Infra Is So Over: Onboarding in the Consumer Crypto Era

reporter at coindesk really excited for this panel today called infra is so over on boarding in the consumer crypto era I'm just going to welcome my panelists to the stage we have Jess holgrave from wallet connect Hillary scaving ton from Robin Hood crypto and hunis Gray from Zeal now I'm going to give each of you 30 seconds to just introduce yourselves lay the foundation for us so everyone in our audience knows who we're speaking to and then we'll dive into to our discussion Jess let's start with you hi everybody I'm Jess holgrave I'm the CEO at wallet connect um this conversation for me is super exciting I hope that infra isn't totally over given that wallet connect is a core infrastructure play for the ecosystem um but I do think that there's a lot of exciting things in terms of the consumer experience that's been enabled by the infer work over the last few years so excited to dive in thanks awesome Hillary hi my name is Hillary skevington I'm a product manager at Robinhood crypto C to um I cover onchain transfers and our on-ramp Robin Hood connect I'm super excited to be talking about consumer products in the crypto industry um I've been working in crypto since 2015 um for zapo bank which was a consumer uh Bitcoin wallet for a period of time so I'm definitely aware of all the problem points and how we can make crypto hopefully more a little bit more mainstream and hnis hello everyone my name is hannes gray um and I'm one of the builders at zal wallet which is a smart wallet where former revols which is a slightly more known brand than Zeal uh and we're moving into the smart wallet space because we think this is a key thing to enter the next billion people coming into the space so Zeal and hus all right now just before this panel everyone in the audience was asked who's building a consumer application and not everyone put their hand up and so my question for the panelists here on the stage today is is that a problem shouldn't everyone be thinking about whatever they're building as having a consumer application Hillary I see you nodding yes everybody should be building towards consumer products no um I mean I think there's a lot there there's infrastructure obviously for Developers for institutions there's a huge amount of um value in building those types of products I think if we really want to push this industry to a broader adoption there has to be a consumer facing point there um so I hope to see more hands next time I think for me it's less about should everybody be building a consumer product and more about should we all whatever we're doing be building with the end user in mind and I think that this is really key to creating great end user experiences um I often hear the term like how do we onboard the next billion users into crypto and I really hate it I'd much rather that what we were doing was taking crypto to the next billion users rather than thinking that they're going to come to us and so I think that when we're building infrastructure consumer products whatever they are what we need to be doing is thinking about who those consumers are and how we create amazing end user experiences for them um so this isn't about everybody building a consumer product but it has to be about everybody building with the consumer in mind um and I think that that is that's really what's going to drive future adoption Hest yeah Custer Obsession customer Obsession we need there is some customer Obsession but primarily the customers so far have been people in crypto and we need to have customer Obsession about people also outside of crypto and now we have a lot of infra in place so now we can start to obsess about their needs as as well Jess I want to come back to what you were saying how do you keep consumers top of mind a lot of the things that folks are building in this room are very technical there are a lot of challenges ahead uh a lot of products are in a beta phase at through each stage of building how are you keeping that end user in mind so that you know you're building along the right pathway I mean I think without just like going into normal product management kind of skills one of the the things that we think a lot about at wallet connect is standards right so we sit at this unique point in the industry where we work with uh both wallets and daps and as a result we have to think about enduser experiences both on the wallet side and the application side as well one of the things that I often think about there is that competition is awesome in this space the more competition and Innovation we have the better we're going to end up with end user experiences but the downside of competition is that can end up also with very very fragmented experiences and I think at the moment especially this is true where we have many different types of login many different types of ways of creating wallets of storing wallets and we're going to end up in a situation where we have assets all over the place and we don't really know how to manage them um so one of the key things that is where wallet connect started was in bringing these different groups to the table facilitating conversations about how we have a shared set of Standards so that these things become interoperable um we run something called The Chain agnostic standard Association do a lot of work around chain agnostic Improvement protocols uh proposals a lot of work on EIP of course and things too um and these things are all designed ultimately as a way of bridging that Gap from like how do we build great infrastructure but also how do we make sure that the end user experience is great and I think it's those conversations that are so important for the industry to be having I just want to make sure everyone on the stage knows that you can jump in don't wait for me to ask if you have something to add but Hillary or Hest did you uh you have a different perspective there go ahead there yeah there's a fabit of fragmentation of Standards um but again there are ways to work around all of those things as long as we put the customer first and and I think that that will drive some of the standard implementations as well so that we can