Zeal: The Day-to-Day Crypto Wallet for EVM Chains - Hannes Graah. Ep. 562

Transcript

but on a first principal basis if you don't have custodians if you don't have intermediaries then there is more money to keep for yourself or whoever you're transacting with you refuse to pay and if you look at the product Market fit crypto's had so far where is gas being spent on chain something like 80 90% is being spent on the Unis contracts so the very clearest indication of part Market fit for crypto today so far has been trading assets um but crypto hasn't really found for Market fit yet for payments which is kind of ironic since it was the riddle promise of Bitcoin 15 years ago to create peer-to-peer to cash and so that's what we're doing at Zeal is to take the assets you have onchain and make them useful in the real world being able to spend them in different

places and connecting the the offchain world with onchain world so the onchain wallet that's off the chain that you can use off the chain as well welcome to appic Center the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization and the blockchain revolution I'm fra an and today I'm joined by Han gray who is one of the Builders of zeal um yet another wallet and we will go into kind of why Hanes and his team are building another wallet um and what what sets them apart from the existing um Myriad of wallets before um we talk with hanis let me tell you about our sponsus this week this episode is proudly brought to you by nois a Visionary Collective

committed to fostering and expanding applications for a decentralized future nosis is is at the Forefront of innovation with nosis pay circles and metri revolutionizing open Banking and creating a superior form of money with Hashi and nois VPN they are building a more resilient and privacy focused open internet are you seeking a robust L1 to launch your project well look no further than nosis chain enjoy the same development environment as ethereum but with significantly lower transaction fees and with a robust network of over 200,000 validators nosis chain stands as incredibly neutral and resilient foundation for your application governance at nosis is driven by nosis Dow where everyone has a voice in

shaping the Project's future join the nosis community today by participating in the nosis D governance for you can deploy your project on the evm compatible and highly decentralized nosis chain or help secure the network by running a validator with just a single gno and lowcost Hardware embark on your journey towards decentralization today at nosis doio crwi is one of the biggest node operators globally and help you stake your tokens on 45 plus networks like ethereum Cosmos C last year and dydx more than 100,000 delegators stake with corus one including institutions like bitgo and leder sticking with course one not only gets you the highest

years but also the most robust security practices and infrastructure that are usually exclusive for institutions you can stake directly to corus one public note from your wallet set up a white label note or use the recently launched product Opus to stake up to 8,000 eth in a single transaction you can even offer high yield staking to your own customers using their API your assets always remain in your custody so you can have complete Peace of Mind start sing today at chorus. one Hi H thank you so much for joining me here today hi FR greetings from buels yeah you're at ECC aren't you that's

right we're a couple of the builders here uh experiencing ECC firsthand super nice super nice hes you have a super fascinating background and I think it kind of um it's very emblematic of kind of like the changing landscape of builders in the space um tell tell us about um what you've done before where you've been before and kind of why why you embarked on a mission kind of build zal um prior Adventures to zal was in in retail or consumer experiences a long time in Spotify and in revolute rute is probably one that's the most relevant for building a wallet R being a mobile Bank uh in fact most of us at Zeal were

a bunch of EX revols so spent a lot of time there uh Reinventing the front end or backing if you will moving away from High Street offices to to mobile interface uh and now we're tackling a different type of reinvention here at seal yeah super nice and you guys you actually pivoted um quite markedly with your project right kind of like when you started zil was doing um something else right I I'm not sure we could pivot but we have definitely gone from being broad to much more narrow in that um as you said there are a lot of wallets out there in the space and so we started building quite broadly trying to appeal to a lot of different use cases and we have built a lot of features that cross the the whole SWA the things someone

wants to do on chain from um route optimized bridging to swapping to supporting every even Under the Sun but we became more and more appear as who built more and more was that there was a a gap specifically on uh daily finals the original promise of Bitcoin if you will yeah daily finance that sounds good if you think about kind of the landscape of wallets that are out there how do you classify them in your head so kind of when you say there's kind of like this gap for da Finance what do the others cover so I think if you're if you're a startup Builder you look for Market opportunities and you see what problems people have and if you look at the

product Market fit crypto's had so far where is gas being spent on chain something like 80 90% is being spent on the unisol contracts so the very clearest indication of private Market fit for crypto today so far has been trading assets and so if you're a building a wallet you're like okay well let's solve problems that are specifically on that use casee right let's make trading even better and so we have a plethora wallets that are really really good at doing trading and moving tokens around um but crypto hasn't really found product Market fit yet for daily payments which is kind of ironic since it was the original promise of Bitcoin 15 years ago to create peer-to-peer digital cash yet 15 years later still very hard to just send digital cash to someone to their email

