Mobile Takeover of The Wallet Space Kosala Hemachandra

hello everyone my name is kosala himachandra i'm the founder and ceo of my ether wallet and um for those who are not familiar with my wallet we go all the way back to the inception of ethereum so a little over six years so for the past six years we've been still like providing you guys with secure user-friendly non-custodial privacy oriented wallet solution for all ethereum users and we basically grew with ethereum so we people call us the original og ethereum wallet and um now i'm going to be talking about uh mobile wallet solutions how mobile wallets will take over the wallet space so uh let's first look at what is a wallet this is this is a wallet literally this is it so there's nothing to it so um first paper wallet started in uh sorry the the these wallets introduced in 1600 after the paper currency was introduced before that i'm pretty sure people were carrying satchels with like valuable items with them anyway so um let's look at some pros and cons because these pros and cons are actually also applicable to blockchain wallets or private keys i'll get to that in a second so some of the one of the pro is readily available which means like i have my wallet right here so it's always readily available and that also means it can easily be stolen like i wouldn't know if someone come behind me and like steal my wallet uh and lose everything that i have over there and it's liquid so credit cards cash everything in that is liquid also that's that's a con because it's liquid uh again if it gets stolen you lose all the cash you lose cards everything and it's private as long as it's with you and again the con is it's not insured if you lose it you lose it pro is identity you can keep your identity in your wallet um for example to verify to get into a bar to make sure you are 21 or to drive if you have your driver's license over there and that also means whoever steals this wallet is able to do identity theft or act like that person is you so um yeah fine what is an ethereum wallet actually this is also applicable to a lot of blockchains out there uh it comes down to 32 bytes most of the wallets are actually 32 bytes so that means 32 random numbers between 0 and 22 155 so as long as like even if you write down to be honest you can write down 32 numbers between 0 and 255 and that can be converted into a wallet but please don't do that because humans are not capable of coming up with enough randomness so if you do that it's most likely like it's possible for someone to crack that and then again still and then mnemonic again not really a mnemonic but mnemonic came into the space with the introduction of bitcoin uh improvement proposals so it was bip 32 that actually brought the vip 32 introduced the concept of mnemonic to the world they basically came up with this concept of okay like we can convert entropy to easily readable or easily memorizable words and then beep 39 uh bitcoin improvement protocol 39 actually came up with the words that that'll uh convert the entropy to the mnemonic and bib 44 later on introduce different paths for different blockchains and so another advantage of having a mnemonic is one pneumonic can be applicable to any number of blockchains so ethereum pneumonic can also be applicable to for example let's say a polygon mnemonic so that's why a lot of evm compatible chains or compatible wallets can cross-work against each other so yeah i've been talking a lot about losing your wallet or probably like you guys are scared of now losing it more than keeping it safe but there are ways to keep your wallet safe one of the ways are buy a hardware wallet and some of the advantages are keys reside in a secure hardware element it runs on an isolated environment basically it's not connected to internet so as long as you have your hardware wallet with you whenever you want to sign a transaction the hardware wallet is where the private keys the keys that i described before resides and then the hardware wallet will take care of the actual signing part and then send back the signed transaction so that your keys will be never exposed to the dab that you're using and on top of that you can add an additional protection via like a pin code or password uh but like one of the downside is it's expensive like hardware wallets go anywhere between 100 to like 600 dollars so depend on it depends on what kind of wallet you want what kind like what what appeals to you what kind of blockchain supports the wallet has and all that um and another downside is easily recognizable so if you have uh one of these hardware wallets in your bag and like you for example you get checked at the tsa they know for sure it's a hardware wallet and that therefore they know you have crypto so it's super easy for you to become a crypto person in public if someone see this uh this wallet these hardware wallets and it's not readily available like for example if i need a wallet right now i can't there's no place to just go and buy the wallet i have to either order it online and then wait couple of weeks for it to get here or like like you can probably do amazon which i don't recommend because you don't know who other vendors are so there are these problems that recite like comes come come with the hardware wallets and then uh and then we have mobile wallets basically if you look at it you can see we have the all the good things and we don't have the bad things with the mobile wallets because just because you're carrying a smartphone doesn't mean that you have a crypto wallet any person with a smartphone is like not everyone who has a smartphone is also not like a person who has crypto with them and then it's free and readily available you can simply go online download your wallet and it's a fully secure full-blown um wallet for you for all your transactions i will get to the point where like i mentioned