reach out to customers the right way sometimes standards don't actually lead to the best customer experience because we haven't focused on the customer first definitely I mean with Robin Hood we're obviously a big consumer application um when we launched Robinhood crypto a few years ago we saw a huge influx of customers and then last year when we launched Robinhood wallet we really positioned that as the bridge to bring customers from rhc and other platforms into the self- custody World um and there's just a lot around ease of use intuitive UI Etc that we're trying to build to really solve those problems um as a product manager you know we talk to users all the time I would have to say three the three big problems are going to be speed cost reliability um and recently we actually launched collaboration with arbit trim for our Robin Hood wallet where we're offering inapp swaps um and it's just to you know basically solve those problems how we can how we can make it more cost effective faster and on a really trusted platform so we're excited to see how that grows um but that's definitely consumers and fixing those problems are definitely at top of mind for us I want to come back to that consumer research in just a moment but hus I have to ask you um is infra actually so over how should we be thinking about infra as we move forward well infra is never really over right uh we don't have to build infra for a billion people already we're not quite there yet and so it'll go in Cycles right we're doing infra for the current couple of million people and then the 100 million people and it scales with orders of magnitude um same thing in in web 2 and 1.0 as well um infra is never really dead it just goes in Cycles but we do need more customer speaking of Cycles just I guess my first question is are we in the next poll market and how do you prepare for all of these users who come along with bull cycles who are reading the news headlines and deciding hey maybe I'm going to try out uh one of these new novel products I'm hearing about um I think uh judging by the how much fun everybody's had this week and the activities I saw in a nightclub last night it feels certainly like we're back in a back in a bull market um on a more serious note the numbers that we've seen wallet connect over the last few weeks last few months have really also demonstrated that in terms of the connections between apps and wallets uh across a whole range of sectors within the space so I think that that's really positive and obviously we've had a lot of head uh Tail wins in terms of the Bitcoin ETF and all this sort of stuff so are we in a bull market I think so how do we prepare for that um you know firstly I think it's about making sure that the technology is reliable and secure this is really really important I think the other thing that we have to do as we enter these these exciting times and I actually love the other times where we can focus um but as we enter these exciting times what we have to try to do is spot where there is real kind of substance and not just hype and make sure that like that's where we really build um I think the other thing that we have to be aware of is as we as new new users come into this ecosystem they're not as familiar with this technology as we are and and whilst a lot of the infrastructure that we've built over the last few years is helpful to that in terms of onboard in them um it doesn't come at sort of no risk and security we know is still a really big challenge for new users within the ecosystem we did a survey that we just launched a big report on this week and 28% of all crypto users that we asked say that at some point they've been rugged been fished been hacked um and that's a huge huge number um and so if we are going to on board another 100 million people another billion people um that number has got to go down a significant amount and so we have a huge responsibility as an industry through this next cycle to make sure that we're protecting end consumers um and that we're educating them and giving them the tools that they need to to act safely within within this space um so I think that's that for me is is kind of key yeah to add to that too um going back to the user research I mean we hear trust all of the time um and you know one way you could look at Robin Hood is we do have a mix of your more advanced customers as well as as some of the more novice ones and trust is a big one there um and so we spend a lot of time on the education front and kind of abstracting that complexity in the UI so that customers are really aware at any point what they're doing um earlier this year late last year we launched a pricing campaign to basically explain like what does it mean when you place a trade and what are all these different aspects and we were trying to pertain to both the advanced customer as well as a office user so explaining what like a bid price is but then also showing the advanced customers like a breakdown of our pricing versus other exchanges um which was we got you know really good feedback from that um and we were able to kind of converge to user segments that are very different into one product feature which went really well I think whether this is a a small bull market or the start of a largest cycle we don't yet know uh at the very least the shortterm cycle we're seeing right now is heavily centralized crypto driven right ETF listing a lot of demand coming in from that side um but I think that's also a bit of a to some way a red herring yes it's good number go up people give us attention but we actually have to build products that aren't dependent on the cycle that aren't just dependent on trading use cases we need to build products that work in both bare and bull cycles and most consumer products are like that right um so that's why we're excited Zeal is to build products that aren't just for trading but allows you to use your crypto as money for real Finance as well Hillary what do consumers want o big big question um I mean honestly at the end of the day it's it's like speed and cost I I really can't stop reiterating that um and in transparency in both of those things um that's like at the core of a lot of our