or to their phone number even crypto veterans are not asking people for hex address to send over cash rate and so the the kind of counterintuitive opportunities to deliver the original promise on bitcoin uh and make crypto useful in daily life for normal boring if you will finance use cases and not just trading tokens don't get me wrong trading tokens also has a role in the world um but there's so much more that people are doing out there with money than than buying selling tokens so when you think about your user who who is that person so the first C segment the first group of uses we are targeting are the people who are in crypto but specifically the ones that want to put crypto to use um so people who want to

use crypto for more than buying selling tokens like buying a beer paying their rent um to use it in their day-to-day and there are lot people who are in crypto already and have assets there that they're not they're all for all the talk of of increasingly liqued in the world by tokenizing assets they're still compartmentalized in the crypto ecosystem right they're not made liquid liid in the real world um but now we have various efforts that actually are making it possible to make them liquid in the real world make them useful in the real world and so that's what we're doing at Zeal is to take the assets you have on chain and make them useful in the real world being able to spend them in different places and connecting the the offchain world with onchain world so the onchain wallet that's off the chain

that you can use off the chain as well so when I think about wets often the user experience is pretty terrible so kind of kind of starts with these are your 24 words write them down never lose them yeah so basically and and then kind of you you have to click on uh you have to sign messages that you don't understand you kind of you don't know which sites you're connected to which contracts you've given allowance to and so on in order to kind of um roll this out to well quite quite frankly even for the people who are in the space now now that would be nice but to roll it out to even more people those

are things that kind of you absolutely have to fix right so how how do you think about those problems yeah I think we really are now at an inflection point where a lot of the fundamental technologies have been put in place of the last 10 years to solve those kind of technical problems uh I would call them we have been revealing the piking of how the technology Works to us this because there hasn't been a way to do it in a smooth way so examples you mentioned we we now have um the the innovation of pass Keys combined with Biometrics that can take seed faes out of the the picture right seed pH is the the recurring um pet issue for everyone in crypto even the veterans right where do you put your seed faes um now we can

solve that with biometric and paskis and smart wallets or smart accounts right so there's a combination of these technologies that finally are reaching maturity production Readiness if you will that allows us to solve a problem like that scalability is another one we have a lot of scalable scal scalability Solutions in play and now we are getting to the point where we can almost consider transaction cost round aable to zero but it takes time to get there right traditional Finance infrastructure has a 100 plus years to iterate on infrastructure and optimize it and we only had a 10 and 15 years to do so in uh in crypto or defi let's maybe dig into this so um tell us about the the P key Innovation for for um Keys H how

does that work so for zal um we pasis are P cannot yet be validated um on the base layer right so we have a smart contract uh that validates Pas keys on chain so that means that when you create a uh smart wallet a safe with Zeal we do two things we uh create a p validator contract that's unique to each user um which then creates a safe which is the signer the first signer and the deployer of the safe um that allows us to have consistent address space because we're always using this passy Val contract to deploy station and news chains and then we add on a second locally stored private key to do ongoing transactions

which allows us to get the best of both worlds the efficiencies of of signing with a a locally store private key um as well as the ability to uh use the pass key for consistent address space um as well as a recovery model that uses a Cloud solution like Google or or apple depending on where you store your P keys so where do you where do you store the private key the locally stored one yeah so the the second private key is stored locally uh in the in the application so I assume it doesn't leave the device that's right it's locally encrypted storage um and it doesn't leave the device in fact we we're we're also um we're basically not allowing people to export that private key at the

moment because the private key is is not meant to be exported the private key if you will is a the locally store private key if you will is a is a throwaway component of this model where the primary owner of the safes is the the pass key valid the contract and so when you then recover to new device a new locally store prate key is generated and then add into the safe for that device okay tell us a bit more about pass keys so kind of like if um say if I download Z as a mobile wallet and kind of I on board with Pass Key um does this Pass Key port to other devices so say I want to use it on my desktop yes as long as you have access to the same uh Cloud Model if you will you can then recover it also in the

desktop so indeed you can create it in your you can create in your phone and then recover it on the desktop or vice versa um and there is not yet in production and interoperability between Apple and uh and other ecosystems so that's something that is not just an issue for pasis in crypto but more broadly on how to create interoperability but I would say here the P key is a movement in web 2 is something that's being adapted and adopted at at scale right so it's something that is undergoing a lot of scrutiny uh and security research because it's securing a lot of value not yet in crypto um but in web 2 um and so it's always good of course as we know with in crypto to to work with the the

larger Trends um that is getting the most scrutiny because um that's where we can also build up security or time also one of the reasons why we're using the safe smart contracts and line for the smart wallet they are the most battle tested at scale securing the most value yeah that makes that makes sense so coming back to the P keys what's the underlying security model or the security assumptions kind of that kind of you you say kind of like part of it is is synced by the cloud so whom do I have to trust in order to use a py so for the recovery bottle you do rely on the the cloud that you have your pasis with um to be available uh that's for the covery and for the Alo transactions because the pases are validated U or the

