Good morning. Oh, it's a bit loud. I'll start here. Good morning, everyone. How's everyone feeling? Welcome to WalletCon, which is rebranded as Reown. And I just want to say thank you so much to everyone coming out here and taking the time to hear all these amazing speakers that you're about to hear present. And without further ado, I wanted to welcome Jess Houlgrave to the stage for the opening keynote.
Thanks, Michelle. Hi, everybody. Good morning. I'm Jess Houlgrave. I'm the CEO at Reown. I joined the company at the end of last year, and I was super pumped. I met Pedro over the summer last year through an introduction from some of WalletConnect's investors. And since basically WalletConnect was created, I've been using the product. Back in 2017, I was trying to build a decentralized application in the NFT space — way too early — but I realized the pain of trying to build something that users could actually use. And so I was just wildly impressed with the ecosystem that we had already built. We had a ton of different wallets, a ton of different applications. And having kind of also worked in the payment space, I got really excited about what the potential for WalletConnect could be, which was more than just like the blue connect wallet button in the top corner of an application, and actually thinking about like what the future of this industry is all about. And so I was really delighted to join the team and could not have been more grateful for the last year with everybody. And by everybody, I mean everybody in this room, all our partners, our wallets, our apps, our infrastructure partners, the Reown team, now the WalletConnect Foundation team, because it's a real privilege to join you. So today we have a ton of amazing speakers. I'm going to do a very quick overview just to give you a bit of an update on what we've been doing and maybe what's to come as well. Oh, going to go back.
That too quickly. These are the crypto poster boys — the crypto poster boy of 2020 and the crypto poster boy of 2024. And for me, these poster boys represent just a dramatic shift in the industry that we have. We've come — and don't stand too close to the speakers — we've come an awful long way. We've seen improvements in regulation. We've seen the market certainly over the last week also change with more news. Maybe we actually have a different crypto poster boy. And we've seen amazing progress from an infrastructure perspective. It's been certainly a challenging few years, but I think that we're at the peak, at the sort of inflection point now where we're ready to see a difference. But despite all of this, I think that there's still some major challenges, and that's why we've brought everybody here today. And that challenge is user experience. The infrastructure is there, it's scalable, but it's still like very, very hard for a user to actually use this stuff. We're all here in this room, and so we've probably been inspired enough by the mission behind crypto to go through that pain — the pain of like writing down a seed phrase and putting it under my bed and like hoping that it doesn't disappear somewhere, or the pain of having like lost crypto in a scam or something like this. And that's because we're excited about the technology. But the reality is that the next wave of crypto users probably aren't going to be like that. They're not there because they're excited about the technology. They're there because they want to be able to use an app, they want to be able to do something, they want to be able to play a game. And so I think that the reality is that they're not going to be willing to go through this pain that we've all been through, and we need to make it easier. We need to make it more intuitive for them. And I think for a really long time as an industry, we've held ourselves to this sort of like Web3 user experience standard, but we need to raise the bar. We need to make the bar for user experience equal to or better than Web2, because that's how we're going to make this stuff usable. That's how we're going to get the benefits of this technology, which for me is like choice, control, self-custody, being able to hold my assets where I want. And we need to get that into the hands of millions of people because the institutions around the world are failing people more than ever. And it's only by making this really easy for them that we're actually going to be able to deliver that into the hands of millions of people. And this phrase of like taking crypto to the next billion is like the worst phrase that I think is possible, because actually we can't, you know, like we can't bring people to crypto. We need to take crypto to where they are. We need to meet them on their standards, what they expect. And people have got used to amazing user experience. Web2 companies have been building and investing and spending millions and millions and millions of dollars to find out what users want. They want less clicks. They want intuitive login processes. They want secure experiences where they're not worried about losing their bank account. And so we've got the blueprint there. We now just need to make it happen. But there's one thing that I do want to call out, which is that we have a choice as an industry in how we make it happen. We can do that in a walled garden way. Apple have had a really successful track record of building things in a walled garden, and I think there are some people in crypto who are taking this approach, which is that we build in a walled garden, we try to capture users. And for me, that's like completely antithetical to this industry, which is about openness, it's about collaboration, it's about giving users choice. And so wherever there is an Apple, there is also an Android. And at WalletConnect, we're here to build that community, the open community, the community that can build together where everybody is welcome and where we have choice. People, we're going to have hundreds of different types of wallets, we're going to have hundreds of different types of apps, and we want them all to work seamlessly together. So that's really our mission. The WalletConnect Network, which was started in 2018, has kind of been growing ever since then. We solved that first user experience challenge: how do I connect my mobile wallet to my desktop application? And that alone has now grown to over 180 million connections since we launched the next version of the protocol last year. We have 600 different wallet partners on the ecosystem, 40,000 registered projects on the outside of the ecosystem, and we've seen tremendous growth. And that WalletConnect Network remains at the core of our hearts and the hearts of the industry, I think, in terms of providing that connectivity to people. But we've made a lot of changes since then. And that WalletConnect Network, we announced in September, is now on the path to decentralization. We've welcomed new node operators into the ecosystem so that we can really start to make sure that this is a resilient, trustworthy, uncensorable piece of technology, foundational technology for the industry. And that's going to be stewarded by the WalletConnect Foundation. We've got some new Foundation team members here today. Pedro, who's the founder of WalletConnect, is going to come and talk to you a little bit about that in a minute. And we recently rebranded the company to Reown, and had a lot of questions like, why Reown? What is Reown? And for me, Reown is about the fact that we have an opportunity right now to take back the ownership of the internet from the incumbents. The internet was always promised as something that was open, but the way that it's manifested in Web2 is that we have these giants who control it, who control our data, who control our assets. And it's time for us to take back that ownership and reown the internet. And so on the Reown side, we're going to continue to build some products, partnering really closely with the Foundation to make sure that the network fulfills its promise. So let's dive a little bit more into what that ecosystem looks like. As I said, we've got the network in the middle, which is the kind of connectivity between the apps and the wallets. Over 600 different wallets now use WalletKit, which is our wallet-side SDK. This provides them with connectivity into the network as well as a bunch of other things, security features and the like. And on the app side of the ecosystem, we've got our own SDK, we own AppKit. We've got a number of partners who also use the WalletConnect Network — people like Privy, Dynamic, Thirdweb, ConnectKit, FamilyKit, many others. And then we've got also a number of apps who do direct integrations to the network. So it's a really thriving ecosystem now of people who are able to use this in the way that they need to deliver for their customers. And these are just a few. If we tried to fit a thousand logos on, we couldn't. But I want to call out some of these who are people who are running nodes, some of our key supporters in terms of the innovation that we're seeing on the network. And I think like the what I love is that this is so representative of the industry. It's people from all over the world, all different parts of the ecosystem. So I've been told I don't have enough time, so I'm going to start speeding up because I tend to talk too much anyway. So our mission is to build the onchain UX platform. And what does that really mean? So we have this AppKit and this WalletKit, and these are toolkits for all developers to be able to build in Web3. So on the app side now, which we relaunched this year, we've got things like email embedded wallets. So I can sign in with my Google account, I can log in with email. We've got the ability for end users to onramp directly into the app without needing to go to an exchange and fund their account somewhere else. They can bring their own wallet, of course. This is at the core of what WalletConnect and what AppKit does. They can swap into any token that they need to be able to. So for the first time, instead of creating a wallet, going somewhere else to fund it, finding somewhere else to get the token that I need to interact with that app, I can do that all in one interface. And that I think is a, you know, a real game changer for user experience. And there's a lot more to come that we can make even better there. On the WalletKit side, our focus over the last year has really been on security. We released something called Verify, which allows domain verification, giving users more comfort that they know which domain that they're actually interacting with. And we've got actually some really exciting announcements that are going to hopefully help user experience in Web3 on the WalletKit side coming later today from Derek, our CTO. So this year has been big. We've launched Universal Wallets. I can take my embedded wallet that's also a smart account to any app that's within the ecosystem using AppKit. We launched AppKit for Solana, having historically been very EVM-focused. We are on the path to multi-chain, and more announcements about that coming as well later. We've made really amazing strides into the payments space. I think the stablecoin, the era of the stablecoin is definitely upon us. We launched with Stripe, Raise, another gift card platform in the UK, in the US, so that we can deliver more to even more people using crypto. We facilitated billions of dollars of DeFi access to institutional customers through partnerships with custodian solutions and people like Fireblocks. So this is bringing a different kind of user into the DeFi application. And we launched our Unity SDK as well. And we've worked with people like Ubisoft on NFT drops and Immutable in the gaming space. So it's been an amazing year, but I think it would be foolish to think that our job is done. As I said, we still have a ton of problems within Web3 UX that we need to solve. And later today, you'll hear from some of our amazing colleagues at Reown for things that they're building in AppKit and WalletKit that I think are going to be real game changers. Imagine the world where I can do a transaction and if I don't have enough native gas, doesn't matter. There is a solution for that. My transaction is still going to go through. Maybe I don't even need to know what gas is. Maybe I don't even need to know what chain my asset is on, and I can just use it. I can play the game. I can purchase the thing that I want. This is the world that I want to imagine, and I think hopefully it's the world that we can bring to the ecosystem over the coming years. So with that, you'll hear a lot more later, and there are also some workshops downstairs taking place with many of our partners. We've got some incredible partners from across the ecosystem who are joining us today also. They will be sharing exciting news. I've heard some of it, and I'm delighted that they've chosen this place to share that news with you as the ecosystem as well. So please stick around, hear those announcements, join the workshop. But for now, I'm going to hand over to where this all started, which is Pedro Gomes, who is the founder of WalletConnect.
Thanks, Jess. So many great things coming to Reown, the AppKit. So much progress has been made in the last year. And as Jess already mentioned, my name is Pedro Gomes, founder and director at the WalletConnect Foundation, and I'm here to share more about how the WalletConnect Network has evolved since we first announced and how the Foundation also has some great plans ahead of us. Because since starting WalletConnect, it's been quite a big journey, but it's really great to see that like after all of these years, we have been able to actually achieve decentralization. But decentralization doesn't happen overnight, and I want to make sure that people understand why the Foundation exists. Like the idea of a Foundation is that it's here to serve the ecosystem. We're going to develop the ecosystem of developers, apps, wallets, our tooling around what it means to actually have a superior wallet experience. It's truly important for the Foundation to be very focused on that, and part of that ecosystem is obviously the network. We will continue to strive for more and more decentralization, but not just stewarding the network for more decentralization, but also to actually have better features to provide more utility through the network, because decentralization would be nothing if this network wasn't providing the value of what it means to be the wallet in the future. And of course, like we also want to empower the community, because the community isn't just the apps, the wallets, and the developers that have supported this project for so long. It's also the users, the users that have been power users of the WalletConnect Network and now will truly become owners of what is such a foundational piece of infrastructure. And obviously, when I'm talking about WalletConnect, I cannot talk about the Foundation that is now going to be driving this. And in September, we have announced Yess joining the Foundation, which I'm very thankful to have him in the team, which he has been leading projects such as Near and Polkadot and Ethereum back in the day. And now we have joining us Jakob as executive director to complete the amazing talent team that will bring forward the future of the Foundation. And Jakob, with his experience expanding globally with Revolut and Kraken, I think we have a very strong team here to actually push the WalletConnect Network into the right direction. So I'm really glad to be joined by two talented people in the Foundation. And yes, in the announcement we have announced in September, the WalletConnect token, that was a big day. Not only we had the announcement of Reown and WalletConnect, we also had the token which was announced in September 17. A lot of excitement, so much feedback, so much messages, DMs. Definitely my Telegram has gotten not so enjoyable, but I'm really glad that people are reaching out and talking about it. And in the season one, like we had this massive window between September 24 to October 19 where we closed registrations and we achieved over two million, two million profiles were created as part of this registration. And this is only the season one. With the season one, now we're announcing that in November 26, as many people have asked, you will be able to go and check your profile and you will be able to claim your airdrop if you're eligible. So this is a big deal because in November 26, you'll be able to finally check your eligibility. But as I mentioned, one great thing about this airdrop is that people were able to create their WalletConnect profile. So maybe we should like dive deeper what that means. The WalletConnect profile is quite a new concept, but the first thing that we were actually opening up is that people were able to aggregate their wallets into a single profile. And this obviously allowed for eligibility for your airdrop to increase because we obviously want to make sure that you as a power user have the ability to actually get the best out of the season one. But this also means that you actually have a better understanding of what you can do with WalletConnect. We have added the ability for you to manage your accounts through this profile, but also the ability for you to claim the airdrop for season one and future seasons through the WalletConnect profile. And obviously, we're very excited to see the staking going live on November 26 as well. Once you claim your airdrop from season one, you will be able to stake it right away. And as you can see in the demo, you can see how smooth the experience will be where you'll be able to do everything under your WalletConnect profile. And eventually, we will also be introducing the voting, and this is still TBD, but this is something we're working very closely with our partners to allow you to participate as part of the community on the governance of what is the future of WalletConnect. So let's talk about a little bit of the future. What have we done so far? We have now announced the Foundation. We have now announced the token. Season one airdrop is complete. November 26, you'll be able to claim it. You now have your profile, which is going to be a key component to how as a user and how as a developer you'll be engaged in this community. And staking will be going live in November 26. We also had our first node operators announced in September, and later this year we will have another wave of node operators joining us by doubling the number of node operators in the network. And we also have WalletGuide and WalletConnect Certified, which is something that I'm going to leave that for later today when I'm going to give another keynote on it. So I'm not going to spoil that one. But what we have coming next, like we have a few things coming soon. So we will be, after launching profiles this year, we will have actually more customization. So you'll truly make the WalletConnect profile feel more like yours. And also something that I'm very excited because the whole point of this network is to incentivize partners. So our service node operators will be able to receive rewards very soon. But not just the service node operators, also the wallet partners. Our wallet partners will be receiving rewards for participating in the WalletConnect Network, which is going to be a big component of why this WalletConnect Network exists in the first place. And obviously, as many people have asked, when is season two? Season two airdrop will be coming soon. And as also coming soon will be when the token transferability will be coming. And when I talk later today about the WalletConnect Certified, I can ensure you that Certified round two will also be coming very, very soon. So what isn't coming so soon, but like maybe in the near future, we have quite a big roadmap ahead of us. Like decentralization is a very big part of the roadmap. So one of the big things about WalletConnect is the registration of apps and wallets. Eventually in the future, this registration will happen on-chain because we will have app and wallet NFTs for registration. We also will allow your WalletConnect profile to be managed with a passkey, which will make the experience even more smooth of how you can actually manage all of your wallets together. And then obviously, as part of the registration of apps and wallets on-chain, we also will introduce the concept of payment NFTs, which is something that we briefly discussed on the whitepaper. And we will drive more and more features. Projects like Reown and all of the partners have been working together building smart sessions. We will eventually take this natively to be run under the network. And other features like gas abstraction and chain abstraction will also be coming to the network. And WalletConnect will be driving more and more value as the centralized platform for all of this technology. The Gateway is also something that we're working very closely with Reown to decentralize, and we hope to have very soon a technical paper that describes this roadmap. And chain abstraction is a very big focus for us because one of the key components of the wallet is for the wallet to eventually not feel like it's getting in the way, but it's actually helping you own and take control of your identity in this new internet. And finally, but not least, we have the permissionless mainnet, something that is the ultimate goal, where not only you have all of these key components making the network more and more decentralized over time, but eventually anyone can join as a node operator, as we described in the whitepaper. So that's one of the big milestones, and this is pretty much covering like the near to mid to kind of long term for the WalletConnect Network. But there's so much more, and this is why we want you guys to be very much involved in this roadmap. And we will have like more and more conversations as part of the Foundation with all of our partners to drive what is the future for the WalletConnect Network. So I'm really excited to have all of you here, and please enjoy WalletCon. Thank you.
