Mobile DApps are Built Different Panel - Jarrell James, Marek; TBA (MetaMask) and Ashley Taylor

um so yeah why are we here what are we doing uh the thing that we gotta like look at is what are the audiences that are actually using mobile apps who are the devs that are actually building mobile apps i would like anybody in here to guess what do you think the actual like population density is of web3 devs that also have like react experience or really any kind of mobile development experience uh silence any guesses no one five percent ten percent it's not not it's not five percent it's less you think it's higher you think it's higher i would say it's probably between five and ten percent those who actually have confident solidity experience and competent mobile development experience and could actually build like robust mobile dapps that affect billions people's lives and so big part of what we're doing here is actually starting the first mobile track at east denver of any ethereum conference has ever happened and the point is what's up yeah yeah the thank you i was a really big passion of mine i really wanted to say i was like eat denver let's have a mobile track it's weird that we don't um and i imagine this will be a much more populated room in about three years so um without further ado i'd like us to get into the panel and we'll introduce uh everybody involved uh so let's start with merrick introduce yourself thanks jerrell and yeah big fan of having a mobile track whew um hey everyone my name is mark koscievsky i'm one of the co-founders of cello which is a mobile first blockchain we worked really really hard to make uh cello uh work extremely well on mobile devices we have a like client that is extremely efficient that uses zk snarks and a lot of people in the ecosystem really care about usability and accessibility for mobile devices and so that is our focus it's great to be here hi everyone i'm ashley taylor i'm one of the co-founders of resource resource is a platform for businesses to access credit in an alternative kind of stable coin that they don't actually have to buy to participate they can just start earning it by providing their products and services hey everyone um one of the team at balance and balance is a wallet that is for the iphone and is very focused on the new opportunity that's afforded to us by safari ios extensions uh we have a working prototype if you'd like to try it and it's a balanced io hi my name is henry i'm the co-founder of ghani and ceo ghana is a mobile service a free mobile service where users insert their sim card and start earning ghana tokens that go into their included wallet our objective is to get millions of users into the blockchain from the middle and low-income communities in latin america that's pretty based all right well this thank you guys for joining us here and thank you and the folks at home for being interested in where crypto goes when it comes to mobile development um i will start off with barrick uh you're the only one up here who's actually focusing on a layer one that is mobile first and trying to create the ecosystem uh tools and infrastructure for mobile adapts to exist uh i was curious obviously you've been involved in ethereum for a while what are the major differences that you see between between ecosystem teams that are coming out of cello and ecosystem teams from more traditional legacy chains such as ethereum and could you give us a couple examples or one example of a team that highlights this difference uh the best sure yeah uh so fun fact when we first started cello um we did so after trying to build a decentralized venmo on top of ethereum so we worked really hard to build um effectively something that would allow anyone to send stable value really easily to any phone number in the world and we tried to do that on ethereum four years ago and you know as you can imagine it was quite difficult to do that and so when when we failed we said okay i think let's try uh building a layer one that actually uh has all of the primitives that you would need in order to build a decentralized venmo on top of and so um that meant that you know absolutely we wanted it to be fully ebm compatible and so we kept that um but we also layered on a few additional features and you know the first is a light client that actually works on mobile devices uh if you think about um ethereum um it's it's incredible um but sadly the light client uh is way too heavyweight to actually realistically use on your mobile device right which is why every wallet today uses infuria or some other trusted rpc node and so we wanted to to create a like client so we did that next up addresses as as amazing as publicly derived addresses are for identity um it's it's very clear that we can do better especially as we try to onboard more and more users in the world and this is a mobile track and luckily phone numbers are extremely good addresses that you know if you look at what's going on in places that use mobile money you know people are really kind of flocked to and so we worked on a decentralized phone verification protocol that makes it really easy to send value to phone numbers and then finally we wanted just to make it really easy to actually pay for gas with things that people were selling sending and so we added the ability to send or to pay for transactions with any erc20 token which means that you can actually pay for gas with stable coins and so if you combine all of these things together then you can actually start building decentralized venmos and kind of for your second part of your question you know what's a great team that that's working on this well we had denise up here uh two panels ago from from veloura you know that's an example of of uh one of the companies in this space doing that hold your no continue but hold your mic a little closer yeah well that's everything um sorry about that interruption uh another great company by the way is resource network over here i was gonna get into that um yeah ashley i have like you know i met you through ecosystem like stuff in like the whole web 3 space in general ashley's actually pretty og one of my best friends in this space was introduced to uh ethereum by ashley like years