DappCon 2023: Buying coffee with treasuries. Web3 wallets that break down boundaries - Hannes Graah

Transcript

hey son everyone good afternoon in the sauna fortunately I'm Swedish so I'm quite used to hot climates or at least te is us all right so I love the sequence from nosis pay to talk about um ramping with monium and then one of the most famous wallets um I work with wallets as well and explain why I'm so excited about it I'm the founder and one of the zeets building Zeal which is a a permission free wallet I will use the word permission free somewhat interchangeably with self custodial because I think permission free is a benefit and self custody is by many perceived as as an obligation and that's what we're building at Zeal we're building a permission free wallet for daily life and I will make a case for

why we need more permission free wallets for daily life but since we're the new kid on the Block um we've been building for a bit more than a year now I will just present some of our street creds uh we're 11 people uh a lot of us seven us are from revolute where we did spend a lot of time working on everyday payments and spending for your daily life but also Spotify and coinbase uh and these are two industries that have also seen a change from an old incumbent industry that wasn't embracing the digital habits of people um when we talk first about music people were forced to buy plastic pieces to listen to music on the banking side people were forced to go to High Street offices to do their banking

errands but both of these industries were changed and allowed people to do them from the comfort of their of their phones um and that was enabled by a lot of fundamental Technologies being in place from mobile adoption to to bandwidth and I think we are at a similar inflection point now when it comes to web 3 wallets uh for quite some time there there was a lot of talk about transaction fees and um moving money in N crypto was also quite of a Hustle but a lot of these things are not actually solve problems and we're getting to the point where it's possible to wrap these technology IES with great ux around it and deliver great products and that's why I'm so excited especially many of the things we heard about today like nois pay and monium are enabling

Technologies from this and we have scaling solutions that allow you to basically disregard the transaction fees on on different networks which also a while back wasn't really seen as something feasible um but this change is coming at a point where the global economy seeing some challenges the last couple of years if anything should be seen as as a Tailwind for web 3 in what we are building here us monetary Supply is is done at 10x if that was a token someone would be very happy but now it's the supply um we've seen Central Banking uh also having its day in the Sun and Banks like Silicon Valley Bank collapsing on the back of um of some mismanaged risks and um and aggressive practices and of course our

own sector has not been unscathed when it comes to uh mismanagement of risk with FTX although I would say that probably my more favorite example of of problems in the last couple of years that reinforced that's a need for what we here are building is the the Canadian trucker protests which uh was an example of um weaponization of the financial system to to quell freedom of speech where Canadian truckers didn't want to get vaccinated and in response to that their financial accounts were Frozen um and when they managed to get support from friends and family the accounts of the friends and family were frozen as well uh and this was not not know totalitarian North Korea or or China um this was just in draw in a in a

Democratic Society this was not Vladimir Putin and so when these things happen in places that many probably wouldn't expect them to happen it should be a wakeup call and a and a clear signal for us to to take heed of it the the powers that we give to the people that are uh in power today shouldn't be judged whether the people whose policies we like should have them but rather the day when people whose policy we do not like are in charge are we okay with them having those Powers so we basically have multiple things stacking up with record inflation implosion of banks freedom of speech being silenced by banks with and the government so that's all fine right uh well it's a perfect storm and really

what we are building here permission free finance and self- custodial wallets what it was built for to be able to handle these things 15 years ago we got the Bitcoin white paper we all know it took some time before you start to get more traction and it's a similar backdrop that created that back then that we see now today so I think it's important to remember that freedom is not a default it's not a it's not a singular trajectory that societies go to to achieve freedom of speech and freedom if we want to protect our freedoms we have to do so through actions if Builders don't build then change doesn't happen we visited the moon 50 years ago and then we didn't go back and now forgot how to go there if Builders don't take

charge and build things then it won't happen and crypto I don't think is the default path it's something that we have to make happen and we are making happen now that's why it's so exciting these important changes in front of us so we have a moral imperative to build wallets that allow people to use their assets for their daily lives but also I am a pragmatist and quite often moral arguments don't work so we have to look at the economic arguments self custody as I said is often seen as an obligation rather than a benefit from any but there are other important value props that drive towards the economic reasons right so peer-to-peer payments is a more efficient way to exchange value without intermediaries or custodians it lets

