J3 SAY 02 Taylor Monahan MyCrypto

all right hello everyone how are you guys doing today it's early huh I know I know so I'm Taylor Monahan I'm the founder and CEO of my crypto previously I was with my ether wallet and I'm gonna talk today about why the future of aetherium doesn't have wallets so if you know me you know that I've been basically building and scaling and aetherium wallet for about two and a half years now so this talk make he seem you know a little bit different but based on my experience over the past two-and-a-half years I've come to realize that your average user your average person who wants to interact to the blockchain they really shouldn't need a wall in the future especially where we're going okay because the decentralized global autonomous future that we're envisioning for aetherium that's gonna be Docs it's gonna live on on a whole different level than this wallet interface so first we're gonna start by talking about what is a wallet and one of the most I would say wallet is one of the most confusing words in this ecosystem when people kind of enter this space a lot of times they started on coinbase maybe they start on an exchange and they come with all these preconceived notions about what a wallet is and what it isn't and then when they came to my ether wallet and now when they come to my crypto we were like trying to figure out how to explain to them that hey we don't hold your funds we don't hold your keys it's on you it's your responsibility and the word wallet just really isn't that clear in terms of it just doesn't make it clear that period at all so in the new book master ethereum by Andres Antonopoulos and Gavin wood they do a really good job by talking about what a wallet is so they say at a high level of wallet is an application that serves as a primary user interface the wallet controls access to the users money manages their keys addresses their balances creating and sending transactions and then they go on to talk about how confusing this concept is to your average user and they say a common misconception about aetherium is that a theorem wallets contain either or tokens in fact those ether and tokens are stored on the blockchain they're not sort in your wallet at all so in a sense in a theorem wallet is more like a keychain than anything else and this is how we describe it as well as we see it as sort of this interface this level this gateway this portal whatever you want to call it but it allows you to access the blockchain but we don't actually store your funds at any point unfortunately like users really don't get that like they just period flat-out don't get it and if we're really gonna build this future we're gonna build this future you know all the ideas that you've heard shared around this conference and over the past couple days you can't have such inherent confusion so early you have to make it really really easy for them so why are wallets so integral today because so much of this ecosystem right now is it just revolves around speculation okay so with aetherium we have people speculating about the price of ether and then we have icos which is basically speculating on tokens future tokens and their utility or their value in the future so it's it's all about money but if we look towards the future and we look at what people are building right now and we look at what we want the future to be what kind of feature do we want to build and be part of you know I just I asked myself what role does the wallet play in and this is like one of the very first infographics that I ever saw got aetherium it was like back in like maybe 2014 or 2015 and they spoke to the differences between traditional what's up and a decentralized what's up and it struck a chord with me like it really really hit me because I was like this makes sense but if you think about this idea this is centralized what's up at no point you have a wallet interfacing not at all so I think a really good exercise is for us to sort of look at what role does the wallet play in a traditional app because if we're building the future to replace the whatsapp's and replace the ubers and replace the Airbnb s the reality is we have to be at least not easy we have to make easier we have to make the average user who's using Airbnb right now want to use the decentralized version of that and frankly it's not gonna happen if we have if we have everything separated if you have to go to your Airbnb you're just centralized Airbnb and then you have to go to your wallet interface and you have these tokens uni but this either it's just not gonna happen so one thing that you know when I look at uber when I look at Airbnb the one thing you'll always notice is that the payment part of it is so we hidden it is such a small part they tuck the settings under settings so you have to go through deep level into settings there's one page tie to your credit card information that's it and then when you go and you want to book an Airbnb or you want a book and uber the actual like okay here's my money part of it is one step out of a lot of stops right and that's what makes it so easy and this is why people use uber over traditional taxis so if we want people to use decentralized super over this uber we have to make it even easier for them so if we imagine sort of the ecosystem right now and we imagine that just magically tomorrow decentralized Airbnb popped up you would really really realize that this would be a terrible experience and we would not win anything so let's imagine that there's there's this magical Airbnb decentralized Airbnb tomorrow I would basically go to this top I'd be looking around maybe I want a place for this conference for example I would maybe look at some reviews I'd look at the photos I decide to book the place and in the traditional Airbnb app you literally just click a button you click that book button it's like John but in the world that we're living in right now the doc would present you like instructions on how to maybe it's got the tokens maybe it's get some ether maybe it's to go open your your wallet interface and send X tokens with this data parameter maybe it's installing meta masks and making sure that you do this and then once you send the transaction you're gonna need to check it and the real problem is is that if at any point in this process so if you can't figure out how to get ether if you can't figure out how to get tokens if you get tokens but you forget to leave either in your wallet if you don't know what a frickin wallet is you're screwed you you you don't have an Airbnb and there's an additional problem that you have this real real real