principles and what we're doing right now um people want to know exactly what they're getting at any given point in time they want to make sure that the service is reliable and that they're able to move and and actually own their Holdings as as as as much as they want um and that's you know we're seeing that in the industry today already with some meale twos and rollups like we're seeing um a lot of those problems getting solved for and it's cool that we're able to see that also within Robin Hood wallet with the arbitrum collaboration that I mentioned before um but yeah honestly it comes down to just like speed and cost and for Robin Hood what you're describing sounds to me like convenience and I think web to has done a really good job at being convenient at the cost of some other things that people hold near and dear to their heart Jess I'm going to uh pass this question off to you how do you balance that convenience and that education piece when you think about onboarding the next 100 million or billion folks so I think that um I I I don't disagree that like speed and reliability and cost and things are important but I think that unless we have real value behind that doesn't really matter you can be really fast really reliable but if what you're actually engaging with is but your product doesn't really do anything it's not fun or it doesn't give you some value then like that doesn't really matter um and so I think that actually what consumers want is like more fun they want their problems to be solved they want things that they've never been able to do before they want gaming Loops that are only enabled because we we build them in a decentralized way they want to be able to send money from here to another country without having to go through the pain and the time they want all of these things and yes we need to make those those like interface pieces smooth and fast and stuff like this but like unless we're delivering real value to end consumers none of that really matters um and I think that for me part of why I'm excited about like this year is that some of those like friction points are going away and what that does is it gets us just to the starting line in my view that I really think that we are just to the starting line but it gets us to the starting line where Builders can focus on their core competencies rather than having to worry about the these friction points right so if you're a game developer now you have the tooling to just focus on building really cool web 3 enabled games if you're a Marketplace you've got the tooling to just focus on creating a really cool Marketplace for whatever that is um and I think that that's what's really unique about this cycle versus things that we've seen before is that for the people who are building those end consumer experiences they no longer have to spin so many cycles just thinking about the friction friction points like I remember back in like 2017 when I was building this nft project the amount of time that I just spent thinking about like the wallet experience and not focusing on what I was really trying to build was extraordinary and so I love that in this cycle hopefully Builders don't have to do that we think there are three overarching dimensions which roughly maps to what you guys said so I think we're all relatively in alignment although not everything needs to be fun but it's fun if it's fun um for us those three overarching truths and dimensions is one value that people get the most from their money whether that is a higher yield return or lower costs right but a higher net return uh the other one is safety people want to feel safe and secure when they're doing something has to do with money right uh and the third one is convenience uh something that just works for you whether that's related to how the security is set up or how you make the transaction so we need to build Solutions and in the case of defi where a defi product something that's easier to use than cash safer than a bank and can be used for all your financial needs walking around the conference seeing all of the projects that are here do you think that what we're talking about right now on this stage is being done well and if so how and if not what do we as an industry need to think about and do better yeah I mean I think it's I think it's very promising what we're seeing um I think to Jess's Point there's a lot of different projects and different that are solving different different problems gaming tokenization crossb payments Etc um so just like the optionality is is all out there um in terms of what can be better I think yeah there's a big there's a big focus on trust right now um and I think the best way to do trust is just through education and just more transparency um so making it more available and and making some of those tools that are accessible even more userfriendly is what first comes to mind um I guess when I think about are we doing it well one of the things that I'm not so sure about and this goes back to something that Hannah said is like whether what we're doing is actually really decentralized at all um and I think that that's maybe one area that we can continue to do better including us at wallet connect big Focus for this year um but I think that that is uh that's certainly top of mind the other thing that I think is really interesting um as I observe like different uh projects in this in this space is um how we think about understanding our end user um and how we think about their like expressed versus revealed preferences and I think that um still in this ecosystem today we're building a lot for expressed preference rather than revealed preference um there's a really again as part of this report that we that we uh released this week um like 50% of end consumers within crypto say that they want more security features 27% of the same group say that they don't use the security features that are available to them and 6% self-identify that they don't use them because they're too lazy so like already we are at this place right now where even some of the things that we're bu we are building and particularly even on the security side which is often considered like really quarter adoption