Too many wallets, not enough dApps

Transcript

Perfect. Hey guys, thanks for being here. Yeah. Um, how's it going? My name is Before we start like two questions. One, who here has heard of Xerion? Cool. Okay, good good bit of crow here. Okay. And who here is a developer? Okay, cool. I'll I'll keep it uh aligned for both technical and uh nontechnical folks. Just got to get my analogies accordingly. Um, but yeah. Yeah. Hey folks, excited to be here. I think today the talk is going to be a little bit different. I'm not going to be focusing on the Xerion wallet that a lot of people might know and use, but instead of instead of that, we're going to focus more on the data that actually builds

the wallet and other wallets that you may use every day. Um, main takeaways, one, you may learn something new about jargon like RPCs and APIs that you may not have, you know, learned previously. Um, I promise you it'll be interesting. and two, um maybe some exciting new stuff uh that you could be using to build your next big crypto wallet or DAP. So, let's keep it interactive at any point. Um you know, if you all have questions, just keep that in mind and we'll save some time for Q&A towards the end. Um awesome. I guess the highlevel discussion here, right? Like before we get started, like we've been building Xerion since 2017. We used to be called Ethereion Labs. We build the smart

contracts for teams like Nexo and Celsius um that you know you might recognize from the centralized defi space. So we've we've seen like how smart contracts and the overall developer journey has evolved since like early ethereum you know pre ICO days and I'd say like UX has come you know 10x um in terms of like how we've actually started building apps now but infrastructure in a way is still stuck in the past. And what do I mean by that? Um we still build the same uh we build on the same rails that we've been building on for the last 5 years more or less. Right before this we had a great talk from one balance. One balance and toolkits obviously are helping advance how we build. But still I think they're

quite centralized. They have um you know limitations that we'll get into in a bit. But I'd say like the main point here is like while our overall user experience embedded wallets, how we interact across chains have, you know, advanced a lot in the last few years, we're still stuck using the same underlying infrastructure. Um, before we get started, I told you I'll teach you a little bit on the jargon. Um, let's get into this. So, what even is an RPC, right? Like why am I saying RPCs and APIs first? And this is this is kind of the old way to build things, right? It's an RPC, simple remote procedure call.

Um, essentially like the analogy I use here is like imagine you go into like, this is a non-technical analogy. Imagine you go into like a bakery and you're like, "Hey, I want a cake." But they actually give you like the dough and the sugar and the flour. That's like an RPC, it's like essentially gives you like in the Ethereum's context, right? Like gives you data points that's like raw data points and then it's up to you to like mold that and actually bake the cake. Um and in this case like I guess RPCs are how we've always been interacting at least in the EVM world. Um to build apps to like you know compose and modulate data on top of that and to like build the beautiful frontends that you know you you see now but why is this a problem um or what are

the limitations with RPCs? I guess like one every app out there we build our own custom logic. So like there's a lot of repetitive infrastructure work. Again, coming back to the bakery analogy, like it's a ton of work every time you want to like, you know, like build a new version of your product or like add a new endpoint. You almost have to rewrite your entire backend or at least that's what it was like before. Um, it's not very user friendly for a lot of front-end teams or, you know, it's not very AI friendly. Doesn't scale crosschain. I mean, it's it's chain specific. A lot of times if y'all have used big node providers, you'll see, you know, downtime because like one of their RPCs is down or like there's not a stable public RPC. It has its own quirks

and it's tough as a develop to work with them. And finally, I guess it kind of sucks that as a developer like we've just recently launched in Salana. We've gone crosschain. We still need to understand and reconcile all these naming standards and you know crosschain conventions, how contracts work. it shouldn't work that way ideally. So, it's just like a lot of headaches um and things that we've we've kind of like, you know, just learned um to solve ourselves. But if you're a new team building in the space, you'll keep running into the same headaches and honestly like hit yourself in the wall just being like why do I need to build this way? Um and like chronologically summarizing right like as a space in Ethereum, we went from first early in the days decentralization self-host your

own nodes. If anyone's been a developer in that era, you'll probably realize how hard it was to actually build a product and like you're focusing on instead like managing your nodes, you know, like doing like like having fights on Twitter on like decentralization and why that matters. And then all of a sudden in 2020, you had providers, great providers like Alchemy and Quicknote come up and honestly completely change how um you know we we use and uh query data. We started going from a space that really value decentralization towards hey like actually they provide all of what we need in a simple RPC and a node endpoint and it it became as easy as like now for the first time we starting to trust