possibility of losing your funds and that's what we see all the time and that's what I see the problem is so when I'm looking towards the future I'm looking at what my crypto is building and where we want to take the future and how we want to help usher in this decentralized future I keep coming back to this this quote that's basically good design is invisible right we have to remove all all the complicated stuff all the stuff that the user doesn't care about because at the end of the day I don't want to pay someone for a place and I don't want to pay someone for a ride I want to get from point A to point B or I want to be able to come to Paris with an Airbnb and have a place to stay period it doesn't the payment doesn't come into my head and so having the payment layer at such a at the forefront right now in this ecosystem that's a problem so there are people working on the solution that aren't us you know we have this really big we have this like blockchain interface where you can do more than just like wallet features so we have like enough stuff we have contract stuff meta mask is a browser extension and they basically are like an access layer just a browser extensions an access layer that allows you to manage your keys and then you can interact with these dots and then you miss them brain but they're sort of building the browser itself and they're gonna have some key management stuff inside of that but you know the conversations that I'm that I'm looking at that are happening online that are happening here a lot of them are so much bigger and broader so ours like on Twitter the other day and they're talking about how does someone make a transaction in like a BR world how do you not take these or out of this this immersive reality and so that they can like making aetherium transaction and that's like a really good example of kind of how absurd the current ecosystem is if we're thinking about building the future of daps so if we ask ourselves what does this look like and if you're out there stock right now looking for answers I'm sorry to say they really don't have too many for you because I don't know it's it's quite a complex problem I do know that if it's successful it really really really won't look like much okay it's gonna be really really really invisible and I think it's gonna be it has to be universal right because while we have the browser extensions and while we have the browsers themselves the future probably doesn't exist on your computer or in your browser necessarily we have our cars we have our VR headsets we have our our doorbells we have our phones we have all of these things and at some point in the future these things are probably going to want to interact with the etherion blockchain so to back up a little bit well the future of aetherium really really really really want less and I'm gonna say probably not like there's probably going to be situations just like there are today where you just want to interact with your wallet that means you want to see your balance you want to make just a payment maybe you want to send her an exchange whatever but it's gonna be more similar to the experience today so if you pull out your phone right now and you look at your ops on your screen you're gonna see your mobile banking app is one of maybe a hundred apps okay it's not the one that you visit every day it's not the one that you probably visit every week it's but the one that you visit from very specific use cases and so moving forward that wallet that sort of mobile banking experience that's gonna be just one little slot of this big fraud ecosystem so how are we sort of gonna get from where we are today as well interface to this like totally awesome decentralized future and because I'm not the type of person to I don't know like go sit in a room alone and try to figure out how this is gonna be and you know come back in a few years with your answers we're gonna take a bit of a more balanced approach so we're gonna start with we're with where we're at we're gonna make it better and we're gonna basically start obstructing away as much as we can and making every little piece more and more and more invisible and make it easier and easier and easier for the user and eventually I hope you know we'll find a really really really slick solution that works in a more broad fashion so what we're working on right now we just launched beta dot my crypto comm this is an entirely brand-new codebase it's written in react it's rich in written in typescript we have a team of developers that have been writing this for about eight months now and they've all worked together for eight months to make decisions make sure it's a really solid foundation make sure it's really maintainable we've got documentation and we have like tasks we'd like all those really great things that we probably should have had from the beginning so we're doing it right this time it's gonna be fun one of my favorite features like this is such a simple little thing but we moved the gasps slider to be more contextual so it's in line now with the here transaction it's just a slider and it'll automatically get the gas price from an Oracle that we have so you don't actually need to like go and know what the network conditions are and know whether you need to set like a really high gas or a low gas and then hey we show the USD value of that ether so you don't send unexpectedly a transaction for like a hundred dollars which happens quite a bit right now we've also I think it's a ip68 one or one eight I don't know it's one of those but it's basically QR codes for requesting payments which again is like one of those really simple things that we just haven't had in a really long time so we want to thank Jen and Leakey for really making this like pushing pushing pushing this a IP through and everyone else that commented on this EAP like thank you so much because we can now have QR codes where you can scan this and it has all of your information so no more copying pasting the addresses and the values and all of that fancy stuff and this just reduces that you know I in my experience people if you give them the opportunity to make a mistake they will make a mistake and so this is like removing one more little thing that they can't screw up we also just integrated with shape-shift so you can trade all the tokens now it's super super cool it's super clean and we're really really excited to be working with them because we think that moving forward having just like really easier ways and again removing the opportunities to make mistakes is gonna be great so instead of okay I want to trade my ether for tokens