Increasing Wallet Usability to Decrease the Anxiety of Self-Custody (#319)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 319 hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sebastian Cujo well the holidays are officially upon us and as we wrap up the year we've decided to take a well-deserved break so for the next two weeks we're releasing panels moderated by sunny and me and we'll be back in the first week of January with all new interviews and we have some really amazing ones lined up for you this week I'm really excited to bring

you the future of wallets panel I moderated at SF blockchain week epicenter in early November this was truly one of the coolest and funnest panels I've ever moderated the panelists were Taylor Monahan of my crypto or elo hi n of Zingo David Gould of the fire protocol and Dan Finlay of meta mask I really hope you'll enjoy because there's a lot of great insights in here and the conversation was really really fun as we wrap up the year there are a number of people that I would like to thank and recognize first I'd like to thank the incredible team who make this show possible Peeta our production manager Vedran or audio engineer she nagy her artwork

designer Graham our CMO Martin or developer and Anna our accountant these people work incredibly hard behind the scenes to churn out new episodes every week and I'm very thankful for their hard work and dedication and I think that you all should be as well he's epicenter really wouldn't be possible without them I would also like to give a very special tanks to all of our guests for making the time and their very busy schedules to be on the podcast you know recording an episode of epicenter it takes anywhere between an hour and a half to two hours with setup and everything and that's a lot of time to block off like if you're a founder and you're busy with meetings and

everything two hours is very precious and so I want to thank all of our guests year for taking that time and sharing their stories and insights with everyone you know for free like this is this is free time that they're giving to us and to all of you and so we should all be very thankful to them also a big thanks to all of our sponsors this year who make the show possible Microsoft Azure top towel cosmos trail of bits Phil Toro benign lab Stark where Peppo and eToro we're very happy to work with all these folks and hope to continue working with them next year and for many years to come I also want to

give a very special thanks to my amazing co-hosts Brian Mayer Sonny and FeliCa they are all incredibly knowledgeable and inquisitive and they all bring a unique perspective to the show their contributions have made epicenter the best podcast in the industry and I think I'm very lucky to have the opportunity to work with them and I know that you all appreciate them as much as I do and last but not least I want to thank all of you I've said this before but doing this podcast is so rewarding and it's incredibly humbling it's been great to meet many of you this year at events and it's been a lot of fun interacting with with you online on Twitter I really

think we have the best audience in this industry and so thank you for sticking with us for all these years so if you're hearing this on the day comes out today is December 24th it's Christmas Eve but it's also my birthday now please don't go up and buy me a present because there's only one thing that I really want for my birthday this year I would love it if all of you could give us a five-star review on Apple podcasts or stitcher reviews are really important because they help us rank higher in search results and they let people know that we're a great podcast and that they should listen to us so if you want to make me happy this year for my birthday please take five minutes and give us a five star review

before we go to the panel I'd like to tell you about our sponsors for today's episode the cosmos hub 3 has launched we're now officially in the third era of the cosmos network it's really exciting there are a number of improvements and changes in this new hub one of the things I'm really excited about is the community pool which is now of open and available for people to submit proposals there are a quarter of a million atoms available here in the community pool and anyone can submit a proposal and governance will vote on whether or not atoms should be allocated to that proposal so it really shows government's at work it's it's it's a great it's a

great experiment to see blocked and governance working so I'm really looking forward to seeing which proposals will get voted and how the community pool will allocate those funds so go to block cosmos network to learn more there's an article there detailing all the changes in cosmos hub 3 and while you're on the website go to cosmos network /g o Z to learn more about gain of zones it is the adversarial test net challenge in preparation for the upcoming IBC module this is gonna be a huge test net challenge we've never had an interoperable blockchain before so you

know we have to figure out how this works first and that's what Gio's II will allow us to do a lot of people to learn about how an interoperable blockchain network will run and so if you go here you can join the riot chat and join all the people already discussing game of zones which will launch in 2020 we'd like to thank cosmos for their support of the podcast we're also brought to you by eToro and I've been having so much fun using you Toro and learning about trading so if you're interested in getting into the financial markets but you don't know where to start building your portfolio eToro is a great place to start because it makes trading easy it's unlike any trading platform you've ever experienced

