Thank you, thank you. Thanks to my fellow Portuguese for pronouncing my name correctly for the first time in a conference. As you heard, my name is Pedro Gomes. I'm the founder and director of the WalletConnect Foundation. I'm thrilled to talk about the future of wallets, how we're going to change the user experience, and most importantly how smart accounts will use smart sessions. I feel we need to go on a journey to understand why wallets work the way they are. Let's break down the lingo. When you think about wallets, you might think of leather wallets or digital wallets on your phone, or even MetaMask, Rainbow, Zerion, Trust Wallet. But what makes blockchain wallets different? It comes down to this experience: before we used to log into applications, now we connect. It's not just the word change, it changes the infrastructure and technology behind it, revolutionizing the future of the internet. All these terms like dApps, wallets, smart sessions come down to authentication. Authentication means proving who you are and what you own. In short, when a user sees authentication, they just want to get in. Less clicks is more. Our mission is to build a better user experience. But a wallet is also insecure if you don't approve everything, so balancing convenience and security is tricky. Why is Web3 different? I like to bring one of my oldest diagrams I've been presenting for over five years, explaining how infrastructure changed from Web2 to Web3. Before, we had a server powering your application with an authentication module. Your login lived in the server. Blockchain doesn't have a server, so we put the wallet on the user side. The wallet sits no longer in the blockchain; it is your authentication from the app. But that created the inconvenience of needing a second app every time you use an app, adding more clicks. When you think about a wallet, it comes down to credential, signing, and account. All wallets have an external account. I did say that 'connecting' is the new verb, moving away from login. We tried to recreate login with blockchain, but it didn't work well until sign-in with Ethereum. Sign-in with Ethereum is a text message that says 'this website wants to access your account' with parameters like chain and period, and terms. It's similar to Google login, but we're early so we don't have a beautiful UI, just a text message. Wallets are adopting sign-in with Ethereum to display it better. You still have to connect then sign, which is a two-step process. I'm part of the Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals community, and we proposed wallet authenticate to bring back the login experience: what if we just connect and sign in one step? That would give a Google-like experience with your wallet, even more secure because signing verifies ownership. That reduced clicks, but is it enough? Most wallets are used for transactions, and logging in is just one part. After you log in, you still need to perform transactions, which involves switching to the wallet and approving. Signing transactions is complex because Ethereum is a smart contract blockchain; you can do everything, but understanding the transactions can be daunting. People often just approve without looking. We need to balance convenience and security. I think this is where we go back to the definition of a wallet: credential, signing, account. All wallets today have external accounts, so we have the concept of smart accounts. Technically, external accounts are called externally owned accounts (EOAs), and smart contract accounts are SCAs. Most wallets today (99%) are EOAs. We're in the process of making the experience better by turning them into smart accounts, which are more programmable. That means you have to deploy a smart contract, so your wallet is no longer just one key managed by a seed phrase; you have a smart contract account. But how do you sign? ERC-1271 created an interface called 'isValidSignature' that takes a signature and returns true or false. Your smart contract says this signature was done by someone authorized. Now we need to break down what it means to have an account. An account is defined by who is the signer, who is the payer, and the cryptography. In an EOA, the signer and payer are the same, and the cryptography is secp256k1. With a smart account, it's more flexible: you can have multiple signers (not necessarily a multisig, but using different devices), different payers (you or someone else), and different cryptography (like passkeys using P256). This makes it more secure and convenient. Smart accounts allow you to have a universal account across devices. This is account abstraction. It started with EIP-4337, which introduced the concept of a paymaster and a bundler. The app can detect wallet capabilities using wallet_call APIs. One important method is wallet_sendCalls, which changes how we think about sending transactions: instead of sending a single Ethereum transaction, you tell the wallet to execute multiple actions. The wallet_getCapabilities allows the app to discover features like paymasters or session keys. This creates a more vibrant ecosystem. The standard ERC-7677 standardized paymasters. Then ERC-7579 provided a minimal framework for modules, like plugins for your account. One interesting module is session keys, which allow the app to sign operations on behalf of the user, reducing clicks further. With smart sessions, you log in once, grant permissions, and the app can operate within those permissions. The app can generate a passkey for your smart account and control it under certain permissions. This essentially creates a mini wallet inside the app. However, this works only on the same blockchain, and we have many L2s. Chain abstraction is the next step to make smart sessions work across chains. The future of wallets is to redefine the experience, making it as convenient and secure as possible, with less clicks so people can enjoy the benefits of these applications.