How are we all feeling? That was great. Louder. Awesome, just making sure you're all listening. Yeah, so we're really excited about the WCT token claim and staking, which will go live on November 26. And as you heard, Derek right here, he's going to give more announcements throughout the conference, so I think you should stick around. It is a bull market, right? So we are a little behind, but I wanted to welcome to the stage momentarily Kurt Larsen, which is the co-founder of Rhinestone.
Woo, thanks. Hi everyone. Just waiting for the slide to load. Can we get the slides up? All right, I'll start with an introduction. So hi everyone, I'm Kurt. I'm one of the co-founders at Rhinestone. We build infrastructure and tooling for modular smart accounts. And today I'm going to be talking about a new emerging thesis called the account-centric developer platform. I'm also going to be announcing some builder incentives, and so stay tuned for that at the end. But in order to get into this new account-centric developer platform thesis, I first need to define what is a modular smart account. So on the left here we have a monolithic smart account where all the features are integrated into the account, and the development of this account is closed in the sense that only one team can contribute to those features. So a great example of a monolithic account is the Coinbase Smart Wallet. And then on the right side we have modular smart accounts. So modular smart accounts take this concept of a minimal kernel that stores state for the user and also like a mapping function to these external smart contracts that we call modules, and they can extend the feature set of the account. And most major accounts today are modular. And so what do we mean by modules, or what can these modules actually do? So there are roughly four major types today. The first are validators, and validators are what determine what signatures are valid on the account, so essentially account authentication and authorization. The second is executors, and this allows developers to build custom execution on the account. The third are hooks, so these hooks can hook into this execution pre or post and enforce different conditions or constraints on that execution. And finally we have fallbacks, which essentially is a way to future-proof the account and allow for new functions to be handled by that account. So in terms of some examples, the most simple example of a validator is passkeys, and that's become very common today. So essentially using the biometrics of your device to sign transactions on an account. But a more kind of, I guess, out there example, which Metalink talks about a lot, is quantum-safe signature validators. And so with modular accounts, when this becomes an important feature, this is something you will be able to add to the account to bring quantum safety. For executors, we have DeFi automation, so you can create the ability, for example, to have automated rebalancing between DeFi positions, DCA, TWAPs, etc. And there are many teams exploring this. A great example of a hook which no team is working on would be to have a ZK KYC hook, which can essentially provide some kind of sybil resistance by only allowing certain executions on the account if you have the right ZK KYC credentials. And then the final one, fallback. So there is one concrete example, or there are a couple, but the one I'm going to refer to is the CowSwap fallback module that sits on the Safe, and essentially this allows for off-chain signatures by making the Safe ERC-1271 compliant. So this is an example of a fallback module. So there are many teams already unlocking innovation with modules, and these are just two examples that we have today. So on the left-hand side we have Claster, which was actually bought by Bony recently, but I was too lazy to update the slide. But for Claster, they're building a cross-chain transaction orchestration protocol, if you want to call it that. I'm sure they have a better name. But the key component is this ITX module, or I think they're calling it Super Transactions now underneath Bony. But essentially this module allows a user to sign the root of a Merkle tree, and the leaves of the Merkle tree are essentially instructions for transactions across multiple chains, networks, etc. And so this module is a lynchpin component to enabling the Claster protocol to orchestrate these transactions across multiple chains. And so the chain abstraction thesis is what they're going after there. The one on the right is Gnosis Pay, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with, but they require two modules for their protocol to work with the Safe account. The first is the roles module, which allows the protocol to withdraw funds from the Safe account when the user transacts with their Gnosis Pay card. And the second is a timelock module, and this is what ensures that the user is not able to double spend the protocol. So these are just two examples today, but you don't need to be a Solidity developer to tap into the power of modules. And there are these kind of building blocks that are being built by many teams in the space. Rhinestone is one of them. And the two I want to highlight today, the first is smart sessions, which Pedro mentioned, and we've been working super closely with WalletConnect and the Reown team on this. But essentially this module allows for on-chain permissions to be created by the user and granted to a dApp or some off-chain service. And so this can be super powerful for just improving general UX, but it can also be great for things like I want to delegate to some external service that is doing some complex thing on my behalf. So maybe this could be like an AI agent that is investing on your behalf. The second is, and actually one thing to highlight is that at 11:30 we will be doing a workshop on smart sessions. So if you're keen, definitely come by and we'll get into the technical details on that. The second is resource locking, and this is a new module type that has started to take off. And essentially this allows users to make credible commitments that can be consumed by either an off-chain service or another on-chain protocol to allow for new products to kind of take place. So for example, this could be cross-chain intents, this could be new credit systems that are linked directly to the account, or it could be an off-chain order book. There are many different examples where resource locking is very powerful. So these are, you know, these are core components that are available to all developers through tools like the Module SDK and other developer frameworks that are out there. Cool. So essentially what these modules allow is for any developer to tap into the programmable account validation and execution of this smart account. And so this is what enables this account-centric developer thesis to start to play out. And so under a protocol-centric model, you have validation and execution logic that is tightly coupled with the settlement layer. In this account-centric model, you have the validation and execution logic becoming more tightly coupled with the account, and hence allowing the application developer to become truly protocol-agnostic by building on this account-centric platform. Cool. So this introduction of modular smart accounts is transforming the AA stack and essentially introducing this module layer where these composable components can be built that can extend the feature set of the account and natively bring more features or unlock new product experiences at the application layer. But no developer wants to build modules, build like an implementation of a module, the same time, like repeated times for many different account vendors or account types. So we require some kind of interoperability layer that makes the smart account stack a unified, interoperable, and composable stack. And this is the role that Rhinestone plays. I won't get into the details of how we do this, but there are many different tools and services that we provide to unlock this experience for developers. And maybe just to make sure the point is hitting home here with the prior two examples I talked about, Claster and Gnosis Pay. And so without this interoperability protocol, you have the example of Gnosis Pay, where essentially the protocol only works with the Safe account because it is tightly coupled with these specific Safe modules. And so this restricts the distribution that these developers can get through their protocol with all the different emerging account types. And so what Claster has been doing is working closely with us and with Bony, of course, to adopt ERC-7579, to adopt the services and tooling that we're developing at Rhinestone to ensure that their protocol can be maximally distributed across all these emergent account types, including EAS with EIP-7702 coming early next year. Okay, and the final thing I want to say before we jump into the builder incentives is that smart contract development is like building hardware. So in this diagram here, you have in the center the software development cycles, which are fast and iterative, and on the outside you have hardware, where essentially you need to have a ton of testing and security that is front-loaded before the product goes live, when it becomes immutable and essentially irreversible. And this is very similar to smart contract development. I would say smart contract development is much closer to hardware than software when it comes to these development cycles. But security audits are also super expensive. And so another thing that Rhinestone is doing outside of our tooling and infrastructure to enable teams to build these modules is also helping subsidize these security reviews. So we've been working super closely with the KeySpear, Bit, and Renaissance on the audit of these core modules that I mentioned earlier. And we're going to be spinning up a 500K audit fund for developers that are building monetizable applications where modules play an integral role in unlocking that application, but also developers who are building public goods that can become core modules that are applicable to many different applications. So just as an example, it was just last week that I had a team reach out to me to say, well, we're building ZK technology that can extend smart sessions to enable private session keys. And so this is an amazing opportunity to get a core module out there that can be applicable to many different applications and help fuel the network effects around ERC-7579 and these modular smart accounts. Okay, so if you're interested in getting involved and you're keen to learn more, please scan this QR code, check out the Notion. There is a form there with, it's very simple, it's like four questions, fill it in, and yeah, we'd love to chat, hear more about your idea, whether you're super early in, you know, like the design and planning, or whether you're a product who's further on in your development and thinking about how you can bridge to smart accounts through this kind of module landscape. But that's it. Thanks for your time.
Great job, thank you. So as you heard, there is a 500K audit fund. I would suspect that a few of you guys would want to speak to Lazo, who's right there now, regarding the fund. It's probably more strategic for you to speak to someone that's also invested in you while getting your auditing services, right? So next we have Clint Widget, which is... sorry, we have Joe Hoffman, head of product at Reown. I'm so sorry, it's Lazo. We have Lazo Sabo at Seal of Clint. I would like to welcome him on the stage. Thank you so much. How are you? Do you have the energy today? Woo! And yeah, I mean, it's not Joe this time, but can you hear me well, or is it a bit loud? I guess, yeah, you turn off the sound.
So I wish, and I'm certain you wish, you attended the iPhone keynotes more than 10 years ago when it was launched. But guess what? Even better, you're at WalletCon today attending Kilo's keynote on how do we integrate with the WalletConnect ecosystem. But first of all, who knows about Kilo? Raise the hand. Kilo, Kilo. Okay, not too bad. And usually, developers know us a little bit less because we integrate with the main platform so that we can offer staking and DeFi to their users. So we are the leading rewards management platform. In that case, we integrate with Safe, with MetaMask, with Trust Wallet, but also brands like Fireblocks or Anchorage. In fact, we are also the largest staking provider on Ethereum, running more than 4.6% of the Ethereum network. So the past year, we talked to more than 50 wallets, some of them are customers, and we realized there was at least three major pain points they faced, and most of these wallets would face at least two of these pain points. First of all, the lack of expertise by integrating and monetizing staking and DeFi. Second is they lack front-end resources. They also lack engineering resources in general. And last, as the users are seeking more yield-generating products. The other thing we realized is that staking is much more mature in terms of TVL and adoption than the DeFi market. In fact, it's 2.5 times the TVL of DeFi, and it's 10 times the revenue that is made through staking versus DeFi. The other shocking stat is that I think we all agree that stablecoins found product-market fit. There's 170 billion of stablecoin in circ today, mostly USDT, USDC, though the stablecoin war has already started. So if you have a stablecoin, natively yield in stablecoin, keep it going. But less than 4% of the stablecoins are bearing interest. If you compare it to the staking market, for example, you have more than 50% of stable assets that are staked. So DeFi still needs to grow. It's still a very immature market, and stablecoins need to yield a little bit more. Savings in stablecoins need to happen. And we think that the main reason for this is when you go to one of your favorite wallets, nobody is offering you stable rewards for two main reasons. First of all, it's hard to offer for wallets, right? You have to integrate directly with 15 or more DeFi protocols. Then you need to get the appropriate reporting custom to each of these protocols. You need to deal with deployment, with management of smart contracts if you want to monetize. And if you want to monetize, often what do you do? You have, if you can, and most of the time you can't, have a commercial agreement with the DeFi protocol, or there are referral programs, but these referral programs are not great. And when they exist, for example, Uniswap sunset their program lately. So this is why we introduced Kilo DeFi over the summer. Kilo DeFi is a way for wallets to integrate with more than 12 different DeFi protocols with nine different stablecoins, and this is growing as we speak. In fact, I think we added two other DeFi calls since it started this presentation, so it's going very fast. And it's a way for wallets, and you will see any front end, to monetize DeFi, put the commission fees via vaults that we deploy, and then we're working on rebalancing. So you will be able on the app on-chain to rebalance from any yield position to the other in one transaction. And you might think, well, this is all beautiful, but as a front end, as a wallet, how long will it take for me to integrate? We, as mentioned, we have limited engineering resources. Well, if I told you that you can integrate staking and DeFi in any front end in less than a day, you said, you said Uniswap, you said widget, this is Kilo Widget, even better, integrating with the wallet ecosystem so that any users can interact with DeFi and staking very easily. I have a little video there, so I'll show you exactly what we mean when we mean widget. I think you can play it. It's going to be fast, so please be focused, and I'll try to point out all of the capabilities of the widget. Aha, so here you see the widgets. You can pick and choose the product you want to offer to users. Is it DeFi? Is it staking? Is it stETH pooling, right? When you talk about Ethereum staking, there's a reporting dashboard. So we'll take the example of the Reown logo, right? I put the Reown logo there. I match with the very nice color of the Reown branding. In that case, this beautiful pink color. You can put it in dark mode. You can change the rounding of the widget. You can change the overview. Seeing if you're happy. Well, okay, maybe you're happy. Oh no, okay, let's put a last purple color on this widget because this new branding of Reown, well done to the designer, did it, now matches completely. So you can now copy and paste the code snippet of the widget, and you will integrate it. You'll paste it in your production environment. Then you just have to paste the URL on which you want to see this widget live. So we'll look at the previous URL, the Kilo widgets. Okay, that's the pie version. Nice. But now you're going to deploy the new version, the Reown one, on the Reown URL. So you put the Reown URL there, and boom, easy. In less than a few minutes, you have deployed widgets. And by integrating with the WalletConnect ecosystem, you can push your users from any front end to interact, stake, or interact with DeFi from their favorite wallet. In that case, I'm going to use MetaMask mobile app, scanning the WalletConnect QR code, approving that I'm connecting to the widget. I'm now connected to the widget. I'm going to deposit 10 USDC on a Compound pool that gives you 30% APY. Well, this is not an investment advice. Then you approve this deposit, and you're done. Any user has deposited through their favorite wallet, in that case MetaMask, to your new widgets. So if you're any front end and you have users and you want to monetize this user base by offering rewards, staking, or DeFi via all these protocols, you can now do it. The best example is this widget being in production via Safe. So now on the Safe dashboard, you can easily stake stETH, but more to come. And they were the first meaningful partner to integrate this widget. So as an example, my mother was never coded, she could integrate the widget in less than a day. And I'm sure I hear what you're saying right now. It's like, well, how can this guy on stage could have built all of this? Well, I wish I did, but that was the result of one of the best, if not the best, team in the crypto industry, and some of them are here today. Want to shout out to the Martans, right? I'm French, so not every French are called Martan, but there's a lot of Martans in France for sure. Maxim and the rest of the team. Also big shout out to the WalletConnect/Reown team for organizing this event. Jess, Derek, R, Sam, and the rest of the team. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Lazo. So Kilo Widget is now compatible with WalletConnect. So connect with the team, whom you already know, they're getting off stage now as well, to find out more and make staking as easy as possible. I would like to welcome Joe Hoffman, who's the head of product at Reown, on stage now to give a keynote on the Reown AppKit. Welcome, Joe.