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people who spend a lot of time researching the markets developing their own strategies and building their reputation and their portfolio so when you copy their trades whatever gains they make you'll make the same profits proportional to your investment one of the most underrated things about each row is their daily update newsletter I love getting this thing in my inbox every day it's a quick easy to read bullet point format market insights newsletter that just helps you stay up-to-date on the markets and know what's happening on any given day of course you should know that this is not investment advice this is my personal opinion investments involve risks especially cryptocurrencies because they

are highly volatile we'd like to thank you Toro for those support of the podcast we're also brought to you by pepper & Peppo is a community of creators sharing short video content on crypto and entrepreneurship and the way that I like to describe Peppo to people is that it's kind of like a mix between Twitter tick tock and steam it it's like Twitter because the conversations kind of resemble the ones that you would hear on crypto Twitter its video it's like short 30-second videos and when you like something when you want to show your love for a content creator you tip them with pepper coins and when you want to participate in a conversation when you want to like reply to someone you show

your interest by putting up pepper coins as well so Peppo is developed by the open simple token team we've had them on the podcast before it's well-designed it's easy to use it's really built by the community because the team has been really attentive to people's feedback and they've been implementing features based on what people tell them they want in the app which is really the way you want to build something right the community is still small but it's growing and the conversations are really interesting and high-quality and so recently in preparation for our interview with Charlie Shrem we had a little huh what you said was I supposed to say that was it did I just give that away well well now the cats out of the bag so

Charlie Shrem is going to be on the podcast in January and him and I has a little back and forth on Peppo you can go check that out it was really fun so go to Peppo calm that's PEP Oh calm to download the app you sign in with your Twitter handle and you can also find me there my username is the same as on Twitter its sub 2.0 sub 2 P o int 0 and come say hi and you create your own content on Peppo and see people like it we'd like to thank Peppo for those support of the podcast and with that here is the future of wallets panel so let's start with some brief introductions I'll just let you introduce yourselves starting to you tally yeah hi I'm Taylor Monahan I'm the founder and CEO of my crypto my crypto

is a user interface for interacting with the ethereum blockchain a lot of people call it like a wallet I just don't really like that word and yeah I'm just here trying to make this space better in literally any way shape or form hey I'm Dan Finley I'm a co-founder and lead developer at meta mask we are a tool for interacting with smart contracts on the etherium blockchain I am David gold I'm a CEO of DAP X we are building the field protocol which is a blockchain usability protocol that will do for blockchain what HTTP did for the internet make it easy to use through an industry standard that connects wallets exchanges crypto payment processors and were backed by baniyas and v venture funds and have 28

industry partners hello my name is URI Aloha I'm CEO of Xango at crypto white that has launched recently and that has the particularity to be non-custodial but what work without private keys and with a very seamless experience maybe we'll talk more about that well let's start on that topic I like that at least three of you mentioned experience or user experience I think you said it was a tool yeah but you use a tool yeah you use a tool so let's start with that in this self custody space because I think I agree with you that like wall is like a word that's sort of phasing out and people are moving towards more of this idea of self custody etc in in the self custody space what do you think of

some of the major advancements that we've seen in the last year with regards to users and usability so last year I think there were a lot of new wallets that we're starting to try releasing backups with like email or your phone number or something like that so there's gonna be a kind of semi custodial solution and then this year there have also been several I think smart contract wallets starting to get some traction and and usage and that's really exciting because smart contracts are kind of what a turing-complete blockchain is good for so so yeah there's obviously once you're a smart contract you get to kind of opt into the security model that you like it doesn't mean that there aren't keys so I take odds when everyone's whenever anyone claims to not have keys and their

crypto solution but but it does mean that you can put the keys where you want you can be creative about it and that's great creativity is what the space is all about yeah I completely agree and I am i think that we're entering sort of a new like a new phase of sort of experimentation in terms of where the keys are going to be and and where does the balance lay between you know the most secure solution versus like the most usable solution because as we all know it's a hard balance to strike and so I'm really excited to see how these sort of like the smart the smart contract oh the smart wallets play out I'm also really excited to see how some of the the usability features rights like abstracting away gasps abstracting

away the keys in general how that you know what's actually valuable to users rather than just like we think that this might be valuable and then most importantly I'm really looking forward to I think that the privacy conversation is going to come to the forefront and seeing how and what the wallets do and how they can empower users to do things in a private manner I'm really hopeful that that we can figure something out because yeah you know Libre China etc etc yes so we're obviously biased with what we're doing to focused on on on the usability aspects of moving the value around and custody is a critical issue which is not something we're solving and all the innovation that's going on and

