The Need for Seamless New User Onboarding for Broader Web3 Adoption

next up we've got a panel on the need for seamless new user adoption as a long time ux person this is what the community's needed for so long really excited for what you have to say take it away Eric and panel all right uh uh I'll sit here next to you on amazing maybe in that spot's for you all right what a time to be alive thank you for joining I'm super excited about this because I'm gonna eat Denver on the main stage and I get to talk with these leaders about a topic that I'm actually super passionate about which is the need for new sorry it's [ __ ] it up the need for seamless new user onboarding for broader web free adoption I'll tell you the reason I personally am passionate about this is because I joined crypto like two-ish years ago but I still visually remember how [ __ ] hard it was for me to learn anything do anything super super simple and so I think this is going to be a super important topic I'm excited to go deep with these people here but before we do that we love intros of who you are what you're working on maybe we just go right to left absolutely absolutely wow this map works okay so my name is Johan uh so on the on the social media I also go with Peter so it's uh easy to spell and I don't have to correct people's pronunciation but other people actually pronounce my name very well and very surprised so I'm the co-founder of amitis I'm also the co-founder of Nouveau at numosphere.io so a very uh happy to have this option you need to chat with this uh very bright Minds in this panel to discuss about the the U.S Express um yeah thank you my name is Dr K I'm the co-founder of Qui Network we're a new layer one it's a hierarchy merge my blockchains which allows us to scale to 50 000 transactions per second on an ebm compatible set of chains but maintaining the guarantees of security of Bitcoin so I'm also glad to be here looking forward to the condo nice do you want my mic hello okay I'm Vivian I'm from optimism I lead our Partnerships with foundational Partners which are essentialized exchanges wallets and infrastructure partners so we optimism mainnet is a layer two scaling solution built on ethereum we also announced our vision for the super chain last week and had base launch on op stack which is our our modular code base I'm very happy to be here and talk about this topic because every day I talk to wallets and I talk to builders and users about how we need to fix this experience hey everyone I'm maricosevski I'm one of the co-founders of cello and Cello's origin story is actually one around the ease of use we tried to build a really easy to use Global venmo-like wallet on top of ethereum around five years ago and we weren't able to get the experience that we wanted and so that took us down the path of creating cello which is a fully ebm compatible chain with a number of really nice bonus features for developers that makes it easier to build just really easy and delightful user experiences that are fully decentralized fully self-custodial but that are easier for end users to to hi my name is kuber and marimutu I'm the founder of Cipher wallet we are we're based in Palo Alto California we've been building this for a little over a year it's a non-custodial crypto wallet on on evm and Cosmos we're trying to solve a few problems in like user onboarding which we're going to talk about more during this talk we have an SDK that helps a lot of D apps like onboard new users and like hand hold them through the onboarding process all right we're back to you Eric what a crew what a crew thank everyone for the introductions okay let's go on in a cute first question for you which is I know a lot of people probably know this but what exactly is so hard for new users to onboard into web3 like what is the specific problems and what's keeping everyone but the degens into the industry yeah thanks Eric so uh before we talk about the problem I also want to set some context talking about my personal experience in crypto which which was so relevant to answer this question uh so I'm originally from India where access to uh fuel lending mechanisms is actually control through which religion or cast you come from right economic freedom is like super broken uh in different parts of the world right and when you connect the dots and understand like how decentralized Finance like empowers access to finance right that's so fascinating to me in first place and another important data I want to share is like I spent like seven eight years of my career last seven eight years working for Amazon and coinbase building payment integration with banks that run on like Mainframe systems and all that right if you connect both of these data points I personally see that fundamentally like the decentralized finance in first place is going to like completely replace the financial infrastructure that powers Finance worldwide and like that's always fragmented until today right which means there are a lot of users who are going to be gravitated towards decentralized Finance without even knowing that they're actually integrating with crypto because of the way decentralized Finance actually solves fundamental problems with economic freedom around the world right so which means we are too early right like if you compare this with with internet I wouldn't have imagined if 15 years back if somebody had told me my dad sitting in a tier three city in India would actually use internet banking without even walking into a bank right so it's taken like more than a decade to actually take this to like like the even traditional fintech to like the real world right so with this context I want to talk about to actually take web3 to like multiple billion users I personally think we are actually 100 steps away which means like everybody in this room including people here are going to like build different parts of the system not only just the wallet it's actually how the system underlying system works and how it actually integrates with the rest of the world and like technology is going to be a key step that being said I want to specifically talk about the immediate step that Cipher wallet is trying to take like in the journey towards the next decade of like building this is where like when you connect with the apps we're trying to like after you connect wallet can you like actually simplify certain parts of the flow where users can actually interact with the diab maybe a lending protocol where the interest rates are better than like what you would get in California to like get usdc uh without even like figuring out what orbitra means and stuff like that I'll leave it there and and