michael from Keybox talked about social issues that Keybox want to contribute to solving.

When asked about how the regulators are facing the new trend of decentralisation, Electra from the Law Boutique thought the regulators were looking from a human-centred perspective too: “They want to create protection and certainties in the market. Unfortunately, Brexit has disrupted a lot of the plans that we had to look more into it.” Speaking of Brexit, Electra, whose firm aims to provide affordable legal advice to startups and SMEs gave an interesting answer: “I haven’t really offered any advice on Brexit because none of the startups have asked me. I don’t think lots of startups are thinking in a proactive way. I think they’re waiting to react.” This could be down to the higher tendency of risks entrepreneurs typically have, or simply as Eric pointed out, companies like Keybox who will be expanding globally perhaps won’t be affected as heavily by Brexit.

The “Blockchain-based Payments for a New Financial World” MeetUp was attended by around 80 people and ended with a lively networking session. To join the next Keybox MeetUp, stay tuned to the team’s Twitter page!