or tokens for ether okay let me go copy and paste these addresses let me go to shape shift let me go back to my wallet we're just gonna let you do it all from the interface it's gonna be way better we're also moving to be not just generate the keystore files which are the the UTC JSON files so we now have them mnemonic phrase generation so this is gonna be you can basically go much more easily between meta moscone and my crypto if you want and then obviously as we are building this entire new codebase we realized wow there's a lot of tooling that we need and so everything we're building is open-source and it's gonna these are some of the tools that were working on right now that make developers lives easier so we have Shepard which is a client-side node balancer so basically if like one of our nodes is offline or being really really slow it'll just automatically client-side just switch to a different node so for example on my crypto you can use our infrastructure and Bureau's infrastructure either skins infrastructure or giveth in so it'll just automatically like like go through those if something isn't responding if our request isn't responding whatever then we have awesome typescript libraries that make things more typesafe and make interacting with contracts a lot easier and then we have drawbridge which is my personal favorite and you know we use this word trustless a lot in this in this ecosystem and the reality is is that up until very recently if you were using my ether wallet or my crypto you were trusting that us the developers were pushing a good code and that not one of our computers was compromised and our build process wasn't compromised etc and what drawbridge does is it basically it's it's multi-factor it's multi-level and so it requires multiple people to actually sign off to check there's automated tests those made notes us to basically ensure that what's getting distributed to the website and to our future apps are all the the builds of apps are going to be deterministic and the website you know everything's just checked and that basically just ensures that if my computers personally compromised you guys don't get served bad code and that's massively important we're also working with swarm city to complete the gas station and basically this is going to be it's sort of like this API smart contract mashup and it's super super cool basically what happens is that a lot of people just want to send tokens so whether they just invested in an ICL or they invest in ICO last year and now they want to go use those tokens and experiment with this stuff right now you have to have eath in your account to cover the cost of gas and that's a really confusing concept for your average user so what gas station does is it essentially allows users to pay for gas in tokens and this is really really really important because instead of you know right now the error message basically says like hey you don't have any like go get some either for gas and you have to teach these users how that how that works and why it works that way it's just gonna display like V of 0 Ethan your account it's gonna display the gas price in the tokens that you're sending so that's really really really cool we're also working with chronologic and Piper Miriam gentle methi ethereal arm clock and so this will be scheduling transactions so basically you know let's say you want to send a transaction I'll leave your point you can do that a really good example of where signing transactions for later is is a really kind of a necessary thing is with the ENS and so when you have these time-sensitive transactions where you have to complete this complete that's up wait a day that kind of stuff this sort of tool is gonna be really really helpful and again we're gonna focus on doing it right and doing it to centralize and so that's a really great stuff going on there too and as much as we talk about all you know the fancy tools the fancy future these the the build tools the dev tools everything that we're doing at the end of the day I do like to remind everyone that the decentralized features really about people right it's about you it's about me it's about all of us together and it's about all of us working together to build this really global future world that's that's gonna replace all these centralized forces and so my question to you and my call to action to you all today is what are you doing to help usher in this decentralized future and what unique skills do you have that are gonna make this ecosystem better and more usable and make this reality more real and I have a lot of people talk to me and have a lot of people come up to me and they say so often they go I love what you're doing but like I just I don't know I'm not an expert I'm not a block to you expert I'm not I don't know this space and it's like they're on the outside looking in and I just want to say none of us started as as experts I still don't consider myself an expert I'm starting to buy really really really smart people all the time that blow my mind and then I say to them oh like you're an expert and they say no not okay none of us went to school for this none of us have been in this ecosystem for like thirty years like this is an entirely new thing so my call to action you to shift your thinking into what can I do don't tell me what you can't do don't tell yourself what you can't do don't tell the people around you what you can't do okay tell me what you can do what unique skills do you have what jobs you have what people have you communicated with how were you where were you raised how are you brought up all of these things okay and then how are these things going to help build this decentralized future because this future is global and we need people from all backgrounds all types of people we need the engineers we need the UX people we need the thinkers we need the doers meaning everything in between and if you want to help us on our decentralized dirty jobs that might crypto is the place to go or you can find me or my team they're all right here like this whole middle role right here yeah that's that's everyone and I just want to say thank you so much this conference has been amazing and it's been an absolute pleasure to talk with everyone here today and yeah find us thank you so much that people have anxiety when they deal with money in whatever customer journey that they're going through and I think given that there's a lot of speculation and fluctuation in price of cryptos that anxiety actually gets amplified so I'm wondering if improving the bridge between Fiat and crypto will improve basically the customer