was just discussed is really cool and important at the end of the day having custody of your assets is only important if you actually can do something with them and that being able to move them and we wash our test net this week so we think that's pretty big news because it means that we're on the precipice of of these players here and others being able to do things between their products that are fundamentally impossible to do today and to do that in a completely decentralized and secure way so they've been some some progress recently in in what it's to my test is that include ourselves not enough I think we're still very far away from creating product that excites enough people to bring them to the industry and that's the bad news the

good news is that I think there are step function improvement that are being made in terms of ways he's are generated and transactions are being signed so you refer to smart wallet as must contract what that's interesting but that applies only to each area more derivatives our atrium so there is the rest of the world I think there's been a very interesting progress in multi-sig that have been done a very interesting development with no signatures threshold signatures and that sought to become adopted by not just world but also type of custodian now I think in terms of application I think we are still in the first era of crypto where most people still have to back up their their keys

and still doing that so I think something is missing and not sure quite right exactly currently we're not doing good job enough to do to arrive there but I think we're getting there you mentioned the step improvements and usability and I always like to sort of look at this as like two parts of a scale right so you on one side there's like usability and on the other side there's technology and I'm curious in your minds if you think that it's sort like a chicken and egg problem is that the usability that's arriving and then pushing the technology forward or are we making advancements in technology that are allowing like new forms of what new use-cases applications to be built specifically on the wallace side like for example the cryptography that it would allow multi signature schemes or

this sort of thing what's your viewpoint on that yeah so it is a chicken-and-egg problem right you have to have usable solutions for them to be used and if they're not being used the usability is kind of useless but if you look back at the Internet as a corollary I mean it was around for over ten years and it had millions of users and it was growing but I was growing relatively slow and it had a bunch of siloed protocols that you people used to interact with it and it was clunky and hard and it was a usability protocol that caused that all to change so you know I do think that in order to get the masses that people who are not in this room to actually start feeling comfortable using it we've got to get it to another level of ease of use and safety and security on the

movement of the value as well as the custody of the value and I think that's what's exciting about what's going on now there's the real work of making blockchain functional and easy to use I think has been happening in the last year and is starting to happen much more than than what happened in the few years before that I totally agree with you that like there's there's this still siloed effect kind of similar to the early Internet where I think there's a lot of creativity and ingenuity that can bring a lot of value to these platforms but a lot of times that that value is kind of blocked by things like the usability of those protocols so we've had state channels for like two years but what's a state channel wallet right so there's kind of been this thing where you need a

wallet to integrate and so a lot of new protocols and new ideas that have new value to offer end up having to implement a wallet from scratch just to do it so I actually I often taking kind of a oppositional role to this um thing that like usability is everything and that we just need to solve usability because I think ultimately people will actually get over a lot of usability things if there's value for them we've we've seen people you know I'm not trying to claim that meta mask is a seamless experience but for the people that it's made a difference for they've worked through it and I feel like sometimes we're like polishing or like widening the doors to a to a garbage buffet if we just put some better things on the table I think people will make their way through and so that's why at

meta masks one of our current focuses is on allowing the wallet itself to be more permissionless Lee extended to support community ingenuity so that hopefully we can grow the pie in the middle and people can work through and be creative with the the usability along the way then I love that garbage buffet yeah I love that too thank you yeah I might quote you on that sometimes that's the headline for this talk right now no I completely agree and I think that we saw this with I SEOs right like there was such there was such promise and most of those promises were very very empty but people somehow went from not holding an encrypted right being true no coiners to purchasing moving it to a noncustodial wallet and then

sending it somewhere else and receiving tokens and me oblivia those tokens in like a day now not everyone was successful we saw a lot of loss we saw a lot of loss due to like just addresses in general and sending and like those concepts we saw a lot of loss from not making proper backups you know there's no way to restore then obviously there's there's no like revocation either so you do you lose your private key or you give your private key to a Fisher it's gone so yeah it's sort of there there's very much chicken and egg but if the value is there if the promise is there people will do just about anything to do it and as we've seen the amount of sort of usability like the improvements that we've seen since the ICO sort of era

