EthCC 2: Taylor Monahan

all right welcome back from the coffee break I hope you had a little caffeine boost I know it's it's early especially for a conference for those that don't know I'm Taylor Monahan I am the founder and CEO of my crypto and I'm gonna talk a little bit about fixing a theorems fragmented user experience and I don't know hopefully you can take some things away from this and we can all grow and elevate this entire ecosystem together because we really are going to need to work together if we want to reach mass adoption or even just like your average person so in order to sort of like figure out where we are and where we need to be I wanted to kind of go back in time and look at you know the internet and how the internet evolved back in the early early 90s this was pretty much your computer experience which was way way better than say in the 70s and 80s but it was still a pretty rough experience and I was doing some research and I was trying to figure out what did people back then think of the Internet right what are those early geeks like how do they describe it and I found this really amazing quote that literally seems like it could be talking about crypto today and it says the Internet itself is a rather loosely organized with no one really in charge and as this guy Ross put it it's amazing that it even works at all and I just like I read this article about the Internet in 1993 and I was just like oh my god this is this is literally us right now and another quote from this article again I was just like this is this is us this is that right here the Internet is quite difficult at first because it uses a computer operating system called UNIX which few people are familiar and this is from like this this high school sort of article magazine and so these two students Robert and Jason wrote a manual for all their fellow students on literally how to use the Internet and then moving forward a little bit we had this sort of amazing annoying thing that that came into being basically AOL started with floppies and then they transition to CDEs and they I think the quote was at some point 50% of all CDs manufactured had an AOL logo on them they literally like carpet-bombed everyone with these CDs and these CDs allowed people to you put the CD in or the floppy in and we give you access to like your little AOL panel you get your your email it was still like pretty rough as we'll see in a minute but it definitely was a huge step forward um and so Jan Brandt who was the chief marketing officer who kind of like created this entire this entire idea to basically give everyone floppies described it as this people really didn't know what the internet was it was proving difficult to explain it succinctly it was much more effective to let customers try it firsthand and this was like one of the very very early new eyes for ello I'm sure some of you are having flashbacks right now and she she dove deep into sort of the decisions around these CDs and the struggles that they had and one thing that she found was she was constantly sort of in this battle with the engineers at AOL because they wanted to make like the best software possible but the bigger the sufferer was the less likely it was to fit on like one floppy or even one CD and she would just like have to drill it in your heads no you can't put it on to floppies guys I'm sorry like you have to restrain yourself because it's already hard enough to get people into the the the ecosystem and onto the internet and if it's on to floppies it's just not gonna work and again this quote feels so so familiar to what we're experiencing today she says it really is all about the consumer making it easy and taking away the barriers is what we had to do ah and again like this experience is nothing like extraordinary right like everything just sort of clicked into place and it gave people a way in and it gave people something to do and it gave the average person a way to access the Internet which eventually led to this AOL Instant Messenger which was probably my favorite thing in middle school and then it led all the way to today which is we are literally overwhelmed with apps our phones are filled with them we have I don't even know how many messaging apps it's absolutely you know insane but the user experience is just flawless right like it's you know anyone can message at any time anywhere in any way shape or form that they want so instead of sort of continuing forward with today let's sort of hop to like the future and where we want to be ideally where do we want crypto and the blockchain in this ecosystem to be in say 10 years 20 years 30 years 40 years whatever and so I didn't really have any huge insights myself so I pulled some from really really smart people in this ecosystem and Eric for he's recently said that people should be able to transact as easily as they can communicate with each other I can send an email hop on a video call shoot off a message from my phone my computer to anyone in the world very easily borders don't matter there's no cost no one can censor me or stop me when financial interactions are that easy and effortless and accessible or around the entire world we've won okay and if you think about it if you think of how early internet days if you think about even just AOL Instant Messenger and then where we are today with communication and messaging that sort of like the leaps and bounds that we've made in that evolution that's where we need what we need to do with the the sort of the financial transactions right now another great quote from Andres Antonopoulos this isn't just about banking the unbanked is about unbanned it's not just access to a bank account but access to the full power of a financial institution the ability to trade transact anywhere in the world in a very very short amount of time 24 hours a day 365 days a year without any limitations in any currency and again these are the same things that Eric was talking about before right like it should be for anyone borders should not matter our time shouldn't mountain shouldn't matter our location shouldn't matter who you are what class you are where you were born none of that should matter everyone should be able to access this stuff and then lastly germy loves love's love's and I love his sort of how he how he thinks about tokenization right and the tokenization of literally everything and he looks at the blockchain as not like he looks