#DappCon22: Day 1 - Abstract Wallets As An API Using Pile, Balazs Deme

Transcript

awesome next up we have Balaji Demi from oh thanks from pile Capital uh to talk about abstract wallets as an API so please welcome uh balaj thank you all right hi everyone thank you for joining um yeah like uh they said my name is blush and I'm here to talk about abstract wallets as an API um you know and I want to kind of ask with this question of how can we

fully eliminate the connect wallet experience and really put the wallets in the background um and for the users to really make web3 and using decentralized applications similar to how you know you would use any kind of financial app any kind of different game and to really make this user experience like much better than it is today um abstract wallets are not a new idea you know we just have a different way at pile to kind of serve more the developers also the fintechs with kind of our set of apis and our approach of how to bring this to the market um yeah and I guess to talk a bit about

myself you know this is not my first time at depcon I was here three years ago because I've been building out of Berlin in the blockchain scenes for the past five years of sorts um I'm the co-founder and the CTO at Pyle which means I do all the coding smart contracts back and front end and really kind of my journey started with being an interoperability working on decentralized exchanges working on like cross bridging of different kind of ecosystems and to really connect to different kind of blockchains together uh but now kind of with pile I wanted to bring crypto closer to fintechs while still focusing on on depth developers

and the whole ecosystem because I always felt you know we are kind of rebuilding this whole kind of financial system you know we are building a better internet of sorts so I think there's a lot of missing infrastructure between these two worlds uh that is still not done you know I think we made a lot of progress in the last six seven years in making sure things are more scalable it's more privacy focused you know the users are more in control um but if you kind of look back and think about it there's still a bunch of different elements that are missing from from Mass adoption and really that's what I kind of want to cover in my talk because I think a lot of people have mentioned already today I was listening

to the conversations of uh when does the mass adoption happen you know what is needed and I think we we both have different ideas on these things so that's kind of what we want to solve with Pyle is to build the crypto infrastructure as a set of apis for fintechs neobanks but also obviously Developers um why for fintax you know I think this is um yeah like I said one of the ideas we have around Mass adoption is that a bunch of a bunch of fintechs of today are becoming these kind of financial aggregators no matter where you look what are you looking at Latin America Europe um everyone now has buy hold and sell for crypto uh people are starting to integrate uh different nfts you know I I

don't think it will be long that within your financial app you will have um different kind of crypto games integrated as well ZK snarks who knows um and we really feel that you know as gen Z is kind of growing up also um with crypto they're gonna sooner or later be with some fintech and they're gonna start using the app and they're gonna you know put pressure on these different aggregators or financial service providers to have some sort of crypto integration um but obviously regulation is a huge issue especially being in Europe and especially when you talk about D5 fintechs and end users so one of the one of the biggest issues we saw with

fintechs is when they have end customers who want to access D5 whether that's swapping on uni swap you know access hypnosis chain um buying in an ft or even deploying Capital into different protocols the issue always becomes um regulation who's doing the transaction who's doing the signing um because if a fintech is is having like a sort of custody account let's say and they are signing transactions to put money into any kind of protocol that's a uni swap as well they are becoming asset managers uh which is obviously not something you want as a fintech because that's not your main business um and and it's also why you know especially in Europe there's going to be

a bunch of questions asked by regulators and I think you see this Saga with tornado cash already playing out you know um the government wants to know where your users who are they using you know where is the money coming from uh and and this will I think get even even worse no matter where you are in the world um so I think we see both problems both from the decentralized application side and also on the fintech side that sooner or later um you know we're gonna be underway heavier scrutiny on the regulatory side um and it's also what we found out by research you know Web 2.0 and dapps you know have this sort of same problem uh you know fintechs require api-based self-custody and dap

developers just want you know an easier solution when it comes to signing transactions handling events you know they want something that's more closer to the Web 2.0 developer experience um and that's really kind of our idea of what an abstract wallet as an API can look like you know why can we not go from these modules these different kind of spinners to more traditional developer experience where you don't have to worry about you know which sign are you using which chain your customer is on if they are on a different chain than what they selected on the web interface you know these are huge huge issues especially when you're building front ends to kind

of manage the whole mess of different wallets that exist um because this shouldn't be the case you know to connect your wallet button shouldn't really exist in a sense and and that's really kind of our solution and and the way we kind of think of this is having a single set of rest based apis wallet creation portability self-custody and Abstract away all the complexity from you as a developer when it comes to interacting with smart contracts handling events and so on and this is not only for the fintechs of course this is also for for dab developers as well because we really feel you know there's still a lot of friction and work to be

