Progressive Wallets: A Holistic Approach to Crypto UX | Jonny Howle - Capsule & Offscript

okay has ever has anyone had a chance to check out the chill Dome it's just over there uh there's maker space stuff there there's uino boards um there's uh raspberry pies obviously uh you can hack on blockchain and stuff uh and they have a DJ you should check it out so our next speaker is is uh Johnny Howell from capsule sloff script and he will be talking about Progressive wallets a holistic approach to crypto [Applause] ux all right check check okay let's see here we good to go all right um thank you all for being here um I know 440 on Friday could be tough and you could be other places but um I think that there's some Alpha in this presentation about uh Progressive wallets um the idea of progressive wallets which I'll talk more about uh is this idea that wallets should can uh evolve with their users they don't have to be kind of a static ux at some point on the decentralization spectrum that can change over time to grow with the user along their Journey uh but before I dive in I'm Johnny um we were named capsule up until a couple of weeks ago we just rebranded to perah so you might see us now under that that name um and I lead design at Pera um briefly so you have some context uh perah uh does what we call Universal wallets or cross apppp embedded wallets today um and a bit of this presentation about Progressive wallets is about what we're excited about and where we think wallets are going and should go and what we're looking at in the future in 2025 um but today what perah does is uh we are the you know we consider ourselves the most comprehensive wallet and authentication suite for crypto applications there's a number of reasons that we believe this um we offer easy web 2 and web 3 onboarding uh the wallets that you create on one app in a very easy way can go to other apps they don't get siloed and you don't have this liquidity fragmentation problem with your users um Security's all customizable and because we're built on uh some fancy MPC uh cross chain is supported out of the box so users can easily create ethereum wallets just as easily as they can create and use Salon wallets so we've heard this term I bet uh a million times and I'm sure many people are sick of hearing about how we're going to onboard the masses and I think it is the question that we have to ask is like what are we on boarding the masses to and in a lot of ways we're on board them to a wallet and that wallet is supposed to be the thing that allows them to experience web 3 and in a lot of ways people get onboarded to exchange they don't really get to experience web 3 they get onboarded into a siloed embedded wallet and they don't really get to experience the magic of web 3 yes they sign messages they sign transactions but I think at perah we think one of the magic properties of web 3 is being able to carry your wallet and your identity around the internet and that's the thing that we really are trying to preserve and that's what we should be onboarding the masses too when we do it so most people know that if you've onboarded a friend uh you expect them to go on this journey from centralized to decentralized over time uh but really the journey doesn't it it really isn't a journey we actually have a situation like this and I'll talk about what some of these logos are if you if you don't recognize all of them but instead of having a smooth Journey we have these like discreet steps with all of these tradeoffs along the way and if you want to maintain your wallet um and your identity and all your funds that you spent all that that time KY seeing and on ramping on uh you have to like export your private key or send all of your assets to a new wallet when you're ready to upgrade for more functionality or more security and that just doesn't have to be the the way things are done and so actually so the logos on here I mean centralized versus decentralized is kind of the Paradigm I think of it as um but you know the that far left one you might remember debuted here in Denver that's the burner wallet uh by Austin Griffith um we that a few years ago here at eth Denver um and it's a great experience like it's a it's a wallet that is ephemeral it's stored in the browser but it's super fragile if you clear your you know cach a on your browser your your memory um you're going to lose your wallet in the funds and there's no way to upgrade it so you would really just have to export the private key and that's a problem then you have something like um well the other ones are Dapper privy Argent safe and then all the way down this side is metamask where it's just an EA you have access to your private key um and that's kind of the most decentralized Sovereign thing we have maybe you would say a ledger or a hardware wallets even further than that but you get the picture um so these concepts of progressive wallets kind of arise out of two different uh other Concepts subconcepts and we're putting them together so first is Progressive decentralization U I'm sure you've seen the l2s that are decentralizing over time um and it's a network design strategy to allow for platforms to transition to protocols over time by Shifting the incentives I think we should all be familiar with this kind of strategy for web 3 crypto products by this point but there's another concept for any designers that are here I'm sure you're familiar with and that's Progressive disclosure and uh that is the interaction design technique that sequences information and actions across several screens in order to reduce feelings of over Helm for the user that's a academic you know uh definition um but it doesn't necessarily have to be over uh a set of screens it could be over you know a set of touch points over time um but you get you get the picture so we have Progressive decentralization we have this ux principle of progressive disclosure and what we can do is we can combine both of these things into something called a progressive wallet um which is how we think wallets probably should be um in the future we this this is where we think we're going so it's a flexible and composable wallet interface that seamlessly transitions between each stage of the user's decentralization Journey so the thing that makes this possible is what uh I mean we've I think the term that we hear a lot is um programmable cryptography but uh composable cryptography is the kind of the way that I like to think about it I think of all of these things hsms MPC pass Keys all of these buzzwords all of these acronyms are pieces are tools that can be composed into a single ux experience they can be and they can be added to over time um and that's that that kind of gives us this journey that we're that that I was talking about where you might start with some level of security some level of cryptography and then you can add to that structure over time um to enable more magical experiences across web 3 so I'll take us through a little bit of this journey so it's a little bit more actionable you can put some UI to these Concepts um starting with this TLS this this is like the burner wallet which I was just mentioning so here's the old burner wallet on X die um this was uh it's super easy to create like I said uh private keys are in the browser it's fragile it's not super safe uh but it's really good for onboarding quickly and trying out apps like there's no reason that we should ever have moved away from burner wallets as a pattern but we should now be incorporating this pattern because it's a really lowf friction way to onboard so how can we preserve the beauty of what the burner wallet did while also allowing the the the user to upgrade into better features and things and and and better security and safety over time that brings us to adding ooth to it so you can simply add ooth after a burner wallet and here's uh an example of something