at the Internet as data exchange and he looks at the blockchain this value exchange and he thinks beyond just money he thinks beyond just these financial transactions he thinks about everything being tokenized and then being able to have a really transparent record of everything and then also being able to trade and transact everything so it's not just money we're talking about this could be property or this could be more intangible things they can all be recorded they can all become transparent and it can all be on the blockchain so now let's let's get real per second let's talk about where are we right now in this ecosystem this is how to use the killer Dobb today you guys are t it's pretty amazing all right so first you're gonna sign up for an exchange you're gonna give them your name or email address your actual address your birthday at your ID and a selfie you're gonna wait for them to verify you you're gonna finally buy you're either with your feet you're gonna wait for that to all happen then you're gonna wait for the exchange actually give you your ether then you're like oh no I need to pick a wallet Oh everyone tells me I should have a hardware wallet okay let me get a hardware wallet so you wait for that thing to arrive in the mail you learn how to use it you set it up you make sure you back it up the USB cable is a flaky piece of so you got to get any USB cable and fix that and then you need to find your address and what the hell is an address that ugly thing I'm supposed to type that are you serious oh no I have to copy it I really really have to copy it all right so I copy I go back to my exchange I pays my address I wait for the exchanges send the either to my new wallet why do I have less either than I originally sat by the way like I sent Thai neither I have like nine point nine nine nine nine nine eight seven okay cool oh and in order to use the stop I need your token I have to do this entire thing over again with your token and I need a DA Prosser so everyone sells metal mask I use meta mask i hook my hardware wallet up to metal mask I go to the job I wait for ipfs to load the job Oh awesome auger is a decentralized oracle peer-to-peer protocol for a printer to Lamar so I accept the terms without reading I explored the gap I find a button look I found a button guys I found about I'm gonna click it I'm gonna click and I'm gonna click it oh my freaking look what is this why do I supposed to do this got it I'm gonna run okay I'm gonna run that's terrifying okay and then after I've regained my composure I brought a bunch of reddit threads I've regained my club pins everyone on the under and I was telling me you can do this sailor you I swear you can do this I go back I click the button in Madame s I just trust that everything's gonna be fine and it tells me that I need either in order to send these freakin tokens so I go back to my exchange I buy more Eve I send more eat back to my address I check my wallet I go back to the table I click the button again I can firm the transaction I click the transaction I'm now on either scan I don't even know what all these numbers mean I closed everything I go back to the table and it turns out oh hey I did it it went through I did so I don't know what I did but I did it now what that's what if we continue down this path that a centralized feature is a hundred percent canceled we cannot have that the experience okay we just can't we have to figure out how to break down those barriers how to make this easier I know how to allow average people to do the things that they want to do and access this value without having to read a manual or a book so this is sort of the state of the ecosystem this is how I imagine it in my head right now right we have exchanges we have the Fiat on-ramp so we have the wallets we have the da browsers we have the adapt interfaces and I separate the top interfaces like the auger interface we arrive at that site and you can click buttons I separate that from the sort of smart contracts and the protocols because they really are different we have all these essentialize finance systems we have these tokens we have education which there's a lot of people doing a lot of amazing things with education by how do we bring that inside where people actually need it so that I'm not you know 50 tabs deep and and this sort of how fragmented this all is results in users not being able to get in which resulted in gaps not being able to get users we can't unbanked we're still really really reliant on these centralized forces and and ultimately we can't exchange value we cannot transact easily and value can't be created and there's this concept of like one plus one equals three right where it basically means the value of the whole is more than the value of the individual pieces and this is what we're experiencing right now you have all these individual pieces and individually they have some sort of value they're contributing so much to the eCos some but if we bring them all together if we make their relationship really really seamless the value is going to be immensely immensely larger because it's actually going to empower people to interact with these technologies and interact with these dots so the big question is how the hell do we get there right this is what you guys are here for I assume how do we get to a big happy Huggy you know it goes to somewhere where everything is connected really seamlessly so the first thing is that we need to connect the pieces and this is probably one of the biggest things that we're experiencing right now is that when you're interacting with adapt you basically you might have your hardware wallet and then you have your madam asked which is like your Chrome extension and then you have the adapt interface and they're all very separate and the information that the sends - madam escort us wallet or whatever it's very limited and it's very technical and it sort of has to be that way because of the the trust factor you can't just have like any dots on anything - madam ask and display it buy it results in really really confusing interactions for the user so we need to figure out how to more seamlessly connect these pieces we need to figure out how to get the education in line inside the DAP we need to improve the user experience of these things but we also need to work together in doing this we need to connect each other and one thing that I've noticed in a out this conference