back to you editing that's amazing I love that you mentioned the value prop of crypto and D5 even outside of the US right the economic freedom so I think one thing Brian Armstrong always mentions is that we if we work at coinbase in the US you know realize the economic freedom you receive here because freedom is quite High here I think that's amazing I do agree that new user onboarding is obviously really tough I actually on boarded my mom last week and I screenshot her seed phrase which is not a good idea um but maybe maybe you want this is the next question for you actually I stalked your LinkedIn you've been in crypto for quite a while now what how you get here um like well I worked at Clubhouse and use it on board is one of the first questions you asked but how has it been like a decade now but New Year's onboarding is still broken what do we get wrong in the last Bull Run because that's the easy answer right but actually uh deep down there's a more more fundamental problem that we have in this particular industry so if you for example can I just say about crypto windshield that we have right now the bear Market we have right now is actually not because of FTX it's not because of Terra it's really the the liquidity lack of liquidity we have in the market now the problem is why is blockchain industry so affected by the liquidity it's supposed to be a technology that can help uh change our lives change how we interact with each other how the update their own ship has been done but somehow we're still tied to the stock market somehow this industry becomes a pure Financial Market this is something that fundamentally we haven't addressed since the decade at the start of the the whole industry a decade ago so I mean we do think that uh what we need you to build is the what we call the West three economy Webster economy D5 is definitely very important as the capital market and that's how you uh exchange the resources how you exchange the capitals and how you allocated capitals but you also need to care about the users consumers you care about the producers those other ones that actually provide produce values on a chain and and the level of Netherlands has been done on the the consumer product and producer part because most of the interest in this industry is on the financial Market and those people do really not really care about uh whether you have a seamless experience experience onboarding the application a D5 what you said right so so hey you know what if they need if they can make money they will endure all those inconvenience to finish every startup and make money because that's what they want that's part of work but for regular users who wants to enjoy the values are created on blockchain they cannot accept this the gas fee is another barrier of Entry because if you want to use any chain even you have to get the ethereum meetings you have your abilities so you have me some tokens to pay transactions and gladly we have 4337 coming up and we have recently implemented BRS wallet from the Eastern foundation so those are the measures we can definitely help finally finally I do think we need to expand this value proposition of blockchain industry and my personal opinion in the next Bull Run I think the decentralized credential will be the next big thing because I do believe it is the easiest way to introduce the blockchain technology to a mainstream adoption uh reason why we have worked with a partner who has uh basically running a webtoon application they only spend 10 minutes to integrate with renewable and start using the decentralized credentials I think there's a lot of potential here that's amazing I do agree with you like there needs to be a why right like a use case Beyond just making money in the financial markets as you mentioned it's funny that you said make money because I feel like I've been in crypto and I've only lost money but you know I guess some people make money some people lose money it's a zero seven games the illusion of making money the delusion paper gains yes I was an early investor she may even put it right into Solana so there you go but actually this is a good question or transition to Merrick at cello I know you're working on financial prosperity for all I'm curious as you take these learnings from the past Bull Run and missions the last decade of crypto how are you encompassing that towards your mission statement what are you doing differently this year during the winter as opposed to last year yeah great question um so I think everything in the cell ecosystem is built uh with kind of the Normie user in mind we we want to make crypto accessible for all um and and we're doing that through a number of ways I think first and foremost cello is is built with Mobile in mind um it has a ZK like client that lets you sync on your mobile device really easily and you know that required thinking about consensus and making those changes early on when we were building the you know scalable consensus protocol but beyond mobile I would say there's maybe three things that we're doing that are really designed to make it really easy for people to get onboarded and Off to the Races the first is around on and off ramping the second is around making gas really easy for people and the third is around phone numbers using phone numbers as identifiers in addition to public to keep derived addresses so on the first on the on and off ramp side uh last year we launched Fiat connect which you can think of as the wallet connect of the Fiat World Fiat on and off ramping world it's an open API standard that allows wallets to connect with on and off ramps in a way that's fully standardized fully interchangeable so if a new on and off ramp comes up a wallet can simply add a configuration change to their app one line and boom they can add a new on and off ramp and we think that's really important because in order to reach everyone in the world we're gonna need potentially hundreds of on and off ramps that all have local banking relationships that all have the necessary MTL licenses and it has to be really really easy for wallets to integrate with all of these hundreds of different on and off ramps and critically you know Fiat connect is a back end API standard which means that the wallet controls the ux ultimately we're building for a world where when you're caching into your self-custodial wallet The Experience looks and feels just like when you're connecting your bank account to your venmo wallet here in the US but instead of being powered by just one company that connection can be powered by hundreds of companies and support hundreds of payment methods around the world so that's on the on and off