ago so thank you for my friendship with cassidy daly so one of the things i heard from you in lisbon was like actually i had this idea for resource for a hot minute but i didn't have any like real chains that were out there that had the usability that allowed me to bring it into reality so you kind of floated around for a while working on other people's projects waiting for the functionality you needed so if you could speak to that like what was that functionality and how are you using it yeah so my journey was uh going out into the world in 2015 with the prototype of ethereum and specifically was working with farmers in upstate new york who you know if you know about like the farming industry small farming is an industry that's very much challenged right now economically from like large government incentives for bigger farms and so these are people that care and are passionate about farming and the land but they don't have a lot of extra cash they don't have a lot of extra time so it's really interesting to say well what could a technology like ethereum actually do for economic empowerment in a really fundamental way and what i started to realize is the design and the tokenomics of ethereum are really prioritizing the acquisition of eth and so how are these farmers who already didn't have time to learn about a new financial system who didn't already have access to capital how are they going to get eth to pay for gas fees so in 2015 i started to sort of see that the evolution of the space was going to take some time to get to the point where the actual end users that i cared about in terms of adoption were going to actually be present so i think when my co-founder david introduced me to cello and explained well no there's actually technologies out there that work today they're easy they're cheap of course there's still a lot we have to do in the space to ensure that usability and adoption can continue but for now cello is our best choice because it actually has solved the usability problem of today and i think that that will continue to remain a challenging part of our ecosystem is how do we optimize for the development of the new economic financial system that continue to make these decisions that allow inclusion and empowerment yeah i mean like realistically we have to look at the fact that we all bought into and we all perpetuated the idea of banking the unbanked quite a while ago and then there's the realities of like chain uh chain you know constraints that don't actually allow for that community to participate in maybe some of the more expensive legacy chains however it sounds like you're also saying that even though cello is your best option now there's a lot to be done like if there's suddenly a huge uh onboarding into cellular ecosystem like the prices and the gas fee could potentially still go up and it could essentially like be in the same position so it's about being vigilant and seeing how your users are affected um and that kind of like lets me segue for uh rick because i find that you're you're i'm gonna get into the safari plug-in thing later so we don't need to get to the functionality of how your thing works but for when i understand like you're essentially um building this for the mobile market but i get from what i hear you're looking at the populations that are like gen z and you're like looking at like these next generation of mobile devs well maybe ashley and merrick were initially looking at like okay there's markets that are currently right now but as everyone here knows like ios is not the device of like emerging markets or the developing world or the global south but you're saying okay yeah but there are still mobile users that can be on board into crypto from other markets and i'd love to hear what you have to say about that yeah i always say um the past of ethereum is middle-aged wealthy and on twitter and the future of ethereum is young on tick-tock and you know kind of really mobile native and those are the people who are going to bring the kind of fresh perspectives the new ideas the new energy it's certainly not the kind of semi-successful and floating around the world uh twitter arty who ship nothing in their lives and so i'm really thinking when i hear all these kind of fantastic visions for how ethereum can deliver the future or let's mine asteroids and turn them into tokens or you know maybe we can restructure politics inside my head i'm just screaming it doesn't [ __ ] work on your phone i mean literally if you try and use so many daps with any of the systems that are available right now they barely function or they don't render the transaction or something it gets dropped somewhere between the app and the wallet and just overall the experience has been so terrible because there's been this gap between the browser on the phone and the wallet on the phone but that gap has now been bridged and and that's why i think there's an opportunity to make a product that affords really interesting development environment and something that the kids can use because many people here have a desktop but that's really not what most people are exposed to they're exposed to apps and web apps and websites so we're doing it for the kids i'm doing it for the kids yeah definitely um uh yeah i love that i i will have some follow-ups on that in a second but henry our surprise uh panelist edition but i i like i hear what you're doing i think it's pretty interesting so let's just dive into it uh you're basically focused on bringing internet connectivity to uh these communities and you've decided to use crypto as the easy means with which to do that so i'd love to hear what you think about like ios and android being devices of of the emerging markets versus like established markets and what's your experience been definitely android is 99 of the users in in emerging markets latin america has 500 prepaid mobile users users that hate their service their plan they have to go queue up pay a couple dollars that it's going to last a couple of days but they don't have any other option the reason they have to do that is because they have no credit they have no credit they use cash in 2017 less than 50 percent of these people had a smartphone even if we've