specifically is we have about like I think four or five X connects in the ecosystem now and they're all trying to solve the same problem right you have the wallet connect the argent connect them you connect all the connects I was joking on Twitter I said that we're gonna make a connect connect to connect all the connects and and it I was joking but like how do we get to a point where everything is connected and how can we use everyone's strengths to connect those pieces and for those who are building products in the space regardless of where you stand in the space education and onboarding is immensely important and another conversation that I've been noticing lately is that oh it's it's ex persons it's the wallets that should be on boarding or it's the Fiat on-ramps that should be on party and in my opinion that's not gonna work everyone needs to be on boarding right everyone needs to be teaching people not only about their their products and their value and the core concepts and the why but they also need to be sort of like fitting that into the larger crypto ecosystem they need to be instilling values into their users so that the users understand why they're there and what they're doing and if you rely exclusively on a coin base to onboard people in the crypto we're gonna be in trouble because the values that are going to be instilled in those individual users may not 100% aligned with what you want your users to see and feel and do within your decentralized application and this ties back into the first point a bit but I am a huge fan of competition I think competition forces us all to be better right if we don't have any sort of competition you can get lazy you can forget that there's new remarkable things being felt but that doesn't mean that we should be building the same thing 80 times when we could work together and just build the one thing 80 times better and this is with with the connect connects this is like the perfect example of that we need to be working together to create like the best sort of interaction layer that can help everyone because if we don't the reality is is that when you you build a job and you're presenting it to your users the first experience they're gonna have is like 80 different buttons with 80 different logos that's not like and if you want to use this service you can click this and if you want to use this service you can click this and if you want to use this service you can click this when the user is really interested in using your DAP right so how do we get them from the real world the traditional world the world that they live in today to actually getting the value out of your job and that is I think the biggest point that sometimes gets lost in these conversations is that we are all creating value for people okay we're not creating technology for technology's sake or not being too centralized for decentralized sake we are using these technologies and using these values and instilling these values and others and giving people the ability to access that value for people whether that's to connect people to empower people to bank the unbanked to give access to financial tools to those in countries that don't have financial tools whatever the point of your decentralized application or your product or your whatever is think about the people okay it's it's so important that we remember that we're building these things for each other for the larger world for this unknown user for someone in some country that you've never even heard of and if we can create that value and pass that value along and allow people to access their value we're going to be in a very very strong position and this would be my final sort of call to action is think about how you personally can contribute to this ecosystem and figure out how you can be cryptos AOL CD I think that we're a little bit see these are a little bit past their prime so not recommend carpet-bombing the entire world with CDs but I would think about what did this what did this enable right what if this do for the Internet and how can you create something of value that can do the same thing that can get people in so I can get people that otherwise wouldn't explore this whole decentralized thing it allows them to what can we do what can you do what can we do together all right now I'm just gonna show here at my crypto we've been working really really hard and we've been thinking a lot about these problems and we're trying to figure out what what is the sort of next generation of our product because I want someone this is this is my whole goal with my crypto I want to be able to take someone random off the street and like tap them on the shoulder and be like hey there's this thing called crypto it's freaking amazing if you go to my crypto calm like it'll just you it'll it'll take care of you and I want them to be able to land on our site and go from whatever money they have in their pocket all the way to actually getting value out of adapt right like the whole thing I don't want them to just buy their crypto and hold it which is where we are today I want them to actually be able to get value out of the blockchain and so they approach that we're taking which is just one approach and I don't encourage people to take a whole bunch of approaches is we're gonna try to integrate all of these pieces into a really single single interface so that instead of the current interaction which is you land on our site you're presented with all the stuff you unlock your wallet instead of that you're gonna basically have a singular dashboard with all of your stuff all of your different accounts it'll have some fun graphs but ultimately this dashboard will allow you to do other things and maybe that's you know supplying a loan via compounding gaining interest on those those holdings of yours maybe that's playing around with a prediction market on augur whatever things how our users wanna do we want to empower them to do so and this is the first stop on that journey and as always we're focused on sort of improving our our creation right who are all importing or our whatever you want to call it and so first thing we're doing is we've really worked hard to figure out what the frick the difference is between a wallet and an account is an account and then we're gonna explain to people what an account is and how that fits into their wallet and for those who don't know a wallet is sort of like the interface