DappCon 2023: App Chains and Wallet Pains: From Concept to Deployment - Abi Dharshan

Transcript

who here has heard of zerion before or has used zarion okay we have a we have a decent Bunch um so I'll definitely go through the intro and you know give you all context as well um great to have you here good to be in Berlin I used to live in Berlin in churg like 5 years back so um it's fantastic to be back to a city that's pretty much not changed it's just the same as it's always been as Dean as ever um so it's yeah it's I'm pleased to be back to say the least um today I'm going to talk about something that I think I talked about you know with pretty much every wallet in the space there's this new layer to Cambrian explosion that's happening just across the board and wallets and portfolio

trackers we have we we pretty much bear the brunt of you know more data more chains more vent tokens right so I'm going to demystify a little bit on a what's a good framework or approach to think about how how you sort of scale you know your platform to be ready for both tracking and integrating a lot of these newer chains and B I'm just going to talk a little bit on maybe some of the you know features use cases whatnot that we've been thinking through at zarion to sort of uh you know cope with the upcoming upcoming cycle of uh just new layer twos and new new chains in general um so a little bit of context you know um I'm also going to go off some captions based on some rap titles one of my friend adti from uh she used

to be at Celestia and now she's working with capsule she started this trend so we're just going to riff off that she had this really good talk called Mo chains more problems in ECC and our summaries are pretty much going to be similar so just hang in there um so if you remember def5 summer right um back then we just had this huge you know compound starting out this whole like governance token um you know sort of Summer and pretty much every D5 protocol suddenly had this need to you know launch a new governance token or you know have liquidity farming so we went from this uh you know sort of season of I remember right like in March or February 2020 we just had four or five def5 protocols so was like the Unis swaps or the compounds or like the you know think it was what like a and then

we had instad daap um for us as a portfolio trackers zon started off initially as a mint or personal capital for web 3 you have all these assets across you know one chain there's no multi-chain you just want to now instead of having three or four tabs open have one tab open connect your wallet do all these actions right simple we then went from that to like hey like here's this Pro fation of like exchanges and then in the next couple years a ton of new D apps coming out so as a product you know we iterated and we you know added a wallet because people wanted to actually now you know store their funds in zerion we I don't know like we we sort of added more wallets so you could now track your Ledger you could even like you know connect your Ledger Nano X to our mobile

app to trade on the go right features like this that just made it more easy to cope with this new season of you know D apps and chains and whatnot um but then now we're at a stage where obviously like web 3 has evolved a lot you have a ton more use cases you have a ton more you know liquidity layers and you have actual you know features that both developers and users use very simple example right like now my ens um with my ens and with my identity you can pretty much track know understand you know what kind of person I am on chain what kind of you know features I usually interact with am I more of a defi guy nft guy you can see how rich or poor I am you can much you know sort of across the board

if I choose to dox myself with my ens understand what's going on but there's a few problems here right like the first being very easy it's always been the feast like for an average consumer you know across the world it's always been inaccessible to really I just to really like make actions Beyond like a simple you know free sign transaction just given given the feast that we've had to contend with and I think more lately there's been like three factors that really brought in this big Layer Two Season right one we just have a mature development stack you know Stacks like op stack and Al polygon with their recent one and ZK stack like just makes it a lot easier for any new tool to consider white labeling their own chain

two it's also become like I think a lot more what like interesting as a market we went from you know D5 protocols needing if if defi protocol needed a new chain they need a whole liquidity layer of tools and like you know of like other liquidity providers but now you have social apps you have gaming apps they don't really need a whole you know liquidity layer anymore so that's that's also made it a lot easier and then finally it's just the feast like I said earlier uh a lot easier to you know want to get a layer two just because of the advantages these offer to you um so now we're in this interesting space where you know you have rollups you have validium you have every sort of team just fighting it out against each other on you know how their Solutions better