had smartphones forever um in 2019 over 88 percent today over 90 percent of these users have a smartphone and yet they still use cash um so so these people are very smart they're just ignorant of the fact that their smartphone is already a mobile wallet in waiting so what we're doing is is bringing them free mobile service so that they can get rid of the prepaid and in boarding them and bringing them by the masses to this new world that belongs to just very few people and and and you know make them leap over the banks yeah so to uh your point like you're talking about the assumptions that are made around how they think the cell phone their smartphone interacts and and gives value to their life as a whole which is actually pretty interesting there's a computer scientist named marcia mcluhan who talks about the assumptions of the west and how we develop our technology for specifically those who are are using it and it's like okay if you're using a desktop wallet or like that's that's what you think is the right thing to do and so you're saying there's there's a lot of value in pioneering people's perceptions around the mobile phone being a perfectly feasible reasonable way of like having wealth accumulation and even an identity protocol yeah yeah and i just think that even as i kind of turn the corner on my 30s i can't quite tap into what kids are doing with some of the most cutting-edge mobile interfaces and so to remain fresh to remain young to really understand how kids who've grown up with phones through their high school and how they can kind of throw together edits on tick tock or they can use certain memes to reference other memes to find create mazes so people can't understand there's just a whole interesting digital world that's occurring inside their minds and inside their social circles that that many of the people at this conference are just simply not party to and i'm i'm trying to understand it because i think there is the kernel of the excitement of the adventure of joining a dao or exploring an interface or voting in some kind of new opportunity or creating some new tool and i guess i'm not sure specifically what will emerge from this set of opportunities but just that i want people to be able to construct transactions of any complexity with simple interfaces um you know and with with the object that they can afford through a subscription in their pocket i mean yeah i think that's a really worthwhile i uh idea though one of the things i think can hold that back is the fact that there are uh gatekeepers that exist in the mobile world i mean realistically speaking the ios like if apple decides tim cook wakes up with a bad mood like you guys could have an entirely different like product roadmap so if there's any issues that you've run into with wheeling with app stores i think that it'd be worthwhile to hear about them that's an open question by the way yeah well i do think that apple has um uh not been so familiar with this protocol and the opportunities or if you think about apple they make objects that give people access to protocols you wouldn't buy you know this black mirror in your pocket if it didn't connect to the internet and didn't act give you access to all this interesting information um but i think the vast majority of apps that have been submitted to them they felt were just not tasteful or were trying to hop onto trends and they didn't really have the kind of institutional knowledge to be able to sift through what was correct and what was not and that makes it a challenge for developers to push forward where i think things are changing three ways first of all tim cook has publicly stated he owns crypto and that's a very big signal he wouldn't do that publicly unless that was something serious second of all there are rumors that the secure enclave team the people who built the stuff that secures face id such id in apple pay are kind of working on a more interesting api for uh that will allow developers to to kind of sign messages inside and move keys in and out and thirdly i happen to know that several of the senior management apple have gone from crypto being a small percentage of their portfolios for it's being a very large percentage of their portfolio so number go up does help our case um but yeah we have a lot of work to do in our relationship with apple because it's a three trillion dollar country and we're kind of multi-trillion dollar protocol and we've got to start talking to each other better maybe just to add to that i think one of the things that we benefit though i'm sure it's a trade-off there are walled gardens but we also benefit from features that phones actually provide us right so if you're building a mobile wallet or a dap that's targeting mobile phones suddenly you're you have a whole manner of additional things that weren't available to you if you're building for desktop right the enclave i think is one a great example um obviously on apple it's been catching up on desktop as well but but you know gps's obviously are something that that have been incredible uh on mobile on web too but for web 3 there's a whole bunch of other things that can also be really great right contact lists are really really interesting right valora one of the things that it does is it uses that decentralized phone verification protocol i mentioned before and it allows you to actually send payments to people in your contact list in a fully decentralized manner right that's something that we can't do with desktop wallets that really from a usability perspective um makes things just so much more accessible push notifications are another one right if you have a a position in compound that's about to get liquidated getting a push notification right before that happens that could be quite useful and that's something that that we get on mobile that you don't necessarily have on this are you are you saying that there's a better way of finding out about that except for instead of just like watching my friends scream on twitter watch out yeah and actually apple just added an api where you can do push notifications from web apps and we're still just beginning to poke around with that new opportunity but one of the interesting things about the antitrust