it's the way that you access it so your ledger is the wallet your men Damascus wallet my crypto is a wallet on my crypto in madam asked on your ledger you have access to very accounts you can create a new account etc we're really gonna try to instill this concept into people because right now simply the words that we use are really intimidating and so one thing that we're doing is we're gonna we're gonna start explaining to people across the whole app but primarily when they're first getting started and we're gonna differentiate between an address and a secret and the reason that we chose this word secret is because it inherently gives the user some information that like this is secret don't share it but it also eliminates the need for saying a private key key store file or mnemonic phrase every single time you want to explain anything and so yeah so this is like sort of part of our new onboarding flow we're playing around with a lot of stuff if you want to like dive deep with me and you want to talk about words or language or design or anything I'm always always down to talk to people and then also super exciting in January we acquired this company called Ambo there are a small team that has just been cranking on the mobile side and really have the the same sort of vision of we want to make people able to use the tokens that they invested in in 2017 and how can we do that so this just passed security audits we're cleaning up some final things I think we need like a support email on there you know the little details and then we'll be launching that and we're super super excited to have them join the microbes of family and also super excited to be moving into the mobile area and then I just want to leave you with this this last little bit is everyone in this room or watching on the livestream or wherever the hell you are what value can you add to this ecosystem and what future do you want because really if we remember back to like the very first slide where they were talking about nobody's in charge of the internet and it's decentralized so this is awesome force and where we are today with the internet how did we get there some things were really really good and some things were maybe not so good right and so as we're building this you coast some think hard about what future do you want what values do you want what value can you add how can we work together better and if you are interested in adding value via microp though I am always looking for amazing people to join our team or a remote company so you can work from anywhere and yeah jobs at my crypto or you can just tailor at my crypto or you can just find me I'm always around and yeah that's all I have for you I am Taylor Monahan and thank you so much [Applause] I guess we have time for questions does anyone have questions one two yeah thanks for the nice talk I just want to ask about this dashboard with the statistics etcetera when is that gonna be rolled out soon TM okay so it's it's all all the pieces are sort of like design and together the interface level now we're hooking up all the pieces and making sure that we do it securely because oh it fundamentally changes how we interact with accounts so I don't know you're sitting next to the engineers on my team you can ask them for a timeline and then like maybe for exit but yeah I mean in the next couple months we're hoping to roll it out good things thank you very cool presentation so one question ad is that basically you you have discussed about several problems we see in the space from education to like taxonomy if you want and interfaces and also in the fact that it competition is good but we still have the problem of understanding how to find like a common ground with naming and all this kind of stuff so how do you see this happening in practice because right now we have like competing projects on the same and you know exactly with the same scope of work that use completely different terms terminology and this is confusing to users of course yeah and it's been difficult since the early days you know I I was in 115 like okay we can't use this word private key we shouldn't be even using private keys like this is a concept that people can't they just can't wrap their heads around and we've seen that over time you know a lot of people have come to the realization which has led to instead of like a easier like instead of having a singular thing that people refer to we have like 20 different things that people refer to so what I try to do is that when we use new language or new terms or new whatever it is I try to be really aware of what other people in the ecosystem are using and if I can like do everything in my power not to use new words because it's that it's that old ex xkcd comic where you know you have I'm gonna make the perfect standard and then Oh there's 15 standards we have you know a lot of people are working on solving these problems some of them are in like a IP so they can be a little bit hard to access but you know things like QR codes things like URIs and URLs strings things like you know a lot of these sort of low-level specs that a lot of different apps are gonna use either having like finding the EIP that's already been created on it and and being part of that discussion or creating your own EIP that basically goes over how you're going to be using it and proposing it as a standard for the entire ecosystem can be really helpful obviously it's not the perfect solution for things like language because you know you can't really do an EIP for like hey we're gonna call this X but for those I would definitely you know have conversations with people in the ecosystem provide your arguments for for why you think this word is best and you know have conversations with like your competitors and say why aren't you using your this word can we all use this word are you you you wanna yeah you want to shell Yogi's like give can you give him the mic so my question is about the language and a big part of what made the internet click I think Without Borders is that by now there's a very powerful shared visual language like people know what an upload button should look like people know what a download button should look like they know what the send button should look like and they immediately recognize them and in crypto I don't think we have those powerful visual metaphors and I think that you are uniquely well-positioned to introducing them and it would