than the other but it's all come out of a necessity of hey we need to you know make Defi and just vb3 in general more accessible to users and fees need to go down at the end of the day um and now coming to the kind of core problem here right for say like a average like wallet or like a d apppp user um this is really currently how the user journey is right like you might have like a million different assets and ton of different chains um then you want to connect your wallet to a new D app for the first time and this is assuming you only have one wallet and not more than one which I'll get into later you like find out that hey like here's this new layer 2 Chain you know whatever like ethereum coin or vitalic coin you don't have the chain

added and then you click on you know you want to add a custom Network then there's a ton of details that you usually don't care about and assuming you already have funds on this chain all right you read through those details you add in your RPC URL and you're done but assuming you don't which is I think 99% of users when you're trying out new chains or you're I don't know farming for an adrop or whatever then you sort of realize you know you can't transact you need Bridge assets this whole process is going to be a 15in process of like you know understanding which Bridge supports that if you don't know about socket or lifi like shout out to them they make it a little bit easier but then you connect the wallet you know send the bridging transaction wait and then finally hopefully your transaction

is confirmed and you're ready to like start right um this is a big problem and this is a problem not just for wallets but it's a problem for anyone trying to solve for user experience across the board um and we've been thinking a little bit about how you you know we want to approach this but also how we want to collaborate with other wallets in the space to just think about how you know I guess layer twos and whatever comes after will sort of bring in you know more constraints um ideally obviously you want to have you know hey like you can connect a wallet um in this D app um in the same screen like you're able to see like while you know you're connecting the wallet you you just get an automated like you know confirmation prompt to add this new network and

ideally also in the same screen you're able to like you know your wallet itself offers you hey like you know you don't have X assets on this chain like just here's the best offer based on all the bridges that we've you know scouted through for you on bridging assets and uh because we already know that you don't have these assets then there you go whatever it is eat stable coins what not you have it on the Chain still there is the problem that Bridges I hope will fix and there's also a ton of I think uh proposals coming up to make this process a little bit easier but uh the waiting period for you know assets to Bridge I say 15 minutes as a stretch depending on network con condition but it's still a problem and that's something that we can't really fix as of now but at least

the user experience of you know not needing to like understand all these details on like you know the rpcs and the URLs and all that I think that's that's one thing that you know we realized at first we could solve for um and this is something that uh you know we'll be working on um in the coming Sprint or so um and I think the the key use case here is this is user experience that no one's really built as of now right so understanding you know in the long run what kind of design language you'll converge towards all of that are still very open questions but I think the whole whole point of this is to start getting into that you know how do you make the user Journey easier in this layer two World um and the other problem right like the other problem is more

around hey so so sure you now understand that you know you need assets on this chain you've bridged a bunch of assets maybe you've done some trades now you have 10 new assets on this new chain right how do you track that you have these assets on this new chain um there's a bunch of different issues here right one if this is a very I don't know it's a Stak asset on new new like uh you know liquidity pool in a chain that we don't support at all we'd probably not even like display that right as something you track so I just broke this down into three different areas one it's the meta information for nfts fortunately we have you know providers like simple hash that make it easy they they are adding new chains almost on a daily basis so what we do at on we just

you know tap into aggregators for that data so simple hash for example get every chain added then for nfds even you know your pull P Ops that you've just collected today we're one of the only wallets that show the poops on chain we show video nfts we show music nfts you know any any sort of interactive element right so there are providers that exist for that which maybe a lot of wallets don't even utilize yet right so that's the first thing try to identify what meta information providers exist and use them use them wisely I think Co Geo is another example you know in terms of simple token metadata they they are adding as many new chains as possible but we always see this as something where you've got to you know have a approach based on you know what problem you're trying to solve for the other I