have been huge right and we learned a lot of lessons so I think that we'll get there it would be really nice if we got there a bit faster and and with a bit more thought but I'm really interested in seeing where the true value comes from right because we hear a lot these days about how this is gonna be in or that's gonna be at or ie OS or the thing or T Phi is the thing and you know the question that I keep asking is what value does that provide for these or what value does that create for the user and if we can get there we as like wallet creators will actually be better equipped to build a product for them because we will be understanding of what they're trying to accomplish not

necessarily just like we'll build this thing that allows you to maybe do anything and nothing at the same time or yeah I'm really excited about your answer because I know you guys are sitting really at the forefront of like the tech and also the user experience so actually I'm not going to talk about us but about something that I think is it's not that that ought to talk about us but I think something more important than that is I think nearly obviously the future of computing is mobile it's not the desktop there is way more people with a mobile phone and a computer we all know that and sadly the G were the biggest usability problems exist and that applies to every single player including those who try to do mobile applications including ourselves and it's not necessarily technological it's

mostly due to the fact that the mobile platforms and I want name names but not so many are not necessarily allowing us to play by our rules but to play by their rules so what that means is that the experience that we enjoy on desktop terr facing the wallet with anything very conveniently and let's call that permissionless he's not necessarily possible on the mobile no matter how much develop on the mobile you are not allowed to except replacement in approaches to service DAP Center service anything that is a way of payment you not able to have that directory and things of that nature and if we really want to be usable if want to have wallets that are really usable we cannot just desktop we have to

think mobile first so that I think is a big hurdle and it's very intimidating for people including in the space to deal with that friction do you think that this friction that's inherent to mobile platforms do you think that's a hindrance on potential business models for for wallets and just generally I'd like your thoughts on what are you know the interesting business model or businessman opportunities that are open to us so yeah directly that directly impacts the business model because as you know I mean many people never understand that but - well as don't make money out of transactions the fees are paid to minors and so not to banking whatever you take if you return there's a transaction so how do what make money they make money out of basically an affiliation systems

most of the time they link to exchange is a link to how the wall has the link to whatever but if you want to make money with Deb's with services with defy and get a cut out of that you need the mobile platform to allow you to do that right and so I think it's very structural to the economy of wallets and I'm not sure there will be a solution to that so maybe we have to think about something better but that obviously has an impact and and I just want to build on that because I think he made a really important point even dialing back from the business model use case the the current application stores in mobile platforms they won't allow you to do a variety of things they have their own policies and so for example a variety of wallets that were very similar to meta

masks got blocked from the Apple App Store last year because they had a DAP store right you know just by calling it a store that's against their Terms of Use so there's there's an amount of extensibility that they want to have on lock down you know we saw Apple take like you know nearly a decade to open a Siri a P I and they've just opened a a sliver of it they're very cautious about the amount of extensibility they lend and and this extends to applications so I agree that it's like a completely critical frontier because crypto so about innovation and it's so very carefully regulated by these two companies right now Taylor do any thoughts I actually had another question how do you guys get around some of the limitations we call

them sites are you secret's out of the bag folks are you guys already live in the epsilon test right we have a live mobile app so if you go to madam asked that I oh you can install our mobile app from the App Store yeah yeah so the good news is that these app stores are maintained by bureaucrats who enforce the letter of the law but we'll see how long that lasts I think at a certain point we're gonna need a more open platform yeah I completely agree and because I remember talking to you back back in the day about the different concerns and I think one of the most interesting things about the the mobile platform and the fact that you are you're basically relying on on Apple and Google to allow you to distribute your application that's like a very dangerous

place to be in in my opinion and in what's even more sort of I guess you guys looked deeper right and you looked in and you saw exactly what they were enforcing and it turns out it was like the the semantics or whatever which is great because you can get around that but yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of policies that I think will will hinder a lot of things and I also think that the you know the security and the technology in general you know everyone has their opinions on whether I phones or Android phones are secure at all but I think that that's gonna be probably a huge conversation that happens especially if people are holding more than like you know a couple of dollars you know worth of crypto on their phones if first of all I think it's a great

question because the companies that are providing the usability products that people use like those on the stage here they have to make money right otherwise ultimately they're going to go away and so business model we're not learning series you're in trouble now series been listening so but anyway that was that was a quarter driver bind you know the field protocol being set up as a decentralized autonomous consortium where the economics of our protocol from from the actual structure it are built to drive tokenize income to the wallets