case against apple is it's forcing them to open up a bunch of new apis to kind of prove to the regulators that developers can have more flexibility than they otherwise would have had before um but but i think that also it's important to know that apple's one of the few companies that actually doesn't have the incentive to kind of know your brain and sell you an advert and so as a result i think the set of incentives that they have are quite well aligned with the ethereum community they just wish to sell you an object they focused on privacy security and and kind of not revealing your data to lots of ad networks because that's not their business and it does it does concern me that we've gotten to bed with so many projects and companies whose incentive is eventually to sell you an advert in some way i think there's an interesting uh future here where apple as the wild garden being subject to regulation and so when i think about crypto i always think about identity and reputation what i'm able to build across all different protocols i think that's really where the space is heading and if i'm building reputation across protocols that actually apple regulatory wise is not able to acknowledge anymore because they have to not enable that app and their ecosystem for regulatory concerns then there's going to be a real desire for a hardware that exists outside of the apple ecosystem so i think that's when we'll start to see some pressure that may go in a different direction i mean yeah and to your point the legality of everything is very interesting uh and to kind of further explain what you were saying because for everyone what you were trying to say with the ecsa being added to the secure enclave is essentially that your heart your phone your smartphone could be in fact become your hardware wallet that is like using biometrics from apple to log into your hardware wallet which is actually pretty huge for everyone up here i think as as as a direction for your your product roadmaps and i have a question for like merrick and then also henry and you guys can jump in but it is around like merrick from a layer one perspective you're funding an ecosystem or how or finding like people to come enter the ecosystem um i i think you're a lot of what you guys have done is try to like use otis to like secure mobile phones as like a gateway to crypto but do you see like hardware advancements in that fashion really taking your layer one to the next level because just it's all all encompassed yeah the secure enclave changes are really really exciting and it's not just on apple that you know we're looking forward to this but also on android um when we first started cello we were part of the google startup labs program and so we spent a lot of time with the android team um really letting really talking to them about um about adding this kind of functionality to their version of the secure enclave because absolutely it is just super super important right i think uh to get hardware wallet like security on your mobile phone that's incredible right this is why you know for example anchorage uses mobile phones over any other application because from their perspective it's much more secure than anything else they can offer that's in the custodial world but in the self-custody world um once these uh improvements happen i think it's going to be really really exciting yeah i want to give henry i want to give henry a chance to give us the android perspective on this real quick and then go back into discussing apple well the the android is is basically a an item where you can use your biometrics but at the same time remember that it has a sim card inside that in in our case in in ghana's case the sim card also has an id so the combination of the sim card on our network plus the biometrics of the android and the phone number that we give the user is is you know a lot of identity and it helps our users who are also the ones that receive remittances and make payments for their phone and and it's it's a very interesting uh tour the road is also coming with e-sims you know the ecms now are just in the top-tier phones but you know in a couple of years it's going to be in all android phones so so um there is all these points of contact with the same user that will make our our job in installing this wallet that instead of giving this huge mnemonic phrase we can use other points not only the hardware of the android and one thing i wanted to share is is if if things go the way we think they're going to go and these applications provide you with the superpowers we hope they do i think the objects that manage keys become almost as important or as significant as your phone and this is why you know one thing i wanted to share on stage is there are teams and people building new kinds of hardware wallets are you chilling on my panel right now i'm chilling right now this wonderful little object made by a guy in the back there in the orange hat so everyone just and he's building like an ipod touch of hardware wallets and exploring you know new kinds of objects and new kinds of things that that can be updated by a phone because again all of our hardware wallets require you to own a desktop in order to use them so we've got to think about the whole picture the whole story not just the software but also if we do need objects and we do need multi-six what's that going to look like and how we're going to make those accessible to people and maybe in the future your hardware or the thing that stores your keys is almost as important to you as your phone yeah i'm into that and the other day i saw a demo of a smart card that was um like an nfc style debit card that had a private key on it and you can pay with nfc and it signs a transaction in the actual card itself so that's really freaking exciting yeah it's pretty based um okay so now i mean let's segue that into the fact that we're at a developer conference like i mean first and foremost i think the denver people would be quite upset if we did not classify this as a developer conference and so one of the things i walk around i look out here i'm here to mentor people and help with a hackathon uh there is a very small community that that is inside the venn diagram