done on this sense and that's really what we do um so obviously if you go to our website today you won't find this because I think it's the first time we're publicly speaking and kind of approaching you know this community with the set of apis we're doing um because that's what we saw as well is the creation of new wallets the management you know scaling them is once again a huge problem that you as a developer shouldn't have to deal with you know you should not worry about if your customer is using metamask if they're using Argent if they're using noses chain and so on and so on you should just focus on your ux experience and leave the rest to you know simple

apis that we would provide um and that's really what we're doing as an API first is equation so if you have a new user come on board to your different kind of um web interface if they don't have a wallet yet you can create one with our apis we do it everything securely and encrypted so I I cannot reveal a lot now about you know the MPC we have but it will be the case that in the next one two months as we enter into a new kind of beta and we onboard developers this will all be public and open source and you can play

around and put it into your web application but like I said the first step is always creation uh encryption of the different kind of wallets uh to our API and then whenever you have you know the customer login once again we have a signer integrated why is it important to have a signer um I guess the most important part is not to have field transactions not to have the case of a user signed for a transaction and then you have to you know track it if it failed then show a different message um we take care of all that with you know simple responses to to make sure that when you send a transaction to our API you know we can give you uh feedback right away so we have an integrated

signer you don't have to worry about all that infrastructure that's needed to sign and broadcast transaction and that's really you know the last step is being done and not having again the models and the Spinners and so on so um you know we really make it easy for you to get events back after you send the transaction so every transaction you send has an identifier and then you can query what what were the events you're looking for um you know what are the outcomes you want to show to the user um so we really focus on on this whole um like I've said abstraction and really you know smoothening out the experience of the users and for you as a developer um and that's really kind of the

direction we're headed as well with Pyle so I think I saw firsthand both from the developer side of myself integrating the different wallets and the different providers sometimes the different on and off from providers you know if you want to have a better like a better dap and you want to integrate some kind of on and off ramp to allow your users to um you know put the put actual you know hard fiat currency into crypto then you need another widget integration um so I think there's still a lot of inefficiencies when you consider a what the whole like developer and user experience can be because until we don't solve the

friction between crypto and traditional assets and let's say the fintech is the next step we're still creating a lot of inefficiencies and what do I mean by these different inefficiencies um if you're charging an End customer whether they are crypto native whether they're normal three percent uh fees on buying a certain cryptocurrency um it's quite a high tax on users right especially if you focus on yield and I think us as working a lot with fintech providers who are having I don't know consumer apps consumer wallets a lot of the times these fees kind of um you know hold back a lot of the adoption

because if you have really high entrance fees and exit fees from from crypto then you have obviously a lot of costs involved and I think we we had a talk earlier today where um it was about credit cards and all the different processors that are within here and as and I think we see the same thing with on and off ramping from crypto that there is payment processors there's fraud detection there is exchanges so you know the people in line who want to take a cut from the end users coming in um is is quite a lot so I think until we solve this until we really make it frictionless effortless cost free to

come on board into crypto um you know we we have a lot of work so that's sort of um what we're doing at pile as well because we started with the wallets actually the wallets are the second product we started with um providing fintechs with D5 access so we're connected to 18 different protocols we provide trade lending borrowing and swaps um so that's all done and in the sandbox but now we're focusing on wallets which we are announcing today but then afterwards I think the most interesting part is on and off frames at scale so on and off ramps at scale means that from your Dap You can have an integration some lightweight kyc because we must do

that but then afterwards we don't want to charge your fee we don't want to charge your end user as a fee so we're like slowly rebuilding a bunch of this fintech slash traditional Finance inefficiencies for dapps because we really feel like you know this is one big topic that's holding back adoption um but I guess we'll find out I think this is uh one bet we're making um and yeah we are based in Berlin and building out of Berlin and you should come build with us um you know as I said we haven't announced this product yet uh publicly on our website but what we're gonna do for the next one month two months is really focused a lot

on having a developer community letting you try out our apis letting you try out our wallets um what does this mean it means you know we want to get your feedback on on how to best build it because we might have one approach to build abstract wallets but there might be you know better approaches and we really want to focus on uh developer experience as well as a developer I can say there is some horrible stuff out there not in the crypto World in traditional fintech or banking as a service um so yeah um I think that's briefly about pile what we're doing guys I know it's quite quite a curveball that we are more fintech but building also for adapt developers

um so yeah reach back out I'm happy to to chat and yeah come build with us thanks a lot [Applause] and it's questions I'm I feel I think if if anyone has some questions all right awesome thanks a lot thanks