Mobile-First Markets - Panel

hi hi uh i'm i'm jacob from metamask i lead operations for metamask and um yeah uh hi my name is connor i'm an engineering lead at uniswap labs hi everyone i'm denise i lead a bunch of things like products strategy and operations at valor my name is alex i'm a head of mobile at myetherwallet nice and i already introduced myself so i'm really big fan of like conversational panels but like let's also have some pointed questions towards the actual uh participants themselves um i think it's really important that we actually understand why we're here which is that like there is a huge population of people that don't use crypto presumably we like to think that everyone at this conference is using crypto but there actually is probably people who aren't actually using crypto here and so we want to discuss like if we know that the next billion users are all going to probably be on mobile phones what are you doing to address those markets and what are you doing to actually design your ux and your infrastructure primitive demands for a mobile-facing audience so i want to start off with uh denise holm here who is from veloura and i've known denise and working on the lore for a long time and i've been a big fan but one of the things i wanted to ask you is uh you guys launched veloura as a wallet for the cello ecosystem but the unique thing that you did was introduce a did system that essentially cryptographically salted a phone number to a blockchain address essentially giving someone identity while also access to a form of uh wealth accumulation and and wealth storage so now that you've actually had velour in the wild i have a question which is do you see that did has been super useful for user onboarding and or have you seen do you see yourself maybe changing and adding more did solutions such as my as like email uh verification or like uh even twitter handles yeah great question so valora is a mobile wallet it's an app built on sello and salo is a layer one if you don't know that is mobile first oh like this can you hear me great i can also hear me so that's weird um so valora is a mobile wallet and the feature that you were talking about that users can map their phone numbers to their wallet address is meant for peer-to-peer use cases where i want to send my friends in let's say uruguay where i'm from some solar dollars or some crypto and so they may or may not be on valora or may or may not be using crypto as dora mentioned the idea of using phone numbers that's one it's easy to reach people everybody knows someone else's phone number it's it's maybe they don't know it by heart but they can find in their contact lists and so like you can reach other people so like the phone number um form of identification is important for like network effects and social um network effects for other things like accessing d5 um using wallets for for web3 and if these phone numbers are not so relevant obviously and so yeah other forms of of identification makes sense it could be a user's wallet address it could be um identifier i don't know about email i had never thought about that i know crypto and email don't seem to like go well together or not intuitively at least yeah awesome actually there's i believe ceramic is who it is somebody's working on a did solution that allows you to tag your twitter handle but they had discussed going forward with email and i thought that was a strange decision as well but uh maybe i'm just like you know not a boomer uh but uh so my next question thank you so much denise um is to alex over there right here sorry alex uh um and it's kind of around like so my youth world's been pretty successful you guys haven't like you know not gotten attention so it's interesting that you have this direction towards mobile first development and i watched wanted to straight up know is like that always been in the roadmap or is there a reason that you guys have kind of started to focus on mobile development thank you uh so my ether wallet is the one of the earliest wallets it's been launched two weeks after the ethereum itself was launched and i think we've done a pretty good job in addressing that early stage of cryptogrowth but if we want to keep growing keep growing that ecosystem we can recognize that all the users like majority of the users are actually on mobile there's been i think latest numbers is 6.6 billion mobile phones are out there there's more mobile phones than computers that's for sure and this is what i uh personally joined to my through wallet to address we start like we switched from being web only to being mobile first web is still very much a thing uh you can think about it as sort of windows into the same building you have the phone you have a web you have desktop and wherever it's more convenient and it probably will be more convenient uh in majority of the cases to use your mobile uh that that's where we want to serve our users yeah awesome i mean it's good to see that you're thinking about that next you know billion that are probably only going to be on cell phones and the 6.5 that are already there um it actually segues pretty well for me into connor mcewen over here from uniswap um just correct me if i'm wrong is this not this is your first public appearance as a panel participant for uniswop right that's uh very correct yeah do you want to like say hi to mom or something at home you can um so i think one of the questions that is going to come to light for i think all of all of you except for denise who's actually mobile first native as a product is going to be like connor specifically uniswap is already a very successful project on you know traditional desktop like application for web3 so what is the benefit to you that you guys like kind of focusing on this new mobile market is it about getting there first before like competitors do is it about like locking down this super rumored and highly coveted tick tock gen z generation why do you think that you guys are focused out on the mobile market yeah um i