Pedro Gomes I Future of Wallets I WalletConnect I Pragma Singapore 2024

[Music] all right welcome back everybody I know you're all still uh just settling in from lunch but uh we're going to begin the rest of the the afternoon schedule we're halfway there a lot more amazing talks and interviews to go and I want to jump right in so for the next interview I want to bring on Pedro from W connect Foundation he's a director there previously the co-founder of w connect and we're going to talk about some amazing news that they just shared with everybody in the world and we'll go directly into that now so please welcome Pedro on [Applause] stage so the awesome part about all of this is that we get to effectively break some news and you just talked about creation of the W connect Foundation and uh I want to give you the first opportunity to tell people what was just announced and we'll go right in so please tell everybody the news yeah so it's quite good to see like the title already updated because you know like if glob already had a little Alpha there about the title change but it's it's been something that we've been working for so long like I I hope it's no surprise that like the whole goal of wanic has always been to decentralize it just took six years to do it like but it's so good it's finally out there in the public and now we have like this mission to continue the decentralization of what is a very foundational piece of infrastructure so congratulations on the The Connect token why now so won at the beginning had this very I guess open source approach that you know at at the beginning of this history of ethereum public Goods funding was actually pretty good but even if you do things like very decentralized from the beginning you end up slowing down a lot and it all started in 2018 with the eum foundation grants and it had like one GitHub repository with all the code and I was managing those repositories with multiple contributors and we partnered with gitcoin to distribute bounties but things weren really fast and then around 2021 we had to accelerate things and we became like Venture funded but that also came at the expense of centralization so we end up having to find this balance by having to accelerate and decentralize at the same time and last year we performed a major upgrade to the W connect Network that made all of this happen so 12 months after I think we have done a good job of actually putting together the structure for what it is the future of the decentralized network because we have unlocked the technical limitations of the protocol itself what uh for for kind of those in the audience what was that change and what sort of made it immediately possible yeah so the way in W was designed at the Inception it didn't really make like um both apps and wallets very comfortable with running the infrastructure it it put like very heavy requirements in actually running nodes and you know it was a very optimistic approach that everyone is going to run a no and we're going to have like 3,000 nodes of Walla connect Network and then we have to be a little bit more pragmatic and understand that like you know these people have businesses and they have to like operate and serve their customers they can't be operating thousands of noes for different things so now we have a more like a triangle approach I like to call it where you have apps wallets and node operators as separate entities and that re architecture came with the upgrade last year and while we were upgrading we just realized like YB evm specific and we also introduce multi-chain support so now we're actually supported by Salon ecosystem Cosmos PKA do tesos alant like the list is huge I could go on on that's amazing um so now you're on announcing a network you have a foundation what happens to the company and how does your role change yeah so to give a little context like it's not easy to kind of go to conferences and tell people guys we should do things differently we should do things better because at the end of the day if you're an app developer you're just building your app and if you're a wallet developer you're just focus on building a wallet so in 2019 to bootstrap the adoption of welcon I created this SDK called web3 model which got really really popular back then and that actually was uh the focus of the company so the software company focused a lot on building the webt modal experience to build a better developer experience and because we wanted to separ at those two missions like you're still building a better user experience but you're taking a very different approach where one is like a community of developers building a decentralized network and the other one is building like a superior developer experience through an SDK so the company through the announcement of the wall connect Foundation rebranded itself from wall connect to reown so now you can find app kits and wallet kits the sdks that we now offer at the Reon and that came with the transition from me uh from the reown to the wanic foundation and what what does it mean for you now cuz the reown team is going to maintain now the sdks but what does your priority look like so it's interesting because I mentioned that in 2019 web model was like one of the top sdks but you can't really be the top SDK if you're the only SDK like and back then there was like only one SDK so like that's why it was was the number one it was either you didn't use an SDK or you used web3 model since 2018 a lot of sdks came into the market so you have rainbow kit connect kit you have Dynamic privy third web loock native all of these sdks came into the market and they all support the wallet connect Network so now Ron is working in parallel with these companies to build a superior wallet experience and they're also uh one of the biggest node operators of the network as well so they're both the node operators for the network together with other partners like Ledger consensus Kil figment Sensei nodes Lugano nodes and also they're working on the SDK experience together with the other sdks so wanic Foundation takes a little bit of a step back from reown and being like the main SDK and being just another SDK that collaborates with us building this future so collaborate with you the foundation or the the rest of the ecosystem other other providers I feel like the role of the foundation is to be the glue between all of them because it's very hard to set standards and at the same time compete um those conversations can be a little hard to have I actually think that like the wallet space is actually one of the most friendly ones like you do see a little bit more tension in other parts of the ecosystem like wallets are actually quite friendly uh but yeah basically wanic Foundation can be seen almost like this United Nation of wallets where you know everyone can agree that like we want to do this together but nobody wants to take the first step so we will try to like Steward the people in the right direction I want to go a little bit off topic just s of curiosity but what are some common things that you feel like need standardization in the world