centralized providers to like query data and then now I think in the last 2 years um really like since like I think the last like bare market or so we've seen a shift in how a lot of apps go to market um we've seen previous talks from teams like one balance on like the enduser state data. We've also seen talks from teams like privy on like the embedded wallet infrastructure. But one that as an end user a lot of people often times forget is the actual like data that's shown in your app. So like whether it's the charts that you see for your wallet or it's like the P&L the token balances that has changed drastically in the last two years towards what we see here which is real-time APIs streaming web hooks and whatnot. So essentially for the

first time as a developer it's become a lot easier for you to like go live with an app vibe code whatever within a couple lines of code. So I think like this evolution we've seen this all over each time even in the traditional internet space if you were a front-end developer previously you need to understand how HTTP works you need to understand basically low-level languages now you just have frameworks you have like you know react you have like uh scripts whatever it is to like make your development a lot easier and then we have vibe coding obviously which is like a lot more recent right and we'll have that version we're seeing that in crypto already um but it's it's important to realize is like how developers access data has changed a lot. Um this was the

first takeaway that I was talking about earlier and I guess like how we look at it is like RPC serve data API serve products like we've powered silently over the last 2 years over 400 crypto companies under the hood. So like you know for example if you use you know unis swaps wallet and you open their um you know his historical transactions view all of the data that you see there is powered from our data. So essentially under the hood team started coming to us being like hey how is zamon surfacing this like morpho defy position that no other wallet shows or like you guys found us an airdrop that like we didn't even know we had because it was inside like a instadap you know proxy contract.

We realized that us natively building a bunch of these apps um from day one and use cases meant that we also like stored and indexed and transformed data internally and it was a matter of like basically converting that into a easy to use endpoint so we could actually start helping other teams in the space or competitors even right like other wallets um build better user experiences at a much cheaper price and at a much more like effective like you know way to go to market. So now I think some of the you know examples of products if you use privy all of the enriched transactions under the hood for privy is powered by our API. We have you know defy teams like infinex uh synthetics and whatnot.

We have forecaster wallet. Um and a lot of these teams use a combination of APIs from several different uh companies like ourselves. So I think what's happening is like we have we saw consolidation for the last 3 years with RPCs and now we're seeing again fragmentation in a good way like if you need Salana data you can plug into a easy to use Salana API if you need you know like social data you have teams like Nenar building like really cool forecaster and Twitter native social feed you know endpoints so like point being like as a developer things are getting better but obviously there's still a long way to go. um our I guess like if there's one thing to take away right like it's like we've started to talk to a lot of teams including chains like we're seeing this explosion

in chains right now and a lot of chains from what we see they if you if you personally have launched a chain you probably experienced like what I call like the chain um kind of like that chain float which is essentially you get fleeced by a lot of infrastructure providers because they assume that they kind of try to sell you on all these things that you think you But like what if you could skip nodes entirely? Maybe you don't even need an indexer, right? Like I guess APIs like ourselves and a lot of the other teams that have started to build in the space in the last year like shout out to teams like you know Zapper, Debbank, Dune like you there's a lot of teams where like we've started to see like very interesting like modularized endpoints in this space and I think like the new

like shift for developers is essentially like what if you could skip nodes entirely like there have been a couple blockchains that we've piloted like I think Somnia is one of the sponsors for HCC where it's like you know we kind of had to talk to these teams and tell them, hey, like you don't need to pay a million dollars for an RPC provider to just like index your chain. Rather, your goal is for apps building on your chain to build faster, easier, and cheaper APIs, web hooks, streaming solve for that. So, I think like what we're seeing is like essentially there's new products and faster products possible with us, with like toolkits, with embedded wallets. Um, so essentially that's that's the takeaway here, right? It's like it's more purpose-built for

wallets, for like AI agents, for even fintech companies that are starting to enter the space. Um, I'll give a couple examples. Let's go into like some case studies just to like really drive the point like you know if I can actually share my screen here. We have this team called Loomlay building an AI agent. Um, and their their product essentially aggregates every LLM out there and they make it super easy for you as a developer to like launch any kind of agent you want, whether it's like a, you know, Twitter intern agent. It doesn't need to have a token. It's essentially a cool technical product. And their problem was that they wanted to build an MCP. So, an MCP essentially is a way for you to aggregate several different APIs without needing like an account with

each API. Point being they wanted to get an MCP and access crypto data. What did they do? They very easily integrated our API. We we like surface for them like DeFi balances, wallet balances, NFTTS, P&L, whatnot in real time. And now this in turn ended up powering if you go to our you know web app like the the little like co-pilot that we have here. So I can say like you know analyze Vitalix wallet and immediately when I do like all of the data that you see like the product is built by them it says powered by loom over here but the actual data under the hood they use a combination of our APIs maybe they use you know like Zapper Dune whatnot for data that is

most relevant and most accurate and under the hood it's an AI that's you know deterministically um identifying the best data for each uh type of uh a response. So, so like for teams like this, like it's it's much faster for them to build. Like we had another team build an MCP. I can maybe even play a quick demo. I'm just showing other products here because at this point, I think like for us, Hi, everyone. Today, we're launching the beta of Kira.ai and it's changing forever the way you're cons. This was this week, by the way. Yeah. Kira connects your chatbot to real time data sources, meaning there are no preset answers and no outdated information on Cherra.ai.