ramping side but once you cash in if people were to cash in with stable coins on most networks they would be kind of stuck and so one thing that we've been working on that's been kind of baked into the network from the from the beginning is this ability to pay for gas with tokens you know there's a lot of talk about account abstraction this week and you know we're really really proud to have kind of invested in in this kind of work really early on and it's enabled this really wonderful experience where you can cash into a stable coin and then be able to actually use a DEX and buy an asset that you care about or access defy or buy an nft you effectively have the same experience that you have with the centralized exchange but it's fully self-custodial and it's powered by multiple companies it's very decentralized and the third and final piece is is something that we're calling social connect it's a it's a standard that's at the protocol level that lets wallets send payments to phone numbers instead of just to publicly derived addresses and that unlocks some really nice usability features where you can send money to people in your contact list not just to you know people who have addresses that you have to kind of maintain and kind of look up and so if you're curious about you know how all of this comes together and what it looks and feels like I would encourage you to try a wallet called velora which is on the solar Network and really does a great job of using these platform features to create a great experience that's amazing I mean I feel like I'm the negative guy on stage but two Side Stories I'll share quickly is one I feel like I always try to buy crypto with a credit card always gets rejected and I try to connect my bank account then it would take five days and then again I'd lose money on the coin and then two I always forget to save money for gas always and then I'm just stuck there but I promise I still love crypto I'm obviously here for a reason um Dr K same question for you I know you're building choir right now which is still in testnet but going mainnet maybe later this year or next year curious how you're also encompassing sort of new user onboarding or making it much easier more seamless as you plan for that full launch yeah so when we think about how we're gonna actually scale blockchain and bring the value of cryptocurrency to the world we can really think about it sort of in three tiers the first one's scale the second one's use case and then the third one's user interface so at Qui we're focused on scale in the base layer so if we think about something like email and we have this ubiquitous protocol um SMTP that everybody can use with any client we don't see that protocol we just use it if it's you know Gmail if it's protonmail doesn't matter the problem that we have in the space in the base layer is that we have all of these scaling Solutions but they're all disparate they're all siled and they're not all interoperable so the first thing we have to answer is how do we scale in such a way that I can create a user experience it's like email or I can create a user experience that's like going to google.com the user of google.com doesn't need to know about the servers that are distributed throughout the world and the sharded databases and how they're running clusters to like make that work for billions of people all they do is go to google.

com and there's enough backend throughput to service the request and that's what we need to see out of the base layer and then the next question is what's the real use case if we think about D5 and we think about a billion users if we're talking about Finance are there really a billion users in the world that are caring about Finance is that the first use case I would argue that the fundamental value proposition of crypto is we figured out how to transfer value so what is a transfer of value it's money so the first use case that we should be looking at if we want to onboard a billion people is being able to function as money but to be able to function as money we have to go back to the first thing which is scale and then once we answer those two questions now we have to talk about UI ux and obviously that's important so we have a lot of complicated technology right multi-threaded uh modular you know uh hierarchy of blockchains right like you can throw all those Bud words buzzwords out um right and we've Shard context and we have you know interoperable State machines but to the user I need to make the experience so they have one abstracted address and I minimize their uh exposure to that underlying uh complexity so you know we have shards and we have a sharded address space so am I going to make the user have to understand 13 different addresses and figure out where they're going to have to operate when they're going to have to operate no I have to create a seamless user experience that I abstract away from them so they have a single address and it looks like a bank account so that's like the third question and obviously there's you know big pieces that we need to draw and that people have put together like how do you onboard an off board out of the Fiat system how do you make good wallet experiences do you use you know social onboarding before you force them into a seed phrase or you create like a nice RFID or NFC wallet that they can use with their phone right and you can do this sort of in this incremental way to bring them into the system but to start out maybe it's just social onboarding they don't have a ton of money but they can get on and they can have a venmo-like experience using a truly decentralized back end to function as money and then once we answer that question then we should start talking about D5 that's amazing I feel like I'm just becoming the child poster or poster child rather of all the mistakes but I also put your address Point remember when I was early in crypto I sent a lot of crypto to the wrong address and it was just gone so if anyone's out there and you made that mistake just talk to me I'm sure I've made every mistake in the book for web3 but I love this conversation so it seems like you know after hearing everyone speak here except for Vivian I have a question for you at the very end but there needs to be a why clear use case that needs to be powered by a very powerful blockchain but it also needs to be very user friendly in terms of the gas do I need to even learn about gas as a user about the bridging Cube I know you mentioned swapping and bridging and do I need to really learn about all the bridges and chains and I should just be here for the Y and it should be as seamless as I don't know entering Facebook if I want