Hi everyone, welcome. So hey, I'm Joe Hoffman. I'm the head of product at Reown, and I'm super excited to talk to you today about what we've got coming up. You know, I spent a lot of my career working on improving the user experience across all kind of different products, whether it was in Web2 or now Web3, and that's super fortunate and super lucky because at Reown, that's what we do every day, is we obsess about user experience, how to improve it, and ultimately make these experiences way better for everyone to use. And we do that through the lens of our toolkits. So we have two toolkits, AppKit and WalletKit. If you're not familiar with those, AppKit is for app builders, WalletKit is for wallet builders. And every day when we look at how to improve these user experiences and deliver solutions to builders, we're doing it through the lens of choice, control, and composability. So how can we extend out new problems, new solutions, new innovations to builders so that they can ultimately serve their end users way better? Now, you're going to be hearing about WalletKit in just a little while from our CTO, Derek. We have a really exciting vision and roadmap there to learn more about. Today, I'm going to be talking to you specifically about AppKit. So if you're not familiar with... oh, we got the wrong slides. Wrong slides, but I'll keep going. So on the AppKit side of things, if you're not familiar with AppKit, it is the number one chosen, most used toolkit for builders of apps to get their users connected to their apps, onboard them, and ultimately get them interacting successfully with their apps. And what we've done over time is extend this out quite a bit to have other capabilities. So for example, the users can select any wallet of their choosing to get their users connected. We support every wallet, basically. If the user doesn't have a wallet yet, they can create an embedded wallet. They can either do that through an email address or a social login. And then we've also got on-ramping features once they're connected. So the user can fund their wallet, have the funds there to get going. And then we also have a swaps feature as well. It doesn't stop there, though. We also support lots of new functionality and lots of new features and standards that are coming to Ethereum and other chains so that we can make sure that builders have everything they need in order to be successful. So here's the little demos of what I was just talking about as we get caught up. And so what have we been working on the last few months? What have we been thinking about? There are other problems to solve. There are always new problems to solve. And so we are thinking about topics such as multi-chain. You know, AppKit has its roots in the EVM ecosystem. We love EVM. There's lots of other layer ones and layer twos out there. There's lots of other builders that we ultimately want to serve. There's this concept of user access. So how do we meet users where they are? We can't force users to do anything. We're going to have to see what they're doing, what they want, and then deliver problems and solutions rather for them. We're thinking about fees, that concept of gas. You know, all of us are crypto-native, and gas is still a pain point because we may not have enough of in our wallet. We may not have the right token. And so how do we abstract that away and remove that for a regular user who doesn't even know what gas is? And that's going to be a huge friction and pain point for them. We're thinking about permissions. So how do you allow a user to set a structure with an app where they're comfortable with it performing actions on their behalf? And then we're also thinking about insights. How do we empower builders with better information, understanding, and insights into what their users are doing? So first up, let's talk about multi-chain. AppKit is now multi-chain. So we spent the last few months completely re-architecting AppKit, and we've basically got it set up now where from an architectural standpoint, we can very elegantly add support for new chains. And to that effect, at Solana Breakpoint in September, we announced support for Solana. And so if you're a builder of EVM or Solana, AppKit can help you on both fronts. Or what we're also seeing more of now, aay, is builders supporting across multiple chains. So if you're supporting EVM and Solana, AppKit is also the choice for you. What I'm excited to talk about with you today is that AppKit is coming to Bitcoin. Bitcoin's the OG. It's how this all started. So we're super pumped to say that AppKit is going to be coming to Bitcoin later this month. We have been talking to many builders in that space. They have all the same problems that the Ethereum builders have, the Solana builders have. They need to get users connected quickly with the wallet of their choosing, get them funded, and get them set up and successfully interacting with their dApps. We've been seeing all the activity in the Bitcoin ecosystem with the new layer 2s, the new DeFi apps, Ordinals, BRC-20s, and just the ton of new venture capital funding that's been coming into the space. So AppKit for Bitcoin is coming, and it's going to have that amazing same user experience that you can expect and are used to from Ethereum and Solana side of things. I even met a builder last night, and they said, we're working across Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. This is going to be the perfect solution for us. So AppKit is going to be ready if you're around to use it towards the end of the month, and you're willing to be an early tester, let us know. It doesn't stop there, though. So meeting users where they are, we've had builders reaching out to us saying, hey, I'm building a Telegram mini app. I need AppKit. I basically need to get my users connected just like any other ecosystem. A lot of these builders built their apps on other chains, and they have moved over to a Telegram mini app because of the distribution. So we all use Telegram all day. It's got hundreds of millions of VI users, of which hundreds of millions have...
tried a Telegram mini app, so they're already familiar with that. And now with some tweaking, we've made AppKit Telegram mini app supportive. So we're super excited to say that we've already got some partners up and running using it today.
Next up, I talked about fees and that concept of gas. So we've been thinking through this for quite a while, understanding how to solve this, and we've come up with a new product. Basically, it uses a verifying paymaster solution behind the scenes where you as a builder can now sponsor fees or gas on behalf of your users through the Reown Cloud backend service that we have. You can go into there and set up a policy where you're basically dictating, I want to sponsor this kind of transaction at this point in time on these chains up to a certain amount. You can set spending thresholds. This is going to be awesome because you can get kind of creative with this. So if you're a DeFi trading app, for example, you could say, hey, over this weekend, I'm going to sponsor the gas on any trades. So you can kind of be creative with campaigns if you're a marketer.
And think through how to use this to your advantage. If you've got an NFT in the mix in your app, you can think through, I'm going to sponsor the minting of the NFT. And this is all going to be capable through just a plain old credit card process via Stripe through our backend, so you don't have to worry about moving crypto around as well. So super, super butter smooth user experience.
So Kurt talked to us about this a little bit just a minute ago, but smart sessions. So we're introducing smart session support, and this is a complete unlock in terms of new user experiences that you as builders can offer to your end users. So this solves the problem that just doesn't get talked about much in crypto, but is totally in our face every day, where if you're a user and you want to execute an on-chain transaction, you have to be physically present at your computer or on your mobile device to approve the transaction and see it go through. With smart sessions, you can set a permission structure between you and an app so that it can execute transactions on your behalf asynchronously, as we say. So for example, if I wanted to have a dollar-cost averaging strategy set up with Uniswap, I could set permissions that simply say, every Friday, take 20 USDC from my wallet and buy ETH, and that policy will continue executing every Friday until I set it to expire or I revoke it or cancel it. So as you use the builder to think through that, you can say, hm, this also unlocks subscriptions, for example. Now I could have a user just set up a $20 USDC per month permission structure, and I'll deliver them my content for a subscription plan.
Or you could think through gaming use cases and auto-approving gaming-type in-game transactions, limit orders. There's tons of new use cases that this just totally unlocks and that we will have support for natively through AppKit.
We're thinking through insights. So we've heard from builders just time and time again that they feel like they're flying blind in terms of knowing who they're serving and who their end users are. So Reown Insights is a new innovation that we're releasing that's going to have a blending of analytic-type data, so you can see what wallets your users are using, what countries they're coming from, some other data points, but then also you'll be able to see their account addresses. You can collect email addresses so that you can better and more effectively market to them. We're going to continually innovate and iterate on this over the next few months as well to start blending in on-chain data. So for example, we could tell you what the average spending power of one of your users are. We could tell you that if you're a DeFi trading app, for example, hey, about 10% of your users are starting to use this other DeFi trading app, one of your competitors, so that you can use that to make better, better information, better decisions, and ultimately serve your users better.
So between all these different problems that we've been solving, we've got a whole slew of new innovations, a whole new slew of features coming out for you to be able to better reach your users, better serve your users, and improve user experience at the end of the day in crypto, because that's what we're all about here. Thank you so much. And if you want to learn any more about this, you can find us afterwards.
Great job, thank you so much. So I don't know how many of you are based in Bangkok, but this is like my second time. As a fun fact, do not ever leave a bad review for any reason. It's actually defamation. If you do, I learned it the hard way. Do not do it. Fun fact to break up the slew and flow of things. But on that fun fact note, I wanted to thank you, Joe, for the presentation and welcome our first panel to the stage as we're getting set up.
So building on Bitcoin is the next panel coming up for all of you interested in this. Panel ready to go? Awesome. And as a kind reminder for the folks in the back that are networking, if you can kindly just lower your voices, that would be much appreciated for the speakers on stage. Thank you so much.
Round of applause for our next panel. Woo!
I'm joining late as usual. I'm super excited to have this panel mainly because one, there was just a huge announcement on AppKit and being built on Bitcoin. And I'm someone that just crawled into a cave for the last three years. I've only been focused on EVM, EVM and alt-VMs. And before I crawled into this cave or echo chamber, I always thought, okay, Bitcoin as a store of value or it's digital gold. Turns out there's so, so many things happening on Bitcoin today, and I'm really excited to introduce some of these builders and people that have been in the trenches. So I'd love to start with some intros.
Okay, so hey everyone, I'm Ben from Reown. I'm the director of engineering. I joined Reown when I think I was employee number nine back in the day with Pedro, and it's been a great journey up to this point and with all of you today. So I'm really looking forward to having these great people to talk to about Bitcoin and AppKit.
Hi everyone, my name is Alicia Painter. I'm one of the founders of Botanics Labs. We have the most decentralized EVM L2 on Bitcoin in the world.
Hey guys, I'm Kathy. I'm the APAC BD lead for Mezo. So Mezo is also an EVM Bitcoin L2 that utilizes tBTC as its gas token, and we're basically building a dApps hub surrounding Bitcoin.
tBTC. Hey everyone, I'm Ken, founder and CEO of Xverse. Xverse is a Bitcoin wallet for Web3. We're the leading wallet for Bitcoin ordinals, runes, and the other protocols that are being developed on Bitcoin right now. So if you're interested in that, go find Xverse.
Awesome. My name is Emily. I'm the CMO of Hype. We're a crypto-native marketing agency. So I'd love to start high level for noobs like me. What even is Bitcoin DeFi? And maybe I'll start with Kathy since it seems like you oversee so many different companies building in that space.
All right. For me, I think Bitcoin DeFi is, I would say, building, trying to like the initiative to build a financial layer on top of for Bitcoin. So as we know that Bitcoin has been for a long time seen as digital gold, aka as store of value. But now I think with the new technology, so for example like Stacks from all, no, protocols, even BVM and more like Bitcoin staking and restaking protocols coming out, the initiative to make Bitcoin more productive as a more productive asset. So for Bitcoin holders to participate in different DeFi activities, for example staking, lending, and then utilize Bitcoin to generate more yields. So that's how I understand Bitcoin DeFi.
I'd love to go a layer deeper. Why does Bitcoin DeFi even need to exist if we have EVMs, if we have alt-VMs, if we have blockchains built purely for smart contracts? Why should DeFi on Bitcoin exist? What's your take, Ben?
I think it has a value proposition where I think Bitcoin, based on its history and like the kind of ethos that a lot of Bitcoin holders have, especially I think some of the larger ones, is that maybe they don't want to be involved with what we're so familiar with in the EVM world and that ecosystem, but they want to have something that's native to Bitcoin. So maybe Stacks is a good example here where it has its own language rather than using Solidity like Rootstock does. And I think it has its own space. I mean, in some sense, will you be reinventing the wheel a bit? I mean, yes, because a lot of this has been done already in the EVM space, but you can probably take the learnings from that too. But I think also it provides a kind of firewalled solution for people, maybe even institutional investors, that say we want to get the best of DeFi without being exposed to the kind of hacks or risks that we see in the EVM ecosystem. So I think it has its own kind of space in the market.
Yeah, for the two of you that are actively building on Bitcoin, can you walk me through why you chose Bitcoin versus other chains? Is there any other insights, or do you completely agree with both Kathy and Ben?
Yeah, I think to take a step back, there's what BTC DeFi is today and what I think we should be building for towards in the future. So BTC DeFi as it stands today, what's really happening is a lot of this Bitcoin is aggregating, folks are bridging it over to Ethereum and seeking yields. And I think the existence of WBTC as an asset class is a testament to the potential of Bitcoin DeFi. And if you think about it, WBTC is very centralized. That is why a lot of Bitcoiners have been averse to engaging in BTC DeFi because of the inherent centralization both in WBTC as well as within Ethereum as a whole. So I think the existence of that as an asset class, the existence and emergence of what is now being labeled as BTC DeFi is a testament to how much potential there is out there.
Now, Bitcoin is the elephant you cannot ignore, right? The election happened and the number one headline related to crypto was related to Bitcoin price. It is one trillion dollars, it's actually 1.5 now. We cannot ignore it. So we can think of it or let it ossify into digital gold, but that's just going to hold crypto back because at the end of the day, it is the only cryptocurrency that your moms and dads know about. And if we don't potentialize it further from a store of value into something much more, I think it's going to hold back the rest of crypto as well. I tell this to a lot of people, Ethereum at the end of the day, it's the same 10,000 of us at every conference and the same 200,000 users. If we really want to make crypto and blockchain accessible to the masses, if we want to make a meaningful change and transform TradFi into something that is decentralized and brings power back to the people, it will only happen on Bitcoin.
Yeah, so I think maybe some people sometimes forget that this DeFi stuff is meant actually to be on Bitcoin. And people don't remember that Bitcoin actually has smart contracts, right? It's just that it's not as powerful and, you know, it's not as scalable. And that's one of the reasons chains like Ethereum and others were developed so that you could have a more scalable chain to build these applications. And, you know, sometimes people joke and say that, oh, Ethereum was actually a testnet for smart contracts on Bitcoin. And I think that's maybe true to some degree. And we're seeing that now with, you know, several years of tech being built, research enabling Bitcoin to actually maybe evolve a little bit and have this, you know, more advanced smart contract capability with L2s. I think attention, money, builders all flooding back into Bitcoin where, you know, this whole DeFi, you know, the global financial system could be, you know, actually be based on Bitcoin, right? So I think that's the reason we're building on Bitcoin.
And actually, just to add on to that, it's really interesting, like around the 80 teams that are building on us, they're all EVM builders because we're an EVM chain, but they're all OG Bitcoiners who are so excited to now finally be building on Bitcoin because that is the reason we're all in this room today.
Thank you so much for the context. So something I was doing to prep for this, just imagining that I came out of hibernation and I'm trying to catch up with what's happening in the Bitcoin world, was I looked at DeFiLlama today and I noticed that there's 3.1 billion staked worth of Bitcoin. And I made sure to check, is it purely because the value went up to all-time highs? But no, it looks like in the last two weeks it went from 10,000 Bitcoin staked to 50,000. That's a 5x increase. I don't know if these charts are correct or wrong, but I'd love to hear from some of you on what is going on, what are people actually doing on Bitcoin, and what are some of the reasons that caused the surge?
I mean, I don't have a sophisticated take on this, but my take is that I think because of the US elections and geopolitics, that a lot of risk got kind of taken out, especially over the last week, for people. And they maybe felt more comfortable from having Bitcoin liquid, so to say, to going back to more long-term view and staking. That's without having researched it further, would be my naive take on it.
I think Bitcoin staking is actually fundamental for acquiring and aggregating liquidity for Bitcoin DeFi and also Bitcoin L2, because liquidity is essentially really a foundation for a network or for a chain. And I think the growth of, I cannot tell because I don't know the actual data, but I think the growth of those staked Bitcoin volumes are mainly steered by the Babylon staking cap two. I think 23,000 Bitcoins have been staked into Babylon. And apart from that, a lot of Bitcoin staking and restaking protocols also accumulated some other Bitcoins. So that's the main driver for this growth.
