Valora - Mobile Stack: Onboarding the Next Billion Web3 Users - How to Bring Crypto to the Masses

hi everyone uh I'm silus uh from Vora I'm the CTO at Vora Vora is a mobile app on IOS and Android and for the last couple of years we've been focusing on uh making really great user experiences for casual web 3 users so they can easily manage their value on chain grow it and and share it with others a lot of our use cases are focused on stable coins and today I'm happy to be here to share what we think is one of the biggest challenges for scaling up the adoption um across users for stable coins and uh how we want to join forces with the ecosystem to solve that challenge okay uh so to start I want to highlight an opportunity in Mobile uh this is probably something that we're all familiar with um but in 2024 over 7 billion users have smart phones we expect this number to increase by about 200 million a year for the next 6 years uh most of this increase is coming from users in sub Sahara Africa in Latin America and so those are probably places where we think that stable coins can provide a lot of utility um probably even more exciting for us is that there's um increased evidence that these users are more and more trying to engage with web 3 about 50% of users who accessed uh the most popular web 3 daps were trying to do so from a mobile device however uh only about eight of the top 100 daps have a native mobile experience and so if you're like me uh and you believe that native mobile experiences provide a far superior user experience compared to accessing a Dap a web- based app on mobile there's seems to be sort of this issue here where there's demand for these mobile experiences but as an ecosystem uh we're not supplying them uh so the issue is uh probably no surprise that it's uh really challenging a ton of work to build a great mobile experience um the sort of example or maybe the the rule of thumb for what constitutes a really good mobile experience is that all the core user Journeys uh that a user might might take take place entirely within the application as soon as you uh essentially kick a user out for them to complete some part of that user Journey outside your application the Casual web through users are likely to turn out and so in the example of trying to earn a yield uh on your stable coin assets if you kick the user out to get them to cash in or you send them to um a DEX St app to get them to swap to the right assets uh or if when they want to you know finally contribute their stable coins to some pool you move them to another dap at any one of those points a casual web 3 user is going to turn out and so if we put ourselves in their shoes it's pretty easy to start thinking about all the stuff you need to cram in to your mobile experience to make sure that can happen all within a single app um because we're talking about sort of more casual I think the term I heard earlier was unsophisticated web 3 users they're going to want a web two like login to manage their keys uh you're going to need to build a cash in experience they're going to want to bring value uh from Fiat on chain they might have some value on chain uh they're going to want to rebalance periodically so you'll add swapping to the list finally you can uh wire things up to to your protocol of choice um they'll likely want notifications when there's new opportunities uh to earn so you have to add push notifications to the list uh and then lastly cashing out eventually the user is going to want to move Val uh off chain um I kind of like think of this analogy um around IOS and Android if you're just building a a normal mobile app without crypto um and you tried to do so without there being abstractions provided by the operating system for a keyboard drawer or a back button that's kind of the state we're in with uh mobile crypto apps and so it's it's easy to see why only eight out of the 100 top uh dap or protocols end up building mobile experiences native mobile experiences uh so I'm excited to share what we've been working on to solve this problem uh it's called mobile stack uh mobile stack includes uh all the components I just mentioned and then some and is a really simple way to uh stand up a native mobile app on IOS and Android U Back to the sort of os analogy uh we think of mobile stack is kind of a complement to uh IOS and Android that provides all the abstractions that you'd expect uh for building a crypto app on a mobile device I don't have time to uh list all of them but I have some like rough groupings here of the types of components we provide um there's a set around acquisition and onboarding so helping users get started um setting up their account sort of a set of features or components around core wallets I think like swap sending and receiving visualizing your positions and then a set of features around engagement so helping users continue to stay engaged and find Opportunities within your application one thing that um I think is distinct about mobile stack and I want to call out is that these components work end to end out of the box and so if you pick the swap component for example you don't have to worry about building UI and ux components on IOS and Android you don't have to worry about calling a router API you don't have to worry about accurate fee estimation or doing approvals or tracking volume all of this works out of the box for IOS and Android the uh one feature that I'm pretty excited about with with mobile stack um is how you actually bootstrap a native mobile app um we're still refining the like precise developer experience with how that's going to work but essentially you run a command create mobile stack app you pass in adap URL and you get back uh a native app that has some bells and whistles uh has some of the components you'd expect uh and works on IOS and Android and embeds your dap uh within the application so to make this more concrete um I have this hypothetical example of how we might build a savings app powered by curve I've called it curve savings and I'm going to show uh a short video that will uh visualize how this would come together with mobile stack okay so we like spin up our mobile stack app we call create mobile stack um and we end up getting um this shell uh that includes uh a lot of the basics that you'd expect ignore the if you're an engineer like ignore the code part uh it's been simplified quite a bit for this this video but the point is there's some like knobs you can tune uh to style it and customize it for your specific application so we like Dress It Up in curve branding um and we add um the curved app URL um because we're trying to build this for casual users who are looking to like earn uh a little bit of yield on their stable coins we enable mobile Stacks uh web to like login experience or key management experience uh and then next we want to enable uh buying and swapping uh to allow users to easily uh use Fiat uh to buy crypto we have a bunch of different providers already integrated um and swaps work on same chain uh and across different chains and so at this point uh the user has access to uh the curved app they're able to complete uh most of their user Journey all within uh the single mobile application uh and then they can pick a pool through the DAP that they want to contribute to to start earning a yield um okay let's um at this point um it's likely that people will want to start customizing or progressively iterating on their native app um in the curve savings example um the curved app is like not quite the right fit for um a savings app targeted at more casual users it like includes knobs to the curve protocol that are unnecessary and would probably confuse most users it's also kind of a clunky experience to use an embedded dap um in a mobile application so we have a path to um progressively iterate and basically pour more pour more functionality from that dap into your native application it's this plug-in framework we call hooks um hooks are basically uh little scripts um that are run in response to Transitions in the UI or state onchain um they're basically glue for mobile stack to understand how to integrate with uh with your protocol we announced hook during ECC last year uh we've had a bunch of of interesting contributions since then um it's very easy to represent relatively complex positions on chain simply uh in the UI uh we have some hooks around claiming Ubi uh more recently we've released a set of hooks that allow e e