Scaling Web3 through the Mobile Experience

Okay. Okay. Good afternoon everyone. Good afternoon everybody. It's 5:00 p.

m. How's everybody feeling after a few days of hacking? How are you guys doing? Let me hear you a little bit. Come on.

Come on. All right. Well, everybody, thank you so much. My name is Jorge, your boy Tech Cortez. I'm MC for E Denver.

And this is literally the first panel I'm presenting. Um, and I'm happy to be here with all the family from Denver and the E Denver, uh, that have been welcoming us for so many years. This is the greatest one of the greatest examples to follow is the community and the people committed to grow East Denver for so many years. I want to give them a big shout out to all the volunteers. Everyone I Denver, thank you so much for hosting us.

Um I'm your boy Tech Cortez coming visiting from Miami. Uh been here before as volunteer mentor judge and this time around we are presenting to you guys. Want to have a lot of more uh people coming if they want to join us for the next panel. We are uh making uh announcement, big announcement everybody. If you guys want to come join us, we are announcing the launch of Eid Mobile and we're so proud to make it here on the main stage of Eid Denver.

So, thank you everybody for joining us. Uh I'm not going to take too long. I think uh our speakers are ready to come in and take over. If you guys have ever heard about wallet connect, raise your hand. Come on.

Has anybody here about MetaMask ever? Raise your hand. Come on. I'm out of here. Everybody, well, thank you so much.

We're going to have great panel of speakers uh tapping into what it is the last consumer uh tapping into how do we make mass adoption possible through the mobile experience. So I want to welcome our last panel of the day. We have been having some changes on the agenda and we brought it here uh to the main stage because it's worth it. And this is uh the first announcement happening in Miami. So stay tuned.

This is going to be a little introduction to what's going to happen uh down in Miami for Eid Mobile. So welcome everybody. And I want to let the speakers come into the stage. Uh and I appreciate if we give them a round of applause to our last panel of the day. Welcome.

And I'm going to let them uh take it from here. Thank you so much everybody. Please one more round of applause to our last panel of the day. Eat mobile launch at E Denver. Thank you so much everyone.

Cool. So much here. Oh, you want to say something? I want to say what's up F Denver. Woo.

What's up, Denver? Where is the energy? Awesome. Awesome. Awesome.

See so many strangers, so many cool faces. How many of you guys are building uh a uh are building something at this hackathon? How many of you guys are developers? Raise your hands. Oh, awesome.

Awesome. We have a good audience. Let's uh let's quick jump in a round of introduction. Uh yeah, please uh go Mirro. Hey guys.

Hi. I'm MCO DeLelengineer at MetaMask. Been involved in the Ethereum space since uh 2016. Really excited to be here. Hey guys, my name is Freddie.

Um I'm the co-founder of Seden. It's a Venmo style peer-to-peer money sending app. Um we're currently um launching our MVP for testing. So if anybody's interested um come hit me up and get some money. Yo, what's up Denver?

I'm Derek. um CTO at Wallet Connect but uh my internal official title is chief buck committer um which was very hard earned um Jacob who's clapping thank you Jakob can confirm and yeah I'm thrilled to be here and I'm very excited about bringing a billion people to crypto and I think the there's not even a billion desktops so out there so we need to make an epic crypto mobile experience in order to reach the mass markets So, I'm very excited for Horge and Jenny to organize Smo Mobile to like usher in this new era for crypto. Nice. I like how you kind of like finish it up with uh the the next wave of adoption 1 billion people. I'm super bullish on that.

So, how uh so let's start like what do you want to what do you guys want to talk about? Are we thinking like you know mobile on boarding? Why we need mobile? you know like let's start with some question like why do we need mobile you know and we can jump on account abstraction and specific things around but why mobile onboarding is important and uh who need to care about this um yeah I'll I'll take it so I mean there's just not so many desktop users um in emerging markets people don't have a desktop so if you want to reach mass market more than a billion people it has to be on And I think similar to what happened on the desktop, we can leaprog some of the issues that we're experiencing on desktops and address much of the crypto anxiety through mobile wallets like the desk meta mask um mobile wallet. So one source of anxiety in crypto is am I going to get hacked?