think there's a few reasons ultimately i think uniswap labs is just driven by design and user experience i think you know the swap widget just kind of the swap design of swapping assets i think is is super widely used amongst the industry and very popular and i think for us it's just kind of a continued focus on delivering the best swapping experience uh you know we've had months where half of of swaps on the uniswap interface take place on mobile and so it feels like kind of a natural extension just to kind of cater and tailor that experience more more directly to the mobile use case i think there's things that the operating system like push notifications that you can do that i think just yeah we want to always want to deliver that the best experience and what's cool about the protocol is that anyone can integrate it but also that we can continue to like build on top of it that's cool i i will have like a direct question for all of you in a second but i want to give jacob the chance to like segue us into it um so you guys obviously are another really successful like uh ethereum project that is now focusing on a mobile mobile application and i just like to say that i don't want to hear any hate against metamasks mobile ux because i actually really like it and that's what matters um that's how i got my lunch i got lunch today at the the food truck with my metamask mobile show oh we got a stan over here from the uniswap crew uh so yeah jacob i think one of the things i really appreciate about the ux is that there's like the browser extension inside of metamask and uh one of the things i've wondered is like was that on purpose to maintain all the ux inside of metamask for like a new a new community of users that you're hoping to target or do you think that that was just what made sense for your already existing metamask users so they would never have to leave the app um yeah yeah so for us we say that our core mission is to democratize access to the decentralized web we want the decentralized web to be available to everyone and that meant that the most important way that we do that is is by being a multi-platform wallet and being accessible to the majority of humanity um which you know is is largely built around mobile devices uh we we also in in approaching those things and thinking about the decisions we make as a product we really make those in ways that are are probably different than a lot of how the ecosystem thinks about things so like some some examples are like a lot of projects they make decisions just purely based on total value locked or something like that and and so when when you do that you you end up biasing towards you know wealth rather than users and so like um so like we'll see patterns where like uh in our swaps feature the majority of um you know the largest transactions happen on the browser extension and we get quite a bit of revenue from that um but uh we actually see a lot more individual users in individual usage on mobile and the the um the the use cases are quite different on mobile and so we spent a lot of time looking at um in addition to just like the on-chain data but also looking at unique users and trying to build privacy respecting ways to understand how unique humans are using these products and building around that so if i could summarize one of the main points i heard was that while large transactions are happening on desktop you're seeing a lot of micro transactions and unique addresses being used for the mobile browser itself and obviously that's probably data you have access to that's not on chain but you can see it because you're meta mask and people have made accounts maybe um but uh one of the things i think that that segues well into is like how do you all how do you all like sculpture products for like this next generation of users or this the mobile first community as a whole i think that you might all have different goals so i'll let uh alex you want to start off on this well i think when when it comes to mobile the user experience is key so the device itself is very small and especially if you're coming from like a web background or desktop background the first impulse is to try to shove everything into mobile you know just like make it super feature rich display everything and we are trying to structure our process around saying no to as many things as possible uh without um defeating the purpose without throwing the baby out with the bath water that's actually a really hard process because it's actually like it's everything is super exciting crypto right so there's new projects new ideas new concepts and you you you always get excited as uh we're early adopters of crypto so we're probably like there's some professional deformation there as well so we get like easily excited about new stuff and we think they're it's here to stay and so it's actually really really hard to be disciplined and say no to like 99 percent of the things and then still be able to identify that one percent that you would invest your time invest your team's effort into building and doing as doing it as simply and as elegantly as possible nice i think that i mean so comparing that to let's say denise you guys are already you are always crypto mobile native and that's been your user base from the beginning um and just like a fun little audience fact connor that's sitting next to denise actually helped build veloura but we're not going to ask him any questions about it because that would be weird um but denise like yeah when you guys designed it from the ground up initially what was your thoughts around the audiences that you thought your app and your utility would reach yeah so i agree like the design challenges of fitting all the complex complexity of crypto into a mobile first product are high like there are a lot of like decisions and maybe even trade-offs like you do have to say no sometimes but for us it was more about going to where the users are so people are doing everything on their phones today whether or not they have a laptop