journey at least during this transition period or we should really stay focused on thinking about everything in a tokenized world and in a cryptocurrency world that's an excellent question I think that there's a lot of moving pieces right and so I think that the bridge the on-ramp from from Fiat into crypto is massively important but I also think that there's a lot of other moving pieces that also need to be solidified so when we look at stable coins like makers I like that's a really important part in helping sort of curb that speculation in the fluctuation and the anxiety about future prices I also think that at this point in time as much as we want to like literally decentralize every single thing and we're seeing people not just sort of like disrupt the financial system but also every single type of governance and every single type of like HR and UX and everything I think that you know for me personally I like to come back to like the word balanced so balance between the future and in this ideal world in the centralised world and balance that with okay how does this work today how do we make sure this works today and same thing for like balancing security and balancing ease abuse balancing the reality that right now things are going to be a little bit messy but the reality that you know in the future they might not be and so to answer your question I think that that there's a lot of moving pieces we're personally going to be focused on the more decentralize holding your key version but I think that especially for the speculators I think that key management with people so like funds hedge key management with with places like coinbase I think that those are going to probably say a reality and I think that hopefully I hope that things like like makers eye and sample coins in general will help ease some of that anxiety thanks for the great presentation I've been thinking about this a fair bit since I read your blog post and I was wondering if you felt that the reason that we can shrink the payment down in apps like uber and Airbnb is because there's this concept of handing over a set of numbers and they can draw any amount of money out of my account which is obviously not something that we have in crypto yet and so I'm wondering if there's a kind of like holding account where you say you know I'm willing for uber and Airbnb it's gonna draw out of these or the decentralized versions to draw out of these of this account in an unlimited way maybe you I mean right now you kind of technically have to hand them a private key but I guess it's this concept that we have in the traditional vanishing financial system where you draw money out and if there's a problem you try and get it back from the system and and whereas we are like I give permission for every payment and that's what creates all this friction I just be curious to hear thoughts on those models yeah no that's yeah that's a great point um if you saw it easy he's talked yesterday so that was like a really interesting like thought experiment and and process because it's like basically the concept is like you could give someone I mean I was imagining like you could literally give someone like a piece of paper with this like transaction that's like a credit debit sort of system and I think his point was was well made when he said that maybe it wouldn't work when you have a string of a thousand long but if you have like one or two or the grocery store or your mom or something would probably work and so to answer your question I think that the the reason it works like it does today is because of centralization right is because we have the centralized banks that I'm able to send money that I may or may have for the sake of speed and the banks will work it out if something goes wrong so you have the fraud you have anti fraud you have refunds you have all these things if my card gets fraud it I just get to call on my bank be like hey someone stole my card they just like refund me the money then they go deal with it and that's really really great by that's sort of one of the trade-offs of cryptocurrency at this point and so in the future I think that in the future I hope that we will sort of you know really smart people will sort of work on maybe it's like peer to peer lending maybe it's like a little bit more of like a debit credit system maybe there's insurance that reduces some of the financial liabilities I think all of these tools that we have in like the real world today we sort of like have to still move on to the end of the block tune space in order for the average user to be able to like you know lose $100 or have that stolen and had that be refunded and one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot lately is like I think people you know they've been in this this space for a couple years or maybe year like at some way everyone loses money like they lose a key they get finished like something happens I think all of us have been there and how do we I think people when they when they lose that money they sort of realized that the fees and the centralization maybe it's not all bad right and so that's why again like that word balance is so so important because you know for your average user maybe they would like to pay a fee in order to be refunded if their funds are solon right like maybe they're willing to do that and for those that don't want to do that and don't want to partake in that maybe that's ok so how do we find that balance and how do we make you know this really is an ecosystem you have a lot of different pillars that will have to work together to make that happen so we've been working a lot on building a blockchain solution for the mass market and what we've been leaning towards over time is that we what we find is that the mass market doesn't care about blockchain installation they just care that the payments go through right so kind of along the lines of the same same thought lines is that is it worth wondering if we could have maybe a permission blockchain for the mass-market user who don't care like the Airbnb example you know they they don't see any crypto at all but the users who do want to see there is decentralization loitering happening they can flip a switch in the app where then they see that you know they get a wallet and their private key and then you know they can trade it outside of that ecosystem yeah so when I think about you acts in this space and and design and usability I do think about apps specifically DOPS where you are are choosing to take a course of action that is like Airbnb you're choosing that you want to find a place to stay you're not choosing that