And for example, for Mezo as well, our mainnet is not live, but we had already launched a pre-deposit portal which accumulates around, I think, 2,500, 2,600 Bitcoin to our pre as well. That's also equivalent to around, I guess, 170 million US dollars worth of Bitcoin and worth of dollars. And then I think that's what, again, all the L2s are also doing. So basically, you know, having, yeah, to gain attention, not just capital, but also attention.
We're not doing a pre-deposit, pre-mainnet deposit contract, but I agree with Kathy that a lot of this is driven by Babylon, right? And the Babylon cap that just came out. And I think a lot of this activity is driven by two main LSTs on Babylon, which are Lombard and Solve. And they're doing really, really great work in terms of being able to attract Bitcoin and make it productive largely within Ethereum and Cosmos ecosystems. There are a lot of trust assumptions involved in all of these, and I think we all need to DYOR, but I do think they're doing a great job in terms of attracting Bitcoin liquidity that's never DeFi'd before, which I think is a Herculean task for everyone involved here, and being able to actually attract meaningful yield. I think they're, especially Lombard, is doing a lot of work with Pendle, and so that is a big area of the TVL. But yeah, I think that's the main dynamic that's at play here.
Okay, interesting. Just because a 5x multiplier is insane, and it was literally like hockey stick growth, and that's a lot higher than what Bitcoin or Ethereum appreciated in the last week. So Ken, you mentioned a little bit about research, and Alicia, you also talked about, Alicia, you talked about current state versus future state. I'd love to understand where we're at today, how is the research coming to fruition, and then we can dig into the nitty-gritty of UX and where we need to go to get to the future state you envision.
Yeah, I think, you know, one major theme in terms of like research and development on Bitcoin is BitVM. I think several Bitcoin L2 projects are looking to utilize what's being built with BitVM for their project. So you can see things that were not possible before, like a native bridge from Bitcoin to an L2, now being possible with BitVM. And I think BitVM 2 just came out recently, and now there's actually testnet implementations of it done by several projects already. And I think in the next several months we can see, you know, good bridges from Bitcoin to L2s. And then I think that's the biggest unlock for these L2s to actually start becoming usable. So I think that's the big thing, at least in my mind right now.
From your perspective, are there any features or main questions that builders are looking to AppKit and Reown to implement?
AppKit in general, or you mean interfacing with Bitcoin specifically?
I think it's at least the goal that we have with integrating Bitcoin into AppKit now that we have, I mean, we came from EVM in the first place, then we shipped Solana recently, and now Bitcoin is to really make it more of a no-brainer UX. Like it's the reason we call it, like, the kit for on-chain works in the sense of I want to be able to use Bitcoin, get the transactions in AppKit directly, do swaps when it's being abstracted without me having to understand, okay, I have to do something completely different to do the swaps for Bitcoin versus for Solana versus for EVM and all the stuff that we kind of, you know, take for granted because we work in the industry, but anybody else who's coming to this, it's a complete, oh God, I don't know what to do moment, right, if you encounter that. So that's the main goal for us.
And actually, one question I wanted to ask too is, if you don't mind quickly, I promise, is we have partners coming out to us now, it's like, are you guys going to support Stacks, like L2 questions around Bitcoin? So I want to ask, which L2s do you find the most promising amongst yourselves? Because that's the kind of decision point we're at right now, okay, like which direction do we go in? I think I know Alicia's answer maybe, but yeah.
Yeah, this is amazing live user research. This is exactly what you should be doing in person at these conferences. But it's interesting, right? Please.
I think we're probably very biased, but we're actually like, obviously, but actually we were big fans of Mezo and the work that they're doing. So we're very bullish on Mezo as well. I think there's honestly, there's a lot of room for multiple Bitcoin L2 winners. I think it's far too soon to say, but Thesis are obviously OG, so we massively respect them.
I think in terms of your other question, which is thinking about UI/UX features, I've spoken to hundreds of Bitcoiners over the past year and a half thinking about what is user experience for them. And it's really interesting. We launched our testnet in November of last year. We were the first Bitcoin EVM L2 to come out with an end-to-end functioning testnet with peg-in and peg-outs. And a lot of these users had never used MetaMask. So we actually had to include, and sorry, we will include obviously Xverse and WalletConnect very, very soon. But back then, a lot of these folks had never even integrated with any sort of hot wallets. So on our testnet, I actually had instructions as to how to set up MetaMask. And MetaMask actually contacted us like, we're receiving record number of signups from your page. So I think there's a lot of fundamental pieces that we can actually rethink.
And I think the larger opportunity here for Bitcoin, right, in the vein of ETH was testnet, is rethinking every single aspect of the ETH DeFi experience or the Sol experience and try to make it just more tangible for an actual end user. So we at Botanics were thinking, okay, imagine someone who's never DeFi'd for in their entire life. What do they need to do? Okay, they need to set up a wallet. Let's explain to them how to set up a wallet. Let's explain to them how to bridge funds. Let's explain to them how a swap works, right? There's so much fundamental education that needs to be done because I do think the hundred or thousand next opportunity is bringing Bitcoiners on board and not bridging over existing users. So I do think there's a massive UI/UX potential just in terms of making this experience better than it ever has before.
That's really interesting because it sounds like you're setting yourself up to capture net new audiences versus purely looking at EVM and alt-VM folks that are experienced with DeFi and bridging over to Bitcoin. So it sounds like also Bitcoiners have never used hot wallets before. And it's, I mean, most Bitcoiners, they have like, they'll bury their Bitcoin in their backyard or it's on a Ledger, you know? And so that's, those are the two main avenues of interaction or through CEXs actually.
So most Bitcoiners actually experience Bitcoin through CEXs and not even through any sort of hardware wallet or cold wallet. So it's just a very different mentality. And whenever anyone, whenever any EVM builder is like, why build on Bitcoin? I'm like, three things: new users, new liquidity, new vibes, change the world.
So I'd love to dig into that a little bit more. When you are redesigning and rethinking about UX and UI from first principles, from the ground up, what does it look like? What do you think it needs to look like? I'd love to ask Kathy and Ken.
Sure, yeah. I think Bitcoin is notoriously like difficult to develop for and has so much complexity that people don't actually like, unless you're a developer. The OG Bitcoin wallets like Electrum and some of the other, you know, Sparrow, extremely difficult to use. And people just go use their exchange wallets and just have a custodial wallet, right? So we're trying to change that. And I think in terms of self-custody wallets, Xverse is definitely leading the way for Bitcoin. And our sort of like, our goal is to abstract away all these complexity things like UTXOs, like different address types, right? Those things we're trying to get rid of.
And in terms of what's coming next, Bitcoin L2s, we're also trying to make that as simple as possible, right? You know, on MetaMask right now, if you wanted to use an L2, you have to like go to the network, change network, and connect to a different one. What we want to do is there's no like network changing settings you have to fiddle with. All the L2s are going to be natively supported in Xverse, and transitioning from an L1 to L2 is going to be seamless. And the users don't even need to think about what is the underlying L2. They should just think about the apps that they're using and what they're trying to accomplish, whether it's just transferring some money, stablecoins, or, you know, using DeFi. So that's what we're doing in terms of us.
Yeah, I think that so the major challenge for using Bitcoin on UX/UI side is that I think historically as Bitcoin evolved, there are multiple, so from wallet address, right, there are multiple wallet address formats. When you connect to a wallet address, like use a Bitcoin wallet address, you'll find Taproot, you'll find nested SegWit, native SegWit, and they are all very different. So, and then also there are also different, on top of that, there are also different like Bitcoin the asset protocol, some different token standards, BRC-20s and runes are more like on Taproot. And even if it's, but if you send like Bitcoin to a new wallet address, you need to make sure that, okay, you know, which network or which address format it is. So that actually adds a lot of like complexity to new users as well.
And so for Mezo, we're actually taking a little bit more holistic approach to trying to basically, I would say, attract, you know, the users from the, that users who are the Bitcoin users, right, who use, as you said, hot wallets or they're more active on the Bitcoin network and also kind of like convert them onto an EVM side of world because Mezo is also an EVM compatible chain. The reason why we choose EVM is it's very important, it's very easy because most of the transactions and most of the user and new liquidity is out there. It's more friendly to both users and developers if you wanted to develop, you know, a dApp on top of Bitcoin.
And the bridging part, we have used, we're utilizing tBTC Network, which is the first and the only existing decentralized bridge that tBTC has developed, and to bridge the Bitcoin onto the EVM chains. And it's a viable product. It's been live for four years. It's been battle tested. So we're just like, you know, for us, it was just like building one more like side chain layer on top of this tBTC Network and then to make it more viable and again, like more easy for both developers and users.
Perfect. Thank you so much. We are running short on time, so I'd like to do a lightning round, pun intended. In one sentence, can you please tell me what are you most excited about specifically in Q4 through the end of this year? Just because I know in crypto we can think so far ahead. So I'll start with you, Ben.
I mean, again, I'm biased, right? So I'm going to say like Bitcoin on AppKit. I'm really hyped about that. I've been working with the team towards that already, talking to partners. I know Ken and Xverse are also most likely going to be involved. And yeah, that's, I'm really excited to shipping that. And like you, like Alicia mentioned, you know, growing the user base, new frontiers, and really making Bitcoin a lot easier to use, both for users, UX and DX. So developers too, like the developer experience is just as complex and, you know, varied at the moment on Bitcoin. So I'm looking forward to improving on that.
Bringing Bitcoin DeFi, Bitcoin native DeFi to life with our testnet launch.
So the Mezo testnet, the very first version of Mezo testnet will be live next week. So this is what I'm the most excited about. And on top of that, I also agree with Alicia. I'm excited to see more Bitcoin DeFi protocols come into the market in Q4.
I would say Bitcoin DeFi. And, you know, you mentioned that 5x number earlier. I think that's still like just money that's already in crypto going to Bitcoin. But with Bitcoin price shooting up as it is right now, we're going to see a lot more money coming in from outside crypto. And that's really going to pump that number up. And I think we're probably going to go to the moon. Number go up. Thank you everyone for listening. And thank you.
Thanks. There's so many exciting things happening on the Bitcoin ecosystem to build the Bitcoin Renaissance. I think we hit an all-time high of what, over 81K thus far, and that's huge. Kudos to the entire industry. So round of applause to yourselves. Woo! And so with that being said, it's our first break of the day. So we're going to take a 15 starting now. So feel free to go mingle downstairs, grab a coffee, get some bites. And thank you so much. We'll be back in 15 minutes.
Hi guys, hope we're all recharged from our break. And we have an exciting panel coming up now. I'm sorry, it's a keynote coming up from Lucas, who's the biz dev at MimicFi, who's going to give a product keynote on Mimic. So without further ado, let's welcome Lucas on stage.
Hello, hello. Hi everyone. My name is Lucas. I'm head of business development at Mimic. Yeah, I hope your week is going well. It's going to be busy, so get ready. So what we're going to do is we're going to do a quick update on Mimic. And the slides are not working on the large screen. Yeah, it's working here. It's not working there. Yay. Okay, cool. Yeah, so what we're going to be doing, what I'm going to be talking today is I would like to introduce the Mimic protocol. So our mission today is to establish a standardized approach for automating on-chain operations.
And how we got here is like we've been building automation for the past three years and improving the way on how users can automate their on-chain operations. And during those years, we've seen a growing demand to standardize the way automation is offered to the customers and to different users. And we've wanted to make it more accessible. We wanted to make it more accessible for both users and for the applications, both in the, you know, UX way and also in the integration way. So that's why we've decided to build a protocol.
So how the Mimic protocol is going to be built, so we have come with three different layers because in order to have an efficient automation, you have to have a good off-chain planning, you have to have best on-chain execution, but you also have to have an on-chain security to ensure that what users intend to automate is performed in the right way. So for the planning layer, we have built a layer of different AI agents that will convert user instructions into actionable tasks through intents. We have gone with intents and a network of solvers as we believe this is the best way to achieve the best execution and best prices for the users. And we followed the Uniswap and Across standard for building the intent system and everything.
Last but not least, we have got the on-chain security. So users who want to automate their interactions can put on-chain safeguards to ensure that whatever the planning layer is creating, whatever intents are being created on behalf of the users in an automated way, they are done, you know, with what they intended, within the constraints and safeguards that the user has set.
So Mimic protocol is built for everyone and it's designed for builders. So in order to achieve, you know, large scalability, we decided to go with a design to offer it to different applications. So how users will interact with Mimic protocol is through different frontends, through different applications, especially, you know, DeFi apps and wallets to access the regular users. So through connecting Mimic protocol, wallets and applications will be able to offer a set of different use cases to their users without need of, like, you know, coding any smart contracts or, you know, building any complex integrations. They're just going to be able to integrate our API or SDK and they're going to be able to offer it, offer different automation use cases to their users.
Same applies for more, I would say, professional finance people, crypto treasuries, funds, asset managers. You know, they might want to use it through regular frontends or they might want to use it for a little bit more specialized applications like our own frontend, different custodians or asset management platforms.
So some of the use cases that users will be able to access through Mimic integration in their wallets, so stuff like limit orders, yield optimization, so you can set like moving your position, your assets between different positions in an automated way, rebalancing, so you just set like, you know, the portfolio composition and it will be automatically rebalanced between various tokens, risk-based exit, one of the most exciting use cases that we've kind of explored where you can set on-chain risks and alerts which will trigger the automation. So for example, you can exit a position if liquidity in the pool drops or if like any other on-chain or off-chain alert is being triggered.
And, you know, things like copy-trading as well, like without any custom coding, wallets and applications can offer such use cases. So yeah, there's many more use cases available and like we're happy to discuss it. You know, we're here all day. Oops. So like we're already, like as I mentioned, we've been building this for the past three years and like we're already leaders in on-chain automation. You can see some of our partners and customers here that we've processed $4.7 billion in an automated way on their behalf. So, you know, it's not something that we started building yesterday.
And yeah, we're going to be going live in Q1 next year, but we already have got a, I would say, playground demo available. So, you know, our team is here. If you find someone in this t-shirt, we'll be happy to show you how you can, how automation can work in a more efficient way. And, you know, if you're a wallet, if you're an application, to see what sort of use cases you can open up to your users. And yeah, visit our website, mimic.xyz. And we have created a POAP to celebrate the launch of or the announcement of the Mimic protocol. So yeah, we'd love you to mint it. Don't know if we got any more time for any questions.
Got two minutes. If anyone's got any quick questions.
No? All right, cool. Thank you very much. That's everything. Hope you enjoyed. Thank you.
So Mimic protocol is switching from DeFi automation infra to protocol. So huge update for DeFi lovers out there. Find Lucas who's walking past. I wanted to welcome next on stage Alvin Khan, the COO of Bitget Wallet. For those that don't know, Bitget, obviously the exchange side, but Bitget Wallet to integrate all of your tokens that are listed on Bitget as well. So Alvin, welcome.
Well, good afternoon. What a great start to the week. So, you know, yesterday I was on a panel. I think it was around 11:00 a.m. And before I started, I checked my wallet. Bitcoin was at 77K. After the panel, I think it reached up to 80K. So let's hope at the end of this 10 minutes, you know, we're going to go all-time high again.