And um I think when I'm in my trusted iOS environment, like I'm already a bit less scared than when I'm on a desktop. And um also I think on mobile we can um wallet connect just launched wallet connect v2 and with together with meta mask and one of the core features here is it implements the cape 25 standard um so there's a standards body called casa that meta mask and others are part of um which stands for chain agnostic um standards basically and the cave 25 standard removes chain switching. So as an end end user um like as a no coiner who's coming into crypto like I don't want to know what a chain is like I just want to go. So it's like one of those things um that really helps reduce anxiety and crypto adoption and it's first happening on mobile later also going to happen on a desktop. MetaMask was part of the standard.

So um we're moving I think we're just moving faster on on mobile too. Yeah, for me also it's really important that I don't know if I want to use a DAP, I don't want to open my laptop, login, connect to MetaMask, etc. I just want to do if I want to you to do a DEX swap, I just want to do it from my mobile. If I want to trade some NFT so I think that's why mobile on boarding the entire user experience of DAPs on mobile, it's so important. Yeah, actually I want to pick up like what you said on u uh NFTs like is there any specific like use case of vertical that you think like you know mobile will will will will own this vertical like you know I'm thinking about you know peer-to-peer gamings or so those kind of like layer 2 gaming transactions but do you have in mind other verticals in the space that will conquer mobile adoption?

For me definitely gaming is probably the biggest uh the biggest field and that this is something MetaMask we are looking a lot into it. We recently released an SDK which is uh targeting especially game developers where they will be able to connect their game straight to MetaMask and then they can uh then have things like uh achievement in NFTs the entire connection to different chains. So yeah, gaming is definitely massive. I think for the uh adoption of a billion users, it's also very important to look past the traditional blockchain use cases and the traditional blockchain apps because mobile is super present in all of our lives uh in web 2 apps. So it's just a natural route to gain the new uh users by offering services with crypto sort of technology behind it or parts that are crypto technology behind it.

and you just won't onboard these users if you just offer desktop access. Like this week, Spotify launched on Android with w connect for playlists. So there's like one thing, one theme to follow is like these web two use cases that already exist that are not now like leveraging crypto for some things. So there's Instagram that launched NFTTS also like with MetaMask and Wallet Connect and other wallets. and now there's Spotify.

So I think there's just domino after domino falling where um where apps that have billions of users um like start providing new value for those users using crypto and now we're just like we just have to reduce those less barriers that the UX is really really nice. One example of that is also through the Kasa standards body. We launched a cacao standard um which um which allows you to do a sign in with Ethereum in just one transa in just one user interaction. So as a recap signin in Ethereum allows you to log in or sign up with a website using your um your ch your address your wallet address. And what needs to happen there is that the the website which is usually centralized can recover your public key from assigned nons.

So and thus far this has always been two steps. So for an end user this is kind of terrible especially if you're on mobile and you have to switch to MetaMask or another wallet twice like now with this cacao standard that's pre proliferating many wallets already implemented. Um this is just one step. So it's a convenient user experience and once this has proliferated across wallets then it's easy for the Instagrams and like the Spotify of the world that have billions of users to just add this. What what I wanted to add it as well is that uh for me super exciting that on mobile you can also leverage the native u uh feature of your phone for example you can access your HD kind of key uh you can use Apple wall Apple pay on ramp so there is all this kind of feature that are integrated in your phone by default that you can use and to make them interact with your with your d or with your up.

Yeah, 100%. When hardware wallet on mobile just just for but u I want to touch on your point on uh you know challenges like you know single single uh login right like this is like something that is easier for the end users. What are the other challenges that you see or or anyone here right like challenges blockers why we're not getting more people on mobile like you know like Metam Mask is with extension with mobile uh you know like anybody out there is has his own kind of like mobile version but why not everybody's on mobile today what are the blockers or challenges that you think end users or even developers like let's let's touch because we are obviously in uh in heat Denver we need to touch those on the developers But what challenges do you see out there today for uh for mobiles? I think I want to say two things like for end users the problem is definitely uh no coiner adoption and if I if I own like 30's app is a good example the sedin if if a no coiner enters seden they have to go and download a wallet and then they have to learn what's a seed phrase and at that point my mom is already ultra scared so like my mom really loves me so she's going to go and download a seed phrase wallet, but like not everybody's going to do that. So, I think um that's a real challenge like a seed phrases and then some folks are experimenting with custodial wallets or in my opinion what's better like um MPC wallets stuff like that.

