Good morning, Crossroads. Hi. I'm Jess Houlgrave. I am the CEO at Reown. And I can't get this to work, but we'll crack on anyway. I have been building in the crypto space for now 10 years, which greatly dates me probably a little bit more than even my gray hairs. I joined Wallet Connect two years ago because after building for so long, building across consumer and enterprise use cases, I realized that a big part of the pain that still exists for crypto users is that user experience. It's how I manage my wallet, how I manage my seed phrase. And so one of the things that I'm super excited to be building is toolkits now for both wallet developers and app developers to make those experiences really, really seamless.
So we started in 2018 with the Wallet Connect network. You can hear Pedro Gomez, the founder of Wallet Connect, speaking later today on the network stage, solving one of the first user experience challenges within crypto. We had the first mobile crypto wallets evolving and people were building desktop applications, so the problem was how do I connect my wallet into a desktop application, and the Wallet Connect network was born. That network today supports some 700 different wallets and over 50,000 different projects that are built on the app side and allows seamless connections. So if you're an app developer, you can allow users from any wallet to use your application. And if you're a wallet developer, you can let your users plug into any application too. And then we launched last year Reown. And with Reown, our mission really is to build these developer experiences that allow you to create amazing end-user experiences. So we have AppKit and we have Wallet Kit. Both of these are here to address a really significant issue that we still face. We all talk about onboarding the next billion users into crypto, but the reality is that when you talk to new users about their experiences, they are really, really painful. And I think Solana has done an amazing job at advancing that. It's faster, it's cheaper, but there are still major issues. People need to manage seed phrases. People need to think about where they're buying crypto, how they're on-ramping. And if I take you back to the worst of these experiences, you can imagine as a new user, you come into an application. You don't have a wallet. You have to go and find one. You have to download it. You have to store the seed phrase securely. You have to go somewhere else to buy crypto to onboard to swap into the tokens that you need. Every year we do this user research report, which is one of my favorite things to read. The next one is coming out in a couple of weeks. But here's a little preview about what people say. They say that 39% of users say that high transaction fees are a big barrier to why they don't engage more with onchain activities. 20% cite poor user experience. 23% say that because their wallets are not compatible, they're unable to use different applications as much as they want. And 18% still have major security concerns. The good news is compared to last year's report, that 18% is much lower. So I think we can all be pleased with the progress that we're making, although there's probably still a lot more to do from a security perspective. But what this shows us is that these are users who are competent. They've been using crypto for a few years and even they are not happy to use onchain applications more because of these things holding them back because it's painful. And if it's painful for them, it's going to be painful for developers to solve those problems. And that's really our mission for Reown: to solve these issues for developers so that you building an application or building a wallet can focus on what you do best, building an amazing game or a great marketplace. You don't have to think about the user experience. We take that out of your hands and work with you to create really seamless onboarding experiences. We do that through two different SDKs. One's called AppKit, one's called Wallet Kit. For Wallet Kit, if you're building a wallet, please find us. We're all in orange today and talk to us. Same for AppKit. But this is what I'm going to dive into a little bit: how you can create a wonderful user experience for your application. So there are three core components to AppKit and many other features as well. The first one is the ability to onboard users from any different wallet. So we have a bunch of Solana wallets on the ecosystem. We have a bunch of EVM wallets as well and many of the crosschain wallets, everyone from custodial solutions like Fireblocks. If you're building a DeFi application, you want those institutional wallets, the Fireblocks of the world, to be able to interact with your application. You can do that using the Wallet Connect network via AppKit. We also provide email and social login. So if you're building an application for new users, for people who are not familiar with Web3, but you want to onboard them really easily, seamlessly, and quickly into your game, they can do that with our embedded wallet functionality. They can sign up with an email or with social login to spin up a wallet at the back end, go straight into the application and start using it without needing to go through that painful first experience of downloading a wallet. And finally, we allow you to access on-ramp. So rather than going and integrating, we work with many different on-ramp providers to provide the best on-ramp experience irrespective of where your users are. We have global coverage, which means that as a user comes onto your app, they will be able to buy crypto to start interacting with your application, whether that's a marketplace, a trading platform, or anything else, really seamlessly with on-ramp providers that route dynamically to give them the best onboarding prices and of course experience. And what I really want to highlight, and the reason that all of these images are in mobile, is because we deeply believe in a mobile-first experience. Solana again, I think of all the chains, has really pioneered that. And so you can build with AppKit in many different platforms and we want to see more native developers coming online and we're really investing a lot in that this year. Over and above what you can see here, we give you insights into who your users are. One thing I've learned is it's very, very hard to create great user experience if you don't know who that user is, how they behave, and what they want. And so using our insights platform, you'll be able to see where your users are coming from, which wallets they're using, even which other applications they're interacting with, so that you can design better user experiences for your users. And what does this do? It creates more sticky users, more loyal users, people who want to come back to your application again and again and not experience the pain, but just experience the joy that you're building for them. So we announced AppKit for Solana at the end of last year. We've been really lucky to work with some amazing teams in the space. We're really excited to work with more of you. I'm going to do a quick demo here of Drift's implementation of AppKit. So you can see here they're using our email and social login functionality as well as giving access to all of the wallets on the Wallet Connect network to create a very intuitive, super seamless and fast experience for somebody coming to the application for the first time and starting to trade. And that's what we want to see. We want to see that friction reduced to seconds and for end users to be able to onboard and start using your application without giving it a second thought. So please find us today. As I said, Pedro, who is the founder of Wallet Connect, is speaking on the network stage at 4. We're all in orange t-shirts. There's a booth in the other room. And if you're building an application, please come and talk to us about what you need to create a great user experience so that we can partner with you on that. Thank you.
