Evgeny Yurtaev: Zerion - Web3 Wallet UX 2.0. Ep. 517

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm freder ANS and today I'm speaking with f guini who is the co-founder and CEO of zarion which is a well-known web three wallet F welcome thanks P it's a really a pleasure to be here uh it's a the podcast that I've been known I've known for a while so I'm I'm super happy to be here uh and yeah thanks for both say cool so you know about us but what about you tell us about yourself what's your background sure uh so as mentioned already I'm I'm G um I've been in the

crypto space since roughly forever um I would say like since the yeah like my first interaction was like very like early on in 2015 or even earlier than that but I really really got into crypto after the the white paper for ethereum to be quite honest I still remember the day when I was I was on a subway uh just like scrolling through the internet and I was I came across the white paper and I just read it through it uh it blew my mind so uh that's how I got into like the whole Space basically since then I've been I've been committed to working in web 3 even though it wasn't called Web free back in the day um and um yeah before that I I was still studying at at

that long um I was studying computer science that's my background I'm an engineer by education and like my first Adventures but honestly in like in my spirit I'm I'm an entrepreneur so I've been working on my own projects uh basically since high school uh and I started uh like various mobile apps chat Bots uh and some of them like with variable level of success I think the the most interesting one was actually already in the crypto space that's before zeran was an app called cryptotrader it had over a million downloads with like pretty like zero marketing efforts or anything it was just for tracking whatever price was and I built it for myself and uh it just

scaled to to many people liked it uh and before that U I worked this is how I actually found my co-founder I was uh uh building mobile applications uh with like a venture studio in Moscow so that's H that's the background cool when you on the subway reading the ethereum white paper what was it exactly that appeared kind of the techn the technology itself or kind of the the idea of what it could Empower in the long run um yeah so this is I think a fairly typical story for anyone living in um a third a third world world country um so uh when the financial system basically

like after the Soviet Union collapse obviously Russia took a capitalist approach but um the financial system was not nearly as stable as it was in Europe for example in the US uh and uh first I was intrigued by the the idea of programmable money uh this is like first when I read about Bitcoin but as a as an engineer myself I was not convinced fully I would say uh that this is going to be um you know I kind of liked it uh I started reading about the nature of currency the nature of money how it all works why is uh the currency in my country collapsing uh and in others it doesn't why the stock market behaves why

but like the way it behaves um so this got my interest but really really got excited when I understood that you could leverage the technology of blockchain to exp extend that to essentially programmable trust so it's not just about money anymore uh and if we can't have this uh shared trust layer which is the ethereum computer uh this is where I I got I was sold basically uh and uh yeah um I think there were a lot of other uh really forward looking ideas in in the white paper uh many of which were I guess took years and years to realize but uh I think the main proposition uh was yeah changing like changing the

rules basically and where this whole uh thing is headed yeah absolutely so after the success of crypto Trader you guys started Zion together what was the motivation behind I mean basically even back then there were um a multitude of wallets right so kind of what was the motivation behind starting yet another wallet yeah um so I think it it's fair to kind of took a a little bit of a doute here and uh talk about Zer Evolution so zirin was zerin is AED on only for the last year and a half roughly uh and all the all the time before that zerion was uh kind of three different companies uh so we really

started with um even like you can call it the smart contract development studio uh so we were helping out the companies and with ideas who knew what they want to build on top of theum just realized their uh things um and later I think like the first really the story where of Zer itself starts with uh portfolio tracking when we decid Ed that we actually didn't want to build a wallet there were so many already like there were quite a few wallets uh the space was uh pretty much starting to to be filled with a magnitude of tokens and uh people really needed tools uh for them to to keep track of stuff that is happening what they have even in their wallet uh and uh this is by the way still a big issue for the for the

existing big wallets uh don't have to call call them out here um and uh we started with that mission to track basically everything that happens on chain such that the users don't have to worry about it and they have control because control means safety and uh this is how we got our first user base so people were coming to Zer in just to see what they really have in their portfolio what kind of transactions they were making uh and um that's been uh fairly successful and this is how we got started but um what we realized over time um is that defi is becoming like a big thing and it's now much easier uh than ever because of this uh access to the centralise trust in a way we could just integrate Unis swap

without even like going and talking to Unis swap uh and people could start leveraging that within our interface and we uh soon noticed that uh basically the users who are transacting using zerion they are our you can you can call like super fat so they just love the experience they love the UI they like love the combination of the portfolio tracking with the transaction part part uh and uh we kind of we dives into this path and we've started uh doing more and more Integrations we were the first ever integration of Unis swap I think the first integration of maker Dow the first integration of compound V2 and like a few other protocols so really really early in the dii journey um and eventually this this whole uh I guess