So as the momentum continues, one thing we're very sure of is retail users are going to come in en masse, right? And in a way, it's already happening through channels like Telegram, which is what I'm going to talk about today. But when they come on board, right, and they are already coming in some ways, we have to be prepared for them because they are going to come into Web3 in the channels and in ways that are most easy and convenient for them. If you think about it, five years ago, what was the norm that you would use in Web3? It's Chrome extensions, right? Today, the norm is actually on mobile apps. Look at the latest innovations like Moon, you know, Moonshot, for example. Most of these new innovations are all mobile-first. So in a way, we need to be prepared for what is the next platforms for them.
This is the growth of a Bitget Wallet over the last six years. So we were founded six years ago. We have always been mobile-first. So in a way, we were very early at that time. And you could see that the growth has been really, really exponential over the last one year. We were lucky enough to have caught on several trends. For example, in the early part of this year, it was a lot about airdrop meta, right? And so we built a quest system that allows people to do tasks to earn. We launched our own token together with an airdrop campaign that brought a lot of people. That was kind of the first wave.
Now the second wave, when we went from 30 to 40 million users, was because we caught on the Telegram wave, right? What has happened since then is lots and lots of developers, game studios are all building on mini apps, right? For various reasons. For example, if you're a game and you build it on iOS, you may have, you know, that 30% charge that iOS has on your NFTs. But on a Telegram mini app, you know, you don't have that. So for various reasons, developers are going there. Users, there is about 1 billion users in Telegram, and they're starting to learn about crypto, and that's the easiest way for them to get on board. So we caught in that wave about five, six months ago. We went from 30 to 40 million users in a span of just a few months, and that growth is not stopping.
Of course, the next question for us is then how do we go from 40 million users to 100 million users, right? As a wallet, we have the ability and the responsibility to bring people on board. Now, at the same time, the questions that we are getting from our Telegram users are very different from our usual wallet users, right? The questions they're asking, what is an MPC wallet? What is a seed phrase? What do you mean by different chains? How is Ethereum different from TON? You start to realize that many of these are real new crypto users, right? They're very used to having like banking accounts, you know, fintech accounts, but they have no clue what's happening in Web3, and we need to be able to really, really simplify these things, right? From onboarding to on-ramp to security, really need to dumb it down for them.
And so in order to do that, in the last one month, after months and months of research, we launched two new products that will hopefully ease this for them. Now, the first one is what we call OmniConnect. One of the biggest questions that the users have for us on Telegram is how do I connect to the other chains? Now, why do they have to connect beyond TON? So today, a lot of the chains are starting to realize that Telegram and TON are indeed separate, right? A lot of mini apps are building there. Why? Because of the distribution network that Telegram has, and they don't necessarily have to go on-chain onto TON. But the problem is even today, most of the mini apps are limited to just TON connection because when you go to a mini app, you click connect wallet, it brings you the TON Connect, and the only chain you can connect to is TON.
Now, the other chains are realizing this shouldn't be the case, and so we have worked with them. We created OmniConnect. Now, what this does is from a mini app, it allows users to connect to 500-plus chains, depending on which app the chain wants to bring them to. And this is increasing the opportunities for the users in the dApp. I know for a matter of fact, chains like BNB Chain, for example, right, they are very, very aggressive in going after mini apps. More and more of these chains are going to start throwing out grants, subsidies for the dApps, which will then funnel down to the users. And so by allowing OmniConnect to, you know, get them to connect to other chains, these users can now get more opportunities.
The second one, which I'm more excited about, is Bitget Wallet Lite, which is our Telegram wallet. So I mentioned before, five years ago, Chrome extensions were the norm. Now it's mobile app on iOS and Android. But in the future, it's going to be a lot more platforms. So this marks the third extension of where Bitget Wallet will live on. It's meant to be really, really simple. And this is great for users because, you know, the cost of switching between apps, ecosystems, right? When you go from Telegram to another app, for example, Bitget Wallet, maybe 50, 60% of them may actually lose that kind of conversion. But, you know, if you have this, the conversion has been really smooth from what we've seen.
The one thing that we want to make it really customized to Telegram is that the users love gamification. The kind of UI and UX they're used to, right, are all these tap-to-earn games, something really simple, big buttons, big fonts. And most of them, they don't want to know, you know, for example, what is staking, you know, what is LPs, what is slippage, and so on. They want very, very simple UI to do it.
And so what is interesting here is, you know, you probably can't see, but at the bottom tab, again, the UI is very clean and simple, but we have this tab called What's New. And what we want to do is, one, we want to bring some of this task-to-earn stuff onto that tab because that's what they're used to and familiar with. Now, the other thing is we want to bring DeFi to them in a very gamified way. One thing I really believe in is, I'm not sure if the users from, say, Notcoin, you know, cats, dogs, whatever, they will actually go to the DeFi protocols apps themselves, but rather they will probably do these DeFi protocols in Notcoin or some of the tap-to-earn games itself. So many of these games to become the mini distribution channels for them.
Why do I say that, right? If you look at some of the staking protocols on TON today, they may not be getting as many stakers as the number of users who are staking in Notcoin app itself because people are already familiar with all these apps. So we intend to bring DeFi to them in more gamified and simple ways.
We launched about one to two weeks ago. You can see, very, very proud to say that, you know, we have hit, actually this number is outdated, we've already hit over 8 million users on our Telegram Lite wallet. This is again testament to, you know, again, a lot of the support from the community, but also much from the investment and commitment we've done in TON and Telegram over the last one year. And now the floodgates have opened to all the other chains as well. So I'm pretty sure this number will grow massively.
Now, one last thing I want to announce. So we do have a mini app support program. So we are not here just to get the users, but we want to support the entire mini app ecosystem. So Foresight Ventures is one of the leading VCs out there. They have the listings and the, you know, investor contacts out there. We have the distribution channels and we have the users. So combined, I think we can help these mini apps grow very, very fast. So that's it for today. You know, follow us on Twitter, go check out our new products, OmniConnect and Bitget Wallet Lite. And hopefully when I go down on stage, you know, all-time high. Let's see. All right, see you guys. Thank you.
Thank you, Alvin. So Bitget Wallet announces their launch of a $20 million Telegram mini app support program. So in case you don't already know, you should find Alvin, who's coming off stage now, to learn more. So next we have Pedro Gomes from the WalletConnect family, who's the director on the WalletConnect Foundation. Yes, thank you, Pedro.
Thank you. It's good to be on stage again, and I can see the room getting bigger and bigger. I like that. I like that. So get cozy. We're going to get talking about wallets, but most importantly, like WalletConnect has been built on standards. So we have created a program for that, and this program is focused on working together with the wallets to actually drive collaboration of what it could be to build a better wallet.
So we're going to be talking about the Wallet Guide and the WalletConnect Certified, and these are very important things for WalletConnect because as part of this network, wallets play a huge role of defining what it means to use this new internet. The wallet kind of defines your user experience, and you might see like different people actually have very different experience to yours, and mostly it is driven by how they use their wallet.
Even a lot of the times people are thinking, oh, WalletConnect isn't working, oh, WalletConnect could have been better, and then sometimes what they're actually saying is my wallet just does things slightly different than yours, and that's what we're trying to change with Wallet Guide and WalletConnect Certified.
WalletConnect has kind of provided this shared infrastructure, which is already a massive achievement over these six years to have so many wallet partners using the exact same network and same protocols to connect their wallets. This has opened up an opportunity for collaboration on how we actually define how a wallet should work.
So as part of this, it comes in two pieces. It has the Wallet Guide, which you can now visit already, and WalletConnect Certified, which on top of the Wallet Guide provides certain criteria that gives you the golden standard for a wallet. So let's dig deeper.
When you think about Wallet Guide, think of it as a directory, think of it as a website to explore, think of it as a one place where you can find your favorite wallet. And maybe you already have your favorite wallets, or maybe you haven't found out the perfect wallet for you. A wallet can have different standards, different features, certain security measures. There's not a single user that's going to use the same wallet as you just because you're friends or maybe have the same background. Every wallet is going to fit a different profile because every user will have a different risk factor, every user will have different preferences about how they want to manage their identity and assets. And in this directory, we hope that it kind of helps you to explore and find the wallet that's most suitable for you.
But of course, as part of this discovery, it's also important to have some curation. And this curation isn't some arbitrary curation where WalletConnect is just stamping approvals left and right. This is a collaboration, a collaboration with wallet partners to find what it is the industry standard for what it means to build a wallet.
Because some features might be experimental, some things might just kind of make more sense for some wallets and not others, but there is a bar. There is like what is the common denominator that all of these wallets share that we should consider this, this is what defines to be a wallet, and WalletConnect Certified tells you exactly that.
So we have our first round of partners that are part of the round one of the WalletConnect Certified, and we're really happy to have been working with all of these partners in establishing a few points of what it means to be a great wallet. And they have met, since we announced this earlier this year, we've been working for months on building this program, and the experience of what people think today is WalletConnect has improved not just because of the core development team building a faster and more reliable wallet network, but also for wallets to manage and control your wallet connections better.
And we have successfully done this with almost 20 wallets, and we look forward to expand and to continuously to work with all of our wallet partners to build a better wallet experience. So for round one, really happy to have all of our partners part of this round. And in round two, we want to raise the bar. We want to continuously raise the bar for what it means to be a golden standard wallet.
Starting off, we live in a multi-chain world, and we want to make sure that whether you are an EVM-based wallet, a Solana-based wallet, or a Bitcoin-based wallet, that you are following the latest RPC standards that provide you with more functionality, with more capabilities, and most importantly, a superior user experience. So as part of round two, we will be expanding the scope of what it means to support RPC methods for EVM, Solana, and Bitcoin. Additionally, we have a couple of features that we've been working on for...
the last year that will be part of this second round. Some features that were part of some wallets as experimental features are now going to be part of the actual round two, and we want to work with the wallets to define which features are actually going to be part of this round two, so that we then establish what are the next industry standards. Some of the features might be, for example, link modes, link mode that allows you to have a native app on mobile connect to a native mobile wallet without using the internet, completely offline, or one-click auth, where in a single connection you can verify your wallet and connect your wallets using standards like CAIP or CAIP-2.
And finally, we've defined a few criteria points in round one that will obviously be inherited in round two, and we're going to expand specifically on the experience around the UX of connection approvals and transaction approvals, making sure that all of these wallets have a very consistent experience around how you connect, how you manage your accounts, how you control the chains, and how you sign the transactions. So this is quite powerful because it's not only the fact that all of these wallets use the WCV network, but the fact that these wallets, which you might even consider are competitors, are working together to build each other up, to build a better future for wallet experience as part of the WalletConnect certified program. And I'm really happy that the WalletConnect Foundation is helping this initiative because, as part of this initiative, we're also working on innovating further, not only with setting the bar for what it means to be part of the WalletConnect certified program, but we're also innovating on some research and development that actually goes towards setting grants for new features.
And I would like to announce that the WalletConnect Foundation will be allocating 30 million tokens for chain abstraction adoption, something that is not a certified program but actually on the innovator program, a future program where we're actually going to have grants for not only wallets who are certified but are also using the latest features. And we're really excited to have allocated this budget of 30 million tokens for chain abstraction adoption. So this is something that we obviously are working together, WalletConnect Foundation and the Reown team and our wallet partners. So I invite all of you to join us at the workshop downstairs at 1 p.m. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Pedro. So I just wanted to make a quick announcement regarding the workshops that are happening. As Pedro mentioned, there is a Ledger workshop that's wrapping up right now, and for those that are interested in the WalletConnect and Reown UX workshop, that's taking place at 1 p.m. And the workshops are right downstairs. So up next we have Nihar Singh on technical, who's the technical product manager for Safe, who's giving a product keynote on Safe. Thank you.
GM everyone. I hope you all are enjoying Bangkok like I am. I'm Nihar. I'm the technical product manager at Safe. Safe envisions every onchain account to be a smart account. For those of you who don't know, Safe is a smart account solution that's heavily battle-tested and so far most trusted in the space. I don't want to brag, but we kind of have like a hundred billion dollars worth of assets secured in our contracts. So if you're an account abstraction developer, this is definitely something you should check out. At my role in Safe, currently I'm building account abstraction dev tooling, and right now me and my team, we're together actively working on EIP-7702, which I think is a very amazing bridge between bridging the onchain UX with EOA wallets. So as a product manager, I like to talk in terms of user stories, and before this talk, three top user stories come to my mind. Number one, as a new user on a new chain, I don't want to manage native gas token to play with an app because onramping is painstaking. Second, as a native crypto user, I want to implement some spending limits on my wallet so that I don't get scammed by mistake. Or as a DeFi power user, I want to have DeFi positions across several chains so that I can manage my positions on each chain in a goal. As you can see, these are all smart account related features which are not in any EOA at the moment. So EOAs need to get better, or we kind of have to provide a really easy migration path to smart accounts.
And this is where I want to make a pulse check with the audience. How many of you are indeed aware of EIP-7702? I see a few hands go up, but not too many. So I'll take a few minutes to explain what that exactly is. At the moment, your EOA, your externally owned account, is kind of dumb. You can sign transactions with it or send it to the chain, but that's pretty much it. EIP-7702 is an onchain improvement UX effort to allow your EOA to delegate the signing authority to any piece of code on chain. It could be any piece of code, or it could be a smart account implementation such as a Safe, and the user could technically delegate to many codes on chain or many smart account implementations on chain. That's up to the user. And with Safe, of course, multisig is so far the most well-known feature of a Safe, but there's a caveat that comes with EIP-7702. Given that the private key is still the super admin of the account, your multisig renders kind of moot. Or if you want to implement some kind of a negative control within your application, that's not possible with 7702 as it is today. So we see that this might mean that, you know, Safe is not best suited for 7702. So we thought about it internally, and the product strategy we landed on is that 7702 is an amazing way to migrate to a full Safe account. What that means is that your EOA is now capable of sending batch transactions and gas-sponsored transactions. So essentially, all your assets within the EOA could be sent to a Safe within a single transaction, meaning within a single signature, you don't have to sign n number of times for n asset classes. There's another use case that we're working on, which is to manage Safe sub-account topology, in which your 7702 EOA-delegated Safe would be able to spin up several child Safes, or we call them sub-accounts, and to manage those Safes, you don't need n signatures, you would only need one. And it might sound like an incremental innovation, but in the longer run, we believe that it's going to make a huge impact when it comes to onchain UX. And we've been thinking about a Safe Lite version since many months, but in light of 7702, I think it's the perfect time to execute on this vision. Safe Lite will be a heavily gas-optimized smart contract that's very simple, catering to the two use cases that I mentioned, and would ultimately help us or help the community together to supercharge EOAs with 7702 smart account capabilities. Maybe this is not a long-term vision, but definitely a midterm vision to improve the onchain UX that we have. And if you're still more curious about what we're doing, then on Wednesday, the 13th of November at 10:30 at Devcon AA Community Hub, we are hosting a live product demo. Here's the QR code to the Luma, and my senior Solidity developer, he would be walking you through the entire process, starting with an EOA and ending on the Petra Devnet, sending out batched gas-sponsored user ops. So finally, if you're an EOA provider, I want to talk to you. In fact, the entire Safe team wants to talk to you about your needs, how you see the future of 7702 play out. We are quite accessible throughout this week and would be happy to speak with you. And with this, I would close my talk, and I would like to thank the organizers, Aaron, Salman. Thanks a lot, and have a nice day.