like if you need a laptop to do something it's probably because it's quite complex and so if we want people to kind of overcome the barrier like the scary like oh i'm getting into crypto it's like i'm making a live decision to like oh let me just try this out you need to like people need to be able to try that out wherever they are with however much money or value they have available to them and so that's the reason why valor has always been mobile first we want to make it really simple and like a really easy step to make to make like the first transaction with crypto whether you're like huddling hopefully you're doing a little bit more than just that but it should be super super simple and because people are using their phones all day everywhere at home on the bus on the subway the tube whatever maybe even on planes like people should be able to do things crypto things wherever they are just like they do everything else like social media like even banking everything else so there's no reason why crypto should be any different that's yeah uh a really worthwhile goal and it does bring the question to if you're going after users who are doing relatively small transactions and as jacob was talking about uh there's large transactions that are happening on desktop i have a question that challenges like this assumption because then do we all build mobile wallets with the expectation that it will be mostly micro transactions do we believe or do we believe that people will kind of come around to this idea that i can send large amounts of money from a mobile ux and i'll let you all take that at jacob i think you probably have people spending i don't know conor jacob people spend the most amount of money in your guys's app so let's go ahead and like start with youtube sure yeah uh i think you know if you look at technology in general and adoption uh you know some new use cases get figured out on the desktop and browser but ultimately i think everything migrates to mobile you know i've been doing mobile development for a while and and social apps or consumer apps or you know where you see the real usage where you see you know the real amount of time that people are spending usually kind of people make their way there and uh i do think uh over time we'll we'll see more and more you know high value crypto transactions happening uh on a mobile device i think part of that is security part of its user experience part of its education uh but i think you know we all believe that that will happen and we're all working on it and and so i think yeah i do expect a future where and and i'm already you know personally just doing it a lot like right when you're like hear about a new token or someone says hey this nft right like for me are you toilet trading are you toilet trading right now is this you on your phone on the toilet no no it's uh just hanging out with with all the people at the conference and getting alpha uh but uh yeah so so i i feel confident that uh we're well on the path to real you know many users and a lot of value being transacted from mobile devices yeah so on on the metamath side one one of the ways that or probably the most important way that we grew to the size that we grew and got the adoption that we grew was because we really focused on extensibility and allowing anyone to build whatever they dreamed and you know not not trying to force just this or that feature into the wallet and slowing that slowing down our pace of innovation to whatever we could do ourselves but instead we empower the community and when it comes to to mobile like uh you know it is still a challenge that a lot of dapps don't work well on mobile like the the teams themselves often like you know they are developing on their desktop computer and so they they treat it like an afterthought or something like that and so we've been putting a lot of attention to building a really strong devrel function to help developers support mobile use cases better to try to help people think about the different types of diverse communities that are using their products and how these design decisions and ux decisions affect the adoption in the world and and like it's it's our responsibility to try to bring the decentralized web to people and to keep people safe in it and to not just like allow those use cases to just go to to be deferred to um you know whether it's like chains that don't share our values or that are that are highly centralized or something like that um and and to instead you know really think about how you know how does how do fees affect people and how do we make this accessible for for billions of people yeah um i think just to segue that into my next question uh i think about like the you know the ux obviously you guys are all like ad hocking it from the base you're like i think this is how mobile people will interact with metamasks and like you know you're right about some things you're wrong about other things but then there's also the fact that like the actual ux for the hardware device itself and the os that runs that device could also just change overnight because tim cook wakes up and decides that life should be this way for all of us so one of the things that's happened that's in that direction is like apple introducing mobile safari uh plugins to where now like for instance to talk about usability like veloura signs for moolah market right it opens the veloura app itself to sign for moulin market and attach the address um now does that how do you guys see yourselves adjusting your design choices for for the product now that you can just actually not even have to go and make an app you can make a safari plug-in for those who don't want to download the app or maybe maybe moolah is inside valor so the user doesn't even have to go to the browser oh wow did you just inception me you just what if it's the other way i mean we're just gonna like explore right like we have a small team so we're like trying to improve the experience for users with our current like feature set and the