Hello guys. 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. It's somewhere in between there, 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. They actually have very different properties. 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, East 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? Um, 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 be 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 kind of 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, like 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 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, it's way more than partnerships. It's actually just listening to people and then realizing that doesn't matter if you're in DeFi, 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 that on the developers, on 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 you know, I think meeting you and then 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. Like 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. It 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, you know, you had a few wallets you owned and you would bring with them with you everywhere. And it was very much like that for, I don't know, 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. Like is your positioning as this standard kind of no longer as relevant as it once was?
I think what embedded wallets did was a reaction to the ecosystem. The ecosystem got tired. It just got completely tired of seed phrases and onboarding and all of this stuff. They just wanted to rip the whole thing out and start from scratch. And they basically ended up with what's more familiar. You go to an app, you log in with Google or Facebook or email or a telephone number. It was just easy and it felt good in the moment but then as you said, we have never been this fragmented as before, right? We fixed one problem and we introduced another one and now what I'm trying to find is together with all the wallets and embedded wallets as well, how can we find a middle ground? We went from one side of the spectrum to the other. There are benefits to traditional wallets, there are benefits to embedded wallets. Where do we actually find the middle? And I think account abstraction is the solution but in itself it is a very complex problem. People will say account abstraction as if it's like you just do account abstraction and it's done. You know, it's like saying you just do democracy and you got it done. Democracy is a multifaceted problem, you don't solve it. And account abstraction is the same thing. Doing account abstraction in itself is such an art that requires so many details. And I think eventually we will have this concept of a universal account that just exists everywhere. It's in your embedded wallet, it's in your mobile wallet, it's in your custodial wallet and it kind of just magically works everywhere. And that's what I'm trying to make sure wallet connect evolves to, right? How does the wallet connect network serve this future where there is a universal account that is everywhere?
Got it. What will that actually look like? Like I can still connect with Gmail, phone, kind of all these much more normal and understood connection methods, but then that'll kind of connect me to my universal wallet through account abstraction. What gets in the way of that? Because I think that is a compelling future, right? The I don't need to have...