pathway led us to realizing that this is time when we are ready to start our own wallet uh because the existing wets were still lagging behind in terms of the I I guess the data capabilities so the and the ux in general so ux I think in in crypto in a big way is build on top of good data and like Fast um yeah like Fast understanding what what's in your wallet to make good decisions to sign transactions in a safer way to exactly know like how uh connecting to daps and etc etc so all of that requires good information and we had that for for a while now uh and uh we decided that the wallet should have should have it all uh and um yeah that's that was the whole uh

motivation behind behind moving into the wallet space eventually I think it I kind of see it as like the the end game for zerion we we were thinking of uh doing a wallet for a very very long time we always like postp on that and like it's much harder to compete it's harder to monetize etc etc uh but yeah I feel like we already now and yeah lastly I think what's important to mention here uh a very long time ago go I think it was like 2017 we even had um an attempt at w we didn't put too much um effort into it but it was called tokary it was one of the um it was built by one of our Engineers basically like a uh kind of like a sister company were spinoff from

Zin uh and uh it was called toar so that was like very very simple world it's it was built using the kind of telegram principle of removing all the clud and just keeping uh focus on uh one single wallet just the tokens and signing transactions that that's it uh it was it was a cool thing we still had we still have users on that uh but we're not really doing anything anymore with this and obviously now Zer is is the main thing okay maybe let's talk about um kind of how Zaron handles for the user and then we can kind of talk about kind of the spectrum of wallets and kind of what they do for ux and kind of what you

guys plan to do for you because obviously it's I mean it's super apparent that user experience for wallets has to greatly improve for this to kind of see any mainstream adoption so kind of talk us through um if I go to zion. now um and want to create a wallet how do you guys do that for me where are the keys um how do I safekeep them yeah um so I think the best experience would be on mobile still so we are in the process of releasing so for our web users we are in the process of releasing the extension so this is uh happening already we're going to go public live um in about a month from now uh so we're pretty much gearing for that and excited

for for this launch we still we already have uh over 10,000 beta users of the extension uh but yeah that that would be the Milestone um majority of our users on of the wallet are on mobile uh and um the way it works is a very class non-custodial wet uh so you come you create a seat race we guide you through how you should recover that we were obviously thinking about other ways of custody uh but I think for us the main reason why we wanted to keep it very simple uh is that first we do rely a lot on composability so daps have to work uh for for the wall to be useful uh and second we wanted to it's you can go like

a vampire attack with metamask uh we want users to migrate R over and we still have a pretty big Chu of users just moving their seat phrase from metamask to zerin uh and yeah the the SE phrase just stays on on the device uh and uh we obviously don't have access to it you can back it up in iCloud if you want uh and yeah that's about it in terms of just creating a wet it's very simple just a few tabs yeah and um in terms of the experience I guess uh what you get is the dab browser that works so you can connect to any dab and you can side transaction uh transactions you can um connect to pretty much any network out there so we support um fully support in terms of data capabilities we support

about 10 chains and the rest you can just add any custom RPC and start signing transactions we do check every transaction before it's sent uh by simulating it and giving you what what is going to happen to as a result of this transaction I know that the safe does that too uh and like good better wallets are are doing that now so that's good uh and we obviously check the domain names for fishing uh and basically doing all kind of Security checks in the moment of transactions and we plan to add more and more stuff on um the security of the of basically interacting with the blockchains okay um we'll dive into that in just a bit let's kind of just remain

on the seat phrase for now so I assume the seed phrase is in some sort of secure onclave um in in your phone right when you say you you um you can back it up to iCloud can you also just uh write it down kind of pen and paper or do you never get to see it you you obviously can yes uh so that would be the the default way for for most people to know how to handle the the seed phrases uh but U making it up to iCloud is still like it's kind of an easy way for you to for someone who is not uh to experience with crypto but still want to uh give it a go uh to not lose the key um if for example their device is uh stolen or lost uh in that case uh they might have

forgotten to uh back it up using like a paper uh and a pen and in that case they could just uh using their Apple ID or Google account uh they and plus like their Biometrics they can restore access to the seed phrase so basically the seed phrase is not stored in the open way in ioud or Google Drive it's uh encrypted with your Biometrics and and stored so basically if you lose both your I guess uh pin uh to the phone and your phone that's when you actually lose the the key um yeah but in in other cases it saves from kind of like the most common uh way of losing a SE phrase is when you forgot to back back it up um so yeah that's uh that's where we are it doesn't