be nice to have a visual language in addition to the verbal language that would convey the kind of things that are needed for crypto are you like and I think that you're a my my crypto is best positioned to kind of introduce people to to a new visual language are you moving in that direction as well we've thought about it a lot we did a lot of user research and a lot of sort of experimentation especially around sort of this the concept of like your private key and your address makes your account and stuff and then we also did stuff around your password plus your private key equals your keystore file things like that I wasn't exactly convinced that it would change the world but now that you bring it up maybe we can talk after and and yeah I have a lot of like you know initial wireframes and and notes on it I just we haven't like implemented it yet but I would love to discuss further yeah yeah I've got one question don't you think that the like I think that the other problem of apart from usability of the crypto world is that probably there is no much value for random folks you said that usually you'd like to pass random folk on the bone his back and tell him about this crypto and how how awesome it is and from the developer community like the normal developer community and there are a lot of folks who apparently get all those private key stuff and and and all those things but for that they don't see much much what to do in this world like they I've been able to convince them to create their wallets even you know we shared some tokens we we even build some random tokens for ourselves and share them but there's not much after it like and this this internet next Internet is like an internal premium which in which everything is paid for like every transaction that you actually upload to the blockchain is paid for and normal internet is free so in this premium Internet I don't see this premium value yet yeah and that's one of the you know obviously with my product we've been focused on just like allowing people to access their crypto and I often say that our market is like people that already have crypto on an exchange and want to like hold it themselves or invest in an ICL and that's real like that's not where I want to be but that's in reality where we're at and part of the reason for that is that there isn't really tangible things to do on the other end and unfortunately like one of the things that I regret a lot about 2017 was because everything was so busy and crazy oh honey is okay because things were so crazy and busy I was I was mostly focused on putting out fires and you know making sure our infrastructure is online and things like that and I didn't have time to stop and think about we are having a mad rush of new people entering into space what do we want them to actually take away with them you know next year when the market crashes how can we instill the passion and end values in them and I think that's one thing that the entire Yugo system really kind of dropped the ball on was you know we had a huge rush of new people that were really interested in getting rich quick but we didn't do a good enough job of enlightening them to the real values of decentralisation or these products or these daps or you know the the diffusion of power from the centralized forces those things that we're in crypto for we need to figure out a way to communicate those better be our products we also need those products to exist right we're starting to see some of the GFI stuff come to fruition with things like maker things like compound things like auger and that will help the value on the other end as you say it that will help but it's up to all of us to really help people understand and I always say like I don't think the centralization is a value proposition right like I think it's a means to the end what is the end what is it for you what is it for the average user and how do we communicate that effectively hi I have a small question about how do you see the relation between client-side wallets and server-side wallets like beautiful is what do you see as a future and basically can you reflect a little bit on that Thanks yeah so in order for this space to be accessible to literally like everyone around the globe we're gonna need the whole spectrum right so we're gonna need like the very enterprise level custody solutions where you have someone managing your crypto for you and we need all the way to like this super simple open source tools that you know or or even like the command-line interfaces right and right now I feel like there's a big gaping hole in between the like coin basis or the exchanges and products like mine which is very focused on being decentralize we don't want to take custody we don't want to deal with any of that and I think there's some really unique opportunities to fill that gap and make the experience better and more seamless and give people more traditional experience the downside are the things that scare me most are obviously security with exchanges they're still being hacked every day we haven't learned our lessons you know anytime you talk about a custody wallet or any sort of wallet that has like a traditional authentication mechanism or a centralized server somewhere those being hacked is a huge risk and then the other one is you know I've seen some new products come out that basically try to put a traditional authentication mechanism or link the account to your phone number and again it comes down to like security we know that phone numbers are insecure my phone's been hacked my lawyers phone's been hacked everyone's phone's been hacked and what they do hey Ryan what they do is they Simms huapi right and then they like get into all of your accounts and so what scares me is that you know right now they can get in your Gmail they can get into your exchange they can get you know whatever if that also means you're like your cold wallet or your quote-unquote cold wallet or your reserved wallet or the wallet that you hold that scares me a little bit so we definitely need to we need to figure out how to balance it because the the crypto space like it's such a prime target for for hacks and attack that it's not going away like we have to defend against it from the get-go anything else all right well if you think of anything I'm around all day and I'd love to talk to you and again I'm Taylor Monahan and thank you so much for listening to me [Applause]