transac validated locally store private key you don't rely on that um so in a worst case scenario if um if the cloud that you have your pass in would go down let say Google Apple Cloud would go down you still have the device that you have your local private key on um so you can still make transactions and you could then um replace that cloud and and migrate over to somewhere else as a as a back solution so so what just ass is the the the recovery from the cloud and then of course the local device which depending what kind of device what kind of security that has right if it's secured with usually Biometrics but could also be in some other kind of setup depending on the device okay so kind of if if you were to kind of think in in an adversarial way

um say the for instance Google or Apple are under an order to kind of resin your py and not let you access it anymore and for some reason you kind of you lost your phone with um the local key on it is there anything you can do if you lose both your phone and the cloud yeah if you lose both your devices and the cloud then there there's difficult to do a recovery than this but if you just if you lose one of them though um then then you add more signus so could I kind of say Okay I want to add um a hardware wallet say in NFC hardware water that I kind of keep somewhere you know safe in safe deposit

box or so that I I can use to kind of um reset or add a new key so this is the great thing about um using existing smart contract infrastructure like safe right that you have this ability to create a module a security model um our first version that's live in Pro today is a bit more opinionated um but we have the ability to add on indeed more signers so you can indeed have your uh your Ledger your treasure or whatever hard buet you prefer um but also more advanced secur models outside of that so you can move over to a two out of three model for example where you have a a guardian that validates certain of chain signals to do the second signature and allows a bit more flexibility so so

there's a lot because of the nature of a smart account there's a lot more flexibility in creating strong security models U that are also easy to use because we really need both it's and this is kind of emblematic of of crypto that we can have build very strong security models but they can also be very very hard to use right uh or you can have very simple security models but then then historically have not maybe been the most secure right and so finding the combination of both those worlds we have both strong security and ease of use is what is finally being enabled by a combination of smart accounts of some of these new technologies okay yeah that makes sense so when you think about um smart contract interactions this is um I mean you you you said that you're using saf as yeah underlying smart contract here

um so how how do you handle smart contract interactions because some of them are um very opinion opinionated about the fact that you should use them with an EA rather than smart account yes so I mean one um One Challenge there in the broader defi space isem managing of signatures right and smart contract signatures um but as we're seeing smart walls become more and more adopted this is something that we expect daps if they want to cater to the new audience coming in they will also have to adopt standards to manage smart contract signatures so yeah there's there's definitely challenges in there but if you look at the the key Dabs out there they do handle new standards for that um so if you also think about a new

wave of people coming in they probably won't start with the most exotic of DBS right they will start with the daps that do support smart wallet signatures and also the smart wallet developers or Builders like like Zeal will OB ly lead traffic to the to the applications and experience that do support those signatures to not create broken user Journeys right um so I think it's another one of those um small bumps on the road in terms of figur out the infrastructure that has to be in place for us to create great experiences for people speaking of great experiences I think it's very notable that the zal app um very is very mobile friendly SL

caters ostensibly primarily to mobile users what how did you make that decision so we built that Dr with the mobile app first and then a web app came second um when we went into zal we built a browser extension so zal is right now available both as a browser extension as an IOS app and an Android app um and they look almost the same to be honest uh because the browse extension format is actually not that different from that of an iOS or an Android app uh so it's a it's a react react native uh application that looks pretty similar across the the different platforms uh and we think that's a that's a a format that people are quite acquainted to use and also

because it is the same on all three means we can also have a very high rate of of progress and development where we basically launch the same feature across three platforms at one go so if you look at the feature set of zeal it's very advanced in multiple areas uh Z is the the only wallet that has uh free an Bank transfers of a onchain uh integrated deeply into the wallet um or or nosis pay cards right so you can see in manager knows his pay card directly in there again across three Platforms in one go um so embracing the mobile experiences and making that work across all three platforms uh is is a decision that allows us to both deliver something that is accustomed to users and allows us to move

fast yeah talk about the iban and the north pay card Integrations yeah um so this is a a key unlocker for us um and for the industry more broadly uh being able to use your crypto right um one thing is being able to I don't like the word about off and on ramp ramp implies that there's like a latitude or height difference sh transfer is more even if you will um B is the first feature we launched that allows people to not think of their crypto assets as locked in a casino but rather just another account if you will another another bank account another wallet that should be seamlessly moving between them um but still it require people to move money from the chain wallet to their

bank account in order to spend them U but now that we have cards that allow you to spend not just um crypto that you sold in Fiat there a lot of so-called crypto cards out there that aren't really crypto cards they just allow you to very easily sell your crypto into a Fiat balance and then spend that what the nosis pay card does and and with that deal is to spend your on gen assets right so um within Zeal on all three platforms you can import either order in unpay card or import an existing one and see all the card activities see your card details you can freeze the card if God forbid you lose it or you can also very easily add more uh cast to the card by clicking button doing a coose chain