obviously protect from the leakage of the seat phrase so if you've written down so SE phrases that's the biggest concern so if you write it down somewhere and someone fils it out fils out you see money's gone um and obviously there are ways to prevent from that but but that requires using completely different stack of custody uh and uh yeah I think uh next year would probably be when that gets more in more adoption who who are your users so basically if you kind of look at Financial applications there are typically kind of users who are kind of happy to use their phones for stuff but at some point kind of at some um level of Wellness this stops right you're not

going to make you know a$1 million transaction from your phone people just have an aversion to that so kind of who who Who's your user base actually uh that's a good question so yeah I have two things on this so speaking of the the user base um it's uh it starts with obviously we're not focused on a whale type of user so if you really want to store a lot of money aeran is not right now at least is not the place where you should be doing that so zerin is primarily for your I would call it like a public onchain identity um so if you want to Mint nfts if you want to um quickly sign into something on on the conference uh if you are trying to uh I

don't know like uh buy some random token or mint a sound uh on sound XYZ or mint a post on mirror so these types of actions um whether that's collecting or like buying some random tokens in small amounts just to play around testing new stuff uh new daps new protocols games whatever that is uh that's where we we shine really and uh zerin was meant for users who are doing a lot of transactions so that's kind of opposed to what Ledger is meant to be or maybe safe uh uh like I mean those is safe where you keep a lot of funds and you try not to touch them but when you do you do it like very

carefully so that would be the use case for a ledger and that's why like obviously Ledger is not convenient you you need to carry it around like PL and obviously like you won't won't do that in like a minute uh in Zer you can just like pull it up scan a your code or and Min stuff or uh like test out a new d uh on on the go so that's the main use case um and the second thing I wanted to add is um I think in the future it would still work really nicely with these types of use cases and for that is just a little of a bit more time is required so obviously the safe integration on the zeran end could could be one of the solutions where you could like initiate transactions from

the phone and there there's not going to be any security concerns because you would have a second key where or like you have a a friend who would need to confirm transaction uh and uh even with the Ledger we have uh some users who are using zeran mobile experience with The Ledger and soon they'll be able to do that with extension so it's kind of like an interface so you don't have to worry about the key uh being leaked in any way or uh yeah you can keep as much funs as you want obviously on on these types of bullets uh so we kind of separate the bullet experience from custody and currently our custody works for these like smaller type of like amounts of money but a much broader set of use cases have you looked at kind of second

signers and so on that kind of connect with NFC because kind of we know being mobile first that sort of you know a lwh hanging fruit no uh we did um and by that you mean like uh kind of like a UB key like NFC something to like a tangum card or something yes they issue with all of that um so it all sounds great and I would really love to have something like that um and I've seen I've tested the numerous like cards that you need to tap to like confirm transactions uh I even like I have a an NFC ring like here that that I'm using for payment so I'm I'm a big nerd for these types of things but I think when it

comes to a more mass adoption this is a logistics it's expensive uh so basically the if we have this much user base like only whatever 10% tops would be willing to pay for reveal their address like they're like levels and levels of um considerations that we need to take care care of before using that specific solution and it never really took off so I'm I think our our way is honestly software rather than Hardware when it comes to adoption so making things cheaper and making them making them more um available through existing uh technology and that's why for example account obstruction to me is is more um

I guess a reliable way to progress with the ux um and also like the the new signature so if we can use re reuse the signature from um existing Hardware devices which uh could basic like that they're not currently compatible with ethereum signatures but if you can make using counter abstraction then compatible then we can leverage existing Hardware in in the phone and we don't have to even have a ledger so I think that's the the best pathway forward and uh yeah for for like all the mass adoption cool so I understand that kind of the users that use serion currently are kind of like people who go to events who kind of want to try out um different

apps uh kind of have spending money just kind of like on on a um uh low barrier to entry mobile app what are your intended users because kind of that's that's um as as a market that's a very constrained set of people right yeah um I think it's constrained right now but I'm um I'm a big proponent of uh the growth of the web threee user base uh and we kind of we we Define our users as web TR citizens and we've been pretty vocal about that uh and uh we I I I still feel pretty strongly that we don't really have to change that um I know that a lot of people are talking about unboarding you know the newb uh billions