and others that participate in the ecosystem mmm so so that is part and parcel because of that knowledge that look the wallets have to continue to be there and the end endpoints have to be there for users to use and they have to make money do so on that point what we've seen with wallets is it while it's our area are incorporating an increased amount of services so there's obviously key storage and everything comes around that and then take a smart contract wallet for instance there's an awful lot of additional layers of services like abstracting a gas for instance social recovery etc but you know there are a few ways to look at this one is okay well we're adding functionality and wallets the other is that new work making while it's more and more bloated and adding creating a wider attack vector perhaps pairing with you David

because you're working on sort of another abstraction layer where do you think this this balance stands for wallets should wallets be trying to incorporate more of these features internally or do you think the space will move towards one where all these additional services will be abstracted and wallets will ultimately end up just being key storage I don't think that wallets as a product as they exist today will just be key storage not software wallets at least Hardware wallets - yes if they are just key storage five years from now I think they won't exist as the standalone product because the key storage will be integrated into other things that do a lot more than just store your keys and the usability and the ways in which people can interact

that value and commerce and for utility will be in ways we can't even have any thought about today and and those solutions have to be the portal and tools that they use for that right and so the companies in the stage here and other ones I think are gonna grow and involve and become more and more robust in the types of things that their wallet enables users to use beyond just storing the keys otherwise really they'll store key storage is something that'll be commoditized I think honestly eventually yeah I did a talk I think it's like over a year ago now just called the future of ethereum doesn't have wallets by it um it really drove into the question of like what the hell is a wallet um and why where did these different like you know the features of wallets today where

do they lie and where are they most optimal um and I ask a lot of questions like way more questions and answers but I've definitely I think that what's going to happen is that there's gonna be some core functionality that is just functionality right and that's not a product that's just a thing that exists that can be sort of at different layers of the stack and then I think that you know looking at how we interact with like traditional applications today or or traditional products and services like say uber right like you go and you like open your app and you order a car and then like at some point it just like you automatically pay for your ride right it's not at the forefront you don't go into you don't open another application that's going to connect to

your uber so you can sing to this and then oh wait but the gas and you don't have enough gas because of the token like none of that exists and so it'll be really interesting to see especially as actually valuable gaps evolve and there's there's real use cases where you have a product that the product itself wants users to come to their site land on their site be sold on their product or service or game or what what be a and then the user just starts using it right because the flow right now at least the etherium is is very commonly like they user lands on the site and then hopefully they're convinced to like use this game or buy this product or use the service whatever it is and then they're like okay cool go and sell meta mask and then come back

when you're done and then meta mask is like hey guys like I'm gonna on board you real quick to the entire Crypt don't you go system oh by the way you have to go buy some ether you know go kyc and exchange we'll see you when you're done you know and and the reality is it's like I don't know what the drop-off rates look like but I can't imagine like it would be terrifying right and so I'm really interested in in seeing if right now I don't think that we have like a invisible interaction layer right and and I think that that might be a solution I have no idea how technically I would work and how it would preserve privacy and how it wouldn't be like it has the potential to take you a lot of information from both sort of like the wallet functionality and the dot

functionality um and that's a bit worrisome but if there's some invisible interaction layer that could be created I think that that might replace like most of the quote-unquote wallet and then you can have choices at each end right though choices of the top or what you want to interact with or what you want to give your data to what you want to play with and then where where the key is who has the key is the key being held by a custodian or is it yourself or that your hardware wallet yeah it's sort of like commoditizing each layer each service that connects to your wallet I think I agree with both of you that that they have to evolve a lot and then what does it look like can we make that look more invisible we've been working on this initiative at meta master that

started out to shamelessly promote but it's like a it's a permission system and so the goal is that you initially prompt you delegate a key by spending allowance encryption rights whatever and so now the application can do some interactions without further bothering you and so one of the things we're using that for is to extend functionality because I don't know what the you know end protocol is it with the state channel or the plasma chamber or whatever so we're hoping that can facilitate that you know even when you're using uber like it's it's invisible once you're in it but there was like an initial like handshake right you entered your credit card number you you Apple paid or whatever and and I think we can we can really reduce that initial handshake down to something that's like a user coherent in terms of agreement that's being