current possibilities to just make it more seamless but we are going to like keep up with things happening on mobile and so that's definitely a possibility yeah uh on on the apple note just uh a quick pitch for everyone i think uh the app store policies have a lot of impact about what applications you can use on your phone what those applications can do can you not front run my next question uh and and so i think uh app store policies uh will you know they very much affect all of us uh and i think especially with nfts there are some app store policies that are less friendly so uh i think it's important for everyone to kind of be aware of what's happening and how it might impact mobile crypto adoption so front run one of the recent discoveries i made about the app store policy is that you shouldn't give access to donations through your app so you shouldn't do good with your app because like the app store may choose to like de-list you and that's like crazy um then it all comes down to like who's reviewing that submission right like the release but yeah some some of these policies are crazy and it's super important to like stay on top of it like connor said so to like really make features that are like good for people that are useful for users but also like they won't get stuck they want to get your application stuck in these crazy rules so if we talk specifically about apple because google seems to be like a bit more relaxed compared to to them um it's always hard to predict what their next move is going to be when it comes to review guidelines or when it comes to the safari for example what the what will they allow to do what will they keep private so the way we address this is we threading lightly first and foremost we keep a very close eye on their regulations on all the rules we actually have contacts like direct contact with their developer relationships team and by the way it's important to remember that these restrictions and rules are there for for a reason and they've gone through an evolution nobody could could have predicted what the app store would end up being uh steve jobs initially hated the idea of an app store because that would make iphone impure so and then it evolved originally subscription model was invented for magazine subscriptions and then people were having like a really hard time for all these years adapting it for sas software for example like it's growing pains uh there's a evolutionary uh legacy things there and uh there's also like reasons for for things uh why this happened and i think that the biggest benefit uh that uh all these you know crazy regulations brought us is that there is actually an app store and people are actually feeling safe going on their phone and downloading like a lot of apps uh that's unprecedented before apple nobody was able to make stores as safe as they are right now or make the platform itself as safe as it is right now so it's always a balance of uh one kind of safety versus another kind of safety do you want to be free and exposed to like all the elements or do you want to be safe and there's no easy answer for that and so the way we're doing it is we keeping a close eye on everything and hoping to strike good balance and adjusting as we go yeah so so from the metamask side like i so i i believe in kind of a theory of like metamask everywhere and and so i think there's a place for native apps i think they're really important they have a heightened level of platform risk um from any other platform um there's there's no question about it um i think there's also a place for things like like the safari extension but like ios is not the device of people in emerging markets um so like i don't think that that um solves uh that particular problem although i do think you know the ios community is an important and community that deserves to be um you know deserves to have like really great user experiences and i think that extensions are going to be a part of that i think that native apps are gonna be a part of that um you know another like like you know we see a lot of people in uh the philippines and vietnam use a browser called kiwi which which supports browser extensions on mobile it's a it's a fork of chrome and you know these are like really cool um use cases and uh you know we want to support all of them and help people to use the decentralized web in the way that makes the best sense for them and and however they want to yeah i mean very very very worthwhile i uh i think i kind of sort of have to close us out but i want to leave us with like this thought and maybe some final commentary from you guys wherein and uh i am not shilling for uniswap here but i do think this is a good like case study um there was you know when the uni-swap token air drop happened i think there was a lot of people obviously native to the space that had that got tokens that were suddenly like worth stuff and it was really cool for a lot of people but stuff that actually moved me was there was a few stories from folks who were like in places like chile and others who had just like swapped something one time and suddenly they like basically paid off their house because now the token like was worth more than they had ever like hoped or something like that and i i kind of think about okay if we have mobile ux we have the ability for people to just even do a micro transaction on a mobile interface and then we have all of these different like mechanisms for involving people's passions or involving people's like monetary attachment to this earth into our ecosystems do we have like do we do we think about that do we do we have a uh any thoughts around like hey is this not just also a really good way to get a bunch of people barely involved in the ecosystem and like get skin in the game yeah i mean i think just speaking for myself i'm here because i think web3 is amazing and blockchains are awesome and i think making it accessible to more people is great and i feel like mobile is like one very important platform to make that happen