Hey everyone. Great to be here today. My name is Nich. I'm with 1KX. We're an early stage crypto native fund, and I'm joined here with some great speakers where we're talking all about user experiences. So I think to get us started, we can do a little round of intros. Please introduce yourself and the project you're working on.
Hey everybody. My name is Chris Osborne. I'm the founder and CEO at Dialect. Dialect, we're building the UX stack for Web3. And what we mean by that is blockchain links and alerts. We power alerts for a lot of Solana's leading projects. And then, if you haven't heard of blockchain links or Blinks, they are a new kind of UX superpower that lets products navigate to you. So, the fastest way to integrate on-chain actions and experiences into your product.
Hi, I'm Jess Houlgrave. I'm the CEO at Reown. We are the builders of the WalletConnect network, which is a chain-agnostic network of over 700 different wallets and many thousands of applications. Now, at Reown we also build a couple of SDKs, one for wallet builders and one for app builders, to create great onboarding experiences and interactions between apps and wallets.
Hi, I'm Philip from Soulflare. I'm the co-founder and co-CEO. At Soulflare, our mission is actually to empower you to truly own and thrive. Soulflare was the first Solana wallet that ever existed. Right now Soulflare holds about 17% of all SOL that's being staked through Soulflare. We have about 3.5 million monthly active users, and our goal is actually to protect you and to make you more successful.
Nice. So before we talk about user experiences, I wanted to briefly touch on use cases. And a great place to start there is wallets. Because today, the wallet is still the closest thing we have to the one-stop shop for everything that a user might need to do on-chain. Historically, this has been trading. But over the past few years, we've seen a proliferation of protocols and DApps. So I'm curious from Soulflare's perspective, what's been the trends and why users are coming onto crypto in the first place?
So it's mostly, wallets are tools that allow you to connect to outside apps but also to hold and trade stuff. So it varies from time to time. We had this NFT boom on Solana in 2021-2022 where NFTs were the main drivers of acquisition of new users. Now, it's of course memecoins that are very, very interesting to users because they see the opportunity to gain quite a bit of wealth. Honestly, it doesn't always go that way for users, but they're trying. So it's different from time to time, but there's also different personalities of users, different user personas. You have those that are very interested in quick gains. You have those that are interested in just getting SOL, staking SOL, and seeing it as their long-term savings account. It depends. If someone asks me what's the Soulflare persona, I can't say because we have seven of them and it's super hard to tell.
You have exactly like seven? What are some examples?
Oh okay. So it's the memecoin creator. It's the staker. It's the airdrop farmer. It's the DeFi aficionado. It's the person coming from a centralized exchange, so they're just coming in and trying to do stuff on-chain. And I can't remember the other two, but I know that we have seven.
And in terms of the expectations and standards that users have in terms of UX, how is that different today than it was let's say four or five years ago?
Anytime a new influx of users come in, they expect the same level of UX that they see in Web2 companies that have been here for 15 or 20 more years than we are. So there's many UX challenges that we're currently solving for. I would say one is definitely on-ramping and off-ramping. There's still a lot of issues there. It's not quite easy. The success rates aren't there. The second thing is discoverability of, once I get into the wallet, I deposited some SOL, what am I going to do next. What is out there and even more importantly what can I actually trust to try out. And this is where wallets, as you said, as a one-stop shop, provide a big service because we are extending that trust to those apps if we recommend them. And I think the third thing is still language. Crypto back in the days was built by engineers for engineers. We were executing transactions. So then signing transactions and it's still very, very scary for someone who comes in to sign something, while we're just clicking on something. So we're going from executing to signing to confirming a transaction to finally just confirming. They don't even need to know that it's a transaction. So I think language is still a big barrier for most users because it just takes some time to get used to.
Makes sense. So speaking of onboarding, on-ramping, off-ramping, and just the user experience of interacting with the DApp, I think no project has seen how this has changed over time more than WalletConnect and Reown. So yeah, you work with hundreds of wallets and hundreds of DApps. How have you seen the way that people have onboarded and discovered crypto differ over the past few years, and how are Reown's products positioned to capture that trend?