of wallets yeah like for example one of the initiatives that we were very heavily involved was like the sign in with ethereum because a lot of these connections like people are connecting wallets and they're actually not verifying if people use the wallets and signing with etherum was like a big push there but then that also added like a little bit of friction because now you're connecting a wallet and you're signing it a message right away it's like we already have enough Clicks in web 3 adding another one doesn't help so we brought like some standardization around chain agnostic standards about how you can actually reduce the number of clicks when you authorize and now with this new movement where wallets are moving to like smart accounts we actually can improve that experience where not only you verify your wallet but you can actually Grant permissions to dab so like building up like the connection experience to be smarter and smarter and building like this new concept of smart sessions where you Empower apps to sign on the behalf of wallets which is so I get to say that this app can make transactions from my wallet on my behalf and that's not the same as a account abstraction it is so but the problem with account abstraction is that it's solved like more at the infrastructure level it created like some standards around how different players like solvers and bundlers and pay masters all work together but I kind of forgot like that at the app and wallet layer there was like still missing standardization and they they just kind of expect eventually people will figure it out but fortunately W neck was there to kind of realize like these things don't happen overnight we need to start the conversations early we have like won organizes like hacks very frequently we're already on our second edition and these hacks are actually bringing together these teams into the same room is a little different than what th Global does where you on board new developers we're actually taking existing developers from these big teams and just putting them in the room and say work together uh yeah there's a lot of that when you're staing standard so um do do you I know it's super early but do you kind of have an idea for how other wallet have reacted to this in terms of do they kind of see that this is going to actually make it easier for them to now collaborate and set and agree on standards or do you kind of feel like we it's too early to know but how do you feel like things are going to go here it's interesting right because what end up happening over time is that wallets are striving for like grabbing more market share and some of them actually have taken the approach of building both the SDK and the wallet and that actually created a little bit of a conflict of interest because now they're actually competing with our app kit but we also need to work together so I actually think this partition actually helps the conversations because it creates a very clear separation about who is who now we have like reown building the app kits which is also something that you can collaborate on standards but who's driving these conversations as a neutral party is the wallet connect foundation so we can talk to wallets in a very different tone that you know like if you're thinking wait you're trying to create a standard but you also have a competing SDK and you're telling me to how to build my wallet you know like foundations are really great for that and I really hope that with the network it even creates incentives to actually you know beyond agree on a shared approach um you've been in this space a long long time which means you've seen all the ups and downs you've seen how people have evolved how we've come up with new models and new ways to think about it um the thing I'm kind of super curious about is when you were deciding to make this transition which is setting up a foundation launching the network what were kind of some of the learnings that you uh sort of saw from everybody else whether it's mistakes or things that you really enjoyed and you're like I definitely need to do this thing or definitely do not need to do this thing when I do it for while I connect are there some obvious things that you're like hey we we should not do that or we definitely have to do XYZ uh what kind of came in as you were setting up the foundation I think the number one lesson in all of these years is that this is told in pretty much every startup book and every startup blog every startup podcast which it says focus in one thing and be the best one ated and you really think you're doing that until you actually realize over time how much you spread yourself in and I think through the Journey wallic there was definitely a very focused approach in the early years because just lack of funding and resources and as those funding and resources starting to come in you start getting a little bit more and more ambitious and you start kind of blurring the line what the wallet is and you start expanding expanding expanding and I think then eventually um you know the market goes down and like you know you've kind of like spent more money and then you start realizing actually I need to go back to my origin and with this wall connect Foundation the wall connect Network and even the Ron team has taken a much more focused approach with their appkit uh I think we've learned that like what we really here to do is to build a superior user experience for wallets connecting to apps which it says on the name but it's sometimes it's hard to forget when you're trying to solve every problem in web yeah luckily you have a good reminder to uh to do the job of wallet connections um how do you think about decentralizing the network what does it mean to be on a network and what are some of your goals for de centralization here yeah so you initially think that the problem is very simple because you have applications want to talk to wallets but these wallets back in 2017 they had to essentially create like these I call it like BD armies going after apps like going app after app and saying integrate me integrate me integrate me and having the like this unified layer where all wallets could share the connection reduced a lot of that um like necessity for like you know doing direct Integrations but then it created a centralizing point which was Walla connects the company and now we had to kind of break down the company into smaller pieces so then first node operators are building what is the foundation of the network we call it the service nodes which you can read more in the white paper but then eventually we actually have to incentivize other parts of the system like we have the Gateway which is still centralized and we're looking to decentralize that and more important than that we actually want to make sure that like wallets have more sustainable business models like a lot of these wallets as the funds run out they start looking for more Revenue opportunities and the number one value proposition that they have here is that they bring users to the network and they're not earning money for that they have