Hello, hello, awesome. So smart accounts are the future of UX. If you feel differently about this, but make sure you get to the wallet UX roundtable and have your voice heard. I just wanted to welcome Sergey next on stage. Sergey, co-founder of 1inch. This is probably a panel keynote that you don't want to miss. Sergey, without further ado.
So hi everyone, it's a pleasure to be here. So first of all, I have a question to you all. Who of you is doing martial arts? Hand up. Martial arts, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Muay Thai. We are in the country of Muay Thai. No one? Great. So I'm happy to announce a partnership with Bruce Lee Foundation and the daughter of Bruce Lee, Shannon Lee. Our message is: take crypto seriously. So I will try to repeat it: take it seriously. Just kidding here. So today the talk is more about the current problems in our crypto environment, not just DeFi, also crypto, and how we can address them. So did you know that crypto adoption is faster than the internet adoption? Yeah, back into like 2000, we are actually in year 2000 if you look on the internet adoption. So we are growing faster. That's why you also should take it seriously. The current problem in the space is, especially in DeFi, users need to really think about what they're doing and really understand, educate themselves. And often you need, like for example, if you need to exchange assets, you need to find the right DEX or the right aggregator. Yeah, or you just use 1inch, of course. If you need to go to another chain, to L2, you can of course use native layer-to-layer bridges. It takes long. Please now. Yeah, okay, thank you. You can use aggregators for bridges, but there are some issues I will highlight a little bit later. And then you know, you have like three doors, we call it. You do it by yourself, you trust a centralized entity like the next FTX who gamble maybe with your money, or you use intent-based protocols. And of course, we suggest from 1inch, just use intent-based protocols. There are already some protocols out there. The difference between intent-based protocols and the normal regular transaction is that with intents, the user doesn't really care how this is going to be executed. The user just defines what they want to get. The protocol ensures that it's executed properly by professional executors, resolvers, we call them. In regular transactions, you face of course problems such as MEV attacks, sandwich attacks. I personally lost a lot. That's why we started to build at 1inch intent-based protocols to avoid front-running attacks. So in the regular transaction, the user needs to take care about how it's going to be executed. If a user needs a leverage on Aave, they need to lend, borrow, swap, lend, borrow, swap, create a leverage position. But there's no need for this. If your position is too risky, you can just declare, I want 10x on Ethereum. It's going to be executed by professionals. So benefits. Yeah, you can get also better rates, especially for swaps. Yeah, I will also show how we solve it. You have better experience. You don't need to pay for the transaction itself. You just define kind of an off-chain order or off-chain intent. What it's shared then with the network, and professionals execute. It can settle much faster because if you send a transaction by yourself, you need to define the right gas price. Maybe you don't meet the current gas price because it jumps, and professionals can theoretically bundle your intent with other intents and just execute much faster in the next block. Use cases. At 1inch, we have limit orders and we have swaps. So there's different other protocols, projects who also follow the path with the swaps, like Uniswap X, for example, also based on our Dutch auction, what we introduced back in 2022. There are some more intent-based protocols like CoW Swap, who introduced like an AMM protocol like Balancer, what also helps you to provide liquidity in a safe manner so you don't get sandwiched, what I faced once. So on 1inch, we introduced Fusion in December 2022. We have seen already 35 billion of USDC volume, so it's already a proven solution. It works. Limit orders actually released 21. Yeah, we were not really happy. We were not really happy with 0x protocol. It was very heavy. We thought, okay, it can be different, and we could build something what can be also kind of extended with hooks. So you can actually build hooks on top of our limit order protocols. We have seen 29 billion of USDC volume already. The next problem in DeFi, the liquidity fragmentation. If you look on your fragmentation, of course, most of the money is on Ethereum, but you have Tron, you have Solana, you have Layer 2 like Arbitrum, Base, we have NEAR, we have TON, and all liquidity is fragmented across different DeFi networks. But it's actually bigger what we have here. It's crypto is much bigger than just DeFi and Web3. We have Bitcoin, huge amount of money is in Bitcoin. We have also XRP, like people invest in XRP and they sit on XRP. They cannot really do something with them right now, except going to centralized exchange and keep it there. We have Sui, for example, Network as well, Litecoin, Dogecoin, whatever else, Monero. Yeah, so I personally would like to buy some Monero, but I don't want to go to centralized exchange. So cross-chain volumes right now in DeFi are around 70 billion between 23 and 24. So it's what was bridged. Most of the bridged assets are of course Ethereum, stablecoins, some other coins as well. So crypto volumes in total are around 200 trillion. Yeah, for 23, 24, it's huge. Yeah, and we can tap in this market. So if you compare to traditional finance, we are very small. We are at the beginning. We are in year 2000 for internet adoption. Just think about it. Yeah, so we see really huge money in traditional finance, and yeah, DeFi is really only one small thing there. Solutions to improve this situation with this liquidity fragmentation, this across what was recently integrated also in Uniswap, deBridge, LiFi, and some others, Stargate as well, Thorchain, Swap, great, but there are problems. Yeah, I personally faced bad UX very often by using these different approaches. It's great to have people building in the same space, but I agree also to WalletConnect approach, we need to improve it. Yeah, so there are different bridges for different chains. You need to find maybe the right bridge, or you use the aggregator, and maybe your assets will stuck somewhere in between because you swap, bridge, and then you need maybe to swap again, and the price impact is too high, and it's stuck. So you need to blame it maybe. So lack of transparency, worse rates, and also security risk. We have seen a lot of hacks for bridges, right? So cross-chain bridges, I mentioned already, some of them are centralized, inconvenient, expensive, unsafe. Cross-chain swaps very often slow, too slow, too complex, expensive. And what about atomic swaps? Did someone build something on atomic swaps? I didn't find. But what if we use 1inch Fusion, intent-based protocol, and we take the atomic swap approach with hash time lock contracts, what was mentioned on first time, I think, on the Bitcoin Talk forum by a guy, we combine these two, we got intent-based atomic cross-chain swap ops powered by 1inch. We call it Fusion Plus. Fusion was the initial intent-based protocol that you use in one single chain, and Fusion Plus, it's similar, secure, self-custodial. Very important, our value proposition from 1inch is you always interact with 1inch in self-custodial manner. It's gasless, it's extensible. You can build based on our protocol, based on our white paper on every chain where is possible to implement as a service, as a contract. Bitcoin with Bitcoin script, Solana works very well, TON works very well. We are working on Solana and Bitcoin already. It's trustless, efficient, and competitive. They are resolvers, professional market makers who compete between each other. We have specific flow with the escrows. Origin chain escrow is created for the user, and destination chain escrow is created for the user. And after the verification by the application, the application shares the secret, so the user can ensure that they got the funds what was promised to them. This is sort of Fusion, we call it like engine. Yeah, I'm unfortunately running out of time. I hope I have one more minute. We use smart Dutch auction approach. This is real case. Someone exchanged 12 million US to Ethereum on 1inch. If they would do just normal classic swap on aggregator, they would actually get 135,000 less. So they got extra money here. We have some special techniques for gas adoption, MEV protection by design, gasless swaps, liquidity from across entire network. Yeah, that's actually it. Thank you very much. We are happy if you can test and play around with it in a wallet and on DApp. And I have one more thing. Participate on our special offerings. You can get some Bruce Lee merch, Bruce Lee and 1inch merch, nunchucks, and some drug suits. Thank you very much. It was a pleasure to be here.
Hold on, Sergey, please stay on stage for one second. We want you to perform one more Bruce Lee kick for us. Okay, let's go. Awesome. Thank you, Sergey. With your attire, we had to thank you. Thank you. Great. Up next, we have a hot takes panel on wallet UX. I wanted to welcome on stage a full stacked panel.
Okay, cool. Welcome everyone to this UX hot take panel. It's not hot enough outside. We need to bring the heat inside here. Hopefully there will be something interesting said today. I'm DPPA Dan. I am a content creator, developer here in the space. And I'm going to allow everyone to introduce themselves. But to keep this like cool to start, also, I assume a lot of people flew here. So tell me if you saw an interesting film or TV on the flight. What did you watch and why? Go ahead. On the TV? Yeah, on the flight. On the flight? On the flight. I sleep all night. Oh, wow. Okay. Or you just look at the flight map the whole time? Yeah, yeah, just work for a little bit, then sleep. Yeah, respect. No, for the, you know, the different time zone. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. And who are you? I'm Troy from OKX. I lead the OKX wallet and the DEX, Beauty site. Yeah, hi. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jess. I am the CEO here at Reown. I also didn't watch a film on the flight. I was really hoping I could work, actually, so like that, but I had no Wi-Fi. But I did read a book, and I read a book called Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, which I'm kind of obsessed with right now. And it's about like these young guys designing a video game. Nice, nice. Okay, hi, I'm Maha. I lead product for all of the wallet-related things at Uniswap. I also fell asleep the entire flight. I had a really bad flight schedule. It was like 24 hours, and I popped some Benadryl, knocked out for all of them. That is very impressive. I'm Ryan Jones, the product leader on MetaMask. I can't remember the full name of the movie that I watched, but it was Magic something, and it was about the first creators of the iPhone or the attempt of creating an iPhone before the internet was even around. Great movie, worth watching. Everyone ended up running a bunch of other companies right after, but it talks about failure and then the creation after. Okay, great. I watched Dune 2. Thanks for asking, everyone. Thanks for asking. So this is probably not the first time we've ever had hot takes on the UX. So I want to get everyone's take on like what's sort of the most frustrating thing about wallet UX now, either for yourselves or for users, and why do you think that we haven't like conquered that obstacle yet?
For my experience, because as we know, there are a lot of wallets in the market right now. Each wallet has their own features, has their own unique function. So if you wanted to play all your on-chain stuff, like a campaign, like airdrop, a lot of things on that, you need to go to different wallets, right? And so I think the user experience is like they cannot experience the on-chain activities in at least one or two wallets. They can experience that. So this kind of thing is a little bit inconvenient, I think. The other thing is, you know, when your assets are separated in different wallets, it's really hard to manage, right? And sometimes, you know, for accident, you forgot your passkey, right? You forgot your private key, something like that. It will make you a little bit, you know, awkward and something like that.
Yeah, I don't know. I find there's so many things that I find frustrating, but I think probably the most is the lack of security functionality that's available. I think that we're going to need different wallets for different things. I think that, you know, the wallet that I want to buy my coffee with, the wallet that I want to store my retirement savings in, are going to be different. They're going to need different interfaces, different levels of security. So I actually think that like we need more variety in wallets so that I can like find the wallet that I want for different things. But the one thing that needs to be consistent across them all is like I feel comfortable knowing like that I'm sending crypto to the right place, like telling me that it's the right smart contract, that it's the right domain, that it's like the right person. All of this stuff, I think, is really critical. That's the piece that takes me the most time when I'm interacting with crypto, especially like with more than just like a few dollars worth of crypto, is like I'm checking, I'm copying and pasting, and like all of this stuff. And like we need, I think, to solve that.
Yeah, plus one to security. That's a big one. I would say for mine, I'm going to say discovery. I think right now, like people are finding tokens through like Telegram group chats or Twitter or Farcaster or sometimes even like random TikToks. And then I feel like going from that to then assessing, is it a safe token? Where can I buy it? What chain is it on? Do I have gas on that chain? All of that leads to so many different steps that actually require some specialized knowledge to be able to do. So I think there's two aspects. There's like the discovery part, which is hard, and then once you have like an intent, like I want to buy this thing, how do I go from that to like on-ramping, onboarding to a wallet, having funds, buying that asset, paying gas, etc. So kind of like the whole flow.
So being the last one, agree with all the points. Oh, what a hot take. Very much. But I still think even though we've been going at this for a very long time, it's actually still a technical limitation. So everything that was called out before, I think a lot of that we're making head roads into, but a lot of that hopefully this next year will be able to help solve, but still technologically running into a lot of issues on making it seamless for everyone.
I think the other thing, sorry, I'm going to interrupt. The other part of your question was like, why are those things? And I think it is technical. I also think that like we haven't held ourselves accountable as an industry to fixing some of those problems like that for a long time. We've just expected that users will write a seed phrase down and like store it safe. And we have this mentality of like, oh, we need to teach users how to be safe, for example. And I actually think it's the worst idea when you bring someone into crypto and you're like, hey, use this really cool game. It's amazing. It's really interesting. To get started, what you need to do is get a piece of paper and then you need, and everyone's like, what? Like this isn't how I onboard. So I think like we also need this mindset shift, which is like I have to really care about my users' experience and design that into the flow.
Could I respond to that? I generally totally agree. If it's the hot take, you can definitely respond. I was like, yeah, since it's a hot take panel, maybe I'll reply. Generally totally agree. I think UX is incredibly important, but when you're looking at like something like Polymarket, if you look at the volumes over the last week, for example, people were willing to overcome so much friction to be able to get what they wanted. They had to not only onboard onto crypto, but not on mainnet. They had to somehow get on Polygon, somehow build a wallet. Some people have to use a VPN maybe and do all of these things just to put in a bet. So I do think there's an element of like, if there's a will, there's a way. But I do definitely agree that if you're a new user, it is so hard to get into that. So I think part of it is about like what audience you're addressing.
So I mean, a little bit of behind the scenes in this panel, I got a list of hot takes, but I actually don't know who wrote them. So I'm trying to do a game here to find out who said what on the page. So one of the hot takes actually was that there is probably too many wallets. Like we have a lot of wallets, and Jess, you just mentioned that that's probably a good thing. But does anyone on this panel think that we may be having too much choice for consumers or users or being overwhelming them?
Yeah, just like I said before, right, there is a lot of choice for the different wallets. I think, you know, with the well-educated users, this is not a big thing because, you know, every wallet, their infrastructure, their function, they're similar. The only thing is, you know, maybe some unique function like OKX wallet, we have, you know, already markets before. There is the only function in our wallet, you know, at least for three to four months, right? So at that part, you know, we have the well-educated, you know, a lot of education things, let different people to try it. But after like three to five months, the other wallets also have the same functions. So after the well-educated and different wallets have a different experience, well, the same education things, I think it's worthwhile and it is a good thing to try different wallets. But for the business side, I think for the wallet innovation things, this is really important to find a new solution or new feature for the specific wallets. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
Yeah, I was going to say I do worry a little bit about fragmentation. Like I feel like a lot of what's being talked about at Devcon and in the zeitgeist right now is embedded wallets, and those are great. I am so pro embedded wallets. I think they're so great for a new user, especially those, like you said, they shouldn't have to like think about writing down a seed phrase, etc. But I do worry that if every dApp that you use creates an embedded wallet, and then now you have like dust and a bunch of funds in a bunch of different places, your assets aren't consolidated. I hope we as an industry do think about like how do users now exit from that ecosystem to be able to kind of take advantage of all the interoperability that crypto does offer in general. So I do worry about too many wallets leading to fragmentation.