digitally enforced and so I kind of think of the wallet and and where we are trying to mold it is is kind of into your like personal trust colonel it's it's like the thing which takes you know your your cryptographic keys which yeah you can commoditize a signer but can you commoditize the like human representation of what you can do with those keys and so I think that we're really crafting our product into we're basically what does it mean to prompt the user and get get informed consent because keys are meaningless the user isn't doing the cryptographic operation themselves so they need some somebody that they trust and why not the thing that's holding the keys because they're trusting it quite a bit there to represent to them what they're doing

under the hood you think well then go will be come on okay I I don't know I mean one thing is certain is that people are not going to download 50 wallets and use them all the way it's not possible I got a bus always interesting to receive those block chains that also develop their wallets believing that people will use them so I still don't understand that but eventually people will have a very limited choice of wallets and they will expect those whatever we call them password managers interfaces tools wallets but they will expect them to accompany them across all the needs of the that they have the services they want to use whether this is on mobile on desktop and whatever computing platform tomorrow including those watches and whatever APIs we have in our ears and so

what that means is that no matter how the what services are developed they need to be thought as services and not as software so I think that's very important as a conception you can see that in the Fiat world app that has happened during the past 20 years and you can see for example companies like squirrel doing that and stripe doing this enabling their services being built on top of the same payment trails wherever you need them I do expect that to happen at some point on crypto of course respecting the principles of crypto but I I think it will depend on the words that people will prefer to use I think that will have to do with convenience and security and portability to different platforms the future will

let us know how that plays out cool so switching gears a little bit I'd like to bring this up a little bit to somewhat of a higher level today the majority of crypto funds are locked up in exchanges some would say upwards of 80 to 90% where does the future hold and from this perspective is the future a non custody or self custody future or custody future I think the the future actually is neither a self or a centralised custody future I think it's gonna be solutions that we're seeing happen that that give you a better best of both worlds the reality is I think the average person on the street if you truly ask them they do not want to be solely responsible for all of their

assets that's really scary to them they also don't want to be subject to a hack attack on to the centralized you know bank or financial institution so I think well I think we're gonna see some really cool solutions that have wallets involved self sovereign wallets but also have some sharing of that risk with third party trusted third parties that create a better outcome and an exciting future for what we're doing here I do not claim to have the answer but I do think that you know nobody actually wants to be their own bank and I say this as someone who is made of you know one custodial wallet for the house like three and half years you know I'm acutely aware that that people are there's a very very very very specific user that actually wants that and

actually wants to take on that responsibility and actually understands what that responsibility is and I think that one of the most interesting things about this sort of crypto space right now is that the more involved you are the longer you're around like the scarier it gets you actually learn about these risks that you didn't know were risks you know this is bliss yeah like the tenth time you send like all of your money or you know the the the hundredth time you're sending like a large amount either to or from an exchange for whatever reason it's actually scarier and that's a really peculiar thing especially from a user experience perspective because typically we we can at least rely on the fact that as time goes on and as people use your product

more their anxiety level will go down right like that's naturally like what should happen but because of all the sort of external forces because if they hacks because of the number of things that can go wrong and simply because of how new and different this space is we're not seeing that and so I think that in order to like the solution we should be coming after is one that that reduces anxiety right and I think that's why people do tend to put them in exchanges and leave them there is because they're like well the exchange has it like everything's fine you know it's it's not sort of near it's not as much in front of their face as if they're they're holding their own funds yeah so yeah and centralized exchanges you know also exists not just because of custody issue they exist because the

centralized exchanges enable things that are impossible to do other ways today such as trading one token for another token or for Fiat but in the future it will be possible projects the cosmos and polka-dot occur and enable you to to do in a decentralized way start to trade tokens projects like ours are gonna enable usability that you can't do out of centralized walled gardens today and then it does come down to the issue of custody and with better solutions we will end up in a much more decentralized world than crypto and blockchain exists today I'm not a a maximalist of user custody but I think there's something just fundamentally empowering about having your own key at least like for an account or your first account when you're learning because there is no higher authority than a account that's

controlled by a key now that said we can do so much better but every single other thing like Taylor said has other risks so it's like oh great you got a multi-sig well I hope it doesn't have any bugs or like you know and you're putting it into a new piece of software I hope you can trust that team and their distribution channel and there's there's really just a huge stack of assumptions and so I'm just glad that we're building on protocols that let you move the keys where you want and take the risks that you hopefully can take in an informed manner where you you know hopefully in a wallet that's flexible and adaptable it can progressively onboard you initially you know okay sign up for the service they'll back it up maybe and then maybe now you want to have some friends who

