EthCC 2: Charles Hamel

hello can you hear me good yeah hi my name is Charles I'm the head of crypto at opera I'm here today to to talk to you about what we're doing in this space why we're entering this this web free world and what's you know what's our perspective on it I'll also go through a bit of an overview of what we've built so far also on a technical level so that you guys can understand a bit how this all works also discuss our latest announcement of a partnership with HTC that has very interesting implications for web 3 as far as security and usability and also discuss some of the new things we have coming soon as part of our web browser so we're very proud to be sponsoring this event and really starting to engage with the etherium community participate in Norway where we were founded and we also have offices in Sweden where I'm based and leading the whole team for the crypto work and we also have offices in Poland and and China we also have a rim small remote team in Nice not too far from here that's that's working on crypto and overall we we have with our browser products over to 270 million monthly active users which is you know by any by any metric in the crypto space many orders of magnitude bigger than anything out there so the way we look at this is we're bringing a massive user base that's now web 3 enable that can start using these applications I do to give you a bit of a breakdown so destitution to this 270 most of that around 200 is is on mobile to Android and iOS and about 60 on desktop so that's Mac Linux and Windows so that's uh that's the overall of why we're entering this space that we believe that web 3 needs browsers right so far we've been up observing this space for some time and really try to experiment with it and you know get an understanding of it and friction right okay so we believe web three needs browsers right now there's way too much friction in trying to use any DAP right you you have to install in extensions and/or have a special middleware to do all these kinds of stuff but we believe that in order for any of this technology to be to be successful at a meaningful scale you know browser support is needed and we need to have a mobile first integrated approach to this and that web through providers should be as part of a standard feature set of a modern browser yeah and also from from a developer not from a developer but from a browser maker perspective it's important to be differentiated and we see this as you know being the web free browser of choice is a clear differentiator for for for opera so why web right why we why we say that web three needs browsers because we believe that you know the web is the platform for DAPs for for if anything for the reason that the web is permissionless right you don't need to ask anyone's permission any apps or to list you you know anyone can go to your app and and access it and use it on the web so so it fits very well with the ethos of you know blockchain platforms and smart contracts this idea of open and being permissionless there's also a clear distribution advantage to web you don't need to distribute this app which is a big challenge for for any developer to do so we see that the future is that you know these new apps will emerge and we're already starting to see them today they'll use some kind of distributed decentralized open permissionless smart contract blockchain at the backend layer and then you'll have the web technologies we we all know today front and lair and that for this to work you'll need browser support to make this usable outside of our or small group here so over the past year there's been a lot of sort of thinking and you know blog posts and opinions about you know browsers are becoming wallets or wallets are becoming browsers think there's there's clearly two ways to look at this but there's I think we all want to converge towards this this solution where you know the application platform the web is is connected to the wallet and you know we when we started this this project we didn't say okay let's let's build a a new specific browser or web free browser we said let's take our full-featured chromium based browser with with its own unique feature and add web tree support on top of that so that you know you can have only one browser and use it for the whole web all the web to stuff and the web 3 stuff you don't have to ask yourself like this is this a web - or a pre site it just works out of the box on any platform so no so we're really building this in like no extension no no special browser right this is just the web and we know very well that you know building a browser is hard much harder than building a wallet so and we want these applications to be you know first-class citizens we don't want to be them to be operating inside this very restricted browser that many wallets use this kind of system component WebKit we really believe that these apps deserve first-class experience on mobile so by having this browser wallet combo that enables a few key things that I like to put in these three categories first of all is value transfer I think if if there's one of these three that you know emerges in a few years and survives it's gonna be certainly value transfer I really believe that you know a few years down the line a browser that cannot transfer value on the Internet will be not competitive I think just as today you can upload and download images with a browser I think tomorrow you can be able to upload and download value and having a built-in wallet enables that there's also the identity space that that's very interesting in a browser context today we rely on third parties to authenticate ourselves and manage your online identity but having public key cryptography you know built into the browser now you can open up identity to this and enable single sign-on what we have today like in the product is I see very much as a proof of concept what's out there is it can you can see the benefit today but you know there's a lot of people working on self sovereign identity systems that could potentially now integrate in a wallet as part of the browser and then the third one is a digital ownership and what I mean by that is that now you can have applications web sites that can you know verify the the wallet content of a user and perhaps you know open up new content to that user based on their wallet content or you can have social status associated with something that's in your wallet for online communities so having this wallet inside the browser enables these new use cases and removes a lot of friction which is really our our aim here so this is what we have today just you know give you a short overview we we've built this into our Android browser and it's really a wallet that's designed around you search rights think of this is the wallet that you have in your back pocket there's 50 euros 100 euros in it that you want to be able to use you know frictionlessly on the internet there's membership cards ID cards this kind of metaphor this is what we tried to reproduce we launched this in in December and yeah so it's super simple onboarding we don't