isolated environment because you might say but like the phone is connected to internet so that means there's a way for a malicious app or some kind of malicious person to steal that through internet your private case so that's where the secure hardware enclave comes in almost every single smartphone out there today has this secure enclave built in to the phone and then this secure enclave is actually a completely separate processor with a completely separate operating system and a completely separate memory so even if your keys resides in memory like there are a lot of malicious apps out there that can read your phone's memory and like get all the data from like the memory i'm calling the ram uh and then that's not the case with the secure element because secure element is completely different from existing processor and like your regular process and your regular memory ram and um operating systems do not have direct access to the secure enclave it's again completely separate so it's yeah it's built in a way even if the system is compromised the secure enclave will stay secure and made to secure like for example it's made for a different purpose but we can repurpose that to create a hardware wallet-like situation so it's made to secure your face unlock information biometrics pin code your apple pay your google pay data and all that and then you already know these are pretty sensitive information so all these companies these really like popular smartphone manufacturers and processor manufacturers they're taking this secure enclave very seriously and they want to make sure nothing in this secure enclave leaves the enclave or like get compromised so that's the most important part and then some phones actually even use the secure enclave to protect the bootloader from tampering so like secure enclave will create the keep the hash or signing data for the bootloader so bootloader is like a prime it's that's what boots up your phone and then the operating system kicks in so even even the boot loader cannot be compromised because of these security features built into the phone so yeah we can easily make the use of the built-in secure enclave on modern phones to protect our private information it could be a private key just like you saw before or um any other private information that you can think of and secure enclaves can encrypt and decrypt data within the secure enclave and then give the information back to the user and the samsung blockchain phone some of you are already probably familiar with samsung already came up with either like a blockchain phone that already has ethereum and bitcoin built in basically they are using this part of the phone to do that and um yeah so you can even add on you can add additional security on top of the existing security built into the enclave such as biometric or pin code before signing the transaction so what does mu wallet do me wallet is our mobile application we use this enclave and we take security pretty seriously so we generate the keys locally and the keys will never ever leave the phone so keys will always reside in your phone and then not just one encryption we use two encryptions to keep your private keys safe so your private key is initially encrypted with the password that you choose and then we'll use the secure enclave encryption algorithm to encrypt it again and put it in the enclave and on top of that we don't use just regular private keys we use mnemonic to create your wallet so mnemonics will let us for example not just support one blockchain it'll open up it'll basically future proof us we can now support any blockchains in the future and we are ready to support that and we are already using it to for example create e2 wallet addresses because e2 when it like in ether when ethereum 2 comes out uh it'll the wallet addresses probably will look a little different because they're using a different algorithm to derive these addresses and since we already chose to use mnemonic we can easily use e2 we can derive the e2 addresses using the exact same mnemonic and it's seamless for the user user doesn't even know that this is happening in the background and again same thing you can use it with dabs and then app will never expose the underlying private information so yeah now let's talk about i guess the main topic of the presentation i actually did uh an article at nasdaq about modern finance going mobile so this is a like brief summary of that article and if you if someone's interested in reading the whole article it's at that link it's something that i realized i'd say two maybe two and a half years ago i noticed that modern finance is already going towards mobile like robin hood is a great example before robin hood everyone used desktops like everyone you had to be a pro and then looking at charts you had to know exactly what you are doing you you had to know all the rules and the laws and sec and all that before trading so trading was only applicable to elites back then and then robin hood came up with this the app and then simplified the whole process for anyone to understand and then feel comfortable about the process so this led big corporations like charles schwab for example to increase or like make their mobile apps better for the users and make it easy for the users to understand what trading is or like even give like i call them super apps like add more functionality to the apps so that they don't have to leave the app they can use just one app and do everything that that company offers so for example child swap came up with fractional trading like they cut the fees and um all in one trading account so basically they create added a bank account to your trading profile so now you can transfer back and forth this happened because companies like robin have revolutionized the whole industry and um i actually looked into this survey done by market dive it actually