uh top up swap um so that's uh that's one of the key building books to make this feel more like a self codal bank if you it's not a bank obviously but make it feel as an experience um as broadly useful and applicable as a new bank would so super happy about having now those kind of key building blocks for for the zal experience that makes uh makes people be able to put their crypto to use yeah super nice and you initially said you're currently targeting mostly people who are already in the space so when you look at your users what makes them swap is it kind of is a which what makes them swap to to to zal because I mean obviously if you're a user you

already have a wanted so what makes them swap to zal is it kind of like this Legacy Integrations um narrative that kind of you can use it as a bank account you can top up top up from your bank account um fairly seamlessly that you can spend the cash what's the main value proposition for people who switch Yeah uh it's it's interesting to see it's it's a it's a popular thing in crypto to complain about metamask yet it's by far the largest wallet that the uses right and there's a reason for that is because it's been round for long time people are are are used to trusting it right so it's not enough to just just build a wallet that's 10x better in

terms of featur set versus metamask but it's also important to bring something completely new to the place uh so if you put Zeal side by side with metamask now we have um routing across different exchanges ZX 1 in uh doing route optimization across all the underlying markets so get the best rates we have brid optimization with sockets so you can get the best possible route to wherever you want to move your assets um but but all these things are not enough if you will um and so what we're seeing now to be some of the most highly retentive use cases where people who once they try it they really really stick around are indeed the ones that bridge between the real world finance and the onchain finance um so when we think about I said the target market we

think there's probably somewhere around half a million people people who are Crypton Natives and want to use their crypto on chain crypto in real life today it's it's a rough guestimate maybe it's a million you know but the point is that's still a very small Market in the grand SCH of things it's a tiny Market considering especially it's a global tiny market right so that can really just be the starting point but it is also a good starting point in terms of finding people who have Zeal if you will who have passion and who are who are very interested in this and so um if we can deliver the things that they expect from a normal wallet even better like a metam musk and then combine it with a very differentiated use case that they haven't been able to find anywhere else before which is free Bank transfers and

car payments in one place um then we think and we see also for users who come in and try these features that that is what makes them really excited makes us stick around and continue to use Zeal and if we take a step back then okay so why does that matter when we have you know the next billion people or whatever somebody want use for that it's because it's the people who are in the space today that will on board the people that coming tomorrow whether they are sex converts or cryptocur or sexist centralized exchange by the way uh what where they coming in from right they will talk to you and to me and say hey um what is this what should I do and so that's why it's important to to have the uh the trust and the usage of the

existing people in the space right because they are the ones that then will tell the next person coming yes you know you should try out um use this St here and then they will say oh okay but how do I get my money in there and instead of saying here's a stack of five different solutions to get your money in there they can say well you know but far these is ways to create a wallet at the touch of a finger using Zeal on ramp within a minute without any fees and then you can use that app you can buy the token or even you know nfts if it has a Revival right whatever it is that you want the the or suggesting that your friend to do they can do much easier there right so that's why in in the grand scheme of things while the total

lble Market is much larger the First Market is people who are in crypto today when you think about the totally addressable market right now we're talking about people who are in no way under banked so kind of like everyone who uses a Zeal wallet probably has three other bank accounts that have the functionality of a seal wallet minus the onchain stuff um at also zero cost to them I mean coming from revolute I mean I I would say probably at least in Europe everyone under the Agee of 45 or so um Banks within new bank right kind of so this is already what people kind of expect like a Seamless app um that kind of allows

you to spend and send um how do you think about um the segment of the world population that is underbanked or unbanked so actually we have a lot of Us coming in from those markets um we don't have Bank transfers available yet in um you know whether it's in Africa or or or Asia or Latin America um but we see a lot of interest in there not just Zeal but also other wallets um some of that demand if you will is as simple as getting access to the dollar uh which in its digital form is a is in many places an easier form of dollar to access to escape the local fiat currency and get

access to the dollar and so Zeal adding on more uh territories with licensed cases like backers and cards uh will also enable users people um zealots if you will uh to to get access to to the dollar and also other Financial Services on chain uh the the overing I guess the question we're poking at here is like why why a wallet um versus traditional Financial Services as well in some places they're hard to get access to the dollar but in some places they actually people do have financial services and they're quite optimized Financial services and I think the the overarching why here is if you just think about first principles we've been optimizing

the the defi or open fire or crypto stack for 10ish years and so we haven't optimized it down to its most efficient for we're getting there right we're we're getting much closer to it but on a first principal basis if you don't have custodians if you don't have intermediaries then there is more money to keep for yourself or whoever you're transacting with fewer fees to pay trefi has had 100 plus years to optimize that stack and that's why in some cases you still see the fee structure being more compressed being more efficient in trafi but that's because we haven't had as much time now I don't think we need 100 years to make it optimized in in defi we're already getting to there to now where we have several places where it's it can basically round off to zero um