can help you recover and maybe once you become like a real of buried under your mattress kind of guy you can take your unit your seed phrase for yourself but but I think there's something really empowering about having the keys a database layer available and I'm not going to reveal a breaking news or things that people don't know but people like convenience they like things that work and that are like you said anxiety reductive and the reality is we already know the majority of people have chosen custodian solutions versus non custodian solutions because those are the best today to serve that purpose it's just simpler and you have a phone line that you can use it's an

expression and to work on if you have a problem and hopefully you're gonna get your problem solved and as we know in self eco solutions you always have this giant disclaimers we won't help you you're alone and deal with your own right and be your own bank did you lose your own so that's not something that I think the majority of people will want maybe there will be ways that self custody will be improved via the help of I don't know guardians or peers i I'm very skeptics about that because I think people don't know how to make those choices I do tend to believe that the future has to do with the user being in control so I think that is a fundamental need that today doesn't exist enough but

is not alone and for example what we've tried to do is to decentralize the process of key management without getting in too many details where only the user is able to make transactions but we help can help in the recovery and set up back up inner in a way that is really magical because they don't have all this anxiety to deal with but we are unable to spend our money even if we want to so I don't know if this is the solution but what we are learning from our first user base is that they breathe after they use this kind of approach so maybe that will be the future or we'll see it's a good point I hate to bring up to bring up the boring regulatory question but I'm curious I mean in in

the context of mostly favorable regulation with regards to self custody while developers in the US and in Europe at least is this a question that it keeps you up at night but what what are the sort of regulatory considerations which have to do with each of the products that you're working on if any I don't know this is a relevant question on this panel or not my answer is quick so where we're at right now we're we're fine if we like dip our toe into that pool then I'm in a very different boat and I need a very different team and I need a very different set of skills and I need like a team or lawyers in my life and I don't want any more lawyers in my life so like any sort of if you you had on like custodianship if you go down

anything that would classify us is like a money transmitter you know you need a lot and I'm very glad that there are people willing to go down that path for me personally and the people around me the people on my team the people I've hired we're very excited to be taking a challenging path in a different way of empowering users to control their own money control their own keys you know in successfully interact with the blockchain you know without needing the approval of US or the US government mine is also really small look guys we're non-custodial wallet right you're holding your keys so right now our regulatory environment is simple we've been kind of begging services to start emerging to take on custody or semi custody for a while first time we met coinbase we were like you guys should host keys they're like we don't wanna be

liable for arbitrary transactions that we can't comprehend like so so there's been like a real need for that um I've heard murmurs about regulation around non-custodial wallets that made me lose a couple winks but I haven't heard more about it so I can see that coming up the consumer protection reasons I mean especially like in Europe I could see the European regulators waking up and saying like oh people are holding crypto yeah they need to be protected yeah there's like one line that says if you interpret like one of the money transmitter lines in a very very very specific way you can you can lose a couple nights sleep saying that like a noncustodial wallet is technically like sending money for a user but you know if you literally kind of like I don't know spend five more minutes looking at it

we're looking at what noncustodial actually means you know the way that we've been heard it obviously is like that's silly that's pretty pretty well wrapped up I'm like especially curious to hear because you're doing a slightly recovery thing does that affect you anymore yeah so so we good we looked into the topic but I I tell you I'm not very optimistic I'm actually pretty worried that the regulation will change and the reason why is that we tend to associate the fact that because we don't have the liability of the private key or able to span that we don't have any liability and the reality is that we do have the reliability of the software that we built and so that conveys a huge weight into the equation and number two I don't

know if you kind of heard the hearing of Magdeburg was very enlightening not so much about the answers that were not very always convincing but about the questions and many questions were extremely clear about the worries about the passivity of what they called anonymous wallet which basically the translation for safe custody wallets the basic politicians do not like it at all because no control no transparency no anything so I think they might change their mind about self custodial wallet and less and that's the bonus there is a technical solution that enables us to also decentralize identity so like real world identity so we wouldn't be able we

would be charged to K equity customers and everything but we would have kind of this gate a way to say well this guy is not a bad guy and this guy is as we Zuri's without going through the process of knowing who is but if not I'm very worried that they changed their mind especially in the u.s. yes and we have a different situation so when you said regulation I winced a little bit because we're building a decentralized protocol with a decentralized business model if you will and governments and regulations were not written they're built to even contemplate that blockchain is is innovating business models and creating ways to do things like we're doing that just simply are impossible without tokenized economics and so yes we have are working through with with too many