So, there's a lot of innovation coming but definitely from for the end users the on-ramp experience is the biggest challenge. So, and you need to be onboarded immediately. At Wallet Connect, we're hosting web 3 onboarding summit on Thursday. And um like to really put this on the on the center stage, this onboarding experience for the developer, I think a big pitfall and that's like to everybody here in the room right now. A big pitfall is that we develop our applications on on the desktop.

And why is it a bit pitfall? It's because the one of the biggest challenges developing mobile apps or like mobile websites, mobile dabs on a website, not like native is universal linking. And um Apple is notoriously strict with universal links. So you have to really like dive into the last detail to make these universal links work. So if you for instance if there's any network call happening while you're um while you're before you sign a transaction then the universal links breaks and instead of you being transferred to MetaMask or another wallet you you're being transferred to the app store and now the mo the developers completely confused sorry the end users completely confused.

So that's a real developer challenge where like developers need to step in and up their game and a challenge for developers is there's no test net available on these mobile apps. So MetaMask I think MetaMask is like the exception that supports Ethereum girly but doesn't support arbitrum gurly or any of the L2s or they do. Okay. Yeah, I think Metamas is agnostic as to what chain you use in your your mobile app. Uh if I just want to may to add you want to hold the mic.

Sorry. Uh I want to add on the challenges. I think another big challenge is to bridge the gap between sort of you have your users that want to be fully in charge and want to understand what's happening and want to you know uh really sign every transaction. And on the other hand you have users that do smaller scale transactions. It's not that important.

It's especially for our app it's like sending 10 bucks to somebody. And then you have a lot of issues and complexities around that. Like for example, we use gasless transactions. So we have signed type data transactions and that's not really readily inter interpretable for a user at that moment. So you probably need some sort of um tenderly uh simulation to make users feel more comfortable with signing something that they don't know.

Now obviously everybody isn't able who is technically um sophisticated enough to understand what these transactions do but it's still a big hassle for users to see like this you know JSON file looking like uh screen and and I think generally like making complexity more understandable for people is a big problem and it I think it comes from the crypto ethos and where crypto comes from that a lot of tech is being displayed to the user and I think it's it's a challenge that app d apps and and and infrastructure ructure um providers need to think about how they can abstract the right level of of of complexity away from the user so it's usable was this triangle about like security usability what was the third one I remember yeah it was quite cool yeah it's like decentralization or yeah scalability I think yeah scal usability and the usability but actually we jump on this topic like accessibility easiness like account abstraction the buzz word so what is account abstraction for all grandmas grandpas what they need to know like I don't know what's definition. Let's start with the definition for everybody and then we we go to the next why we need counterraction. Well, don't be shy. I think I'm probably not the best person on this panel to answer this, but for me it's basically that we move away away from the state-of-the-art that we use an externally owned account to sign all the transaction and we move to a um you know smart uh smart uh smart contract based uh account to use everything. And that will enable us to basically abstract away a lot of the stuff that is currently now hardcoded in how how how how a how a signer would work, how a wallet would work.

And that allows you to for example do gases and transactions without having the token that you interact with comply to a standard um and obviously also have recovery methods that make it possible to recover your account. So I think these are the two big points but obviously there's probably others. I think obviously at the moment one big challenge to the on boarding is that when you have a new uh kind of wallet when you're creating your wallet you have to write down your seed phrase and you have to to store it somewhere like the entire uh kind of process is a bit slow. So yeah, counter suction will be definitely a massive uh uh a massive use case for and and this nothing new right it's been around since 2016 2017 but just recently I know all VCs are salivating about it everyone is talking about it there is a very cool project I like uh it's called Braavos braos on starket they leverage kind of touch ID and start account abraction to to have an easier way to on board users. So I really like that kind of thinking and yeah obviously social recovery that will be another big one because at the moment that uh your wallet the way you access your wallet is tied to your funds which is something very ridiculous but yeah accountraction will solve a lot of these challenges I guess.

Yeah, I want to add something. I think it's really important like what is the benefit for the end user with account abstraction. So I think the core benefits like Fed said is like a better and more standardized way of doing gasless transaction. So like a gas station basically a pay master. So the end user benefit is I I don't have to have or one of the benefits is I don't have to have the chains gas token.

