UX: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly | Jess Houlgrave - Reown

[Music] good morning I guess good morning to eth Denver um thank you for those of you who woke up this morning and have had coffee in time to be here I think it's going to be a really long week um but hopefully a great one so thanks for thanks for showing up uh bright and early on uh on Monday morning um I'm just grave I'm the CEO at Ron um Ron is the company behind wallet connect uh which many of you might be familiar with if you've been using any crypto app uh over the last six or seven years um and today I'm going to talk mostly about user experience because we at wallet connect and at Reon believe that this is one of the major barriers to True crypto adoption and and bringing people more people into the space um at Ron we are are um we've been been around since 2018 we relaunched the brand uh last year um alongside launching the wallet connect Foundation um wallet connect has been around since 2018 um it was designed originally to solve one of the first user experience challenges with it within web 3 this was at a time that we had uh the like emergence of mobile crypto wallets for the first time but the majority of applications still today unfortunately although I think that's changing the majority of applications were built on desktop and so the wallet connect protocol was designed that I could really easily uh scan a QR code with my mobile wallet Connect into the application to be able to do anything and everything uh on that application today the network supports over 700 different wallets um I think we have some something like 57,000 different applications registered on the network although uh not all of them are are still alive and kicking but certainly we have um well over 6,000 daily active applications using using the protocol um last year we made about 220 million connections between users and and their web three apps and at around 35 million unique wallets so we have this really amazing insight into what drives users what people are interested in um and for me this has been like a really exciting new challenge to take on I joined the company uh about 18 months ago before that I was uh running at a payments company and a long time before that had a startup in the nft world um and when I was building that this was in a pre- wallet connect world we just had the metamask SDK um we were trying to figure out how new users were going to get on boarded we were doing a lot of work with artists um and having to educate them about what a seed phrase was what a wallet was all felt like a massive distraction in terms of in terms of bringing people into the space and I think we've made good progress but I don't think we've made um enough progress there there and so today I'm going to talk to you about some of the things where we think that there are still big user experience challenges in web 3 um and some of the things that we think are helping to solve those as well um this is a video that due to some technical issues plays at a two seconds so we're not going to watch that um but I'm going to talk to you about some of the things that that we're building so aside from the wallet connect Network which today is supported by 16 different node operators um and is truly running in a decentralized fashion we launched that last year which was one of the big uh kind of aspirations for wallet connect over the long term so we're really proud to be decentralizing the network and handing over the stewardship of that Network to the wallet connect Foundation uh you can find Pedro the founder of wallet connect uh who's running the foundation uh here in a few stages this week um you can also find us all at wallet Con on Wednesday which is our developer conference but aside from that we really now focus on two major sdks one is called wallet kit this is an SDK for wallet developers um first and foremost it gives those wallet users access to the wallet connect Network which means they can connect to any different applications on the network it also has a bunch of security features in um and user experience features like chain abstraction um and then on the appkit side this is an SDK for app developers um used by some 3,000 different app developers today across all different Networks um everything we do at wallet connectors is multi-chain um and and supports different networks and within appkit um app developers can find a really easy toolkit to um let users log in sign messages um we have an on-ramp uh an embedded on-ramp embedded swaps functionality um embedded smart accounts um and social and email logins for those new users that we want to be on boarding um and so this is really a comprehensive kind of toolkit and so Within These to sdks is how we're delivering a lot of the the um advances that we think that should be brought both to ethereum but also to the broader crypto community and and Builders at large um the uh today I think we have a challenge which is that um we've spent a lot of uh a lot of the last few years really investing in infrastructure we're now at the stage uh or nearly at the stage I think where we have these very scalable systems we can manage large numbers of transactions very very quickly um but for me ethereum is still kind of designed for the power user um I've done it several times in the last few years where I've onboarded a new friend um and I think back to like when I was starting to get into crypto and I was super happy to go through all of these challenges right like thinking about when where I was going to put my seed phrases how I was going to store that safely I was like happy to download five different apps just to find one that actually works worked and and that was intuitive but the reality is that like I was doing that because I was excited about web 3 um and the vast majority of users who we want to be able to deliver the benefits of web 3 aren't interested in web 3 itself they want usable systems they want things that bring joy to their life they want things that make them money they want things that solve pain points for them they're often not interested in the the core principles of web 3 and so my belief is that we need to get these people in because we deliver something that they want and it's only through that that we're really going to get people excited about what web 3 is all about in the first place and so this idea that we can still rely on some of the old onboarding methods and and people are going to need to learn about the technology itself for me feels very Antiquated um every single person in this room