What is up? Were you beaming in from a capsule in the future? I love it.
Oh, this is like my little studio. You guys got your studio, I got mine.
Nice. Yeah, Pedro, pumped to have you on. So, Pedro's the founder of Wallet Connect, which has been a leading provider of wallet connecting infrastructure since 2018, which seems like ages ago. And you guys have powered over 300 million connections by 48 million wallets to 67,000 apps, which are massive numbers. So, yeah, I think everyone who's been in crypto for a while knows the name Wallet Connect has seen it probably a thousand times when they've been connected to different products, but I'm sure the majority don't actually have any real idea of what you guys actually do. So, I think to just level set to kick this thing off, could you just quickly describe what Wallet Connect is today?
Yeah, for sure. I mean, everyone knows the name Wallet Connect, but I would say that very few actually understand how it works. Because it's so fundamental to how you use onchain experiences that you kind of just take it for granted. And sometimes I like to say it's like Bluetooth for wallets, but it's also kind of like how Visa is for wallets. And it's somewhere in between there, you know, because you have apps on one side, you have wallets on one side, and then apps have all the cool stuff that you can do on chain, but then wallets have the security and the convenience for you to actually use these things. And they actually have very different properties. And someone has to bring a universal standard that allows for any wallet and any app and on any chain as well to kind of just have this backbone of connectivity everywhere. And that's what Wallet Connect is. It kind of just glues everything together in a way that you almost forget that it's there. And it's powered by this network of node operators which now are 16. So we're decentralizing more and more.
It's a fun story Josh. I don't know if you know this, but Pedro and I met for the first time in Berlin in 2019 at probably the most crypto conference ever, ETH Berlin. Oh, the vibes were high and Pedro was still a man with a big dream and a huge problem to overcome because I think if we go back a number of years, this ability to connect this emerging wallet infrastructure with the emerging dapp infrastructure so we can actually go do the things that we actually can do today was a meaningful challenge, right?
Yeah. And then you know I think you guys have gone sort of through attacking that core infrastructure challenge to ultimately coming out with the token this year and sort of I think you guys sort of phrase that as the next step in decentralizing the protocol. But I don't know maybe let's go from 2019 to where you sit today. You give us some high-level reflections on that journey. I mean 2019 was a whole other world. Like it was quite interesting because obviously there were very few apps and wallets. But I already saw this problem being very apparent and I realized that this is going to be impossible for us to actually have more apps and wallets if we're all just going to do everyone is going to go into their own single journey, right? So I was trying to create a platform that allowed people to actually collaborate and work together. And it needed to be as neutral as possible. And I would go to all of these conferences. I mean Berlin, London, New York, San Francisco, Asia, I was just trying to get every developer to understand that this is going to be a big problem. And fortunately, it didn't become a big problem because people kind of just joined the mission. And what you end up seeing is Wallet Connect evolving with the industry as well. Like it was trying to solve problems for desktop wallets and desktop users and then it was mobile and then it was mobile to desktop and then it was institutional wallets and then it was wallets in Asia that had a different set of problems than wallets in the Western world and then it was DeFi and NFTs and you have to constantly adapt, right? You have to always be solving everyone's problem. And the way this actually works is you just have to gather as much feedback as possible. So going to these conferences, it's way more than brand awareness, way more than partnerships, it's actually just listening to people and then realizing that it doesn't matter if you're in DeFi or NFTs, if you're in the US or in Singapore, you all have the same problems and you're just not talking to each other. And that's what Wallet Connect, I like to say, yes we did connect wallets but most importantly we connected builders together to work together to fix the same UX problems that they all had and now we actually have this massive growth because we focused on the developers, the builders, the designers that were actually solving these problems.
And there was a ton of doubt around your ability to go do that, right? Like I think meeting you and also being a part of the broader conversations, it wasn't clear that even in this sort of industry that hails itself as being coordinators that you would be able to go coordinate such a diverse group.
There's this very popular XKCD comic that says we have 14 standards, we need a new one and now we have 15 standards. I got this sent by DMs, tweets all the time because everyone was like, 'Here's Pedro trying to become the standard and this is just another failed standard. It's never going to be the standard.' But I think what most standards failed to do is to actually be very humble and realize that you have to adapt a lot. You can't push your own narrative. If you want to try to get five people to work together, all these five people have to agree. And I have to take all of these feedbacks and just be very humble that I am just a steward of this project. I'm just trying to drive a common vision, but I am not a project. This is not the Pedro show. This is about what do the wallets need? What do the apps need? And I am here to serve them. And taking that approach allowed this project to grow much bigger than I could. And I think that's something that eventually people start realizing that this is not someone pushing their own solution on top of others. This is someone actually trying to build a solution together. And this is quite hard to do because obviously it takes so much time to listen to everyone, takes so much time to change gears every time someone changes their mind and trying to find that balance between being fast but also listening to everyone. It's a very delicate balance that you have to find.
And Pedro, it feels like we've very much transitioned into this new era of wallets. You know, when you guys started, everyone had a few wallets you owned and you would bring them with you everywhere. And it was very much like that for three, four years. And now with embedded wallets, smart wallets, account abstraction, all this stuff, the vast majority of new apps you use, they have their own wallet. You have to deposit money into it. And it's this very kind of fragmented experience now. So I'm curious, I guess both what you how you kind of make sense of this new wallet landscape and also how Wallet Connect fits into it. Is your positioning as this standard kind of no longer as relevant as it once was?