think the bridging is more interesting we currently only integrate socket but we're planning to integrate lifi and then there's also like the whole you know cross chain bridging ecosystem with axlr and whatnot so that's another area where I think like a lot of players just you know sort of either locked into one bridge and then choosing not to integrate any others but I think for us we'll always take this direction of trying to be the aggregator this meta aggregator and the final one is the reliable node provider so I mean this is a little bit more interesting what we've now kind of formulated internally is for a lot of new chains there's this whole long tale of chains that no one really uses right how about going going about like a lightweight integration for these chains like you don't need an archive node unless you want like the whole

transaction history for this chain so why not just you know just integrate it with like a like existing node provider in a very lightweight format and usually change themselves if you reach out to them they're very open to like suggesting to you like a very easy to use not provider right so that's kind of like one way to solve the second step of the problem after someone's Bri their funds you know now they have some more assets on this chain they've been experimenting a little bit and as a wallet or as like a you know any sort of D app that wants wants to retain users because users need the accuracy of their you know funds on that platform that's that's another sort of way to sort of you know retain there and this kind of brings us you know finally to what we've noticed even in the last cycle it is

really all about the data like zon's Mo or even a lot of the other like you know sexy front ends that you use day to-day their mode isn't really you know sort of hey like you as a user coming onto the platform every day making trades giving them swap fees or whatnot everyone's realizing that everything's all about the API right like under the hood what kind of data have you indexed has it you know been the portfolio history has it been I don't know like anything across like you know understanding like user intents and all of that it's almost a web 2.5 world now right and in that in that layer um we've sort of like also done a lot of improvements in how we not just I guess collect data in a very

privacy Centric way but also in terms of how we optimize for data in a very privacy Centric way so one example of I guess like data is that in wallets we've all faced this you know you have two or three different wallets maybe your metamasks your zons and your Phantoms and you go to a new popup it might not be wallet connect it might be some new VB 3 previe whatnot and you suddenly see there's two metamasks on there or there's two zerons on there you can't use both interchangeably right this is an example where we partnered with the wall connect to release the EIP 6963 proposal essentially now you can have multi- injected wallet Discovery in the same tab so you can connect multiple wallets simultaneously on multiple chains and you know use wallets without

any like popups and annoying you know models and all that so the First Learning lesson there was like Hey like this is a problem what's the web approach honestly that sometimes works like in this case you can pause the zon extension for a certain new D app that doesn't accurately support two different wallets connected at once CU not a lot of wallets or D apps know about the EIP 6963 and now it remembers your preferences all stored natively in your browser and this is a new era where you know you might have a gaming wallet that you use only for gaming D apps you might have you know zerion for your hot wallet or sort of like your you know D gen use cases so that's that's something that we've seen um and we've also now advised a lot of other Wallets on in terms of

how you can sort of approach this very interoperable uh user experience and the second I guess just in terms of some of the newer features that we're planning to release as well like I talked about the multi- injected provider Discovery but we're also releasing a ton of things on you know safety security there's uh you know things that I mention on being able to add custom rpcs and new chains so you'll be able to add pretty much any chain already live in our browser extension in our Mobile Wallet um very in a very easy to use format and all of this well-being privacy first right so if you you've connected a bunch of different wallets um one of one of the largest concerns that we have coming from users is that hey like won't you be able to Doc USS out if the IRS comes to

you and asks you for like the cross Associated data we can't do any of that because all of that is stored on your um on your browser locally and none of that is stored on our backend but what is stored on our back end is um what we' now classify as our API um so back in 2020 and 2021 um almost every other wallet portfolio tracker you know be it zapper be it you know wallets like metamask and whatnot um they would show you asset prices queried directly on their front end from other price sources what we chose to do back then is to actually build all these price feeds and these sources on our back end and build this robust infrastructure such that you know if I don't know infura is down or

if like Alchemy is down or you know ether is down we still show you the prices and a lot of times this happened in 2020 and 2021 during like the whole bull run these apps would be down maybe for a short period of time showing you no prices but say on wood right and over time that I think initial investment just led to now you know us having adapters for almost every D5 protocol in this space or us having these like transaction history feeds that now if you use coinbase or if you use you know rainbow or if you use um um Unis swap if you go to Unis swaps wallet if you go to their transaction history all of that data is now fetched from zerion and we sort of now almost have this B2B angle of hey like we've built this like robust