I imagine has a credit card or a debit card in their pocket but very few people understand the ins and outs of payments acquiring and merchant processing and card issuance that sit behind that and that's because you shouldn't have to you just want to use your money uh and buy and the reality is in crypto today we're still at the stage this this idea that in order to have a credit card you need to learn how payment systems work um and so we have a we have a big gap here to be designing for the average user which a lot of people claim that they really want to be on boarding um we are really lucky to work with hundreds of of amazing app developers and every day we see these unique projects coming online but they're still thinking about them as crypto users rather than as everyday users who would just want to use an application when we think about like ux more broadly this is not this shouldn't come as a surprise to you um we we looked at like ux comments and um you can see see from some of these things that people even even those of us who are in this space because we love it and we want to be building it um find the user experience challenging we all think it sucks um but very few people are really invested in in making it better um so today when we were coming up with like the title for for our report um we were sorry for for this presentation we were a little bit inspired by um a consumer report that we put out last year um and actually I just got the some of the preview results for the 2025 report this morning so that will be coming uh to you all in a few weeks time um but when I look back at the 2024 report um for me it feels that there are still some major major issues and these are experienced crypto users these are people who've been using crypto for two to three years they have multiple wallets they claim to be using crypto applications on a more than weekly basis um and yet every single one of them finds that there's major challenges either around security user experience fees um speed how to onboard people um and so the title for this talk we decided it was going to be The Good the Bad and the Ugly um and so I'm going to talk you through some of the the good and the bad and I'll finish with with the ugly which is really my call to action for how we can all make this space better um firstly I think we have an issue uh that we created that solved one massive problem we solved the issue of speed and and scalability on on ethereum but we created a new problem for ourselves that's one of fragmented liquidity um at Ron we do a lot of work with payments companies and these are people who um see value in crypto they want to be able to bring crypto payments to the masses Merchants who want to be able to accept crypto as payments they know that people want to be able to do that we've seen the rise of stable coins over the last few years um and yet then you start doing user interviews and you say actually you can only pay with your usdc if it's on salana um by the way your usdc doesn't really count if it's on it arbitrum or it's on optimism and users are like hang on this is painful payments companies are like what on Earth uh this doesn't make any sense if I just have US Dollars why can't I use it um and so this liquidity fragmentation is a is a massive issue the good side of this is that I think we're getting there in terms of solving it um we have amazing partners that we've been working with including socket across leafy um and many others and we see hundreds of different um diff different Solutions coming out the ethereum foundation's been doing work in terms of its interrupt standards um and uh and so I think that probably by the end of this year we'll be at a stage where a wallet can manage assets over different um different chains and we will be in a situation whereas a as a payments company um I can just accept usdc my user can have usdc on a different chain not the one that I necessarily want to manage um but we can solve those in single user op and single intent process um to make that payments flow simple um and to enable users to use their assets on on any chain the next big one that um that came up and I think this is where we've also made great progress as an industry is is those dreaded seed phrases uh that that we all have to manage um I think that there's huge scope for having many many different types of wallets um that's one of the things that we're very um pro at wallet connect we work with 700 different wallets and I still think that actually there's scope for more and when people say why why do we need more than 700 different wallets for me that's because we need different wallets to do different things I as an end user don't want the same user experience in the wallet that I use every day to buy coffee as the same as the same wallet from a security perspective and a user experience perspective that I want to store my 401k Fund in um and so we do need different types of wallets we need different user experiences when it comes to wallets um but those seed phrases especially for new users are incredibly complex to manage um I think some something like 24% of the people that we surveyed last year said that they had lost seed phrases or lost funds due to having to manage seed phrases themselves so I think that one of the positives that's come out of the last 12 12 to 18 months is the evolution of not only Google and and uh and social logins to be able to create wallets at the back end um amazing companies like privy magic um TurnKey par who used to be capsule many others who are really solving these problems but also those of smart accounts um so that now I can use pass Keys as signers on my accounts um and set up different permissions associated with them which for me is like the third um the third bad thing how do we actually like go through the process of using our wallet how do we have to sign things constantly um if I'm in a game I don't want to continuously go back to my wallet to repurchase every time I want to take an onchain action um if I want to do a subscription payments today I either need to give pretty unfettered access to my account and my keys to that payments company to manage it or I need to move those funds into some sort of escro smart contract which kind of defeats the point of me having them in my in my wallet in the first place and so I think that the the evolution and we'll see this with Petra as it comes in uh I think in first week of April is the is the latest rumor um this the smart session standards that can be used with smart accounts um something called 7715 that we wrote with