The Future Is Bright, Says Kolektivo's Luuk Weber

Despite its relatively high GDP per capita and its history as a financial services hub in the region, Curaçao’s banks, like many in the Caribbean, have historically offered a sub-par experience to local individuals, who must face long lines in person and find clever hacks to move their own money online. That’s part of what inspired Luuk, in 2018, to co-found the Caribbean Blockchain Network, which connects individuals and organizations seeking to harness emerging technologies that promote sustainable development and financial independence. 

Across the board, Luuk’s practice reveals a commitment to community empowerment, prosperity, and knowledge sharing – from his web3 focused talks and symposia, to his involvement with alternative investment platforms like Icoinic and Cyber Capital, Europe’s oldest cryptocurrency fund. He’s worked with an impressive number of decentralized autonomous organizations, actively contributing to ecosystems such as PrimeDAO, SafeDAO, BalancerDAO, and Optimism – to name a few. As a result, Luuk has a unique viewpoint on web3 communities and governance – and on how financial savvy might help bring us to the next wave of adoption.

CS: You've worked with a lot of DAOs over the years. How can products like Coinshift respond to these organizations’ specific needs? 

LW: It starts with not adding extra friction. In web3, finance and accounting is sadly often an afterthought. That’s just the reality. People don't want to spend too much time overanalyzing numbers, at least compared to traditional financial operators or leaders. Coinshift immediately made our operations easier, for example, enhancing our accounting. That’s what drew us to the product early on, and what keeps most people excited about it. Even v2 made getting funds somewhere easier than just doing it on Safe. It was easier to understand what you were sending to whom, and why that was happening. Removing that friction is a big part of improving operations. Add to that a much better way to do accounting and understanding the numbers, and you have the secret combination. 

CS: We blush. Within web3, are there any pain points that are truly specific to DAOs?

LW: To date, it's hard to get a big picture view of a DAO. Especially the bigger ones. There are no proper standards for what we might call a balance sheet or a yearly statement for a DAO – although they are slowly forming. As a result, many DAOs don't make data-driven decisions. Or, if they do, it's in a silo that is not connected to the overall health of the organization. In traditional finance, in any big company, you would be able to look at what your marketing department did and say, “ok, this is X% of our yearly budget, and it drove Y amount of funds.” But DAOs often operate with dozens of loosely aligned roles that don't always have that context, so most decisions are made without considering their general financial impact. Even in the biggest treasuries out there decisions are not data driven. You’re like, “How did they get these numbers, exactly?” It’s very vague. Providing that bird’s eye view – that’s the DAO’s challenge. I think that’s what Coinshift is helping to solve.

CS: If data isn’t driving DAOs’ decisions, then what is? And is this purely a fragmentation issue?

LW: It's the lack of common financial infrastructure, of accounting infrastructure. There is no such thing as clicking on a button then understanding how much monthly ARP is spending, where it goes and in what numbers. The foundations keep track of their own spending, but as far as I can tell, they don’t do that for all the elements of an organization. It's also a very complex system, right? There are liquidity campaigns, locked up tokens, you name it. Things are allocated then tracked in a fragmented way, if at all. If you’re a delegate who spends two hours a week thinking about Arbitrum, and that data is not easily available, you might understandably ignore the whole element because you don't have the bandwidth to go and cross check. Where would you even take that? You can go do a deep dive or look at a super high-level snapshot, but that won’t give you the detailed insights you need. Plus, some delegates may not have the financial literacy level required to make data-driven decisions. That’s normal: if you are a developer and you're really good at open source technology, that doesn't mean you're good at running the financial side of an organization. Because of the lack of tooling for this to be automated, the level of sophistication needed to make an actual data driven decision is extremely high. It shouldn’t be. 

Some orgs I’ve worked with have had zero clue about what they were spending – or how long they could keep doing it. A DAO might spend 100k for an event because it seems doable compared to other expenses. But if you want to successfully work a marketing budget, you have to be able to look at what you’ve spent before, and how much it brought in, to know how much you can spend or need to make on an event. Without proper tracking, it’s hard to do that.  

CS: So it's fundamentally an accessibility issue, a user experience issue, more than the structures of DAOs themselves?

LW: Once an infrastructure is there that reduces friction enough that everything stays updated, the likelihood of the data being real and usable is high. As a result, people become more capable. They don't need to have a whole financial skillset to understand – they can see if a graph is going up or down, or if a pie chart is one color or another.

Sadly, when a lot of people hear “accounting,” they think “reporting” – their brains go to the government, to owing someone money. Whereas accounting is about being able to make decisions based on numbers. If you package it that way, and make accounting digestible to larger audiences, more people will stop associating it with being punished for not doing it properly or as having something taken from you. Accounting helps people who are already doing good things to contextualize and do them better.