Um like right now I need to have ETH to do something on Ethereum. So if I send my mom an NFT um then she on Ethereum and she doesn't have any ETH she can send it forward to someone else. And that's maybe okay if there's only Ethereum, but I think right now and like at least for the next couple of years, we're clearly in the multi-chain world. So now it's already complex enough for my mom to to just to already understand what is gas, what is gas on Ethereum. But now if she has to understand what gas is on like five different chains, like it's really game over and she's not going to bother with it.

So one end user benefit is really the the pay master feature. But I want to highlight that um there's other ways to do that like EIP437 for instance which is one incarnation of account abstraction like makes this nice but already today we have ways of doing that and that are somewhat constrained like on on Seden for instance you have gases transactions but except for um ERC20 approves which by design can't be relayed and now there's innovation in that space too moving from approves to permits which can be relayed. So there's like many things going on that are going to usher in a world where where we can like for the no coiner abstract away the the gas and even for us for coiners like I don't have gas on any of these chains sorry I have I don't have gas on all of these chains and then of course base just came out with Coinbase which tries to innovate on that too by using just Ethereum as a gas token which people already have um so that's one thing end user benefit that's massive And another end user benefit that's massive is you can batch transactions built in. So for instance when I sign up on ENS there's mult multiple transactions that I have to carry out and that's for me as an end user even as a coiner it's massive anxiety like what happens if I refresh my browser window in step two and these kind of things and here it's sort of the same the same answer like you can already do this with current technology like smart contract wallets like no or argent allow you to batch those transactions and then um there's an EI there's a there's an EIP and also a CASA proposal for batch transactions to also make this with current technology so that I like basically I batch transactions I switch over or like I I show the MetaMask model and then I just sign multiple transactions at one at once. So this is something we could do with the current Ethereum technology with the drawback of it's not atomic.

Um, so but I think there's many many things we're going to explore and that we should also explore at the same time because realistically it's going to take some time until EIP4337 or the alternative implementation is going to be proliferated. So it's great if we have through the CASA standards body and body and other things can proliferate things on the on the way there. What I also really like is that all the logic lives in the smart contract. So you can go really granular with things with the spending limit pay master. So that's I think what we're missing at the moment.

As Derek said there is solution for multisig even for gasless transaction but all this is solution like they don't really let you go as granular as having this logic living on chain. It's um just for the benefit of uh of the audience here what what again are pay masters and why we need it. What what is pay master? What is a pay master? Well, to my understanding, it's just the ability to swap out any sort of ERC20 token against native and sort of have that as a part of the transaction that you want to go through.

And I think by the way like paying gas, you have to pay gas for a transaction. I think it's like in a in a certain way it's a good thing because you have total ownership about the execution of the transaction. But if you compare it to any other service in the world that you're using that is not cryptoreated, it's totally unknown. You would never go to a bank and you know pay for the electricity that your bank withdrawal is using. And I think framing any crypto interaction like that makes sense that it if you think about taking that away from a crypto interaction, you will also see a lot more usage because right now somebody sends you crypto uh an ERC20 token uh you still can't do anything with it.

You still have to sign on to any sort of on-ramp solution, pay sometimes a huge fee or do a strenuous KYC process. Um, and in my opinion, that's that's not going to be the one that's not going to be the mode of operation that brings on uh the next billion. So, I think uh having pay master contracts or a fully fully capable account abstraction um IP is super important for us to actually, you know, scale uh the the blockchain. And I think now now that we have you know um L2s and a lot cheaper ways to um go execute transactions this will be much more um attractive to DABs and companies to you know pay for the gas fees and seek their revenue in a in a more traditional way like taking a cut out of any sort of transaction or you know um offering free transaction execution um from customers but you know take some revenues for their businessto business services. Uh is there any concern?

I mean do you have any concern on the the security side? I mean it's a new technology right and it's still a smart contract. So I guess as always like it will take some time to to being adopted and for people to actually kind of to have an interface to have a kind of schema at the moment there is none. So it will take time. That's why I was saying before like VC are celebrating about it but it's it will still take like it's not something that is going to happen in the next 2 3 months that every wallet is going to integrate account.