of users to to web 3 but to me I think it should grow from within it should grow from uh the the web3 citizens themselves uh and we really want to support the use cases that are uh actually working and useful in web 3 and that's why we we want to kind of we're focusing on what people are doing now uh in web 3 because uh um that kind of gives us early hints of what could be useful for the rest of the market when when the time comes so um yeah I don't think I don't really believe in US kind of deciding uh like someone finding out randomly that this is what people would want and I think the ux of the wallet is is um

no matter how bad it is we need to find the use cases within the web three space that would attract people and once we have that and I I hope we won't miss that so uh as these narratives U are created within the web 3 ecosystem and Zan supports them then all the new users who are going to come to web3 and become web3 citizens they would be uh the ones uh like they would try to look up to all the we pre citizens who were there and they were uh coming they would be coming for the use cases that we developed so that that's my point of view so I'm not like again a big believer in copying something and just putting on on web 3 uh and and making it like look like it's web to because because why like it's the same but just more expensive and uh

users would probably come for maybe some incentives but uh that that's it they would just leave next day okay um then maybe looking at the wallet as it is now not kind of at the user experience as you want it to develop in the future future what are the challenges of building a wallet so kind of I assume there's kind of like you need to run archival nodes and have like databases and so on for several chains but walk us through the the the details well there's uh quite a few and and that really depends on what kind of w we're talking about um so um first of all um none of the I guess like very very few wets run archive notes just on even notes we even though we do a lot of

focus on the data we don't run our own noes because this is like someone else's business they do that better for us I think that speaking from like the product perspective I think the biggest challenge is um really understanding what's key to have on the wallet level versus what's what should live on the DAP level uh and uh that's an that's the balance and I think every every wallet is really going through that so some some wallets were like okay we have to do things very very certain way like like this this is the only way you can do stuff this these are the only daps you can access uh and being very restrictive there are wallets that are completely uh kind of removed from uh from your experience and they just say

okay that's the key uh everything else is like up to you I think mamas is probably on on on that kind of on that Spectrum uh so they don't really make any decisions for the user they don't try to that like help the user do the the right decisions at all I think we sit somewhere in the middle uh so we're being more pragmatic I would say about it so we know that spam for example is a big problem so we do work on our end to remove spam because this leads to fishing it leads to people losing funds same goes to um anything when it comes to like Sting off the transaction we want by default to have protection uh for for our users uh so stuff like that is is where we to we take a stance um but we don't want to limit the user and

that's another reason I I've mentioned that already we wanted to go with SE phrases because we want users to be able to access a wider range of things um so whatever dep they want to access we want to have that yeah and I think that that's on the product level from from I guess the the business angle obviously is monetization uh we we will talk about that I guess later but um yeah monetization is obviously has been a pain for most of the vots with an exception I think of one um or maybe two okay two uh Ledger we can count Ledger mamas as like the ones who were not struggling really with monetization and lastly I think on the inro side I don't think it's a it's a

really hard thing um like a challenge it's more of hard work that we need to put into into that um but I hope that pays off so um if you think about kind of the decisions you make for the user so kind of um what deps um to display in your wallet for instance what's the approval process and kind of if I'm a seron user can I make sure that these are kind of audited or trusted or that there's at least so and so much tvl that kind of hasn't been so I mean what what are what are my assurances uh that's a good question we actually on the on the D side we don't do any kind of restrictions uh so you

can access it's more like a Google like interface and this is where we're different from I guess majority of buet where which run like a mini Marketplace of the the approved uh DBS we decided against that for for the sake of openness uh and uh basically we don't really want to recommend any particular DB so usually users would come with an intention in mind uh of what exactly they should do and uh we provide that with that what we do though to help users kind of make slightly like basically not to go to a different unit swap maybe M type we have a small blue check mark uh so if they start typing

uni a few options would show show up and uni swap would have the blue check mark but that's just a list that we maintain of domain name associations and that's a pretty exhaustive list of nons spamy non fishing DS um yeah we don't have a process for this one so it's currently just managed internally we used to have um so for the tokens we do the same but the process they a little different so we are relying on token lists so token list is like a decentralized effort for curating legit tokens so we rely on that uh with daps there's no such thing um as far as I understand right now um we would want to we would want to have that if if that's available um and honestly

we we don't want to make these decisions for the user um that's that's something that we think uh users should be on their own uh when making stuff like that how how do you think about kind of the attack attack factors that kind of come with being a front end to kind of other people's smart contracts right so basically if your front end were to be hacked um kind of uh your users could be kind of uh siphoned off by malicious sites and so on so H what what kind of security do you have in place for that yeah this is I think a very um this is somewhat of a more solved problem uh in a way so that's not novel it's something