said 85 of the people prefer mobile apps over mobile sites so if you are like thinking of creating i guess a mobile site it's also like take some time to think about oh can i actually convert it into an app and give user a better experience because you the moment you decide to create an app you have access to all these secure parts of the phone that like the the web will not have access to so um that yeah that survey was done by market dive and at the same time i i touched a little bit on crypto is the next big thing in uh modern finance so crypto will be revolutionizing the crypt uh finance industry and that's all of us that's where we are headed and all of us that's where we want to be and we can learn a lot from what happened in the past and apply that to the future when we create a dab or create an app create a wallet and that's what we should be learning from the past and then apply that to future so the best way will be yes since everyone loves phones let's just try to adapt that into our future like create mobile apps create apps that super apps that can accomplish all the tasks that you want to accomplish in crypto again yeah if you want to read the full article it's it's at that link and um yeah these are some things that i learned over the past uh wallet is basically the atomic unit of blockchain without a wallet you cannot use the blockchain um and like there are like a lot of projects trying to make this whole process seamless but at the same time they might be losing some of the security aspect of it because they're not educating their users enough to understand that you have to own the private key for the wallet in order for you to own the funds in that wallet if that's not the case then you don't have access to your funds if that project goes down that means your funds goes down period like there's nothing to it so always make sure you'll have access to your wallet it could be that private key or the pneumonic anyway you you are the one who must have access to that not the project not the company not the corporation and um basically if the so because of that if the what if the world doesn't have access to a secure wallet that also means we are not going for the mass adoption there's no way to no way for the crypto to achieve mass adoption because they don't have access to secure wallets if they keep using unsecured methods to access and then keep losing funds that means at some point in time yeah i know it's like it's a big hype right now but like when the hype dies down at some point in time people will because they are not exposed to secure methods of access they'll start losing money and the moment that happens we'll be stagnant we can't go up anymore so in order for that to not happen we we have to prepare ourselves we have to be able to give our users secure methods of access and here's the good news 84 of the world already has smartphones so basically they're carrying a crypto wallet in their hands and they don't even know it so think about those people think about i'm pretty sure from that 84 percent maybe only still five percent of them know about crypto so that's a huge market out there for you to explore and get to know more about them and then give them access to these methods and uh we recently made wallet recently did a survey on our users and then we realized new wallet our mobile app users use it more frequently than the new web users so that's a good indication and we also realize me wallet our mobile app users do more transactions than our web users and and at the same time it was a great way to onboard people from third world countries because they don't have access to a laptop or computer they only have access to a phone which is a smartphone and it's pretty secure and why not on both them be using a phone so yeah that's basically all i i wanted to call with you guys and um if you guys want to check out our app this is the qr code i'll let it be there for like five seconds ten seconds um and i'll probably stay somewhere there for the next 10 minutes if you have any questions um yeah feel free explore this space it's it's big enough for everyone healthy competition is always good if you are developing an app and want to know security side of things uh like send us a message um and we'll be more than happy to help you yes what's the difference coinbase wallet and your product metamask coinbase wallet and our products yes good question metamask and coinbase wallets are extensions that give you access directly to the dap our wallet me wallet is think of it as a all-in-one solution to access uh everything that has to do with ethereum basically you don't have to navigate to different apps in order to access and at the same time it's we we are also working with dabs to integrate our new wallet application so you can connect directly to the dab just like metamask so you can communicate with them as well yes one stop shop uh the other big difference is that our keys are in a secure storage versus all the metamasks and coinbase wallet keys are in in the extension in the browser in your computer we have time for one more quick question for kasala looking at all the wallets that are available how do you know or what are some red flags that will like how you said choose the right one if the wallet goes down then you lose all your funds what's the red flags that you look for when you have to choose a wallet another good question so um basically like if you're downloading it make sure there are enough reviews and enough downloads right if it's a brand new wallet i'd be really careful about the amount of funds that you put in and any wallet should take you through that process of creating a mnemonic or creating a private key and if it's a login username password that's probably a big no-no for me because that's not non-custodial so if you want to control the funds you need to have access to your keys