throw a bunch of new language at you it's integrated but not you know in your face all the time and it has quite a simple interface with kind of a card metaphor also one thing that was important for us is is onboarding and you know not assume that a user will actually go and set activate their wallet before they use ad app we want it to be that so that if you if you go to adapt then we can detect it and with one tap you you activate this flow so this is an example on on bounties Network where you just type the URL like any other URL in another browser we detect a it's adapt we detect that you don't have a wallet you activate it which is basically just accepting the Terms of Use and you're back to the DAP ready to login and bounties Network allow you to log in with a sign message so you know this is this is at least 10x better than any onboarding that we've seen so far and apps and when you think about it like now you have this huge user base that's one tap away from from any interior wallet and I think that's that's a big deal a few cool stuff that that we have built into the product as well we autodiscover neer c 20s you have populate the wallet with with icons and the name and the balance we do the same for collectibles and through open C we actually gather like rich metadata and show it in the native way full screen so that people really feel like this is in their wallet and really feel tangible so today there's a lot of that's from the gaming space they are using this but I really I'm really eager to see usage of NF TS as kind of unlocked keys for for content so that you can now have this unique asset in your wallet that can open up content for on publisher sites for example we also have desktop pairing so and I think that's that's really a big one because we we didn't want to just recreate you know a whole wallet on desktop because just from a usability perspective having a user managed several wallets adds complexity that's not necessary and also from a security point of view you're much better off having these the private keys on the phone and the desktop is harder to secure it's much more prone to phishing attacks so we have a one-time pairing process where you you visit the apps on desktop we expose a web through provider and when it comes time to to sign a message or a transaction you're gonna notification on your phone you tap and the phone sends off the transaction to the network it's a really seamless web 3 browser from desktop to mobile yeah you should really check it out and then lastly we announced recently that we have this top up feature in the wallet so part of the friction is having a wallet in the first another part is how do I give crypto or earn crypto so we we really wanted to have a top up experience not a buy-sell kind of in a trading environments through an exchange so we we launched this feature in Scandinavia with like minimal kyc in in the wallet itself you can top up with Eve and within a minute you have Ethan your wallet full user controlled and we think this is the way to go for kind of a a wallets that's targeted towards usage and not trading or speculation also for for developers out there this kind of auto discovery works on test nets so if you're publishing contracts and test nuts we also show it in the wallet even with the metadata so under the hood what we've built is is a completely non-custodial user controlled wallets user owns their keys and it's a standard cerium HD wallet we use a standard 12 word minimal Nanak that user is is needs to back up but we don't force that back up and scaring tactic as part of the onboarding a like you have zero balance you don't know what the hell's this is but you know make sure you write these twelve English words on a piece of paper that's not gonna fly so yes backup is important but once usages started once there's value in the wallet now we start you know nagging the user and of course they we believe that this has to improve right but so they that you know losing keys is not as critical and there's a lot of experiments going on to how to solve that but that's what we have today the wallet itself is a native java wallet right it's not run in any kind of extension context within the the browsing environment it's it's actually a separate process implemented in Java and we we use a library called web huije which will also contribute to that's a great project from web free labs and just as most other wallet browser combos we also you know run what's called a thin client we relay RPC calls to full node part to ensure our part to our nodes and we use the secure Android key stored for on-demand signing so whenever the this the app needs to sign something the user just has to unlock their phone right so that means they don't have to create a new pin a new password to sign just the same way they unlock their phone they sign transit transactions or messages and we also have this thing called progressive web app support which I'm going to go into later which hasn't been seen before right so this is a message that's important for developers out there like what we've built operas browser and with its Web to use support requires no middleware there's a lot of projects out there that aim to remove friction by you know having adapt developers put some middleware so that browser support is not even so we we think the approach is that you know this needs to be part of the browser for this to be secure and and really usable so good news is that most apps work out of the box with opera right you don't need to to do much of course is it there's a fine print and that's what I'm getting into now there is one thing that has been a bit of a challenge in this in this initial phase is that developers have grown used to meta masks magically inserting a full web 3j s library in their context and they started using that without really understanding the dependency there and we think this is a bad practice and I think meta mask is also trying to to deprecated this so one one one thing you have to remember is that we inject the provider and we support the good old web free current provider as well as the new AIP 11:02 but we don't inject a library for you I think this is the developers job to make sure that all dependencies are included yes and also in the spirit of being you know the browser for web 2 and web 3 we don't want to spam your wallet address to to Facebook to Google and to every every site you visit that's not adapt so we we set a hard requirement right from day one that you know we need to protect that web 3 object more than other wallets have done before so even with the you know traditional current provider approach we have this permission dialog which is very similar to the geo geo location permission so on a per domain basis we we control the access to that that object so that your privacy is preserved on web 2 as well we think this is super important I mentioned PWA so I guess a lot of you may not know what-what PWA is PWA stands for progressive web app and it's kind of an umbrella term for a bunch of web technologies that have been packaged together to make web apps feel native