but on a first princial basis we will be able to deliver more value for people with with Defi and permission for finance because there are fewer custodians intermediaries whether that's in in Nigeria or Colombia or Sweden uh or Indonesia how do you think about gas fees in the long run because earlier you said kind of like in there are already used cases where kind of you can run down to zero do you think this is something that apps will abstract away from the user or is this something that that's here to stay the managing an infrastructure comes with costr and so the question is just um well first of how big is the what the magnitude of that cost and also

who takes the cost uh we're already seeing now a mixture of that so if you look at 4327 we see look at uh gas instruction and sponsorship a large chunk I think actually majority of transactions in are actually handled by uh by gas sponsorships um and so you have U whether it's a wallet specific use cases or daps that have a business model elsewhere subsidizing those transactions but then there will be transactions that are without any other uh application con to it where a user might pay for that transaction orbe it at a at a very extremely small cost that is basically round rable to zero so I I don't think there's going to be one single dominant model on that and that's also not what we're seeing today we

actually are seeing a diversity of that uh where where both users and application developers are paying for it again the parallel here is to to traditional Finance if you will where um a normal institution or bank has to think about okay um what where do we make money and where do we what what's the profit Center what's the cost center now where do we give value back to users and where do we charge for users and similar will happen but in a more distributed and unbundled way in defi where there are some places that money is made and there's some other places where where things cost and this whole stack will like dynamically relocate depending on the use case between users paying for some stuff themselves and for dep developers or wallard wallets or um yeah fun it

for Z is on several chains and I think this this is probably this evaluation probably would vary a lot um kind of looking at different chains right kind of like say you want to attract away gas on ethereum that's harder to do than say um on on base or nois chain um it's just because you know the the the margin is much uh yeah I mean you kind of have to have a much better margin in order to be able to kind of abstract it the way on those do do you see different models emerging that are kind of in keeping with the cost of transaction on different chains yeah that's I mean that is what's

happening right so um the the fee structure is very different um we'll we'll continue to see base layer optimizations that will D dive down those costs but we'll also continue I think to see more layers um maybe with slightly weaker security guarantees but that allow other types of use cases where that is okay and and how those costs are paid that will also vary um but we'll we'll need to get to a place where whether this is a layer two or or layer three um or whatever layer where we can basically get to smaller transactions where the cost of the transaction is is basically vulnerable to zero um we are in practice that that including ver stream um on on several places today a lot of time right um that

it's basically chemical said as as nil um but there also people still are willing to make transactions on ethereum uh ultimately the user is the one that decides whether they are either willing to pay for this themselves or whether they are wanting to use the value and pay for the value of a application that is subsidizing it but ultimately it's the user that decides on what they want to do what they're willing to pay for either with attention or with money and through which path and so I think what's very important for us is to build the things that people want um not just games but also financial services that people want um and then we'll experiment with those different models uh whether it is transaction Fe subsidized by a

different part of an experience or whether it's user themselves paying for for transactions on on on a use experience how do you handle interoperability so say I have funds on one chain you support and I want to do something on another chain you also support um will you expose that to real or will you kind of just handle it under the hood yeah so first is in networks seal is a an evm wallet we support every evm Under the Sun um there are some networks that we have uh Stronger feature sets so we have deep D5 portfolio on 50 plus networks where you can see chainable rewards you can see uh your your balance is just a SEO drop you know um and then there's a smaller subset of 10 networks

where we have safe support so we support smart wallets uh with a consistent address space so one unlocker for the multichain experience of uh all the smart W is have a consistent address across all the networks um but ideally and I think this what we're getting to users shouldn't have to think about multiple networks and so what is the future of chain abstraction there are multiple interesting attempts I would say now at this um where um different Builders are indeed uh creating harmonized balances Universal balances of assets across different chains intent protocols where you say I want to do this thing over here uh and then you can okay pull asset from different networks uh in an abstracted way um I think this is part where we don't have the solution

yet the or we might have the solution but it's not in prod if you will yet um but it's something that a lot of Builders are very actively thinking about um long term though I don't know if we live in a in a in a world where um all the non if you think about not the first million people but the the next 100 million people if they actually will navigate across 10 different chains whether in a in an un abstracted or un abstracted way uh I can very easily see that the future of connecting Real World Finance with unchain finance will be a bit more opinionated and that there will be certain use cases that are very closely connected to one specific chain and when a user person wants to go deeper they can then decide if they want to experience a bit more of the chains