attorneys a lot of different aspects that good news is we have a really clear roadmap at do that now but it's time and money that is just fundamentally at the end of the day of waste it doesn't really add to innovation or creativity or any value to society so for us it is you know we've we've had to work through that I think you know it is it's an interesting struggle and it's really at the core of some of the essence of what blockchain is about this struggle between individual privacy and liberty and the need that governments feel to be able to monitor every single person to stop the small percentage that are bad actors so right and none of us want bad people to you know use money to go and do bad

things to people no nobody wants that but yeah that's at the end of the day is a struggle and you can even have federated kyc I think someday that concept will exist I met with a cup company just yesterday that's starting to work on that idea of gee could you have federated kyc where you do it once it can be used everywhere but you know if you have that and it's attached to you everywhere I mean you know surveillance state it's doesn't matter if it's decentralized at that point they know who you are and so it's it's an interesting social struggle for sure that we've got I mean let's remember people the government would want to at the end of the day to be to get their taxes paid really that's really their number one area of of worry more like stopping the bad the bad guys I mean of

course like this noble goal to have but what they want is to make sure that people who have to pay taxes and I think it's a legitimate request I mean I don't think everyone wants to escape the taxes this is our societies are built after all you know we can discuss about it if they do we try it but you need that to happen so I think they don't we don't want a system where we escape our fiduciary duty as citizens and so if you're not custodial staff ghos or wallet enable that in some way and the economy a large part of the economy goes to safe kasra world then there is an area of worried that is legitimate and then maybe that will drive them to go against the core principle of of crypto which is like alright let's do whatever you want on let's not know who you are I

know more than one person in the space who's looking to escape their fiduciary duties very quickly because we're out of time in in one or two sentences what are you most looking forward to in the next year or two with regards to either the evolving tech around self custody or even user experience advancements what's what should I be looking into that's a good question I'm actually in a zoom out a little bit just because of sort of the conversations that we've had up here and I think that we are not necessarily like at a transform at a point in this ecosystem but I do think that there are some really big sort of subjects that are fun online you know Libra and the recent hearings and then the recent China announcements I think that it's going to be massively

important that we understand and we think about when we talk about openly and publicly you know what is the value of the things that we're building you know why are they valuable and what do we really want to get out of this and you know what what compromises are we willing to make in order to get there and obviously like some of the the most obvious examples are you know sacrificing usability for things like privacy or things like self custody or you know every everything right and I think that it's a it's been a conversation in a different light but just knowing like really knowing that China is in this space and they're going to be doing stuff and the potential of what that means if we don't have if we do have things like you know every

single account is KY seed or you know simply the knowledge that hey you know nation-states are gonna be watching every single transaction and there you're going to be linking the accounts and they're probably gonna be linking these accounts to real-world identities so when you think about all of that and then you add it to yeah you know you add it add it to the usability issues in the space and the security issues in the space I think the next couple years are gonna be very very interesting kind of just reiterating I'm hoping that making the wallet a more permissionless space will light put gasoline on the fire of innovation and let all these exciting things mixers and layer-2 protocols and contract accounts I think this will be the year to show that permission list decentralized innovation beats the heck out of whatever well-funded

authoritarian project it might be intimidating you otherwise it's looking forward to us now starting to really see the use of blockchain and tokenized value and commerce and for utility actually doing meaningful stuff with us and in our part of enabling that with our launch of our main at early next year to enable abstraction away public addresses payment request cross-gen metadata all kinds of things that are impossible today do between different wallets to help that something read transformative that could happen to the industry siege agency players making a real step not just intentions and whitepapers in the real world so I really looking forward to see what happens with Liberals telegram with cacao in Korea Clayton and disapp we see what happens out how they roll it out

and finally I really really wish that mobile platforms no names would embrace more both the technical and terms of services level the crypto industry that we're about to play with the security and clay vinum more better way to secure better our our apps and that the tools or services and also just the rules of being featured on an app store and what we can do with mobile apps will be a fairer meaning equal to every other category of mobile apps not better but just for equal that's a great way to ender thank you I want to thank our panelists thank you for joining us on this week's episode we released new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify

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