that every um every startup is running into that runs any kind of front end uh so I think it's first all it's a little uh yeah it's a smaller problem and then that just takes um good uh hygiene in terms of cyber security um yeah we we just do testing of our own infrastructure we've employed white hackers to poke around and like try to find stuff the attack Vector is still fairly limited um because it's basically we only need to safeguard um the deployment of these new like the new versions of the front end uh and the biggest risk obviously is where the keys are stored so deployment of extension

deployment of mobile apps uh and that uh a big portion of that security is on the Apple and Google side so they help you not to make like basically if there's a deployment happening we would all see that uh and it's a it's a fairly removed risk uh I think for us where we did pay out bounties for example were um you can call them like informational attacks uh so I still remember like one big case where we had to pay it was like $40,000 or something were a lost and that was because uh someone uh created a fake balancer pool um that looked like a regular Baner pool and had and they

faked that pool to look like it has a lot of tvl so it showed up in in xerion and people were like okay this this is like a legit they thought it's a legit pool because it has a certain amount of TBL uh and uh we didn't check the the factory contract that was created creating that since then we've started doing that but that was a bug that we didn't um anticipate so it it was put up uh on the front page with like high tvl someone uh put some money in it lost it so uh we we assume that this is our mistake even though obviously like it's you have to verify everything but uh we yeah we didn't mean to show this pool anyway so um yeah that's uh these are some learnings uh we didn't go through like a massive uh breach up security um

and for us I think like not sending a seat phrase somewhere where where it shouldn't be that would be the only thing we should worry about uh really and for that we just always do the the audits I think it's been yeah like six or seven uh already and we keep doing them that's going to be a big expense another attack vectors kind of having uh transactions you can't read right so basically human readable transaction code rather than kind of like the ABI that you kind of get how how do you feel about that because it's a it's a difficult problem to solve kind of generally but if you don't know what you're signing as a user it's really

difficult right yeah so for that I think what really works I would say well is the the simulations uh so that's been getting implemented across the board so I think it started with a few extra extensions that or that you need to run in parallel with like whatever metam mask um but now it's integrated in zerion obviously in the coinbase wallet and safe so I think that saves you and kind of allows you to do a quick check uh of what is actually happening it's still not perfect because sometimes the daps would be asking you some signature that is uh you have you don't have any idea what what can happen you have to have a more yeah I guess like a secure

setup so you understand where this signature can be applied but I think this is going to be solved over time as well so uh we do for uh specific signatures when within you are issuing a permit for some contract to spend your your usdc or some something else we would also recognize that and show you uh in in the human rable way that some dap is trying to you know spend this much money is it something that you really want to be doing or or not um and yeah simulation I think really really helps so if you were your intention was to Mint to nft if this is what you see as a result of simulation then most likely that's that's correct uh I think in future this is even uh kind of better

than in um in the web two world so in web2 world you just plug in your credit card and you you leverage the trust network of all the posos connected to visa and they do like all this fraud prevention if they see something ify but you you have to rely on someone else doing the job of verifying that you're actually doing uh something legit and not every every transaction supports like 3D security with cards so uh in in crypto you can have B basically deterministic outcome of the transaction in in most cases so you could see exactly what's happening I think the security when it's when it comes to signing will just keep getting better and user one even need to know what like

ABI is uh and I I really hope that they don't uh at absolutely so I think if we can't make that happen this is going to remain very Niche um so what networks are most of your users on uh good question it's been changing um honestly and um we've been very positively surprised how the adoption of layer twos is uh growing uh so we had like during this year it went from uh roughly like 70% ethereum domination to now ethereum being uh I don't I don't want to be like I I can of give specific numbers I didn't rehearse them but uh we have uh it's it's one of the chain so

you can you can see it's it's full list of transactions that are made being done on all different chains and they roughly similar I think the biggest one is still polygon but it's kind of shrinking in comparison to um ZK for example transactions or base transactions um optimism arbitrum were historically growing pretty much every months uh and ethereum is kind of like at capacity so it's it just sits there and everything else is growing so it's very exciting to see uh and we do believe really like we kind of refocused our attention from defi protocols more towards supporting more and more chains because we think that in terms of The Primitives we're

pretty much there because like I think originally people were thinking that def5 would create you know thousands and we were one of the you know Believers and that that like that we're going to see at least hundreds of different uh I mean meaningfully different protocols um in defi or just outside of defi but it turned out I think that we have a pretty stable set of uh Primitives that people use uh and everything else is more like uh yeah Forks or just slight adjust ments uh of what we have uh and we've decided that okay we we have to support this set of Primitives but really where we should uh spending our spend our time is uh you know number of tokens and and