CS: In media, when you ask someone for a project budget they hear, “I want a lot of money” – instead of “I want to know how much is available to spend so I can plan accordingly.” Quit being scared; it’s just useful information. 

LW: Exactly. As an industry – let's call it DeFi, though I'm happy we're slowly calling it "open finance" again – the only way financial products will succeed is if they are seen as an enabling technology. And not as enabling government surveillance. As soon as people outside of accounting see QuickBooks, they're like, “oh god, this is so official, I'm going to get into trouble because I didn't do my accounting properly.” That is so far from the truth. Of course you need to pay taxes and operate accordingly. Even if the rules are changing and it’s unclear what you have to do to comply, with proper accounting you at least have decision-making tools you can use in your organization. You have the data, and it’s up to you and your team to decide what you’re going to do with your funds. It’s empowering. That is the right narrative. Coinshift is an example of an enabling technology that helps you do better and make a bigger impact. 

CS: If accounting has negative connotations, so does blockchain. In fact, blockchain has its own negative connotations as well as carrying all the negative ones of accounting with it. And the point of blockchain in general should also be to remove friction, right? To inform companies and individuals and make things more visible, not scarier?

LW: One hundred percent. That’s why terms like “onchain value movement” are already so much more interesting than, say, “blockchain accounting.” Nobody wants “blockchain accounting”! Ok, some people might, but it’s not the exciting part. 

CS: On the topic of terminology, can you say more about why you’re happy that “open finance” is coming back? 

LW: There’s a nice evolution that we're seeing in this space. “Open finance” didn’t catch on back in the day – DeFi became the term – but now you’re seeing it again. Imagine going into a regional development bank and telling them you’re building an onchain product and talking about decentralized finance. That sounds threatening, dangerous. Now imagine telling them about an “open finance” product – that sounds neutral, even nice. A lot of these terms have acquired a negative connotation because of this “de-” framing. Blockchain, even “crypto” – it’s still a word people associate with volatile currencies. 

CS: What about “shift”? 

LW: Now, “shift” is very strong!

For context, I ran a DeFi fund back in 2022 that gave me insight into what governments or financial institutions require in terms of all the elements of custody, accounting, and so on. And we learned to never say “cryptocurrency.” We said “digital assets.”

CS: How did you get into crypto? Sorry – how did you get into “digital assets”?

LW: I was born and raised in the Caribbean. I wasn't unbanked, but many people were and still are. Even when you’re banked, nothing financial in the Caribbean is easy. It's normal to wait in line at the bank for two hours. It's normal to have to go to Western Union because you can’t send money to your family from your account. You have to go wait two hours at a gas station for that, too. So I grew up seeing that banking took a lot of time and effort. Even online, my mom was always shouting at the screen: “why is the website offline again?!” As an adult I eventually went into business administration and, when I discovered crypto in 2016, I immediately started a nonprofit devoted to researching how blockchain coulld help create wellbeing in the Caribbean. Since 2020 I've been running Kollectiv Labs, a small venture studio. We work with a bunch of different projects, and we also start some of our own. We have two or three startups that we helped build, and now we provide services to about 5000-6000 in the space. And for the last four years, I've been living completely onchain. My money, my team – everything comes from proposals or grants or work related to web3.

CS: So you are fully onchain? 

LW: Yes. I mean, I could always be more on chain. But I don't pay anyone in fiat anymore, for example. And I haven't for a very long time.

CS: That remains rare in the space – few organizations are paying contributors exclusively in crypto. Why is that model right for you, as opposed to, say, a hybrid one? 

LW: The ease of use, the value of the asset, and how clients pay – that’s why we do it. Until recently, we had a team in Curaçao. It’s hard to get access to an exchange account there – but even people who had those accounts would prefer to get paid in stablecoin. It's cheaper, faster, and they can do more with it. You can't buy stocks in Curacao, but you can with stablecoin. It’s a better asset to hold than the guilder, the local currency, in their bank account. USDC is much more flexible than guilders. Also, as a business we get paid in crypto. We’re working with teams all over the world, so it's much easier for us to just have one EVM address and people sending crypto there, instead of invoicing to whatever country then dealing with conversion rates. I can just use Coinshift to do mass payouts. I only need to make one transaction. I would spend maybe five times more time on payouts when I was doing that in a traditional bank account.

CS: Wait – is being “fully onchain” technically possible right now? 

LW: Ideally, I would never even touch banks anymore. But I'm in a very interesting stage in my life. Literally today I went to the bank to do a big transfer on a purchase: our first piece of land in the Caribbean. It’s amazing! But the process reminded me how weird the banking system is. Someone like me forgets that there are limits to how much I can send. I literally had to wait four days, then go physically into a space in order to then be allowed to send my own money somewhere. Oh, but I have to wait another hour from now to do it. With self-custody, with what Coinshift is working on with onchain value movement, you have real autonomy. 