trading parties le pay less fees and keep more money for themselves nois pay earlier today showed us the the fat payment stack of fees involved whenever a transaction is made and if we are driving a change towards more peer-to-peer transactions whether that is between individuals or companies in individuals or between companies that means that fewer fees are lost in that value exchange and they can go back to customers whether they're companies or or people as lower fees or or other benefits a first principle basis a peer-to-peer exchange is more efficient so we have a moral and economic imperative to build permission free wallets um how are we doing on that front the um the original promise of cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and

eventually much more than that was Finance right permission free payments um it started as a financial Revolution but recently um there's a lot more attention given and of course media feeds into this because it's more lucrative to talk about the the crypto casino with jpegs and meme coins uh and there are a lot more good wallets coming out that are being built but most of the wallets that come out today are focused around the trading use case it's a a lot of trade Republic for web 3 or Robin Hood or free trade for web 3 kind of builds right which is a valid use case but we also need more builds for everyday Finance wallets that let you use your assets as you go about your daily

life and all the tech we've been learning about here today are enabling those kind of things we are not at the inflection point where we can start building these things why 15 years after the Bitcoin white paper it's still not possible to send someone a digital Euro to their phone number like you do with peer-to-peer payments in in web to so how are we doing on this journey uh well Bitcoin might be as a white paper at least 15 years old but our industry is still in infancy albeit a couple of years under its belt last year cor CH analysis 3.8 million was lost in hacks um that is not a sign of a over mature industry so we still have a lot of work to

do and so now is the point we I'll start talking a little bit about how we addressing this and how we trying to move towards this with Zeal at uh at Zeal we're building a permission free digital wallet for daily life so metamask is digital and permission free but you can't really buy beers or or pay rent with it uh at revolute we were building a digital wallet for your daily life indeed for your rent and and was smooth and convenient but it wasn't permission free it's very much a permissioned wallet and of course your good old trusty cash wallet is permission free you can spend your cash as you see fit and you can use it for your daily life but it had didn't have the convenience of digital um and that is that is what we are moving towards but the first step to get there

is to tackle problems that are very tangible right here right today and so we think about people that are web 3 Builders or Freelancers what we call crypto earners people are using crypto today as real Finance not as as speculative um asset class not only at least but also think about this is the future of Finance to use one of our cliches in our industry um and so this is the wallet that we have live today in the Chrome Store uh and I'll go through some of the the features here just to show that we have today feature or 10x parity um versus the the basic feature sets of this browser wallet which is what we have live today first off all wallet Works wherever metamask works so we connect to

the normal apis of metamask we have support for allm so anything you can find on chain list you can also use in zeal when you load up zal we show you all tokens and nfts and also def5 positions that exists for your wallet um we compared all the different service providers and we found dbank had a pretty good data feed so right now what you're getting here is a combination of uh dbanks data feed as well as our own data Lake on top of that so we can ensure that you have the best coverage of both tokens nft and and defa positions and also very very Snappy performance to boot then back to those graphs showing lots of hacks and what we can do about that a lot of people today are installing extra

plugins to manage security checks on sites and transactions we have built-in safety checks whenever you connect so when you connect to a site we verify it against the number of different eristics and also recently last week we integrated block AIDS feed which after extensive benchmarking on different security providers we found that they had the snappiest and best coverage so you get both a combination of our first party safety checks and blockade safety checks once you're connected to adap and you want to make a transaction then we make safety checks on the transactions too we check if there's any funny tokens going in and out of your wallet um we check the payload so you don't accidentally send off tokens to someone else um we also check the transaction that that contract that you're

interacting with there's any issues with the contract that you're interacting with and just a simple ux thing when you're about to send your transaction we show you a simulated version of that transaction so we we show you what's going out of your wallets and what's coming into your wallet in a very simple human readable language and when you submit the transaction no longer does that model disappear into the background and you have to load up block Explorer to find where that transaction went and whether it got confirmed or not we show you your transaction path on the chain to getting to first and second confirmation as a status bar which sounds like a small thing but it's surprising how many people are delighted when they can see what actually happens with the transaction without having to chase it Chase

it and then this is really cool thing we have launched the zal companion which basically is an instantiation of your wallet on each Tab and each dap independently okay what does that mean it means that each dap each tab has its own wallet and network State and that means that on one tab you can be on Noy safe with one wallet that you often use for multi transactions and on Unis swap on another tab you can be on another network with whatever you want there that way you can manage all this independently rather than enforcing a single state across all the different tabs which can create some delightful Jank