infrastructure as a rest API and a websocket API internally team started coming to us being like hey like this is really hard for us to build in house because we need you know someone to like you can't just you know query this data directly from a node provider you have to parse you know a tokens full history you've got a bootstrap okay what's sort of like the price at which person bought this asset what's the price currently what's the ROI we give you all of that in single line of code so I think the kind of the learning there was hey like this new data layer is also a way where we can you know help sort of solve and build for this layer two explosion so as we go forward you know we're starting to collaborate with a lot of chains as well where you know chains might be

interested in giving grants saying hey like I'm a new chain um I see that zon's API is now powering 10 different wallets or D apps in the space how do we go about you know integrating so if you're interested in exploring the API um it's still very much Ste we haven't done any publicity or marketing on it yet but it's available now in docs. zone.io so very much if you're a d developer if you're a wallet developer if you want something you know as simple as a portfolio value and as complex as multi-chain nfts like charts and all of that cool stuff we provide all of them in like a very simple to use rest API um so that's been kind of the culmination of you know all this research across the data across you know how like you know solve for user experience and then

finally kind of like what we're seeing now with this whole layer 2 explosion so just to recap um you know very high level I think one simplest lesson is to like you know just collaborate as closely as possible if you have a BD team if you have a you know public relations team whatnot like I think being close to teams like you know op op stack or being close to like polygon teams that are almost like now Gatekeepers of hey like I know when base chain is going to come out one month from now and I can help you get in touch with them and you know understand how to integrate them into your product natively I think that's the first main lesson so roll up as a service or Layer Two is like really take them seriously um very similar I guess you know both

Technical and empirical analogies to before then yeah any any API that provides comprehensive data if you even just go to like your node provider right now if you use Quick node quick node probably has like their own thirdparty API aggregator right like there's a ton of apis that can you know provide data for whatever need that you want so I think this is more more so like you know sort of like positive development from like a couple years back even like last Market cycle where you didn't have any API any documentation really and people actually hated that right like when Alchemy came out with their um you know sort of super node people didn't like the fact that hey I couldn't just like self for my own node and now a centralized provider wants to do that for me um but over time it's just a

matter of convenience and price and security right um the final I guess a couple things yeah chains and bridges they really should be you know abstracted away wherever possible um and when I say abstracted away I mean this as the end user right so you really don't want to know like you don't need to know hey like do I have you know 100K usdc in this one chain or the other chain or split across multiple chains when you use the end product it just needs to work um and think we're moving towards that kind of an experience with you know chains and bridges often times colluding with each other as well and yeah finally the layer two explosion really will see you know more mainstream crypto adaps um gaining adoption and we've had a couple really cool talks for you know having numbers having estimates

and all that on when this going to happen but I think it's going to be you know uh a matter of like you know sort of when not if more or less thank you okay cheers thanks Sai for the presentation so do we have any questions nobody so how much the I thanks a lot for the talk first of all how how much the API cost this rest API for the data yeah good question um so we have a free generous development key should be you know up to like 15,000 calls or so per day for free so that would be almost half a million calls in a month and with

that you can query a ton of I'd say like if it's transactions data you can qu like maybe 10,000 walls or so like spread over a month um if not um because it's a high level API every endpoint has a different price based on how complex it is so if you take our history or our transactions th those are usually the most uh complex endpoints they started about $50 for 100,000 calls so like $500 for like a million calls and maybe to give you like I Don't Know sample right like some of the large wallet customers that we have they make around 20 million or 30 million calls so per month for 300,000 users so you can kind of just