It will take time but but it's also like yes security may be a concern but like with cheaper gas fees when we move away from these high value investment transactions it's also not going to be the worst thing in the world. Like if you think about like the average sort of everyday transaction that you may make, you can try out something with that, right? You can create a dedicated wallet for your everyday transaction. It doesn't have to be your main account that you know has all your hundreds of ETH that is super, you know, valuable. It can be something where you play around with it.

And I think that's going to be the way forward especially with lower gas fees and especially I think also for apart from end users also for enterprises there is a huge uh uh kind of market there because you can have like a main wallet and then each department or your company could have a separate account with with spending limit. They don't have each account doesn't have to care to care about gas. You can you can have all your gas fee paid from your main wallet. So yeah this really exciting really exciting stuff. I think on the security thing the the problem is rather that we need to enable the customer to like do the right choices like right now if you carry out a gases transaction I think Fetty touched on it but you're completely overwhelmed.

you see like some binary bits and bites and then like even coiners like myself are scared like I I don't know what's going on and also I'm too lazy like I actually don't want to analyze this. So, I'm like excited for the day um when there's going to be transaction simulation and which is a hard problem and there's much more lowhanging fruit um I'm giving a talk on the subject at Walcon tomorrow. So, there's there's way more lowhanging fruit that we can do basically with domain binding just like matching. Okay, you're on uniswap.com or first of all like if you're on evil uniswap.

com you can do a lookup and maybe show the end user hey maybe you don't want to interact with evil ununiswap.com it's like longing fruit then the next layer is hey you're on evil ununiswap.com or you're on uniswap.com but you're interacting with this and that contract but this and that contract isn't affiliated with uniswap.com so maybe you know double check this and then the last step would be like the transaction simulation that I can see when I do this gasless transaction or a regular transaction um like this is what's happening like you're transferring this NFT to that account if I just enable the user to like see this visually then I think most of the security concerns are addressed and then the other security concerns are hypothetically hypothetical like the hypothetical security concerns of the RPC um of the RPC provider being malicious like that's A it's a real security concern, but there's going to be answers, but we're only going to do the right investments into like getting to the solutions if there's enough mass market, like if it's sexy enough and financially valuable enough to address this.

So for RPC for instance there's a lot of money in RPC and now there's one there's many approaches into approving the centralization and there's also one approach like which uses I forgot the name of the company but they use like um HSM and or like they have basically a technology so you can verify the software that's running in the RPC and that it's not malicious and whatever. So there's now a plethora of innovation to address this concept and I think we're going to see the same but first we need to get mass market permission permissionless innovation I mean actually like M I have a question for you obviously how many of you guys know what a metab is your hand a bit so people here know give us a quick background of snaps are and uh like will snaps could help this Uh I mean could could help actually like I mean or did you see some snaps already helping in the account extraction like phase with like you know MPC and uh uh and specifically like account recovery agents is there anything that you want to say but let's give a give a quick like what are snaps so that everybody know and uh sure so snaps it's an ecosystem of programs that runs on top of metam mask and that just extend the core functionality so some Use cases of snap could be like let's say you want to integrate Bitcoin or Solana or any non EBM chain you will be able to do it through Snap. So it's not native in MetaMask. This is something that we probably for a variety of reason want to integrate into MetaMask but you'll be able to access those kind of keys to for those networks. Uh there is stamps for trans transaction insights as well where you can get more insight about the kind of interaction that you're doing with a smart contract or the transaction you're carrying.

H yeah definitely for snaps uh for snaps and kind of structionction. We do have uh a few of them already built. There is a very good one from big economy that I really like and I know that there is people that are doing crazy stuff with spending limit and uh and multiig uh leveraging account obstruction and also for mobile in general. I think snapets is not in a road map in the very near future but it will be definitely a big part of mobile uh where people could be will be able to build a snap for for integrating with their with their native app. So that's something super exciting that we're looking forward to.

Cool. Cool. Good overview. I think we are almost on time. uh quick takeaway or home assignment like give us like top resources on account obstruction that you think we should check out when we go home tonight.