depending on how obstruct it is so if I say that more concretely and tangibly right what what's happening tomorrow or today um it's that a user who comes in and says I want to get an onchain visa and start earning 10% of my deposits they don't even need to know that that is happening in ois chain unless they click Advanced details and dig into it right um but that doesn't mean that they're not using a self-goal wallet with onchain assets fully at their own in their own control right um and that's happening now so chain abstraction is I think a mixture of both opinionated experiences where user actually doesn't need to know it and then a bit further time frame um when users do want to go across multiple chains that they don't

even have to know that they're going across multiple chains when they are with with some of these efforts yeah that that that makes a lot of sense um when you think about kind of like defi protocols and say staking applications and so on um that people who um use Z want to use is it something that you bring into the wantet or do you make people kind of go so kind of do you see the one kind of almost as a browser um and terms of kind of like accessing these different applications or do you just make people connect to it and then handle those totally differently so this is actually a super

inting question where um to what degree do you select and curate and King make if you will certain applications to what degree is it just an an open Buffet an infinite Buffet of of different applications um and in revolute land in traditional finest land um you have have monolithic companies that do a lot of the services in house there are business Partnerships but a lot of it is like a monolithic structure and not that much flexibility in in selecting various permission free services whereas you have that flexibility in in in defi at the same time Choice can be very overwhelming right so if a user comes in and says I want to get the highest yield on my deposits um then saying okay go and look at this catalog of thousand

different service providers um that is not necess the best user experience right so striking the balance between how much is curated and how much is opinionated and how much um is the use of themselves exploring is a fine balance and in Zeal today we have a d browser an Explorer if you will where you can um see a catalog of all different categories of of apps coming from from D radar is what we use to that catalog and um but also there are certain experiences that are more opinionated where um there's is quick access to something um so it's a fine balance um and we we have an approach to that um I don't think we've found the right the perfect

approach to yet either because it's important at the end of the day to have used choice in this this is the promise of permission free finance of of open finance is for for people to be able to make their own choices decide what they want to do um but not completely without some uh some handholding and and recommendation so traditionally this is kind kind of one of the areas where wallets try to monetize their product right kind of like more or less kind of like selling preferential treatment within the dep browser in some way or kind of setting things as for and so on how do you guys at zo think about monetization so today we we have a

number of different fund money flows if you will or asset flows inside the product um none of them are charged with fees so um we do we we can swap inside zal you can Bridge inside zel you can pay cards there's gas abstraction you can pay for your gas and VAR tokens there are all these different ways that that asset are flowing through the product which could theoretically have a fee attached to them um first off we need to build experiences that people love um and really the bigger picture here is not this first 500,000 customers the bigger picture is the the next 10 100 million billion people um and so the the focus really now we think should be on uh if you have the the capital to to

manage a service like this in the short term at least to to focus on delivering user value to maximize user value um but if you look at business models and how these things can be monetized also in a per permission free environment where the user can decide is to offer services that the user can decide and pay and opt into But ultimately the US is the one that decides and in TFI the fees are sometimes hidden Al the regulations try to make them transparent and they're kind of enforced there's no way for you to avoid the let's say the FX fee on on a bank right it's there you don't really have a choice um in a in a self- custodial permission free wallet uh there will be options for you as a user

and so you might be willing to pay for the convenience of using uh an integrated swap which we don't charge for but in the future maybe that could be something to to charge for right um but first off is to just um deliver the best possible user experience and you build something extremely sticky and retentive um and then there are are lots of of of business models that can be built on top of something that facilitates or enables people to to to manage their assets do do you um allow Integrations with external Financial tools so for instance can I kind of uh can I build a tax reporting software portfolio tracker or something and kind of um plug it into Z since it's all you know ontain wallets

and assets um the the switching costs or barriers are very low you know you have your you have your wallets and you can obviously load them up into whatever accounting software uh zal as a piece of software um doesn't today have those uh external apis if you will that you can connect um but I think that's indeed and now we're seeing some work um with more modularity of of smart accounts 7579 being announced and some of these efforts right um that are opening up the space the design space for for more financial modules that are more closer connected to to the smart account um so first off we are very much focused on delivering the best possible user experience and use cases um and as we

see those getting more and more volume attraction then we can also look at opening up certain surfaces for an ecosystem or developers but first it really starts with the customer um we think there will be and there is happening more innovation in the space with modularity so why not EV have a a card where you can expose uh dap image certain metadata that can very easily be surface to users who want to use a certain application um so creating more more modular ways of integrating uh adaps into a a user-facing experience that doesn't require you to go offsite to a separate T page with its own with its own context but rather having it a much more integrated um way that's

slightly opinionated but still leaves a lot of a room for expression for individual developers how do you think about privacy because kind of like when I think about adoption kind of for the for the next 100 million people or so that seems to be the biggest block at this point so people rightfully expect privacy from Financial applications so kind of I mean when we talked about earlier that basically Z wallet can more or less everything that kind of a Neo Bank wallet can do this is true true but at the at at the cost can uh at the cost of exposing everything you do to uh The Wider public and it's very easy to kind of um tag wallets and kind of infer

whose wallet is what so kind of you can't you can't even say well doesn't say it's fed's wallet people will still know it's my wallet or people can find out it's my wallet um H how do you think about that two aspects of of privacy first just in terms of our our thinking on privacy and then more broadly how to make uh finances uh private um the since we we are very strictly a software developer so we don't have any customer relationships and what I mean by that is we we we are we are not kyc customers we don't have any we don't actually even have the addresses of our customers we don't store the wallet addresses of who's using Zeal so if you asked me which wallet addresses are using Z today