you want to pay for a hotel or something you want to find a place to stay so that you have a place to sleep and for that I think that the the amount of real estate that's taken up by the money portion of it is gonna be really really small however this access layer this protocol level like whatever it's gonna be that sort of maybe it's key management or facilitates transactions or whatever that is gonna be that's gonna be a difficult problem or it's gonna be a difficult solution right because you're gonna want to address various types of users and that's what our experience on my crypto has been it's like we have people that are so new and really fundamentally don't understand and don't want to understand and then we have the advanced users who are like you know we're talking air-gap machines ultra paranoid ultra secure ultra technical they want to see all that if they don't see something they don't trust it and so making product decisions and making you a choices about that is really really really tough because how do you make a choice for both user a over here who's like just so new and doesn't care about about any of that and just wants it to be easy and seamless and user B over here who wants every single detail and so I think that the the answer is probably gonna be multiple solutions for multiple demographics like our saying earlier where we're talking about you know maybe some users are okay paying a monthly fee in order for some type of insurance I think the same thing here right I think that there's going to be different solutions some of them for the more advanced users some of them that want that air-gapped sitting in a field covered in tin foil experience and for the average user who you know really doesn't care about the money and then I also think it's on you know top developers themselves and every single one of like the sort of adapt user experience to think hard about this because right now it's still easy for them to get sort of caught up in this idea that you know they're sitting in their slot channels and their disk or channels and their telegram channels or whatever talking to investors people who have been bested speculatively on this token so as they're making products decisions moving forward how do you remember that the products or the people that you're building for are not necessarily the people that are investing right now in your token because if your product is going to be usable in the future if your product is going to be you know enabling people to rent out their their houses and rent houses the people that are speculating on your token may or may not be the people that use that and while the people that invested in your token want to know the price of the token relative to USD they understand how eath pays for gas they understand all these things the people around your house don't care about that so it's gonna be really important for sort of everyone to keep that in mind and provide I think a variety of solutions you know I'm a big fan of competition and I hope that we can all make each other like better and like you know rising tides lift all ships and we see you know what sort of the best solution for best people are hello my name is Manoir I work for be to expand and we're focusing on gaming and blockchain and I think this is really interesting because we really we have a decentralized application and really have all the problems like literally all the problems that you just raised and I think and now one part of a now solution is that I I well I'm in gaming and I see all all of that stuff through through gaming obviously because this is my thing and right now ubirr or Rab NB is not tokenized so it's difficult for users to say okay I have to get a token and get a service but in gaming nobody like literary ask these questions when you pay for diamonds or for gems in a clash of clans or in well everybody does it even on mobile games that are like widely played by all kind of people and nobody ever asks the question of oh I have to to buy gems to then buy lives and it's really like people are all already educated towards that so I'm thinking why don't we get if I over apps because gamification I think is one part of the solution for now until we really have tools and and stuff that really make the whole process of blockchain visible I think it's a part of a solution ya know I love that idea and I am I was actually having a conversation a couple weeks ago with with a guy in the gaming industry and I was like it makes so much sense like exactly what you said right the gems in clash of clans like three year-olds are literally able to purchase gems sometimes like to the detriment of the parents credit cards but so like that's it's evidence of how easy that experience is and I think that part of part of this ecosystem growing is that right now a lot of the the people that are building this ecosystem right now are really really really technically talented and developers and engineers but the that are gonna be coming into the space to build the future they have to be way more diverse and part of that is like game developers game designers people who have had that experience you know part of that is is you know real product designers real people who have have experience in the world right now and can kind of cross this over and you know another good example of sort of like something like okay so square cash I don't know if you guys know what they're doing it's a really good example of like someone that's sort of on the outside of the ecosystem coming in and doing something that blows every cryptocurrency enthusiasts mind because they basically like hey you can get your Bitcoin you can't sell it you don't actually have it you can't buy it you can't trade it you enjoy any of that like but you can just have it and if you ever want it out you have to go through like 20,000 stops and nobody's ever gonna do it and every single person in this room that's probably mind boggling like why would you ever want to do that like I want to have my on my pony axe and my cracking in my bit tricks because like I want the best like diversification of price or whatever right and super cash is like yeah screw that nobody actually wants that and these are really good tangible examples of um I think how the future is gonna be built because when you have the outside perspectives looking in and being like this is silly and they do it their way and then they have users who are like oh this makes sense too that's how the future is gonna come to be I if you have any more questions find me at vac I just want to say thank you so much everyone a gun [Applause]