people just aren't using this and I think that that's where again there's a little bit of maturing in the industry to go around like how we really understand our consumer is how we use data better um and how we build to what people actually want rather than just like what they say they want cuz those things aren't the same people are ready to give it all up for convenience like at the airport I'm ready to give you all of my data to pass bypass that line I've seen that work live in action Hannah I'm going to throw it to you now we're talking about decentralization and the need for decentralization in the space but does the consumer really want that or even care so decentralization is a charged word with many interpretations and there are different like hybrid decentralization implementations as well um I think what we have to always ask ourselves what is the value proposition that users want so we roll it back to these overarching truths can we use decentralization in ways to deliver more value back to people to deliver ease of use back to people then yes decentralization as kind of abstract concept can mean many different things uh and it's hard to implement these things right it's uh there there are different approaches to it um if we look at what what's happening here at this in in this venue I think some of the key problems that have been blocking us are actually solved now I'll go out and Limb and say I think uh security with Advent of pass keys and smart wallets is now relatively solved problem not at scale with customers yet but there are enough implementations in the wild now that this year is the year we'll solve the secure to private Keys transaction Security in those things also getting there um the other one is scaling I think we also have enough that's being done on that side um one part where we still lagging behind though um I think is on the ramping side um it's still a bit of a crypto Casino money inside there can you move them out can you move them in don't know maybe you have to pay 5% to move them across the border um there are several good companies building in this space but I would love to see more Builders solving for the easy move money between your unchain assets and your real world bank accounts um we have in Europe uh instant free Bank transfers but we need to have that kind of utility all over the world so that people can think of their crypto account as interchangeable with the real world bank account um because right now there are too many barriers and then it kind of becomes this stuck isolated ecosystem yeah I have to say on- ramping continues to be like one of the bigger themes for our customers as well is how do they actually get their coins onto XYZ platform um similarly we also have our own on-ramp uh Robin Hood connect and luckily customers can choose any existing Fiat balance on Robin Hood or crypto Holdings and onramp through our service to whatever self- custody wallet that they want um but it's still like a really big it's a still a really big transaction um if you don't have a robinet account or don't have account with another um platform you have to get kyc you have to go through all these different steps and it it is still like a lot to do um it's cool to see that we have a lot of these other on-ramps in the space on and off ramps in the space but there's still um definitely some some room to grow I mean Neo Banks uh like Mal mamat revolute and and many others they're basically offering zero on ramping fees to get people started with their solution right that's how you get started within your new bank account yet most wallets when you get started you have to pay pretty high fees to to get started so we need to take some of those learnings of how things work in web 2 and apply them also here to help people get started without a bouncer that checks if you're wearing the right clothes so if you want to pay 5% entrance fee just I'm curious here you know we're talking so much about what consumers want and I feel like the conversation has been kind of North America Centric how does it change when we look at different regions and we're looking at consumer needs like how do you think about the needs of people in different areas because they're very different yeah they're definitely uh they're definitely very different and I think that that's one of the for me one of the most exciting things anyway um I'm particularly excited about like areas of of the world where there is less developed Financial infrastructure um for example and and here some of the problems that we're solving for consumers are like real real problems right they're like how do I take $100 and if I'm transferring that on a crossborder basis from like some us creative platform then by the time it gets into my bank account it's like $70 and I've just paid $30 into the system that is not working for me um and I think that here like crypto is a prime example of something that is solving like an amazing problem that we in uh in many like developed markets just don't have this issue right like we're used to near-free financial transactions we're used to being able to move money around really really easily we're used to being able to access assets uh in a more easy way and so I think that actually there's huge huge discrepancy all over the world depending on uh the infrastructure that is there the kind of use cases that are available uh to to those end consumers um and so I think that this is again something as we think about like consumer adoption um I think that actually what we're probably going to see is like almost this leapfrogging effect where like if you have something that kind of works today your incentives to like really rebuild it are much lower than if you've got something that's really tough today and you've almost got this like more white space to rebuild something and so I actually think that in many in many places we're going to see this leap frogging effect of like um these more kind of uh Advanced Financial systems into something that actually is way better because of this technology it's going to take time for sure um but I think that that's where we'll see also this this kind of difference as well yeah to relate