to send money or utilize a d app and I think that it's amazing to hear all these people really focus on that during the winter last question for you Vivian I know you have a very I guess like what how do I say this um you get to see a lot of cool Partnerships that's your role as head of foundational Partnerships I'm curious as you work with people and AD optimism as well how has how has the use cases changed how are people thinking differently as you talk to people especially during the winter time yeah good question um I think as we talk about use cases one thing that everyone here would agree on is that what we really need to have real adoption of web3 and this crypto economy is we need to bring the next million billion users in right and the next hundred thousand two hundred thousand builders in um you know we've I think up to now there's like less than a million users that are actually transacting on chain which is a tiny tiny tiny portion of the whole world so how do we get there I think we talk about using use cases the thing that we're struggling with the most is we don't have standardization and standardization is what we need to improve usability and standardization comes across the entire Tech stack right everything from the front end we've talked about wallets down to the core code base of every single protocol so we live in this world right now in web 3 where the analogy I like to make is that you know right now we can go on to any browser and access any web page right it doesn't matter if you're in in Chrome or in Firefox like you can access any web page but right now on web3 that's not the case we go to One Network to access a handful of applications and then we go to we have to switch to another one to access another handful of applications and everyone is fighting there's like zero-sum game where everyone every community and ecosystem is fighting against each other and at optimism that's just not how we see the future right like that's not how adoption is going to happen we're going to continually see this clunky experience for users where they're Network switching where they're bridging assets and you know wallets are trying to do their parts Protocols are trying to do their parts but unless until we unify and standardize it's never going to actually get to the point where we have billion users in the crypto economy so how are we thinking about this in optimism um I kind of mentioned the super chain in my introduction we see a place where there's interoperable networks across all layer twos right and we're here at layer twos like we're trying to scale ethereum we believe ethereum is a future of web3 so we don't see a world where there's going to be you know optimism versus polygon versus you know cello and whoever else right we want everybody to be interoperable so that we can have this better user experience so that wallets can have a single front end where we abstract the way the ideas of chains of having to bridge assets where the front end is just a place for users to be able to access any application that they want on any network without having to understand what a network actually is in the mean in the you know the near term like how are we addressing that that's a wonderful Vision right I think everyone would love to be in that world but we're not quite there yet I think everybody's doing a little piece of that part um you know everyone across from infrastructure providers to wallets and Etc I think in the near term the things that we're seeing like interesting use cases that people more web 2 users like are things that are a very low I would say like low touch things that users from web2 are familiar with so something like oh I can see a tangible result of putting my assets into a liquidity pool because I can get three percent yield which is much more yield than I'm getting in my savings account right or I can create I can mint an nft and create an nft and then be able to share that with my friend and this allows me to have this community between me and 10 other friends so this is these are things that we're kind of looking at that's like you know not things that are like very net New Primitives but things that are very interesting to users that are not in the crypto World another area that we're deeply invested in is identity self-sovereign identity is something that we see as a really interesting use case for you know the right product Market fit for blockchain and identity can span across all kinds of different things you know D5 needs identity no one wants to do you know kyc is not what web3 is about and how having portable identity across web 3 is something that we are actively you know we want to build kind of the data layer so that other identity projects can come and build on top of us so that we can actually create a robust identity solution for crypto tactically what you know some of the things that we've been trying to do I think everyone's touched upon this like horrible onboarding experience from like buying assets like Fiat on ramps to having to bridge from uh exchange over to your wallet and then from your wallet you have to figure out what you want to do so we've been doing a couple of very like fun things called quests we had our op quest which is like an expansion of you know learn and earn campaigns but actually incentivizes users to transact on chain we also have a campaign going on with coinbase that's going to be a launched next year which is also Quest ish which is guiding the user from the you know someone that's really never done anything in crypto from you know buying some something on the retail side creating a wallet you know bringing assets over from exchange to wallet and then doing a swap or minting nft or depositing assets into urine and getting a little bit of yield so this is like you know slow introduction of users into what they can do in crypto and the value But ultimately I think the larger vision is like we need to solve for the standardization and from that you know improve the usability for the next Billy users amazing I love the gamification especially since I'm a big gamer and I feel like some form of gamification will help me learn basically anything but I really do love ideally it being an interoperable world where I can be much more seamless and hopefully next year when I'm eat Denver if I'm presenting I have a lot fewer mistakes that I can tell everybody here um but I'm getting the big red clock that we're out of time but seriously thank you everyone for speaking hopefully this was enjoyable for you as it was for me and thank everyone for the time appreciate it appreciate it 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