center of like very talented solidity dev very talented mobile developer so what is it from your teams and from your ecosystems that you see that has been done to actually bring a larger population into that venn diagram because it doesn't really sound like anything you guys are building matters if there's not people that are actively pushing it forward at a fast rate to me um the the drive of the lower price of the transaction especially that cello brings is is one of the one of the most important parts of bringing blockchain to the to the to the you know emerging markets for sure and and this drive you know even if we're at in denver you know it's it's impossible to transact beneath so so to me that drive to lower costs and make and make speedy transactions you're saying lower the cost of barrier for a developer to even like interact with the main like the the layer one chain that's correct yeah yeah i have i have a set of rss feeds that kind of represent the ethereum community and the apple community and one of the real troubles i have is that many of my the kind of bloggers and and people who cover apple that i admire are just absolutely enraged by all the notions and marketing around web3 and so we have a huge bridge to kind of cross here in terms of convincing people who are very proficient at mobile development that the kind of ethereum is is is not a scam because many of them you know religiously read these kind of top 10 apple bloggers and commentary commenters and and many of them just loathe what we're doing because i you know and i quite frankly understand it because from the outside it is 90 hype and and um distasteful projects but once you're a bit deeper down you start to see the germs of some really new things so it is a real challenge and and many times i find myself searching more for people who just have incredible product taste and then over time trying to chip away at them on the ethereum side rather than trying to find people who have a deep understanding of ethereum and hope that they get better at mobile development because that doesn't seem to work that way and i've had a lot of challenges when it's been reversed yeah i agree with that it's like definitely on us to do the education and community building and in early days of ethereum i mean it was a white paper it was vision there was no utility and i think sometimes we think that we have all this utility and that people should just figure it out and come into the space and we forget that we're still in the days of really building out the ecosystem and continuing to motivate people and share why they should want to join and not just promote it as like you know a way to get rich quick there's actually really cool things to keep building here and i think doing more collaborative efforts amongst protocols around this mobile first effort would probably be the best thing that we could do sounds like you're also saying that there could potentially be uh an information wars to see who joins the steering committees of stuff like react and and other like mobile code languages um which i think you all should probably try and do um so i mean what about you merrick like where where do you find yourself landing on this like a layer one ecosystem obviously attracts a ton of developers because there's just a lot of opportunity but um yeah what's your experience with whose success succeeded the most yeah i think from our perspective the people who join our ecosystem tend to be people who one care about sellers mission of prosperity for all uh and two um want to build for that and if they're gonna build for that they have to build for mobile right i think if you're going to reach every person in the world the only way to accomplish that is with mobile and so that's worked pretty well you know the other thing that i think is interesting um you're talking about a um you know the younger demographic like this is getting easier every year right every year people are coming to us and yeah the idea of building for mobile first is obvious right it's it's what people grew up with um and so it just it gets easier every day every day yeah i think it's really exciting rick were you gonna add something i'm just gonna say one of the things that i struggle with is that when you receive a token there is no insight given to you from any product out there what powers that come with it and and you need to kind of piece it together through blogs and twitter and um maybe a discord channel but where i see it and i hope it gets to is that these tokens feel like they have superpowers and they arrive in your wallet and you understand that you can do chat and you understand that you can vote and you can understand that you can participate in events that are private to that group and that that it unlocks a kind of new world to you it should feel like a kind of invitation to go down a new rabbit hole um and right now i think token gated links that kind of pop you over to a discord channel that then eventually linked to something else it's just getting um narrower and narrower for the set of people that might be excited by that or that could actually make it down through those steps so for me i i hope that the products that we start to illuminate in the next year feel like when you receive this token and it's a cultural object that it's an access to a new world and and one thought i'd like to leave people with is what token would you never sell you know because i think that suggests something that's kind of property that's something that you care about that represents you something that you're obsessed with and i think something where you're not checking the price of it so that's how i feel like about it yeah uh well i would like to thank all of you for letting us how how you feel about it and uh i want to just like remind everyone like the future of mobile is definitely pretty bright there's a lot of topics we didn't discuss like areas like social recovery and just like a lot of the functionality that's like merrick was talking about that do come with mobile communities mobile hardware devices i think you should ask them questions afterwards if you'd like and yeah thanks for joining us for mobile mobile dapps are built different