and yeah like more people getting uni-swap airdrops if they happen to use it on the their phone is is great so yeah if you could just take notes metamask we've all heard rumors just want to say uh our view is that we want to be a community owned wallet that's actually been a foundational principle of ours for uh many years actually uh we we believe in progressive decentralization um and also doing that in a way that empowers the the communities of people who are actually using metamask and not hands control of our project over to like airdrop farmers or um or uh or or or is like some sort of cash grab like uh so you know if if if we were to do a token it would be a token that uh you know would be really well thought out and would be done very carefully and we would take our our time and not rush such a thing all right i mean i'm a really big fan of community owned anything so i i think that's definitely the right way to go um i want to thank thank everyone for being on this panel if you have any closing thoughts any closing shows any like hi moms you'd want to throw out feel free to now's your time i think i'd also like to open it up to any specific questions i think we have about four minutes so for anyone that's here who heard anything they want to ask further detail for feel free to ask i like your jacket all right person in the back i believe that's gabrielle this question yeah this question is for denise or also any of the other panelists that might have been involved in doing field research um mobile first of course but i want to know what is the most interesting or memorable insight that you learn from doing research in the field with users i think one of the most difficult things to explain to people who have never heard of decentralization crypto blockchain before and i'm talking about some of the field research that i've done in mexico or in west africa is the concept of self-custody um the concept of like you really own your coins or your value obviously the obvious analogy is the physical wallet and people understand it with that but when it comes to like writing down a seed phrase um keeping it safe something that for us is like oh i write it down and i'll store it somewhere really safe in my house it's a very simple concept but some of the things that i've heard on the field when like bringing this concept to people is that i don't know where i would keep it safe like what if my house burns down what if someone finds it what if someone breaks into my house and and like gets access to it so the concept of like safe self-custody for even like wallets that will hold what we consider small amounts that for people in emerging markets are not so small or not so trivial amounts it is it is a difficult one so there is a big trade-off in like the what we see as the principles and values of decentralization and what people in the user experience for people in emerging markets of like maybe choosing a custody solution and that is something that we and valor are continuously trying to like simplify the user experience maintaining the security and the benefits of decentralization and custody but taking into account these perspectives that not everybody is in a place that is really safe and like it's not going to get broken into and so like how do we improve our features without compromising on that security is something that yeah it's one of the the insights from some some of the field research just real quick you might find it really interesting we published a report uh together with a merging impact on user research on how web3 communities are happening in emerging markets and there's like incredibly powerful stories in it about uh like like women in nigeria who are afraid to go to atms because the police robbed them after they came out of the atm and how this saved their lives and i i would strongly recommend that for anybody who's looking for research on on some of the trends just a question for um this is specific to metamask what's the strategy for mobile which seems to have now more features than desktop and desktop staying together or not what's the strategy of made a mask on that matter and are you asking like is there a chance that the mobile eclipses the desktop in well it already does i have uh i'm obviously the oldest guy in the room i've been using mademos desktop for six uh since 2016. and i'm i found out i had to actually install metamask mobile to be able to send an nft to somebody so made a mass mobile has features that made a mass desktop doesn't have just curious about the strategy for what you think about the yeah there are slightly different clients so um there are features today on metamask mobile that are not yet on the browser extension there's actually some features on the browser extension that are not available on mobile um and in some ways like we kind of treat the different clients as a way to validate a specific feature and perfect that feature and then we will merge or if it makes sense on the other platform uh uh bring that feature over so like obviously like nft support um and viewing it in the wallet is our flagship of that is the mobile product um hardware wallets are you know really heavily used on the browser extension we're bringing the nft support over to the browser extension right now we're bringing the hardware wallet support over to the mobile app right now all of you who beg constantly for the hardware wallet support on mobile i'm so sorry it's taking so long but like it is coming like soon and we have some like really awesome new partnerships with hardware wallets and they're going to help maintain their integrations and that wasn't previously possible and it's it's going to be a much much better user experience across the board and all right folks so there you have it mobile first markets a lot of stuff's happening a lot of stuff's different i want to thank you all for coming out this has been a very diverse and like cool robust perspective on mobile first development and i will see you guys around thank you