I couldn't say that because we we don't store that um and we don't want to store that we are a piece of software we're like a Louis Vuitton wallet except made out of leather we made out of bits and bites so that's in terms of like the the privacy and and when it comes to transactions they are um they are before they go to the RPC uh through through Zeal they're being relayed through our backend which does not store any information about the user right so in one way it's also almost kind of like a an RPC VPN if you will or um or anonymizer um of course the RPC will see that transaction came from from the Zeal endpoint from zeal uh but not um but not more than that um so we take we take uh privacy and and user information very very seriously um then the kind of

bigger topic which people coming into crypto might not realize is inde like onchain privacy so if I if I do a peer-to-peer transfer to you then that's on chain I can see it um same thing here we're now I think getting to a point where there's a lot of infrastructure work and solutions that have been iterated and built on across the the last couple of years um um know tornado cache um had its complexities I'm I'm personally very curious to see how the next generation of privacy pools so building off the learnings from tornado cach and making it compliant with proof of inclusion and proof of exclusion in privacy pools I think that's quite an interesting approach um there are other builders as well that doing here things here of course the the the lead topic here is how can you create privacy while

at the same time uh reaching compliance for um for making it actually useful and viable right and I think that's what's really interesting with the efforts of of prives so um when we bring on a lot more users that are not crypto natives they will take privacy for for granted they will just assume that when you make transfers or payments of your card that's synonymous and so it's more like they will not saying that they're private those transactions will not be a value proposition for them it's a hygiene thing no one coming in from web 2 and you tell them oh by the way no one will know that you're making payments that's it's like a a hygiene thing it's not really something that they will go like oh great cool like this this moly is without uranium exactly exactly you

know um and and I think I said in the beginning like we're reaching an infection point this this is I think so exactly what's happening in multiple areas we're reaching a point where some of the hygiene Plumbing if you will can now get under the surface and we don't have to explain to people same thing when someone comes in we shouldn't have to tell them oh by the way your transaction is not going to cost $10 and you going to have to wait 50 minutes for the transaction to settle that's not the expectation in web 2 and if you sell that sell that to someone coming into web 3 it's not really a selling point so um a lot of the infrastructure Solutions are like the table sticks that we finally sorted so now we have like solid legs under the table and and a nice

cloth and now we need to cook a great meal on top of this table um we have we have the building box in place now let's make a fantastic meal that tastes really really good and that that point that Reflection Point is now now all those things are in place and we can start start making some sushi or whatever shood cool yeah let's talk about kind of the backand that kind of supports um the seal wallet so kind of do you do you run your own noes do you rely on that party providers and how how do you make that decision so we don't run our notes we work with um a number of different um note providers in the space we have uh we have fallbacks so we have um of course everything goes if you're if you're working with a a network that we

have direct support of it goes through through far back and and then to to kind of this skating waterfall of node providers um so we work with uh with quick node Alchemy INF Etc the the virus node providers depending on the network because we support a very large range of networks and so we have a mix different node providers and also making sure that uh we give really strong performance for um for gas abstraction and account abstraction for on the on the transaction side uh we're currently working with B economy um so uh when you're when you're doing a BND transaction uh that goes through through bomy okay and how um how do you store the local data so say for instance I give my wallet names or kind of i i u

attach a note to a transaction or so where's that stor so kind of if I if I do that on my phone and I I log on to my computer to the same account with Z I expect to also have that data available right so you don't um so from that point of view there's no there a concept of a a Zeal account on our back end i. every installation that you make of zeal on any device is a local installation that you set up and so when you do go cross device um you will then need to install that wallet or whatever wallets you had on on one device also on another device we have no concept of of combination of wallets that we can like recover for you which is a a choice right it's intentional because you decide yourself

where you want to have which wallet and and what you want to get Associated between your wallets but can you let me syn so for instance see say I get a new phone uh can I kind of just somehow transfer that information I mean without kind of like passing it to you just kind of passing it between my own devices the smoothest transfer right now and you can experience this if you just install Z is um the smart wallets so you install that you set it up with Biometrics you do the a setup Cloud recovery with your with your pasy solution uh and then delete the wallet and then you can install it on another device and then do recovery and you'll get that smart wallet recovered with again just a touch of a finger or face