it back to something that you both were saying earlier about the utility um we definitely see that differently in Emerging Markets um personally I started working in this industry 2015 I was living in Buenos cides Argentina and that's where I actually did really see that um use case firsthand um you know crypto offered another way for customers to hold value and that was very you know inspiring and also a great place to see it really come up um and there you know it's a different problem set than what we might see in more developed markets um so it's going to be very interesting to see how that kind of envelops over time yeah the use cases are very different by market right in some markets just the dollar itself is a great use case and crypto is a technology that enables access to the dollar up until a week ago we were also doing ramping in Nigeria and we saw huge demand for people just wanted to move from the naira into the dollar um maybe not as big demand in the US cuz you're moving from a dollar to a dollar for that specific use case but again if you put the customer hat on those needs vary a lot between geographies Hillary you brought up bonus AIS and this I'm going to take this opportunity to cross promote because bonus AIS is actually launching um onchain IDs and I'm doing a fireside chat about that on the coral stage at four so please come it's very exciting news I'm really excited to talk about that okay but I wasn't going to let you guys off the stage without talking about regulation just H we talk about regulation so much in this industry um we've talked about it a bunch today but to Consumers really care or understand what's going on from a legislative perspective here in the US or care about it as much as we talk about it amongst ourselves I mean I think consumers care about regulation to the extent that they feel protected by it right uh that's why a lot of Regulation exists and you can argue about the efficacy of that and I certainly would would have strong arguments that it's not always really protecting the consumer But ultimately like that's kind of the goal of Regulation and some of it's not very good but uh but that's what it's there for and so I think when you just take this as a primitive the idea here is like how do we create that same sense of safety the same kind of Consumer Protections without relying on regulation um and I think that that is something that actually I think this industry is doing pretty good job on now um there's a lot of focus on how we create better user experiences um how we have more protection um we still have a lot of Bad actors in the ecosystem and like that breaks my heart because there's so many people here who are working to try and make a better world that the people who taking advantage of that um I think is incredibly sad um but ultimately if when I think about regulation you know and I've I've done a lot of policy work I've done a lot of work with like the bank of England on some of this stuff but actually I've kind of come to the conclusion that like we as an industry just need to build things in a better way and we need to um we need to call out Bad actors within the industry ourselves so that we can um really create safe technology that can be adopted globally because the other thing with regulation is it's so fragmented that if we constantly try to Pander to this as an industry we're just going to again spin a ton of Cycles um and also we're just going to end up building within this framework of something that fundamentally I believe is broken uh like I'm doing this because I think that there are better ways of doing things and part of that also involves um being more more responsible being more thoughtful and like moving to a world where maybe we have less regulation we need to stop giving money to North Korea um and we are a lot of people that are putting efforts on security um but if we don't self-regulate then we will be over regulated potentially um yeah if we don't do s someone will invent practices that will stop that bleed right um and there are lots of efforts being put into it uh as wallets we have our Our obligation to do as well right with safety checks and transaction safety checks Etc um but it's an industrywide effort we have to do not to mention also smart contract development practice Etc which is an emerging field so it's a complex territory but we really have to do better or someone will make us stop doing it what do you mean by that when you say as an industry we have to self-regulate uh what I mean by that is we need to implement better practices for preventing hacks whether it's at the development stage or at the execution stage for a customer uh as as a wallet Builder that means we are implementing safety checks when you're doing transactions when you're connecting to sites lots of big red warnings if you're trying to do something that you shouldn't um in in web to in neobanks we have whole teams that spend time just helping people protect themselves from themselves doing mistakes um in in defi or web 3 quite often it almost feels like we're encouraged to make make mistakes but it's an emerging industry and so we we move forward Hillary you get the last word here uh what kind of questions are Robin Hood's customers asking when it comes to regulation are they really concerned so I think when I when I think of customers and and regulation I think of just trust and transparency I wouldn't say that hey we get questions specifically about about this but in every single thing that we design every feature that we release it's okay on the infrastructure side what are we building is it safe what checks do we need but then conversely on the front end like how are we informing customers of what's going on and how can we be as transparent as possible possible with them I to the self-regulation it's like okay how can you make it very obvious that there are scams out there um including that in a UI way that people can actually you know um trust themselves to be able to handle their their own Holdings Jess Hillary Hennis thank you so much for joining me on stage thank you all for listening we are all done and I think infra is so not over right okay that's it