to go after swap fees Bridge fees on-ramp fees any other Revenue opportunity that's actually detached from the wallet connection and I really think there's been like multiple business models built around this you know you could think about credit cards loyalty points it's nothing new and wallets should be rewarded so I think in a single sentence what the wck network should achieve the most Beyond rewarding the node operators of the network is Distributing the rewards into the wallets such that they can build more sustainable business models which is actually you know really nice way of solving the problem that they don't have to compete for each other and in different models because if they bring everybody in the network everybody wins which is really awesome um you kind of talked about uh the the SDK now expanding to be supportive of like Cosmos ecosystem and polka dot and Solana and obviously the evm ecosystem and uh it's in your best interest to kind of be the glue to all the wallets but your token is on the op stack what's what's going on with that what's the what's the preferential treatment here that's that's a very good question um so B basically W has always had a very strong ethereum bias because it spent five years of its existence only for evm and a lot of the usage has been surrounding evm so even it's in early history like you know we've been receiving funds through donations through the evm we've been connecting wallets through evm like most of the usage came through evm like the developers that built standards for wallets were eips so if we were to do like a a token deployed in another ecosystem we would basically have to move more people I totally agree other than having like where people already are so we're bringing the token home for the early adopters but that doesn't mean that the token is going to be there forever like I really hope that Walla connect token transcends every Network and then it will be just available wherever you are but uh why op to instead of e net so this is a misunderstanding because obviously we have to be suent with our communication the token is on ethereum Manet but it will be distributed on op mayet right so op Manet is the platform that we chose for the distribution but the actual token is deployed on it main it therefore all the bridges will be instantly compatible with this token oh awesome yeah that and it simplifies distribution alog together um is the goal to just let anybody run a a node here as a third participant or do you kind of because you name specific projects um how do you think about who gets to participate Yeah so basically uh in the early this year around late q1 early Q2 we started like talking to node operators and because we want to make sure that the wall Network continues to serve millions and millions of connection and it doesn't break down we had a very slow onboarding process like these uh eight no sorry seven if you can't Reon is eight node operators have been onboarded like one by one and this is a permissioned network today and this is not going to be an easy task if you want to like scale to like um many many no operators we can't be onboarding everyone so having the token introduction here actually allows us to provide like a stake where the node opers can onboard themselves we already have the hardware requirements specified they can know how to run a node but then we don't want to be like on boarding manually everyone so instead of having a list of which no prayers are valid or not you will just be able to stake and participate but that's part of the road map of the W conect Network awesome and I'm going to ask another question related to something um I asked earlier but how do you kind of think about governance of of this network and uh did you take any lessons from how we've seen governance evolve as a few other networks have launched yeah so I think that the Govern starts at the distribution already this is something that we've been working for like over six months thinking about who actually is going to receive this tokens how much skin in the game they already have that already sets you for a good start but we're definitely going to take a very very slow uh approach with governance there's some foundations that kind of just let the Dow go wild but then that also allows people to capture uh the momentum of the Dow and there's other foundations who never allow the D to take any like material decisions so I think the best way to do it is to actually have them create a little bit of a signal at first and that way the Dow can then essentially train themselves to become more and more involved over time and have the foundation as the executor of these decisions and we actually partitioned this decision into three parts we have like the community so we're going to start with that part where they can make community decisions around education and grants and then eventually we will going have like the technology decision and eventually the treasury decisions so we partition this in three phases like as an after showing some work or you're saying you're going to recruit different communities to own different pieces at the same time just because we we expect in this order to be easier for the community to start learning about the network so taking Community decisions early and then eventually giving them execution power and then eventually they start learning about the technology so they uh vote on some sentiment and then the foundation can actually make the execution but the end goal is that like hopefully in the future maybe not too long from here uh the da actually votes directly into the actual Network decisions but at the beginning to protect the network from like going down we want to make sure that the foundation is the last button push and it just follows the Dao sentiment as a signal I mean that's going to be an awesome goal goal um maybe to add to that as a last question a year from now we're going to bring you back on stage and ask uh how did everything turn out what do you kind of expect to have accomplished in 12 months so um the token at launch won't be transferable uh for multitude of reasons so we want to work together with like the community to come around a timeline for actually activating the transferability of the token at the beginning people will be able to stake and vote in the Dow with the token and then the transfer will be activated later after that and I think it's important that we start with transferability because that will give us a platform to actually activate the fees for the apps to consume the network and once we actually have that final goal of the app fees then we can actually start talking about how we're actually going to distribute wall WS so if I want to be very ambitious I want to do all those three things next year so in the next year or starting one year from now uh well let's put it like Christmas 2025 like okay that's a perfectly awesome goal that's what I want that's a that's a good Christmas present for everybody amazing well Pedro thank you so much for this amazing chat and best of luck with the launch [Music]