and this is something that's been supporting in in Opera and chrome for for a few years and is now supported in Safari and what it allows you to do from a developer point point of view is build a web app so with the distribution advantage in the permissionless advantage but without the traditional gonna drawbacks of a native app that you have to distribute it to an app store and so it kind of a heavy development that that goes with it so it has its own icon on the home screen you can have notification the browser UI is invisible you can have offline cache so really an native-like experience Twitter the Twitter PWA is excellent you'll need to full app there's Google this has made a few pwace I think yeah there's a lot of big players that have made pwace that I've seen the value and the cool thing now is with uprise that you have web 3 provider inside the PWA so you can have a native like app that talks to the etherion blockchain and transact with it without building in a wallet inside your app so we have set up a few bounties with bounties network so that both from from the library injection side of things that if you if you have this problem in your DAP and you want it to work with opera well should you give you 10 die to do it so we go to bounties Network and if you want to try to make a take your DAP and making a progressive web app or web app there's also a bounty for that so yeah please make your submissions and we'll feature you on the DAP store right so now I'll move a bit tourists out of the decor product that we've built so far into your latest partnership announcement with HTC and the egg so this phone this is something we announced last week as part of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and we think this is a really big deal for for web 3 because it's yeah it opens up a new a new level of security and usability that hasn't been seen before on mobile so what the exoduses is a phone right made by HTC this is what it looks like this is actually what it looks like has a cool back that's transparent you can come and see me later and I'll show you and it's also HTC people here but it's the first phone of a and I see this the first of a generation or that's really starting a trend where you know phones will will have kind of secure hardware that's that that can be used as secure wallet as like a hardware wallet that can be used at the system level by applications so that apps while it apps or or browsers don't need to implement all the cryptographic primitives and and security that's typical for a wallet this will be offloaded at the system level in this secure hardware so this is the first one that has this and it's not just it's not just a kind of secure Enclave in the Apple context that you know it's just four key storage this is much more than that so the Zion this the special chip this Hardware wall is called Zion and it's used for key generation key storage and actual transaction signing so the browser never sees the keys so you have all the convenience of using this Web 3 browser at a very high level with the security of a hardware wallet out of the box which I don't think I you know it has existed before so the chip actually understands what an ethereal transaction is actually understands with Bitcoin transaction is or assign messages so the browser simply tells the chip signed this gets assigned blob and sends it off to the network so this is really the best combo of usability and security out there and as part of Zion they've actually they have their own Wallet app that has social security a recovery built in so that you can do Shamir secrets have a set of trusted friends that can allow you to to recover these keys but that's like separate of the browser it's kind of built as a system feature and it supports all standard you know if transfers and contract calls with with data so yeah if you can catch me later I can even do you a demo I think this is pretty cool we've made a short video to showcase what it looks like that's the Zion you I can think of it as a built-in ledger that with this UI that's for login this is really what it looks like this is another artistic rendering or when you see it it's it's pretty magic yeah thanks yeah so this is just a start I think in a few years time this kind of hardware kind of system-wide secure hardware will be just a line item in the spec sheet and that developers will access this tween API sorry about that yes well the next one nineteen yeah uhit present yeah top right okay yeah so that was our big partnership announcement we also have new features coming in the product that probably very interesting for this crowd we're adding ens support with ipfs so on android this means that in the in the opera beta that's being released today you can type in an ENS name in the address bar just like any other domain we will resolve it we will fetch the content hash for ipfs and will request that ipfs hash through through a gateway and show this to you just as any other website so there's no user name versus the hashes you never sees the the ENS address being resolved - and is accessing this content through this decentralized storage network and we think this is really in line with you know being a web free browser it's not just about crypto it's not just about you know having this wallet it's also having a browser it's able to access decentralized networks and we support this brand-new AIP 1577 to encode the content hash and also the kind of the old method as well as a fallback so we think this is pretty cool and we right now it's at the experiment level we have it in beta based on on feedback from from you then we might actually have this across all products we also added after popular demand custom RPC so you know if you have your own node you can connect to it with opera very easily on both desktop and mobile and added transaction history and we also have one more thing being told this time's running out but you know we're bringing this to iOS you know a lot of people have asked for this is a big big group out there that so far hasn't been able to use our product because we're not on iOS we're announcing it today it's coming soon so we're starting a early access sign up page so if you go there you put in your email you'll get notified as soon as we release it to to test flight and it's gonna have a very similar feature set as the iowa the android version with the desktop pairing and all that and we're building this as part of opera touch which is our or browser for for iOS which we've won design awards to it's it's quite it's quite cool if you want to try it even today without the wallets i think you'll be pleasantly surprised oh yeah everyone gets a wallet yeah thank you for your time very happy to start you know engaging with the etherium community catch me yeah if you have any questions I think we're out of time but yeah don't be afraid to come and say hi and ask me questions is also opera developers here that can answer your question yeah thank you Father perfect city Google slides then yesterday because thank you later ok husky secrets Manor I did share it that's the one yeah