that's TLS and O oaf based um this is NBA top shots I think maybe some of their architecture has changed in the past year but as I remember it from a few years ago this runs on the flow blockchain um it's just you know it's a relatively centralizer it was a centralized wallet log in with your web 2 account you have a wallet but they really control um that wallet for you and that still is a good experience for signing people up but you can't really leave if you can't go to other apps and that's something that uh we need to preserve like I said beyond that you can add a pass key so now you have TLS now you have ooth now you can add a pass key to it you probably seen this UI um this is another embedded wallet provider um you add a pass key now you have some extra security um this is a relatively new thing but I don't think it's going away um but again these embedded wallets that are built in this F f are siloed by app uh they're again they're easy to create they're slightly more involved setting up a pass key might be a new pattern for your users um but that'll probably become more commonplace over time uh but the the the creation of these wallets is still fundamentally pretty easy um the security is pretty good by adding a pass key uh but still there's this platform risk um associated with your wallet being locked into a siloed app um and it's really good for maybe just single app experiences finally we could add MPC to this whole setup um and that would be something like what we're doing at perah today this is the current state of the perra product is we do you know we're secured by the browser storage we have Oath we have a pass key and it all runs on MPC to allow the user to go cross app and so that's the next step in this decentralization journey um so it's usable across app slightly involved creation because you need to set up that pass key it's not as optional as it is in other contexts because it's important for our NPC setup and the security that makes this whole thing go around um the the pass key could be replaced by a password but either way you still need that factor um and it's good for you know maybe medium risk full ecosystem or network experiences so like if you're an ecosystem and you have a lot of apps deploying a single SDK uh that doesn't custody any of the users funds all these apps can use that SDK not worry about centralization or censorship and the users can still easily onboard in one app and go to all the other apps but that brings me to where we're probably going into the future and the idea is to take all of those things and all those things that are great about these other steps on the journey and build a single experience that allows the user to upgrade these things rather than have to leave a product and go to another product and so with that uh well pausing here I think um in the design and web 3 discourse we have this uh idea of abstracting it all away you've you've heard that nobody will nobody will know that they're using crypto nobody that will needs to know about a blockchain or the network and I understand the sentiment but there really is no two ways around the fact that if crypto is going to be what we think it can be it means putting at least some some amount of responsibility back on the user and it's not responsibility it's control and it's a privilege to be able to have and be your own bank as they say or control your own keys and your identity and that does come with trade-offs but they don't have to be as harsh and and and the trade-offs don't have to be so asymmetric we can certainly make it better uh which is you know kind of what we're proposing here um but it's not to be avoid it it's to be engaged with and accept the complexity accept that there are some tradeoffs you don't want to make you don't want centralize everything for the sake of a web two style ux we have to figure out a way to thread the needle um and so now we think of Paar as sitting somewhere in the middle kind of um of this decentralization spectrum and expanding out from that point to meet users further down the left side and take users further down the right side in a single kind of product experience and it's and it's generally not just Pera I think that this is probably with composable cryptography where a lot of the space and a lot of the wallets will go and need to go U anyway so here in practice is kind of what we're thinking about how this kind of comes to life you can imagine your typical sign up login modal on an app but you can continue as a guest just allow the user to skip you know through um signing up and adding o off they don't have to do any of that upfront don't make them connect an external wallet just allow them to create a wallet in the browser um and only when some value is accured some reputation something that you think as a as an app provider as a service provider uh think that the user should care about then they can secure their wallet right you can even gate you know UI functions like depositing and stuff until they have you know done this step and so you can introduce this in a progressive disclosure fashion uh at the right time right nobody needs to do any more work than they absolutely have to do um in any given moment so that you don't need to secure your wallet with ooth if there's nothing in it wait till there's something in it something that matters now ask the user to be able to uh add o off to it that will allow them to come back to your app and recover that wallet and not be at risk of losing it if they clear their browser storage and then after that the user might go cross out they might have acrw funds they don't want to have to onramp funds again on another app experience so they go cross app you the the you know R SDK recognizes them even though they're on another app and only then do they really need to add a pass key pass key is part of the cryptography setup that allows them to go cross app so it's super important but you know we don't technically need to add that security layer when there's only a single app user when they go to a uh second third fourth app that's when this becomes important so we can delay that work um later finally uh permissions um there's a lot of talk about this and there's a lot of uh different standards and and things happening we'll see how it all shakes out but you know you might delay if you're an app builder and you're thinking about wanting a user to give you permissions so that you could do things maybe in the background in less clicks inside of a ux you really only need to present the user to think about those permission when they're doing an action that would be worthy of a permission so you might think about delaying the prompting for setting up permissions outside of onboarding right they don't even know what they're going to be doing yet you've probably just asked them to input their email verify uh an email code add a pass key and then hitting them with permissions becomes kind of the antithesis of the ux principle of progressive disclosure so this is something that we're thinking about a lot at perah how to break these things up into isolated steps um and that kind of brings me to the the the conclusion of this which is what we're trying to do is use the right crypto at the right time and that's crypto as in cryptography um to hopefully get users to uh stick with our apps uh complete onboarding have better retention um and we don't have to build uh wallets that are trying to be somewhere some optimal place on the spectrum they can grow they can evolve they can adapt we've had so many advancements in the cryptography space in crypto um that we should use that and use it to compose experiences over time for our users and with that thank you I'll be doing questions yeah is that a question thing [Applause] okay do we do questions if anybody has a question you can come find me I I suppose all right thanks y'all