chains that are being created uh because this is because we had kind of solidified the the architecture I would say uh of this world computer so we have all the all the bits and pieces in place roughly uh these computers can now talk to each other so now we just need to support this network of computers um as as the wallet how do users go between different chains or between ethereum and an L2 um do you guys kind of have endorsed bridges that you kind of offer as a standard interface or how would I go about it yeah we actually support socket. te so we've integrated them and they are an aggregator of bridges um the way it works is just they find the best

rates across different um Bridges for any kind of Swap and um the users just go and like select the bridge that they want to use so they could optimize for faster transaction for faster settlement or just cheaper basically like matching how much they'll get on the other side of the bridge I would say this experience is optimal yeah we've been even calculating the number of steps it takes uh to bridge to like a new chain so uh switching to new chain is very simple it's like a few Taps but uh if you want to move money you need to go and do probably 15 different steps as far as I remember uh and it also requires a lot of waiting time and it's

not transparent even in zerion uh we do as much as we can in terms of tracking asset but the bridging experience is not optimal because you kind of have this moment where money is gone uh you have it in Banks all the time but uh in crypto is unusual when you don't understand what is happening with the money because it kind of it went away and you just like wait there and hope that it's going to come on the other side um so we we really want to optimize that in the future and the way to do that would be um basically and that's a general principle of moving away from multi-chain to one chain ux as we started describing it in s zerion so uh when users already need

to understand the differences between chains unless they want to uh and you can seemless they move and transact uh on any dap on any chain Without Really uh like going through bridging first and then doing a transaction so kind of bundling these two things together and signing them all at once uh so I think that's the the future and we I don't know when but we definitely going to get there what what are the steps kind of necessary to get there kind of the seamless bridging that kind of just goes on behind the scenes without the user even realizing that's a good question question I think it's first it's obviously some ux work that we have to do um and we need to have more

Universal I guess adoption of um signing either signing multiple actions on with one tap uh so that's sell wallets already started doing that before the convention was that you have to sign everything like every transaction one by one uh but uh with approvals that kills the experience because you have to sign multiple things uh um permits are not universally accepted so that's that's an issue uh and ideally yeah we can bundle a few transactions together um and the bridges are fast uh and they could execute on the other side yeah I think these are the necessary steps um I don't know what would be uh the guarantees

between moving bit for Bridges to to work between different kinds of and different uh versions of throwups so whether it's going to be the same uh security guarantees to move from like an optimistic one to the ZK one um I'm not too sure about that but um uh yeah I think that would be what we want ultimately as the goal so basically um you also cover some chains that are not ethereum l2s right this was you can call it an experiment uh with uh we've added support for tracking uh salana addresses um but that we all know the

FTX story um but really it was U I think we we are not like our users don't really uh they're not a lot of users in short uh and to be quite honest I'm we have one of the Zer vales is is done BM Maxi um and that's just like a you know whole company value and we wanted to explore other things we wanted to to see so Solano was obviously getting a lot of traction so we wanted to support it uh and we did um since the the FTX and just overall we didn't see a lot of traction in it and we haven't really put any more resources um personally I'm a big evm supporter and believer U because I feel that we're kind of past uh the threshold

where it's easy to compete with evbm just simply because we have so much code written down and so much investment done in security um I think we will never maybe like someday a new Apple will be born that is going to use a bit of a different architecture uh but I don't think that's um anytime soon uh it's going to take years uh I would say um so evm is the way to go and we've been basically the whole infrastructure that we've built uh for tracking assets tracking positions um is built on evm like specifically for evm we touched upon it earlier just a little bit how do you think about

account abstraction in NPC right this is a this is a long debate uh we've been researching both for a long time I think it started obviously more with MPC and the counstruction became a more recent theme I think NBC is a little um so there there are many things I can say I guess on this uh and the short answer it depends uh what we're trying to build towards when it comes to um experiences that remove the basically the wallet from the picture completely so like applications that going integrate the world inside I think for them MPC is the only way right now uh to manage that I think in the future though