otherwise this is also the Hub on every dap where you can always see how you're connected the the safety status of of the DAP that you're connected to and then privacy against RPC data storage so we basically Shield all transaction details from rpcs with what with think of is an integrated vpm so transactions are funneled through our backend which we don't store any data on uh which allows you to stay Anonymous and safe when you're interacting with different networks out there and then some other features we have integrated swaps with 1 in and ZX we have integrated routing across all the

different pides with sockets and so basically you can always get the best and fastest rate when you want to swap between different assets and even different assets on different chains and we don't charge any added fees on top of that so you don't have to go to the dab to do it you can just get it straight in the wallet at the best rates whether it's a swap or a bridge all integrated seamlessly and now we get to the part where so far this is all cool this is all great and this allows us to be the smoothest transaction experience you've ever seen in web 3 but I talked about everyday daily Finance right so what does that mean we just the the App Store version we pushed live a couple of days ago now have instant free Bank transfers and so what this means uh

you've heard probably nosis pay a lot recently right this is not no pay by the way but we have now instant C transfers um we do use thec on polygon to Euro or pounds within Europe and the UK and because it's instanta and fast payments we're looking at sub one minute for making these transactions this is um we don't charge any fees below 5,000 per month we we've understood from some of our research that crypto earners typically if you want to be able to pay rent and pay some food that's up to like 5K a month um so you can do that at the interbank rate even we're using the same same tactic that we did with revolute in the beginning which is offering free FX between uh dollars in this case and

euros and pounds and just to show you how incredibly smooth this ux is the first couple of transactions you don't even need to do kyc you can offramp actually we don't call it offramp we call it bank transfer because in order to normalize these as part of your daily Finance there shouldn't be ramp you shouldn't move money on and off something you should just be making transfers between your different accounts some of them onchain and some of them offchain and so yeah this Um this can be can be tried out today if any of you are up for giving it a world um what's coming up next where we currently have we're in private beta we have a couple of hundred uses we and we

doing sessions almost every day we we're doing customer interviews to hear what people like and what they don't like and we're soon going to move into public paa and then start working or get closer to shipping our mobile app and smart wallets hello NIS dear hosts H and all of this one of the many things it can enable is for you to tap into tokenized assets uh the title of this talk was buying coffee with with treasuries that's just one of the many things that's possible with the composable uh assets within defi right uh why should you be forced to just just use or Euros or Pounds to to pay for your rent or your coffee just spend your tokenized Treasures that are essentially fungible um on on chain um as this is an audience of

Builders uh and we love to get feedback uh if anyone wants to grab time with us and share your your thoughts both on the product as well as how you interact with we'd love to grab time we set up a vanity URL that here that leads to type form which basically provides Early Access but we'd also love to to meet with you uh to have a conversation about what you like and what you don't like and build the best possible web three experience not just for web 3 and dabs but for your daily lives so that you can work with web3 always and yeah that's it thank you okay do you have any

questions I will it be uh do you see your product existing Standalone or uh are you looking for people to integrate it into other services well we're not a white label solution if that's what you mean so it is its own brand its own product at the moment yeah um yeah but love to talk with distribution Partners if if that's what you're okay and the the mob mobile version you think it'll be the same Full Features as the what you described today we have um mobile as a form factor enables a couple of other really cool

things that you can't do on desktop um so it won't be it won't be the same there will be even more cool things that we do that but I'll leave the details a bit unsa for now because that's part of the magic sauce as well nice but as you can see the DAP itself sorry the app itself almost looks like a mobile app already um so it in terms of UI and ux will probably look we not look at the similar hi and thanks for the talk um I would like to ask if uh you see at any point in the near future um from a user perspective when you receive for example

whatever token you might receive at whatever chain or Layer Two uh all these things being transparent to the user and uh you only see that you received usdc or whatever in and don't have to care about which layer or which sayain and you can do transactions with without caring about these stuff do you see that coming so creating chain agnostic assets where you kind of aggregate all up all your balances across multiple chains when there's uh if there's say like a canonical use to see on all the different chains um there's been some experiments with some wallets to do that um and I think there are some benefits to that long term I think people will think of their dollars as just digital

dollars and they will not realize that they are on this or that chain um and yeah then that chain aspect will disappear in the background but that probably also means that you'll see a concentration of more and more assets into a few chains possibly depending on daps that are available um that's my prognosis so five years from now when a much larger proportion of society uses digital dollars to pay for for their food and the rent um will they have that spread out across 10 different chains probably not you probably going to have a power law an extreme power law where it's concentrating in a couple okay well then thank you for the talk thank you honest thank you