uh on the next device um exporting your whole wallet setup and all if you have multiple wallets added um we we don't have any easy exporting like that we definitely don't want to do it on on our backend and store that state and you know have that be exportable um but if that's something that users want the the zealots if people want that that's something that we could build right um the the very short term um we we think it's not going to be for users are using daily Finance probably won't have about 20 wallets in there so we recovering the new di will primarily we think would be um uh recovering your smart wallet and then adding on a couple of other wallets that you that you have stuff on and so we have a facility need export

experience of that right now but if people want that then we're we're listening extremely closely as we a wallet that launched a month ago um we are listening very closely to users to to hear what what people want and really doubling down on on their asks so now I know there's at least one users that want an easy expert mode uh I do I do so what what's your um I mean kind of you you come from a very growth heavy background so tell us about kind of your insights into grow and skating on web 3 what what are what are the tactics that you'll use for z um that's a very broad uh subject area very broad yeah absolutely two thoughts well as a as a new Builder

product Market fit is the the number one thing to focus on right to make sure that you build something that people love and so that's what we're obsessing about now is to listen to what people want and really doubling down on that and building more of what people are saying that they want and the and eradicating any pain points that they might have so things that they're that they're not liking um and and I think in crypto tradition last couple of years you know proiv Market fit has often been obsc scored by tokens um uh Distributing a token is not equivalent to par Market fit but that's quite often been the the case of intermingling those two um and the first thing is really to to make sure that people love what you're offering without any additional incentives so that's first of of what we're doing um but then indeed there are

lots of incentives that fting around and I think the the crypto space is also the one that's been um done a lot of actually Innovative exp experiments as well with with incentives in various houon forms because of the the liquid nature of assets in our industry right um so I think there are some very interesting things to do uh also in crypto using incentives especially we tap into uh kind of these semi um offchain use cases that are card is is kyc right so already there you have some uh civil protection and so um you can work with some of the mechanics that have been experimented with a lot in in crypto uh in a more even efficient way when you also add in uh add in some of the the the traditional Finance use

cases but first off is just build something people love and listen very closely to what what what they don't love about what you're building and so that's what we're obsessing about now so when you think about um 5 years into the future so it's so very long time by kind of like crypto standards um where do you see zeil at so zeil um will be one of the drivers of making crypto useful um and finally deling I said on the real promise of cash making crypto useful in the daily life um people will be able to uh think of cash not just as this forgotten thing when the fiscal cash will get eradicated but have digital cash side by side with

their centrally custody assets um we're not uh by any means like decentralization maximalists that think that the whole world will become tokenized and decentralized um yes we do believe in that that a lot of things will be tokenized and centralized but not everything um we think 5 years out these worlds will uh go side by side and users will be able to choose um what delivers the most value for them and so if you will it's kind of like open fire the connection of traditional finance and decentralized Finance in a in a in a more integrated World um so F out I see people um having some of their assets on centralized codan because they don't want to to to to have that that responsibility or um or take care of that and some assets they will use in a

more permission free way um and they will work with they don't realize this prot because they won't call it a protocol anymore um but they will work with a a savings account or an earning account uh always right um but it will be very natural it will not be a uh oh yeah I'm into crypto it won't be that it'll just be like oh yeah I I'm using Zeal and I have some stuff on in this wallet and some stuff in this other wallet oh it's a bank account yeah they're you know they're kind of side by side one is self cust and the other one is Central cust it yeah I mean people also don't say I'm into internet backing right I mean this this would be exactly people don't say people don't say uh yeah I think revolute has really good

AWS solution yeah it's fantastic it's really good it uh you can barely yeah I know yeah I I I totally hear you here um so say people want want to try out zal where do they go um how do they inform your product road map by giving you feedback and uh H how um how do you generally interact with um with um the users we z. apppp Z not seal like animal but zal as as being passionate for cost so z.a and that's our own page or zal wallet.com or zal wallet on Twitter um any of those uh you can find zal um we we have most of our our zelot interaction um happening on Discord so

discord. zelot app also linked from any of the the power platforms I mentioned um where we we do very regular um interview testing sessions uh often several times per day we'd love to chat with you U with you or or anyone else who wants to try Zeal and we often do like a half an hour chat where uh you can try zasi is if you haven't already but also prototypes of things that are coming um and so we we try to prototypes every day this is what we've been doing here at Buel and MEC is to uh show our prototype new build uh and have people click on it and see when they smile and when they cry so far no one crying so that's a good thing uh and then just hit me up on a DM I'm gradient g r a a d i n t maybe it's

going to be in the notes um also very happy to do to do over DMS or or video um telegram Twitter Discord any of the above um you're the boss if you're the customer you're you're the boss uh you decide and so we'll listen to you wherever you want to talk to us perfect thank you Hannis thank you so much for coming on thanks for having us uh Fred and de Center