NBC has much less flexibility than the account obstruction for anything related to user experience like recoveries of phrases making actions on behalf of the user um so with MPC I think there are a few attempts how you can implement the same programmability really of MPC uh but this is uh a little too complicated uh and it's hard to see like how that's going to necessarily get all the traction so it feels like um to me uh when it comes down now now we can talk about account obstruction so with account obstruction I think in current form there's still problems so we started a long time ago with this idea of let's replace all the existing

accounts uh and with with smart contracts on the protocol level and I think it was like uh EIP 2 2000 something I don't remember exactly but that EAP was no other priority for the community and for the protocol developers so it kind of was buried and now every everyone is talking about thec 4337 which is U making a construction kind of on on the application Level uh and without necessarily hard for so I don't think this is a way to go for ethereum at least uh because uh primarily because of the costs associated with that um and I think the the future of account

obstruction is really on l2s where l2s make this hard choice and basically implemented on on the level of the protocol when we actually remove the need for uh users to upgrade and move their assets from you know private keys to account obstruction obstructed wallets so I think that's the way to go um and uh I know that there are some teams that are working on uh for example gelat uh Team they're doing a roll up as a service so they are thinking about implementing that for all their potential launch Partners uh such that this becomes a more of a standard in the space where every account is indeed an account abstracted wallet um and in

terms of possibilities I think what what would be ideal in terms of the ESS as I mentioned previously when we report the same cryptography on account abstracted wets together with account abstracted wets being on the protocol level I think that's where we get um all the flexibility that is needed uh and it's not going to be associated with an increased cost uh for every transaction and we don't have to do this massive migration uh I don't know what ethereum is going to do though it's tough I think majority of value is is already on account uh on Smart uh contracts which is fine probably no one will just use ethereum with private Keys anymore at some point with ethereum will be just for uh rollup uh transactions and and

block confirmations um but we'll see um yeah I think that's that's our current view on on the whole thing we are exploring more native support for count obstructed wallets in Syrian without necessarily launching our own version of it we kind of see it as a in a current form it would look like aeran volt in someway because you still need to have a private key stored somewhere um and that would be the first step and we actually already enabled um some of the standards for account obstruction for tracking so you could plug in if you have an account uh you can plug in and get at least a foure value over time for these wallets

um we haven't done on haven't done transacting with the SWS yet but we are wanting to do that yeah let's leave that there for now um I I think there's something I want to come back to later but um let's talk about kind of the business models for for wallets first so kind of monetizing a wallet has been notoriously difficult in this ecosystem um with um the two notable exceptions that you kind of you mentioned earlier Ledger and metamask what kind of business models exists and why is it so hard for wallets to kind of monetize uh it's a really good question um so we've researched them all I would say at this point at least like

everything that's available uh on the market right now uh I think there are a few things that really work uh but they require scale and they require a bit of a you know if if there is speculation and market movement obviously trading fees work and uh that's been working for metamask it kind of does still because they have a massive user base they're obviously earning a lot less uh with uh with this bare Market um but all all sorts of fees they work uh because users are ready to pay convenience and Trust so as they develop trust um to your product if they store enough money in it and they kind of been using it forever they're okay with paying fees we took a

bit of a different um pathway here in comparison to like some other wets so most of the wallets they don't have um any option for more ADV banan users to stop paying fees and uh we took it one step further so we allow allow you to basically hold a certain specific nft uh so Z in DNA with premium uh that allows you to not pay any kinds of fees and uh uh that's basically our we wanted to be using aerus swap ourselves internally as a team and for the majority for like actually big CH of our users who are pretty active and uh they do a lot of transacting it makes sense to have the same good experience but not pay um you

know very high fees for for swaps but at the same time this works for uh less experienced users who are okay with paying fees for the sake of convenience and Trust uh so that's uh the one model that works and um yeah but I'm not really excited about it and the reason is that uh TR training fees um and all kinds of like breaching fees or stuff like that is all driving the wallets towards the financial use cases and we see less and less transaction uh specifically for token trades uh or stuff like that uh so a lot more activities on M on doing some governance so people are doing more things with their wallets rather than just trading

uh and I think that drives away the value of this business model so we don't want to be like Robin Hood end up like Robin Hood selling options to retail users just to boost the volumes for so for us like another big thing was um API this is something that is not accessible for majority of other wallets because they are just a front end we provide the data for the wallets and uh We've we support quite a few wallets out there for example rainbow is one of our clients since 2020 uh they've been relying on zeran's data and they're ready to pay for that data because this is powering the user experience and we have more and more bullets who are using and leveraging our data so that

became uh you can call it like a bar Market uh rescue in terms of Revenue and monetization for us um and lastly I think the way to go honestly a longterm vision is to uh ideally own the whole stack so moving to um monetizing pretty much any transactions that user any transaction that user does and uh the way to do that is um either the applications or the chains share Revenue with bullets or we primarily work with our our own chains or layer twos and we direct users to layer twos that we can monetize so for example like launching our own Layer Two would be an example