a bunch of other partners in the industry allows us to create this idea of a smart session so I can set a policy on my account I can a give access to a specific app for a specific period of time up to a certain amount so that um I can start to use my wallet in a much more sophisticated way I no longer have to just give uh this like broad range access and keep to to Partners but I can say in a specific game I'm going to spend up to $20 a week or I want to pay my Netflix subscription actually with crypto and I can do that by using smart sessions and making sure that that company and only that company can withdraw a specific amount from my wallet um on on a regular time schedule so I think this for me is is probably one of the greatest advances of of 2025 and I'm very excited to see some wallets already adopting it and and more and more apps St to experiment with it um the the the next thing is around security and probably this is on everyone's mind after some of the events of of last week unfortunately um is that we still exist in a world where it's very hard to know what we are signing um it's very hard to verify what contracts and what domains we're we're interacting with via our wallets um and this creates a huge problem not only for all of us who are trying to use apps but also externally for people outside of the industry who continue to view this space as one to be scared of um I remember having a conversation last year where where somebody said we just need to do more education um and I agree that education is good but again if you imagine me giving you a credit card for the first time and then saying right now you have to go through a two-hour course on why and where and how to use your credit card safely Because by the way is probably like a one in4 chance that you're going to lose all the money in your credit card like this would be a terrible user experience people just wouldn't use credit cards and we have to think about wallets in in the same way we need to give people the tooling that makes it really really easy for them to use wallets in a safe and secure way one of the things that we've built at wallet connect um is the verify API so this confirms which domain you're interacting with and all of the Wallets on the network now will flag if you're interacting with a malicious domain um we're expanding this program later this year here to include smart um to to include contract verification uh and and other things and I think like also want to commend the work that ledger and other partners are doing on things like clear signing so that I can actually understand the transaction that I'm about to sign um using tooling like tenderly or block a to simulate those transactions really well before I I execute something we know that that's still not perfect and there are other things that people should be doing but hopefully I think this um if anything if if any of the events of the last week have done is is actually heighten people's Focus around security and um also acknowledge that despite the fact that this is a um we we want to build interoperable things we want to build open systems where anyone can do anything it still is kind of our responsibility as the builders to think about the people who are using our products and to make sure that they're safe while they're doing that and finally um I think we still exist in a world of too many clicks um less clicks is more is one of our motos at at rone and uh one of the things that we're asking all of our wallet Partners to do this year is to upgrade um some of the message signing that's exists as part of the wallet connect Network so that um I can take single orth and sign click requests I don't have to keep moving between an app and a wallet and compi combined with smart sessions I think this um this will help us to move into a much smoother uh smoother user experience but having said all that I think it doesn't really matter how much Tech we build um if people don't want to use it and so my ugly for you today is the fact that even if we build this Tech and we solve these bads and we turn them into Goods um we still need to make sure that people want to actually start using these things and to do that we need to a encourage application Builders to want to be using this technology and we need to have a more of a focus on the user experience um some of the initiatives that we launched through the wallet connect Foundation last year um in terms of ux include the establishment of the ux council this was the first vote that the wallet connect Community passed a couple of weeks ago so we're welcoming some 35 of the industry's top experts around user experience to join us uh as part of stewarding the the network going forwards um to really think about what user experience is and what we should be delivering to to end users um we launched last year a program called wallet connect certified um as part of wallet connect certified we invited the top 20 Wallets on the wallet connect Network to go through a rigorous QA process and to adopt new and better user experiences for their end users when it comes to um both security and ease of use um and we're expanding that program this year to include a bunch more wallets so hopefully encouraging the whole industry to have more of a focus on on ux and that's not to say that wallets don't I just know that many of them have they need to make money they need to attract users um but we believe that by really focusing on security and user experience that will that will benefit them and their end users over the long run and finally the wallet connect Foundation announced a large user experience grants program uh We've welcomed some eight participants now into the smart session subcategory of that so if you're building with smart sessions please let us know uh we'd love to support you on that Journey um we also have grants available for things like building on chain abstraction products um and many other things so overall really what we're trying to do here is establish a center of uh of knowledge sharing of building in the open and of working together to to to improve user experience um we need that we need better um we need better designers we need more people to start thinking about user experience um and ultimately we need to start making this usable if we really want to attract all those people that we claim to do um that's it I'm being flashed to say wrap it up um I'm here all week I'm speaking again on Thursday around and on Wednesday we have wallet con so if you're if wallets are your thing please please join us for that event as well thanks