Yeah, I think you definitely bring up a good point in terms of a lot of these. We need the hot takes. It's coming. It's coming. I'm last most of the time. I know maybe start this way. But yeah, so a lot of them though, I feel like they start as more experimentation and they're testing out something new. But what's interesting is they tend to converge because most people realize there's only so many ways as a wallet that you can actually make money in terms of monetizing your users. And so the hard part is even though there are a ton of these different wallets, they all start to look the same over and over. So I'd love to see someone going in and trying something completely new and something different and trying to go and maybe specialize in one area without converging right back. But that's been really difficult until now.
I just want an AI that I can tell to manage my stuff for me.
We'll come to that. We'll come to that. It's on the page. I'm just curious to show of hands, how many of you feel like we have too many wallets? Just a quick... Okay, like half the room. All right, maybe 60%, 70%, I don't know. You were going to say something that you agree with everyone that had their hands down and hands up. How many people use more than two wallets? Oh, wow, wow, everyone. All right, literally everyone. Okay, well, one of the other points, and I think you brought up in terms of discovery, what would you say is the priority of a wallet or what's kind of the point if you were to describe it to someone that's not in crypto, right? I mean, we have some wallets that are, you know, about security, some about discoverability, some just want to be really fun and have great graphics. What would you say when you're designing a new wallet, what would be the main priority for you? You mean design a wallet? Yeah, for if you want to communicate to a user like you need to use this wallet because of X.
For OKX Wallet, I think, you know, we are trying to build up a really smooth UI, you know, to let people use that, you know, really smoothly and user-friendly. The other thing is, you know, I would like to say, okay, wallet is not only a wallet thing. We are going to build up a Web3 station. We want to, you know, let the users experience different things like our DEX aggregator, like the marketplace, like the, you know, our DeFi taking yield, a lot of on-chain products. So we want to, you know, give the users a whole picture for the whole Web3 station, the Web3 things, let them to experience and from, you know, beginning, be as a beginner or as a professional player, we wanted to, you know, give them the comprehensive experience on that. So this is our, you know, main target. We are not trying to build up a, you know, in the specific territory like, you know, only for this chain or that chain. We support at least, you know, 100 plus different blockchains. So all the different chains, they have a different ecosystem. We are going to try to bring them into our wallet, let them to know how the ecosystem process, what's the, you know, next trending for in this specific, you know, ecosystem. That's our goal. We are not trying to, you know, to be isolated in the, you know, specific industry. We also have our OKX OS, right? So we are going to help the other, you know, projects who wanted to build up the wallet. We provided the technology. So what I think, you know, for our perspective, you know, we are going to build all things in the industry. Yeah, that's, I think that's our, you know, doing all the things.
Nice. I guess when I think about like if I had to explain to somebody what a wallet is, then I kind of start with the whole purpose of Web3, which is that like you can for the first time self-custody digital assets, right? Like you could hold your own assets and you're not relying on somebody else. And like this is, I think, really important to get across because that's why we're all here, right? Like for me, I believe that like most of the financial institutions are going to fail the world at some point, and like I want to be able to control my own assets. And so like the wallet for me is the hub of where I can control those assets because like that's how I'm using my keys. And somebody asked me the other day like what's a wallet going to be in 2030, and I think it's going to be the place that I can store my assets and or store my keys so that I can control my assets. I think it's also going to be the place that I start to do things like control my identity and my data, control my payments. So I sort of think of like the wallet as like the control center, the security center, the vault for probably my entire life one day, or I hope one day I'll be able to do that, where I can really control who has access to my data and when and what data, where I can control my assets, where I can control my like KYC, for example. And so I think we're actually at just the very early stages of figuring out what a wallet should be, and over time it should be the place that like really gives users control.
Yeah, for me, well, plus one to everything you guys said. Oh my, this is hot. I, so sorry. Okay, we need to be more antagonistic. Goodness, they're just really smart. What can I say? What I was going to say is I think my thesis is much more simple. I think things should just work. That should be the thesis of a wallet. So an example is like, let's say I went on Twitter and my favorite like Twitter trader influencer posted Luna, and I'm like, oh, how do I get some Luna? I have a little bit of dust in this wallet with some maybe some USDC, or maybe I don't even have that. Maybe I have like money on my Robinhood account, but it happens to be crypto. How do I get that to now purchase Luna? I shouldn't have to think about anything. I should push a button. I should have the intent, and everything should happen under the hood. And I think a wallet's purpose should be to make that happen in the easiest, fastest, cheapest, and most secure way. But all of the infrastructure advancements that have been happening in the space do lead to that. But I think it's the wallet's job to like abstract all of that. And I think you brought up an interesting point about watching that movie about Apple. And I think to Apple, for a lot of this, they are a company that both innovates at the hardware level and at the software level. But in the end, it's just so easy to use. Like, for example, I got my phone stolen in SF, classic, a few weeks ago, and I was really nervous because like everything was on there. My car keys were on there, my house keys, etc., because everything's digital. But then I was able to just like walk into the Apple Store, get a new phone, download my iCloud backup, and it was up and running within like five minutes, and I could send texts on it. Like, that's crazy. That's the mental model we should have for crypto.
Hot take: wallets will be gone. I don't know why we're here. No, I need to say something. Thank you. Good, good try. No, but I think to your point, like they'll just be embedded, and that like user or the simple user experience, and then truly the power of like blockchain, right, is really driving self-custody. And so even Apple and Google are looking at how do you store a lot of that data on device. And so if you can mix both of these things together, it starts to become really powerful.
Okay, I'll try this again then. So you all expressed your visions of wallets and, you know, the priorities, and you all seem to agree on a lot of those points. Is there anything that you feel from that vision or the goals of wallets, either from a technology or, you know, whatever we're kind of building with that, is a threat or stopping us from getting to that vision? And that could be someone that's not in this room, so you can say, you can disagree with them. So I'll start there, but if there's actually, start with you, Ryan.
Yeah, so I'd actually say building for the current users in Web3 versus the new users trying to build. Who's doing that? I know, right? Who's doing that? Name names. So that's what we are, MetaMask, trying to build for the current versus new users. So you end up running into a situation where if you're trying to build for that, you have a lot of people who understand blockchain, have spent a lot of time in the space, they really understand how everything operates, they know how to bridge, they know how to swap, they have a bunch of other problems, and if someone's coming in brand new trying to get up to speed, and so trying to work across that dichotomy actually can be really difficult. If you're a brand new wallet starting from scratch and not one that was built basically at the same time Ethereum was, like, it's a lot easier to get up to speed and completely change that paradigm. So I think it's actually a really tough situation that you're in in terms of who you're actually solving for. And of course, for MetaMask, we need to solve the problems that our current users have, but we do want to try to find different ways to kind of move forward and push the industry. And that's a really tough situation to be in.
Yeah, I can name some names. I think one of my hot takes is that I feel like user choice is a little bit overrated. We should be building opinionated products similar to Apple. They've created certain paradigms and stuff around, like, you know, staying in their ecosystem, their focus on security, etc. But there isn't much user choice there. There isn't customization, etc. Similar to with wallets, for example. So Uniswap Wallet just launched a bridging feature. We decided not to call it bridging because we're building for the end state where the user doesn't even have to think about what bridging is. Instead, we just called it swapping and give them a great route, a great price, and we optimized for that and speed and permissionless. So we use a protocol called Across, and we decided not to surface a million different routes to them because why should a user have to decide what path their tokens are taking to get the end product? They just want the end product versus other wallets tend to expose multiple bridging options. I think that should go away. Another example is gas. I think we all in this room agree that nobody should have to think about gas, but I think current wallets right now do give advanced users kind of options to choose how much gas they want to pay. But like, why, even me as an advanced user, like, why should I think about the number of, like, the amount of gas that I'm paying for a transaction? I want it to just work, and I want it to be secure, cheap, and fast. So again, user choice is overrated.
Does anyone here, I was, yeah, of course, definitely. Does anyone love paying gas here? Anybody? I don't know. Big fan. Okay, big fan. Go ahead.
I'm going to disagree because I think that, like, this is the purpose of having many different wallets, right? Is that some wallets want you to just give them the cheapest route. Some people might be opinionated about the route because they have a security concern about a particular route. And so I think that's where actually, like, we need different wallets to do different things because many users might want that. There will be some people who don't. And if every single wallet just says, hey, I'm just going to abstract everything away from you, like, actually as a sophisticated user, I might care about that because, like, I might have an opinion about a route that I definitely don't want to take for whatever reason. And so I think this is where we need to, like, think about who the end user is of our specific wallet and who we really want to target. And that will prevent this, like, twenty different versions of exactly the same wallet. And history has told us, like, people, people like opinionated things, but they also want the choice. So, like, and if we can deliver that, I think it's really good. The other thing that I will disagree with, and whilst I love Apple and I am a devout user of Apple, I don't love that they've built it in such a, like, closed garden way. Like, I can never leave Apple because my whole life is on Apple now. And for me, that defeats the purpose of Web3 a little bit. And so I think one of the big challenges for us all is, like, how do we build these amazing user experiences without falling into that trap? Because if we exist in a world in twenty years' time where, like, kind of is every, you know, we can do all this cool stuff, but actually, like, I'm trapped in the Coinbase world, like, we've really failed because that the whole point of this for me is that, like, when that institution fails, I can take my assets and I can move them very, very easily somewhere else because it's like, they truly belong to me. And so I think that, like, we have to, like, balance how we move things forward with also not falling into the, like, old mindset of these walled gardens because then we're, like, not doing what we're here to do, I think, as an industry.
Yeah, from my side, you know, I really like you guys' ideas, like, you know, a lot of things on that. But, you know, our wallet a little bit, you know, different. We are, you know, centralized exchange-based wallet, right? Even we are, you know, decentralized non-custodial, right, wallet on that. But I think not all the people, all the users going to buy it. But, you know, on that part of things, I think a lot of things or barrier is not between the technology or Web2 user experience, something like that. It is about to, you know, distinguish, you know, the difference between our centralized exchange and the wallet. We are, you know, we are going to, you know, separate all whole products and all the things, all the business, you know, to keep them separated and to give them the different experience on that. So I think, you know, this, and also there is a lot of compliance issue and the regulation requirements, a lot of things we need to concern because, you know, even the wallets from our wallets, we are totally decentralized, right? But I don't think the SEC going to buy it, or I think, you know, the government's compliance will chase after us, you know, do a lot of, you know, evaluation, something like that. So I think, you know, for our wallet, we can say the decentralized part and the plus, you know, the compliance and the regulation, the evaluation, all the things will make, you know, make us, you know, more mature or, you know, completed in the industry, something like that.
Okay, so to wrap up this session, we heard a little bit about your future visions. We heard some things about AI potentially or, you know, Apple Store experiences. But let's say we do this panel in five years' time, what do wallets look like to you? What would you think wallets look like? We'll start down there.
Okay, hopefully we do not have extensions anymore. Firm believer that we should get to a point where they're actually infrastructure more than anything else, and they're either living on your singular device or you have some form of a key that gives you access to whatever it may be, and then there's a bunch of different applications that are built on top of them. So the goal, at least in five years, is to try to get rid of the extension.
But then where's the little fox going to live? The little fox face.
It'll be with you wherever you go in one way or another.
Yes. For me, I'm hoping that in five years everything is tokenized and that everything you interact with, whether it's online or in person, is tied to some amount of like your digital identity, things like that. And then on the wallet level, all the infrastructure advancements lead to like an incredible UX, but it's all abstracted away. Like users aren't thinking about the chain they're on, the gas that they're paying, all of that. They can just have fun. And I'm hoping in five years we have like one hundred x the number of users that have crypto right now. And then the last thing is I'm hoping there's more ways that they can actually use their crypto in real life. Like it's not just an investment asset, but they can actually like pay for their daily coffee, their like Uber or whatever with their crypto assets.
Like a MetaMask debit card.
That's in your... Anyone user of the MetaMask debit card here? Anyone? Oh, look at that product-market fit right there.
It's not in the US and LATAM yet, but soon.
Okay, for those in Europe can pick it up and buy coffee or whatever you want. And do you think, to Jay's point, is that whole another wallet that you need to do the physical payments and another wallet to do, you know, your investments, or how do you envision that world?
That's a great question. Personally for me, I definitely separate out the wallets and addresses I use for different use cases, but it really just depends on the user you're talking about. I think, well, one thing I wanted to respond to what you said earlier, totally agree that we should not be building on walled gardens, things like that. But I think the beauty of building in crypto is that the infrastructure is shared, right? We're building on the same block space, we're using the same public-private key pair schemes, etc., etc. But people should be competing on the front ends, so that includes wallets. Like it's fine if wallets are opinionated as long as you're able to exit. So I think that seed phrase, the private key is super important because I can just choose to leave and then use a competing front end. So that's kind of what I believe in.
What do you tell us about the AI that you would like us to experience?
Yes, it's time now. This is probably just a demonstration of my personality, which is that like when I can get an AI that just does everything for me, I'm going to be really delighted. But I think that includes how I manage my assets, right? Like I want to be able to just give my personal AI, which by the way will definitely need to be like client-side. I don't want that going anywhere else. When I can give like some client-side AI an instruction to execute something on my behalf and like it knows that if it's over a certain amount, it also needs to tell me, okay, yes, you can do this, but you have to like tap on your Ledger or something like this as well. And it's just like a really intuitive experience. And yeah, this is my dream one day.
Nice. Maybe it's longer than five years though before I can do all of that.
I think that's within a year.
Within a year? Oh, yeah, there's the alpha, guys. Are you dropping something? Is that the announcement?
Yeah, no, no announcement. But I think if you put together some like a multisig and a MetaMask debit card and you give it to an AI agent, right, it can go shopping for you or do whatever you want, and then you have complete control of those assets.
Yeah, someone can probably just use Cursor right now while we're talking and by the end of this panel have like a working app ready.
Well, you only have like four minutes left, so good luck.
But I was going to say, this is my, if I can add a little hot take into this, my own hot take, but I think the world of, you know, wallet UX won't improve, but I think we'll just kind of give it up to the AI agents who don't care about UX and UI and pretty graphics and all of these things, and they'll take care of it all. But that's my personal take.
But what's your vision of the future in five years for wallets?
I think, you know, payment is the number one thing because, you know, as you can see recently, a lot of trending, you know, they're working on the stablecoin, they're working on the payments, a lot of things. So I think in the future, you know, this is the number one priority for that because we have all the assets in our wallet. There is new utility if you want to do, you know, for the daily life in the real life, right? We cannot stay in the crypto for, you know, for like in our life to have a, you know, have a, have a meals, you know, to conduct every day, you know, daily life in like, you know, different, you know, like window shopping, something like that, right? So we needed to find our solution for crypto payment to make our assets have more liquidity, have more utility. So that's, I think that's the future.
And what's kind of like blocking that now? I mean, you know, we have the MetaMask wallet, I...
have a physical crypto card wallet that I won't name because they're not here on stage, but I left it at home because like the bridging experience is just not that great. But like, is it a regulation thing? Is it this UX? Like, what's going to get me to start walking around with my crypto credit card?