I mean, I think my starting position would be that I'm not 100% convinced that a wallet is the one-stop shop for everything. We see that in the data. Most people now have more than one wallet. They have different wallets for different purposes. And that for me makes complete sense. The wallet that I store my crypto in, long-term, I'm probably going to use a hardware wallet, multi-sig, much more secure, very different to the wallet that I want to go and buy my coffee with and interact maybe with a game on. So, I think the idea that a single wallet can serve all of a user's on-chain needs is actually disappearing. We do a consumer survey every year and even the difference from last year to this year in terms of how respondents talk about having different wallet experiences shows that people want different wallets, they want different things. I also think as we have more on-chain activities, it moves beyond just the memecoin traders. People are managing their data in different ways. They're managing their identity on-chain. Again, this speaks to the need for having different offerings for different user types. So I think the idea that one wallet is the one-stop shop doesn't completely fit. I also think for each of these different users of crypto, they're coming to it from a different perspective. In the old days, it used to be that you come because you're interested in crypto. So your first point of contact is to download a crypto wallet and there you start to trade, you start to do things and that becomes the launch point for you to then interact with an application. Increasingly I think people are interested in the applications themselves rather than the crypto, which I love. I think this is where we get adoption, not just from people excited about crypto but because we're building games that are great, because we're building new financial experiences that are innovative, because we're building different things. And so often the app is the point of contact. The discovery process becomes you're talking to your friends about a great new game, not, hey, have you heard of crypto? And that's changed the requirements from a user experience perspective. Because if you're sitting in the pub and saying, hey, have you heard of this great new game, the user process to go and get a wallet to start using that game can still be really painful. So, we've definitely noticed an increase in embedded wallets, which have some challenges associated with them as well. But the ability for me as a new user to just go onto a game, create a wallet, and I don't even know it's a wallet at the back end, and just start engaging with that really, really seamlessly, I think, is one of the major drivers to the current rate of adoption that we're seeing. And having all of that packaged into one for developers, I think for us is really what we're focused on.
Speaking of embedded wallets, which has really turned the onboarding flow and discovery flow for users on its head over the past few years, even Phantom last year launched their embedded wallet offering. In a world where people are onboarding onto Web3 via DApps instead and just creating embedded wallets which act less as a wallet and more like their account on that game or account on that DeFi protocol, what is the role of standalone wallets and wallet applications as we know them today in this case?
I mean, I think I often view the embedded wallet as just the gateway to Web3. One of the things that we did when we built our embedded wallet at Reown was to make that universal. So, it's not captured by a single application. If you're using any Reown-enabled app, then you have the same wallet. It avoids this issue of dust crypto sat in different places. So, this idea of a universal wallet. We also have a graduation path so that you can export the keys. You can take that into a fully self-custodial environment if you want to. And we do see that there will be a proportion of users who want to go down that route. They get excited by the crypto. They want to become more self-custodial and more Web3 native. I think there's also just a big proportion of users who are just there for that specific game, aren't interested in what's underneath it. So again, I think we see these different things and my hope, obviously being a self-custody fan, is that that does drive more people to onboard to crypto. People then start using these standalone wallets more. And I think as the functionality of those standalone wallets also improves and offers more, we'll see more people wanting to do that as well. And we see that in the data on the WalletConnect network around the skew of different wallets in terms of market share, that's changed drastically even over the last 18 months, especially with more custodial wallets and stuff coming online. So I think there's always going to be a role for self-custodial wallets, and I actually think that the embedded wallet might be an onboarding route for that.
Makes sense. Oh, Philip, you think you had something, disagree with that?
With the embedded wallet thesis, I think it's just worse UX because you get onto a DApp. Okay, it's great. It acquired you as a user. You deposited something in there, but then you still need that main wallet in order to interact with any other DApps or to know where all your funds are indexed in. So you need to know, if I have five different apps, I have to have one central place where I know, in DApp number one I have some funds here, I have some funds here. And then again you need that one central wallet. And the embedded wallet analogy is always like, just imagine that you're going to, I don't know, five different coffee shops and in every coffee shop you have a different card or a different bank account. I don't think that this is the future of how wallets will work.
But isn't that just like an abstraction thing? I feel like embedded wallets can graduate to that, right?