Yeah. And I mean obviously the there is this uh some people might know it with this telegram channel called 4337 mafia where they talk about accountraction on boarding. There is a lot of talk about mobile in general and there is a very good repo uh on on GitHub. I think if you if you look for 4337 uh resources, you will find it where there is a a list of talks and documents about in specific about 4337 and I guess if you're looking for more mobile stuff in general with there's so many resources we do have some documentation on the SDK for MetaMask which is in metamask.io/doccks O/doccks if I'm not correct and yep nice anything to add any key takeaway on mobile on boarding mobile challenges or the topic that we spoke about today going to happen um for the developers here um don't build your apps desktop first from now on like it's 2023 build your apps mobile first like web browser first be very cognizant go into Safari, enable your 3G, throttle down your internet to 3G.

Make sure your app actually works. And of course, if you have an issue with Wallet Connect and hit us up on Discord or Twitter or whatever, where wherever, we'll love your to hear your feedback. Yeah. And think about like usability and on boarding. I think this is really important.

I think also we need more uh you know UX hackathon where actually build be people build like web three products but actually think about how I'm on boarding the end users. Uh I think that's also like super important. Cool. I think like we are at time and big shout out to uh to our panelists. Thank you guys.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Awesome. Big round of applause to our panelists. Thank you so much everyone.

This is uh the official launch of Eid Mobile here at E Denver and everybody welcome to join us first time in Miami very soon. Stay connected, stay tuned. We couldn't do this uh without the support of volunteers, tours, and all people engaged on the Denver ecosystem here. So, we're very grateful for having us and hosting us here for our announcement. Uh and we're gonna do uh one last uh short talk uh from our media partner uh Cointelegraph Acceleration.

It's a new program recently launched. And I want to welcome Anna Shakola to uh tell us a little bit more in a few minutes. So stay connected. Uh please talk to all the panelists. They're going to stay there.

Uh CTO of Wallet Connect, senior developers for MetaMask uh third web. Thank you everybody for joining us. And I'm going to give a few couple of minutes, a few minutes to Anna Shakola from Cointelegraph. Thank you so much. Hi everyone, guys.

It's already 5:30 p.m. I know that you're exhausted, but uh I hope I will be quick, bright, and give you some fresh ideas about new opportunities for startups. Uh are you familiar with the Cointelegraph as a media? Yeah.

So just few now humble things we are the oldest one uh and the biggest one media in space we have 11 franchisees. So once you interact with Cointelegraph you can target different geographies. So we've seen so many cool projects in 2020 21. We create enormous amount of marketing companies and we decided to enter VC space because we want to support you guys. We want to support builders and we want to help projects who who is a latest who at the youngest stage at seed stage preed stage and early a stages.

So we created accelerator with a business model media for tokens or equity. So we are looking for startups who has already a mature MVP and who's ready to on board Cointelegraph traffic Cointelegraph users and who's ready to be published at our sources and explore the beautiful power of our co once future investors will Google you once future partners will search for your company name it's really good mark for you guys at early stages to be published at Cointelegraph. So it's very simple. You just uh press into search link that Cointelegraph acceleration and you will find our landing page where you can find opensource form and fill up the form. I personally will check your application.

Uh you can find me in social network probably probably Jennifer will share my contacts afterwards on the screen and you can easily reach me out to make sure that uh I check your form and I will reply to you. Please follow Cointelegraph keep updated and this year we launch a lot of grants for you guys during all big conference this year. So Paris blockchain conference, Hong Kong Wow Summit, um Paris um Ethereum this July and bunch of other conference we provide grants for them for young builders for seed early stages. Normally from 20K up to 50K please check our website be updated and win coin telegraph grants for your companies. Thank you very much.

I am Ana Shakola. Um here you will find my contacts afterwards and for cograph accelerator. Thank you. Round of applause for Anna Shakola. I appreciate everyone coming to our session.

Uh and one more time, one more day. Uh don't get overwhelmed. Get good food. Get good sleep. Um there's going to be a lot of more days panels.

Uh remember the the main stage at the other location at the main location is going to be open from Thursday. So stay tuned. There's a lot of things uh coming for the next few days. I appreciate you guys um coming to our last session. Uh this was the launch of Eid Mobile.

So everything is being live streamed on Twitch or Twitch and um and all the content and satellite events side events are going to be uh on the main page of E Denver. So all the information is there. Thank you everybody for Thank you everyone for participating on our last session and always welcome. See you guys tomorrow for another day of E Denver. Thank you so much.

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