As you can see on the screen right now, the price of Bitcoin that you retrieve from the Kira app is the exact market price at the moment. This is going to be a game changer for people that need access to live data and also for people that are building AI agents that needs access to trusted source of information. I asked make the video right before this demo. So, you can see on screen right now. Basically, we are able to uh extract the information of a wallet and display the exact balance that it has. If we double check the address, you can see that the information that you got on Q.AI is very reliable and fits exactly what you can see on the Z app. On the other hand, if you go on CHGPT and enter the exact same

prompt to try to get the information about the same wallet balance, you're going to see that Chpt is unable to access blockchain data and that you will have to go to another uh services to have this information or to connect yourself to a blockchain explorer. Yeah. And I guess like the point is there's this small time now where big AI products have not yet caught up, but we're all obviously speaking with teams like Perplexity and OpenAI themselves to directly help them understand what are the most reliable data sources in crypto to tap into with MCPS, right? Another good example I can get into, you know, like a wallet that everyone uses or a

product unis swap. Um something similar here. They reached out to us two and a half years ago being like, "Hey, we're interested in building a wallet." And we hear, you know, basically that we can replicate everything you have in your wallet within a few days. So like what would previously take, you know, a whole engineering team and like months of literally like replaying every chain and storing the data yourself is now as simple as, hey, we have this idea, can you do this for us? And hey, like we have 10 chains that we want to launch in the next three months. Can you integrate them for us? So I think like in a way like we've shifted our like how we see the space as well where it's like you can be a wallet or a consumer app and also like build data products and

developer tools. So coming back to what I said earlier, no need to build or maintain custom indexers for every chain for them. I think that was the big takeaway there. Um, and a couple other things as well if you're curious like I was I was going to like you know if I have more time like even show like some of the apps I was w coding but for the developers here if you want to get a little bit more into the actual uh code I just pull up like you know a couple scripts with my own wallet. So like it's as easy as um might might need to be zoomed in a bit. Um so this is just like a simple like you know P&L script and P&L data by the way profit and loss data really expensive um just because you know you as a user it's

not easy for you to build this data you have to like what do you need to get you know profit you need to get all of your historical transactions add like how much money you've made on that um see if it's like you know accounted well now it's as easy as a simple script um oops well the script isn't working but Good. Thankfully, it worked right before a simple script to get you, you know, here's the wallet I added. Um, here's net invested. Here's my realized P&L. Unrealized P&L. Yeah, my unrealized is pretty bad. It's minus $20,000. Total P&L also super bad. But like point being like all of this and I've I've spent a lot of money to Ethereum. I've donated like $1,300 so far in fees, right? like this this data is like as granular where

you could actually build I think we worked with Coinbase for some of this data where if you open the new Coinbase wallet they have a chart and they have I think net inflows and outflows powered by our API so it's like this same data would have costed them a ton of engineering effort expensive maybe slow we offer this in like near realtime speed so it's like it's become a lot easier for you to literally and I just wipe coded the script earlier which is probably my mistake for wipe coding Um but that's the point like it's as easy as you know a couple lines of code and um very easy for us to get started as well. I think earlier one balance gave a good uh example of like the how do you use LLMs to interact with their

APIs. We have all the similar LLM txt and uh open API piles as well. So yeah I hope you guys took away the two things I said you will at the start. One RPCs versus APIs. and how the space has evolved. And two, if you have a new app or a new consumer product you're interested in building, it's as easy as, you know, you yourself, even as a non-technical founder, could build this and we're happy to help you build towards whatever you'd like. Um, you can get a free API key at uh zerion.io/appi or docs.zon.io. Um, we just launched on Salana as well in beta. So happy to you know I know we're in an ETH conference but uh as a EVM maxi myself I can say the Salana ecosystem is growing a lot

too and yeah in 2025 no one should be parsing raw data to show a wallet balance. Thank you. [Applause] Thank you for the speaker. If we have time for some couple of questions if there is so there is no questions and let's thank you say thank [Music]