where we can monetize any transaction with like sequencer fees uh so that's uh I guess the the path forward potentially but it's a little too early um and we haven't seen so this is like very experimental uh there are no wets currently who have their own layer twos um manam kind of with Lia is kind of moving in that direction I think that's what consensus wants at least uh that's the feeling that I'm getting but um this might be an interesting Avenue have you looked at kind of becoming even more of a service provider and kind of abstracting fees away from people and kind of having them pay like a flat fee or um like a service fee that

kind of because kind of what account abstraction also in principl enabl it's kind of abstracting the gas away from the user which I think kind of if this kind of If This Were to become more mainstream this is I think where we have to go because I mean this is kind of the web to experience no one would ever say you're browsing to my website please cover your part of the AWS Bill sort of thing so do you think kind of abstracting that way and then having people pay for the package do do you see that as viable uh We've researched that um I think first of all from the ux perspective you're completely right this is definitely uh how it it will work uh

so we'll abstract away the fees and I think we're not too far off from that um I think when it comes to monetizing that it's a little different uh so what you're suggesting is that we add a certain um amount of like margin on top so we make users pay more for the convenience and uh you just char them a flat fee per month right so basically kind of like yeah kind of like you do for kind of a uh a regular uh bank account kind of you have like five EUR per month kind of in fees and but then you don't have to pay for like every transaction right yeah um but even with banks right like most of the banks now provide this service for free so it's

kind of like a race to B to to zero with these types of fees so you would ideally want to charge users for the added value and for just maintaining um you know ethereum for like running ethereum if they're not transacting basically covering our node node cods so most of the services on web 2 you would pay premium only for the features that you really want and not just like them running the AWS sure so I think the analogy here is similar so um we are we are moving we are releasing this premium kind of in a more um finalized State this uh yeah next months as well uh so that would be we'll see basically what

our users are uh interested in paying for like if if we provide them with premium um can we provide them a few transactions in months for free uh but these are all more of the economics questions and and we need to test how it really works yeah I'm I'm more excited of like basically if we if we have the chain so users are interested in paying for transactions right so that's pretty much Universal and currently all of that Revenue goes towards the chains themselves and none of that goes to wallets and this is a problem so that I think that um value distribution have to switch so either chains start sharing more with The Originators of transactions um or uh yeah chain or

wallets become kind of like more uh vertically integrated with uh their own chains uh I think that would be that's my uh prediction for for the future because this R stream exists users are willing to pay a lot of money for fees for settlement yeah absolutely I take it it's not on the near-term road map but kind of where would you see that in terms of like future developments for zerion I don't think it's like so we are very agile still as the as the startup uh so first of you never know I think that that's a short answer we we are convening with uh B basically a the portion of our team uh later in October

to talk about what we should be focusing on really in 2024 um as the big priority so for 2023 the goal was to build the bulets the best buet for we PR citizens and we are almost complete with that so with the extensional release that would be basically what we wanted to achieve um and yeah the next phase is a little up in the year uh so we'll we can talk about that probably early next year okay cool and what else are you excited about in the ecosystem there are quite a lot of things actually but um honestly this whole up chain movement is what I'm um really really interested in um it's not

that like we haven't known that already but uh with um I think we're getting we're opening up an Avenue with with scalability we're opening up an Avenue for more um types of applications that are feasible so I think defi was only possible because like uh only def5 was possible because U walk space was extremely expensive so only financial applications that run for whales would would work um but now we can see for example with friend Tech or like even lens a little earlier this year uh that people are excited about social use cases uh for example with all the publishing with mirror or sound XYZ

where artists can directly connect with fans uh these are the use cases that are very new and only were possible because of the layer two adoption um and kind of acceptance of Layer Two as also a feasible Avenue for for settlement and I'm I'm excited to see more stuff that is very much web native that is built using the capabilities of more scalable networks uh that's that would be like the short answer fantastic so where will uh users learn where Zion chain will be launched uh where where where can they follow you is it on Twitter or do you have a Discord we've been around for a long

time we have actually over 100,000 people in on our Discord uh so yeah whatever your preference is Twitter you can type in zerion or Discord as well um I think the ideal way is just to go ahead and try our wallet if you are still using metam mask uh go ahead and switch uh we have a bunch of uh people being super happy about it if you want to provide feedback uh you can ping me anywhere on Twitter for example and I'll add you to the better testers group so you can um shape the future of zeran together with us perfect thank you have guini you for joining us today thank you very much was

a pleasure