Even here in the Netherlands, there was a big scandal where the government was falsely flagging people for subsidy frauds, then blocking their accounts. This happened to not just a couple hundred people, but to thousands of them. If you think about living in an open world and democracy, with rights to privacy, it is very strange that they can restrict something that is yours, all while allowing other providers to access it. Imagine that I do my accounting well, that I have all my buffers. The government says I owe them some amount. I could say, great, can you show me how you did that calculation? Can you explain why I need to pay this and show me how this compares to what others owe? That’s very different from them saying, “you need to pay this or we block your account,” and then it’s on me to explain why that's not right. That is an empowering narrative: to have the power of a bank in your hands as an individual. That is something that we have never had before.

CS: Is self custody the essence of “true” blockchain for you? 

LW: Self custody is definitely very important. But I think it's really about this idea of being in charge, first and foremost – not some third party. That’s also why it’s great that all of these solutions are being built on Safe. If I have a disagreement with Coinshift, there's nothing the company as a provider can do against me. That gives me, as an individual or as a company, a very strong position to operate from. I have complete autonomy to act as I think it best. With a traditional bank, if you piss them off, they might hit a button. But if they piss me off, I'm afraid to say something wrong in case I get flagged. It’s a bizarre dynamic. 

CS: You’re at the mercy of the system. Do you feel like organizations such as the ones you work with, including Coinshift, have an educational role in this respect as well?

LW: You know, I actually don’t think they should have to. It’s more about making the products we build as accessible as possible, so you don't need that education. Instead of telling people to write down their private keys and take whatever measures to secure their funds, we should just work on infrastructure that means they don't have to do all of that. If that framework is there, we don’t need to teach anyone anything – it’s all in the workability. “Yours” truly means “yours,” regardless of how knowledgeable you are. Yes, we should make users aware of the features in the onchain world, but we shouldn’t have to overeducate them about what’s under the hood. Those that want that deep understanding can figure it out themselves. 

There are people in Curacao who think that because they're not allowed to use PayPal, they cannot buy certain things. They have these whole intricate schemes – buy a gift card here, send it over there, then use that to make a purchase. That’s not how the system should work, but that's really how it does work. People will find a way if they want something bad enough. I don't think it's up to us to over-engineer the adoption. I think it's up to us to communicate the benefits of being onchain and to make sure that people are operating in a safe and secure environment. 

The reality is that a lot of people make dumb financial decisions. That is not about a tech stack; it's just how money works. Yes, sometimes crypto is a casino, but people go to brick-and-mortar casinos as well. It’s not up to financial service providers to make people financially sound. It’s up to us to make it as easy as possible to be financially sound, and then show people why that value prop is attractive. 

CS: What do you view to be the biggest hurdle for that level of adoption? Is it still really just about usability??

LW: Yes! I think a big degree of resistance comes from the payment side, which is getting better and better. A year and a half ago I got my first crypto debit card, and it completely changed my life. Except for this plot purchase, I do all my spending with it. That has really changed the use of stablecoins and crypto for me. The next step from there is being able to issue these things as quickly as we're able to create Safes.

There is still an element of proper traditional banking that in some cases you do need to make transfers with. Once we are able to have a solution to do all of that properly – traditional IBAN transfers, fiat payments, etc, and it doesn’t need to be perfect, either. It can take 30 minutes; I don't care. Just make it possible. If I could have purchased this plot by sending USDC to an address that converts it to something, I would have preferred that over going physically to the bank and having the clerk looking at me asking “how much do you want to raise your limit?” 

Right now, this new functionality is for a very small group of people. But I'm pretty sure if my mom had the option to get a crypto debit card tomorrow and work for someone that paid her in stablecoin, that experience would be better than what she has today with her normal bank. That’s what we should be aiming for: providing an experience that is quicker, faster. Over time, people will gravitate towards that.

CS: Are you an optimist? 

LW: Definitely! I'm super optimistic. Especially for my generation and younger. We’ve really started to glorify the entrepreneur and the individual. And that makes sense: you don't want to sell your soul to a company, right? It’s amazing people put up with that for so long. 

CS: If you don’t want to go into an office, you certainly don’t want to go into a bank. 

LW: Especially if it doesn't benefit you in any way shape or form today. I have a younger step brother who keeps asking me where he can learn about blockchain and investing. I wasn't thinking about investment when I was 17. I was just being a teenager. I don’t think this is a trend. It’s a sentiment that’s going to keep growing. The internet is not going to slow down or become any less ingrained in our lives. I don't see the financial world operating even comparably to what it is now in 10 years. 

For this banking experience I described earlier, I had to talk to a chatbot, then go to some weird building that was half coworking, half coffee shop, half offices, where I then had to stand – not even sit – to talk to the clerk. That whole experience was probably tailored to people around my age, but it was horrible. And that makes me optimistic. No one will argue otherwise: finance and accounting should not be burdens. They should be simple, or they should be great.