infer off of that if you're a starting developer we also have you know grants um just got to reach out to API there under IO with your use case and we can even give you like a full free production key and some of the nfts and like the token data and all that those are yeah even a million calls would be I think for the nft data for example it's $50 for million calls um so very similar to what simple hash some of the other players offer so thank you of course okay iby in and I have a question if nobody else has a question so in in this session here today we spoke a lot about you know payments merge into two worlds and I'm just wondering how is zirun looking into that space right now how is it see changing is there user's

demand for you know Solutions like could be Nosa spay or Orum within your wallets yeah good question um even I have a couple crypto cards I don't have no suspe yet right but uh I think I myself would be a big user of that and uh a couple of these cards I've had to import my zerion keys to be able to like use them as a debit card right so I'd say myself personally definitely would be a user and we've had a ton of inbound right in terms of uh I think there's more B2B inbound than user demand though at least for now where we stand because our users are usually what we'd call web3 Citizens right their users are just using on average like four chains every day they have a bunch of D apps from from what we see so far it's still a

market that I think is like something that we'll wait and pause a little bit to see if market demand really grows um just because users prefer to be more on chain and there's this other flip side right like if you have off ramps and if you have debit cards users might actually even like move away from your wallet to take money out right like there's there's a ton of different uh retention based questions that I can talk to with my PM for a long time who was super against some of these things as well um but yeah I think user demand not so much yet maybe some of our us-based users or european users would prefer something like this but a lot of our DJ onchain users they you know haven't really asked us much okay yeah thanks cheers any other question so uh it almost sounded like um

you started out as sort of a an aggregator of apis like ether scan and so on and then you sort of build up this data yourself and now you're sitting on a bunch of data probably your own data Lake mhm uh probably already thinking about data engineering and so on um you mentioned this API like like how do you think about the space evolving obviously the graph is very popular and and you know everybody sort of uses it but there's also some issues with that like um yeah how do you how do how will you make your data usable for developers is it just going to be the rest API are you thinking about graphql yeah and these sort of things yeah yeah good question um so I think one thing that's hard to understand in the API space at least in

three is like what API solves what problem right like the graph for example or a lot of these lower level apis they don't provide any transaction history that's multi-chain in real time so what I mean is you know graph is a good idea say like you're able to submit 100 different wallets they don't output like here is the transaction history for every single like transaction that this wallet has done in a single call what they'd rather do is they have a bunch of like you know graph apis node apis and bunch of other like provider Solutions um so for us I think we're very Niche API right all we do is just solve for this transaction history portfolio and Def or nft assets um for that a lot of our I guess like road map or data

engineering road map is very much like some providers asking us hey like can I have transaction web hooks so now like whenever a new transaction is done you can build push notifications just using a web hook built on top of this API so you don't need to use maybe another push notification provider like epns or some of these other platforms right so for us our and honestly our road map has been very much feedback driven how the API started is a year back rainbow wallet just coming to us being like hey if you like all this data you've built can we use this ourselves right so we haven't really structured this I'd say for a graph and whatnot like they also have this other challenge of you know they usually have a token or they have like a big whatever Venture backed business to like sort of like fall back to for us

our primary business is still the b2c like the wallet and like the sort of like um user facing platform right so this team that I'm working on with the API we don't have those pressures of like hey we need to be like you know I don't know scaling like 100x or like adding like a whole set of new features so we're very much focused on let's try to do what we do best which is transaction history and some of these um wallet native use cases but in terms of yeah like the graph I'm I'm a big fan also I work out of their SF office all the time the edge in node space so the graph um Alchemy and fura pocket Network quick node I think they're all in their own Battle of we need more like there's only about 10 to 20 big customers in the

space right now right so there in that battle we want to try to get like you know as many big contracts as possible for a node provider or for like you know using our subgraphs so we aren't really in that for us it's very much if there's a new account abstraction wall coming up and they need to build this portfolio they come to us through Word of Mouth yeah so different Market okay thanks Abby we're out of time right now for questions thank you thank you again cheers thanks