From my perspective, I think it's the compliance and the regulation that are the most important things, because we have tried a lot of things. We are really cautious on this, because you know, even if you made that happen, after the compliance and the regulation chase after you, that hurts, right? We have tried that before. Yeah, don't, don't be chased by the feds, okay? Go ahead.
I would say it's not necessarily as much regulation and compliance. I think it depends on which... about time we got a hot take for you at the end of it. Thank you. I think it depends on what side of the aisle that you sit on. If you're in the custodial realm, of course, there's going to be a lot of it. But if you are self-custodial, there are a lot of systems that especially put into place now that make it much simpler. And so you have the Visas, the Mastercards, they'll take payment in stablecoins. And so it's a lot more of a UX perspective. And you have other companies like Borderless and Bridge and ZeroHash and all of those who are making a much more seamless ramp experience where before you had to rely on centralized exchanges that would set it up in every single locale. So I think the technology again is like it's finally getting there to a point where you can actually make a very seamless experience and you could give your AI agent access to some sort of assets so then go and make some transactions. So it really depends on what side of the aisle that you're sitting on. But I think regulations have actually come down a lot and it's getting to be a much better situation.
Pedro, your take is that that's not true? This is good, this is the end, this is the end take. So this has got to be the spiciest of the spiciest.
Okay, here's the spicy take. I think the world of self-custodial wallets is like deeply under threat from regulation. We see this in MiCA, which is the travel rule that's being like coming into place in January. For many years, there were people pushing that self-custodial wallets should not be able to interact seamlessly with the traditional financial world, and we're just about to see this. Where historically I've been able to take from my exchange account, I can just copy and paste the address and then I can send funds to my self-custodial wallet. Now that's getting harder than ever. I now need to take actions with my private key. I have to sign in in order to be able to do that. When the Payment Services Directive 3 comes into play, it hasn't been published yet, but like there's definitely going to be something that limits how self-custodial wallets can interact with the traditional financial world. So I think to assume that like all good in self-custody is like a real error for this industry, and I think we have to like keep making sure that they don't just slip these things in and create this chasm. Because if the self-custodial wallet gets cut off from the traditional financial services world, then like this onboarding new users is going to become way harder. So I think actually like we have to be very aware that there are places in the world, including like Europe, where it's actually getting harder for self-custodial wallets.
Okay, well that wraps up our wallet UX hot take panel. Thank you all for listening. Thank you. We had some spicy hot takes there. Derek, I see you. I'm gonna pick on you. What was your favorite hot take?
Uh, let's see. It was, I think it was actually hearing that MetaMask isn't really looking to bring in new users. That was interesting.
Might pick on you later. Thank you, Dave. Dave, Dave, Dave. Thank you, Dave. We have next Derek on stage representing Reown. He's the CTO to give a presentation on WalletKit, the WalletKit keynote coming up next. Thank you, Derek.
Awesome, thank you. Thrilled to be here today. It's exciting to see so many builders, also so many users of our AppKit and WalletKit in the room today. And I really love the hot take, extreme. I think so very concerned about self-custody going away and more regulations. So really, we love that. So my name is Derek. I'm the CTO here at Reown. And before I get into what's next for our WalletKit SDK, I want to remind myself and yourself of why I am here and why I believe many of you are here. So I'm here because I really love crypto, and to me that means the premises that crypto brought to the world of self-custody, ownership, control, and composability. And I really want to bring this to the masses, and I think you really want to bring this to the masses. And I don't just want to do that because I think it's the right thing to do. I want to do it because I think it's going to unlock unparalleled value, especially the composability is going to unlock unparalleled value. I think we've seen this a little bit with quote-unquote desktop apps like DeFi and then aggregators seizing the composability and just building on top of that, but we haven't seen it for consumer yet. And at Reown, we believe that the reason why we haven't seen it for consumer yet is because there still remain so many UX problems. It's still too hard to build really delightful, awesome end-user applications, and we obsessed with fixing this. So our mission is to make onchain usable, to make onchain awesome, and it needs to be better than Web2. And we have two main products, AppKit and WalletKit. Joe, our head of product, was talking about AppKit earlier today, and I'm going to be focusing on WalletKit. And WalletKit, our SDK, is pretty much used by every single wallet that you use. And here are some stats. So we're serving millions of users. It's used by pretty much every network, and it's used by also thousands of applications that sit on top of WalletKit. One thing that we're especially proud of is the way we've approached this in an open way with open standards. So some standards that you might be aware of is the EIP-6963 that enabled users last year to use multiple browser extension wallets seamlessly, and it hence ushered in competition amongst the browser extension wallets, making them better. A standard that you might not be aware of is the CAIP-25 standard that did pretty much the same thing but for mobile wallets and enabled mobile wallets and also institutional wallets to be multi-chain. We think this open way and ushering more of these standards to make Web3 UX better than Web2 UX is more now more important than ever with self-custody under threat, and it's more now more important than ever to empower the onchain community, which is you all. Right. So what am I going to talk about today? What's next for WalletKit? We're thrilled to announce the work that we're doing about chain abstraction and gas abstraction, that we think are pretty much the next most biggest imminent UX problems, and I'm also going to be touching on these other points. But let's start with chain abstraction and gas abstraction. So chain abstraction is a hot buzzword. It's also the most obvious problem, I think, and it seems like there's a really simple solution, but yet we haven't seen that. And maybe zooming out a little bit on chain abstraction, like how do we actually get here? I think crypto or Web3 sort of started with just Ethereum, and you had to have one gas token, and your assets were in one network. At the time, the biggest UX problem were the high gas fees. A couple years ago, minting a Safe or creating an ENS record, it was so expensive. You know, it was really terrible. And then L2s came along, and alt L1s like Solana or Polygon came along to fix the high gas fee problem. But unfortunately, we introduced new problems. One of the problems is that my assets are now fragmented across networks. Another problem is that I have to have native gas token on all of these networks. I need to learn what a bridge is as an end user. I need to learn what a network is. It's a terrible end-user experience. And happy day, Reown are fixing this in our WalletKit SDK. The way we're doing it is a phased approach. So we're going to market with a solution that works for 100% of accounts. It works for EOAs as well as smart accounts. It also works for EVM and non-EVM. We're going to market just with EVM in the beginning, and you're going to be able to spend from... you're going to be able to use an app that's deployed on Polygon. Let's take dPay as an example. You're going to be able to use a Polygon app, and you're going to be able to spend USDC there, even if you don't have any USDC on Polygon, even if you only have USDC on Optimism and Arbitrum, for instance, you can spend USDC on Polygon. The way this works is pretty naive and simple. We're introducing a new screen in the wallet transaction flow that just checks, does the end user have enough funds on the target network and the target asset? And if not, if possible, if the user has assets on another network, gives them the option to source from these networks. Under the hood, this is using proven infrastructure. So we're partnered up with Socket and Across, going to add more bridges in the future, and yeah, going to market with this, supporting 100% of accounts in crypto. What's the catch? Like, this sounds too good to be true, and it is. And the catch is that the latency is not going to be awesome. So it's the source chain finality plus target chain finality. So then in order to improve this, we're excited, we're going to ride the wave of some head tailwinds. So the 7702 standard in Ethereum that's going to enable session keys, going to make the experience better, and then also resource lock experiences ultimately to make this experience better, improve the latency. And in the last phase, we think we also really have an edge here and can also solve privacy with these approaches in a new transaction flow. How exactly, it's a little bit unclear. We have ideas that we're battle testing, but we hope that we can get pseudonymous or even completely anonymous transactions, and also enabling users to draw funds from custodial sources, kind of like the Magic Spend idea. Next, a gasless future. So gas is a terrible term in the first place, and no end user wants to learn what gas is. Like, fees are okay, and as an end user, I'm probably also okay to pay fees, but I definitely don't want to have to onboard into native gas token and have little dust balances on all my networks. So happy day in EVM, the EIP-7702 standard that's going to land in Pectra roughly mid next year is going to enable wallets or end users to pay gas fees in any ERC-20. So we're enabling wallets to seize that, and then we're also going to enable wallets to support sponsored transactions through the EIP-5792 and 7677 standards that landed this year. Next, Link Mode, improving latency for wallets basically sitting on top of universal links. Here you can see Zerion Wallet that's already live with that. So it's a latency improvement. Also, users don't need internet in order to connect wallets. This is only available for native applications such as Pay, Orb, or Openc. Also, we're very proud that Verify API is now adopted by all the certified wallets, and what that means is that end users can have a more anxiety-free experience when they connect to apps. We have more than 14,000 apps that verify their domains, so we can show the end user that they're actually connecting to uniswap.com and not some other app. Plus, these wallets also show whether uniswap.com or evuniswap.com are a scam app and whether I need to be careful. The last thing that we announced today is round one of WalletConnect Certified. We're really thrilled about that because in round one, the theme was it just works, which means that wallets need to pass a tight QA test that we provided, basically making sure that if you're in the elevator and the internet is bad, the end user sees a loading indicator while connecting, or if the internet drops completely, that the end user sees an error message. Also, that deep links are supported, so you can automatically redirect back into the wallet and back into the app from the wallet. And yeah, sounds like small things. We're really excited about that, and better it just works. And we're also excited to work on round two with the wallet partners, and that's what's next for WalletKit. Thank you all.
Thank you, Derek of Reown. So I just wanted to remind everyone that there is a workshop that's happening for BTC builders. For those that are interested in BTC Builders Workshop, just head to the library. Up next, we have a keynote by Flexa. So Dave Hoover, hi Dave, CTO at Flexa, to give a product keynote. Thank you, Dave.
Thanks, thanks, thanks, everybody. Just want to say real quick, I'm going to be reading this mostly because I'm pretty darn jet-lagged and my brain is a bit scrambled. So just wanted to give you a heads up as you'll notice. All right, first, a bit about my background. I've been a software engineer for 24 years. I've spent a decade focused on developing software developers as one of the co-founders of Dev Bootcamp and before that, co-author of Apprenticeship Patterns almost a decade ago. Like many people in this room, I fell down the crypto rabbit hole and joined ConsenSys, writing another book for O'Reilly a couple years later, this time on smart contract development. I eventually went independent and started my own crypto-friendly dev shop called Red Squirrel. Along the way, I worked closely with the founders of Flexa before they started Flexa, and eventually the stars aligned to allow me to step away from Red Squirrel and rejoin them to work on the most ambitious product of my career, a product that fuses perhaps the most important real-world use case of our modern life with a technology that many of us recognize as the most important invention in the history of money. And that use case is payments. Now, some of you may be thinking, when I send money on Ethereum, that's a payment, right? And in certain ways, it could be. But if you take one thing away from this talk today, it's this: transfers are not payments. In fact, one of the major paradoxes of the current state of affairs is that we have these modern retail payments, which are great at getting you and your merchandise out of the store quickly, but really lousy at actually moving money. When I make a payment at a store, it's not actually moving money from my card to the merchant. The money doesn't arrive until two days later over ACH rails. It's as slow as a paper check. But on the other hand, we have blockchains, which are amazing at moving money very, very quickly by comparison, but they're horrible at letting you and your merchandise walk out of the store because there isn't an intuitive interface for either side of the retail digital currency payment. But what do I mean by payments? Well, payments as the world knows are loaded with all these implicit assumptions, and they mean so much more than just moving money. When you're buying something, it really comes down to a few things: who you're paying, how much you're paying, and what you're paying with. And can you use the thing you're paying with to make a payment at this particular store? But on the seller side, it means so much more than that. It means authorizing the payment, integrations with legacy and existing payments hardware and software. It means clearing, batching, fraud. It means a whole bunch, a whole laundry list of things that merchants have to keep track of when they're accepting payments. And this list only gets longer when you add digital currencies into the mix. And at Flexa, we've spent the last seven years building enterprise-grade infrastructure to empower merchants to accept digital assets while their customers move quickly through checkout and the merchants receive funds much more quickly. And so we're proud to count some of the biggest brands in the world as our customers, everything from Chipotle to Ulta to GameStop to BAC Credomatic, the largest bank in El Salvador, for whom we handle all their Bitcoin processing. And for merchants like these, we offer some of what we think are the best payment products in the world. There we go. We have everything from QR codes to payment links and hosted payment pages. These payment acceptance products are designed to help merchants integrate digital assets with their existing hardware and software as easily as they possibly can. We have a goal at Flexa to try to make it as easy as possible for every business to accept digital assets, and so we go out of our way to make sure they don't have to do anything when it comes to incorporating digital assets into their payment flow. And just a few months ago, we introduced a new set of tools called Components that helps app developers improve the experience of digital asset payments for buyers, the users of their apps. We've been working on Components for many years now, and it's really just a way for wallets to interact and communicate more closely with the merchant payment infrastructure we've been building. It's all on-chain. It doesn't require any special cards or metal or plastic tags or anything like that. It's a pure digital currency payment rail. And this is a set of tools we've been developing for wallet developers and app developers to allow them to integrate with the merchant points of sale. To build Components, we've spent a lot of time interviewing and holding focus groups with wallet developers to understand what are the key components and capabilities that maybe aren't at the top of the roadmap right now. Ultimately, we want to ensure merchants have a better experience accepting payments from digital currency wallets. We want to make it easier for app developers to integrate digital currency payments in all the complexity of what I was just describing. And so one thing we found from talking to all these app developers was there was one UI element that was constantly at the bottom of the top ten features on a wallet team's roadmap, which is not revenue-generating, and yet it's a core feature. It's a feature that most customers expect to see on the launch screen of every app. I don't know if you can see it here. I'll highlight it. It's the scanner. Consistently, we heard from developers that the scanner was like the eighth, ninth, or tenth priority on their roadmap, and we understand why. There's no revenue that comes out of this element, and yet it's something that every customer expects. And so that's when we realized that we were in a position to do something about this. We could help build a better scanning UI for any number of customers across a number of different wallets, and it would provide a better experience for our merchant partners. So today, after years of hard work, we're happy and proud to announce our upcoming scan component. It's open source, it's extremely privacy-preserving, and allows customers to scan payment codes, QR codes, and payment requests. Also, it's coming with WalletConnect built in to help you connect with desktop dApps. Our components are regularly audited by leading researchers, and best of all, it's completely free. This new scan component is something we're incredibly excited about because it's an easy way for developers to radically improve the scan experience in their app with very little effort. It also paves the way to becoming WalletConnect certified. So by integrating our scan component and enabling the WalletConnect built-in functionality, you can get much closer to WalletConnect certified as part of the wallet guide that Reown is putting together. If you're interested, oh, sorry, and we're excited to make this available later this year. You can visit this link to sign up for early access before the public release. If you're interested in discussing anything I've just shared or joining us for our workshop where you'll get a sneak preview of the scan component, we invite you to drop by today around three o'clock or whatever the schedule allows. And again, if anything I just shared interests you or if you're curious about how to make payments work better in the digital asset ecosystem, I encourage you to join us. I'm really excited about the path forward. Thank you again. My name is Dave, and it's a pleasure to be here with you all. Big shout out to Reown for running this great conference. Thank you.
