Fat App vs. Fat Wallet Thesis: Where Does User Ownership Fit In? | Nitya Subramanian - Para

all right hello everyone super excited about this next talk thank you for joining us next up we have fat app versus fat wallet thesis where does uner user ownership fit in um giving this talk is nitaa suban from para um sorry I believe it's Pera and and if you could welcome Nia to the stage and we'll get to go thank you oh you don't me just Kidd all right hi everyone um thanks for coming so uh today we're g to talk about um fat apps and fat wallets uh and more importantly what happens to users in the middle of all this a little bit about me my name is Nia I'm the founder of Pera we make it easy for uh applications and ecosystems to onboard users into crypto wallets get them funded get them transacting um basically the set of developer tools that uh that offer easy onboarding um and easy interaction with blockchain for both devs and end users just a little bit about par um we're a wallet and authentication suite for crypto apps we do web 2 and web 3 logins Universal wallets uh security is something that we take uh we have a lot of different modules that provide um MPC powered uh security we use a lot of pass Keys uh and we support evm as well as several other ecosystems um listed here so let's get to it um what are fat apps and fat wallets and why should we care so the term fat is actually a a hearkening back to a 2016 blog post called the fat protocol thesis and the fat protocol thesis basically said that as um the blockchain space emerges more and more value um and more and more um kind of depth whether it's additional layers of the product stack additional economics will acre to the protocol layer it's been almost 10 years since then um and so in 2025 uh we've seen a lot of um interesting Cycles play out around um value acral product building and um we have now uh a variety of um kind of interesting uh work happening at the client layer uh so both applications and wallets as uh I'll talk about them here are usually either mobile apps mobile apps U mobile wallets extensions apps are really any of the decentralized applications that that um we know and love and why are they they getting fat so first off what is a fat application um fat applications um start really specific so they might be something like a a social network or a social feed a token swap platform a lending protocol um and as time goes on uh a lot of these products um have been integrating adjacent functionality um why do they do this to make it easy for users um it's kind of challenging to um to maybe have a a token swap but need to go somewhere else to see your balance um likewise It's tricky to have a social network where every time you want to post a message you have to go um open up a wallet and hit confirm that switching back and forth is a big difference between web 2 and web 3 and as a result a lot of these products have been integrating adjacent functionality whether that's an nft Market Marketplace for secondaries whether it's integrated um swaps or name registration the biggest one here of course has been wallets a lot of apps have integrated a wallet signing layer that's purpose-built for their app to streamline the ux of of putting things on chain and here I've just shared a few examples um several teams that we work with um that uh really just make it uh easy to sign transactions from within the app at the point where the user has an intention to transact and now uh what are fat wallets uh so fat wallets uh started really general actually I think many of us might remember the original metamask UI where I could see a list of my tokens I could send them but that was really about it now if we look at wallets there's all sorts of integrated functionality everything from on ramps nft galleries again maybe ens registration of course swaps now that's across the board bridging really the list goes on and on so why are wallets adding this functionality it's for retention if the second I want to do something with my tokens I have to go to a different app I have to discover which app I can even use to swap that's a retention Challenge and it's a place where users maybe have disappointment or maybe have confusion and so this consolidation into the wallet layer streamlines a lot of that so really all that this boils down to is two things ownership and control so everyone wants one really two things the first is ownership over their user base and as a result their Destiny if I'm an application and my users have to go to a wallet every time they want to transact let's say that wallet has a bug and is down for a while now none of my users can use my app likewise if I'm an app um if I'm a wallet and my users want to do some functionality I need to figure out where to send them let's say that fron gets hacked now I'm on the hook so this is really a question of um in the web 2 world consumer apps have been able to own their own destiny and grow really um on their own without needing to rely on additional products um in crypto we all want the same thing too the second is control over the user experience so likewise not having to deal with another product that maybe isn't up toate with the latest version um of of my app that I shipped or um a wallet that doesn't yet show the token balance for a token that I'm using um with all of this it's really about minimizing popups minimizing switching maximizing the ease of getting onchain so this sounds pretty great in theory right we have all these apps they have all this bundled functionality and users can do everything they want in one place without leaving um it sounds pretty great but turns out there's no free lunch um and in all of this as apps have expanded their functionality wallets have expanded their functionality everyone is becoming a super app the real kind of loss here has been for end users unfortunately um and a lot of that has to go into um fragmentation so when every app has its own wall wallet and when every wallet is integrating app functionality we have massive fragmentation of liquidity when's the last time um you went directly from cash uh into crypto it's a pretty challenging process and when we have to onboard users into every single onchain app we end up having users replicate the most challenging parts of getting into crypto every single time they use an app this is in contrast to maybe folks who've been in the space for a while longer if you were just using a wallet with many apps yes there were popups but you could leverage that liquidity across the board um and so now we've run into this massive fragmentation problem where users have to onboard and onboard and onboard and we have small bits of funds stuck in lots of different wallets to make things worse now if the only way to access a wallet is within the app the app has to add any functionality that a user needs let's say that I have an embedded wallet inside an app that's siloed um and I want to swap two tokens but the app hasn't whitelisted that functionality yet or integrated it I'm out of luck all I need all I can do really is export my private Keys download a wallet and now I'm back to that um popup ux that we were just talking about so how can we have the best of both worlds um have our cake and eat it too so the first thing here is and I think we've actually been hearing a lot of this um in in recent uh months as well is I would say we've really swung to the other side of kind of being anti- decentralization let's not be decentralized for decentralization's sake no one cares about composability or whether your your app is on chain while that may be true a superpower that we get from building a product on chain and putting data on chain is composability namely this property that if I onboard to one app I can and and I put liquidity in that app I can use that everywhere I don't have to re onboard over and over and over again um and uh when you can sign anything from anywhere this actually removes a lot of repeated steps and those repeated steps are often the worst parts of an app um so this is another area where crypto experiences can actually LeapFrog what we have in web to where instead of needing to fun all the new apps that I go to I can leverage the funds on chain that I already have and bring them with me everywhere um so we really want to try to seek out this experience leveraging the crypto superpowers but without all of this onerous ux that we've made so much progress in getting rid of so a reframing of this problem that might help here is instead of thinking about wallets as my wallet is one app we could instead think about wallets as a functionality or a layer specifically wallets can be a signing and liquidity layer for apps super apps any consumer experience this gets us a couple of things if our wallet is available anywhere we can take that to the purpose-built applications that can best leverage it the second I want to swap I can take my wallet to an app that lets me swap anything at the best rate possible if I want to buy an nft I can take those funds to an nft Marketplace and immediately buy the nft I've been looking for likewise I can use that builtup reputation um on a social network uh to have a better follower graph if we can do all of this without the popups and without the friction we get a few things one we get a faster onboarding ux than anything in web 2 connect my wallet and I'm done we get the most control the signing experience happens in the backg there's no popups no kind of uh weird multi-app experience and this leads to lower turn if I want to actually do something with this wallet that's not possible in a given app I just take it with me I don't have to export a private key I only need to deal with seed phrases if and when I choose to do so this leads to a really powerful Effect called flywheels flywheels are something that any of us who use a wallet in crypto have experienced it's when we go to Unis swap to swap tokens openc to buy our um buy the nft that we've been looking for and deposit some of those funds in a these experiences help both apps and users retain um their their connection with these different apps while leveraging composability we're not exporting private Keys here and there we're not manually depositing funds into every wallet we're just bringing our onchain identity with us wherever we choose so how what does the solution to this look like uh Universal embedded wallets are our proposal for how we can bring together the best of these two worlds um so to break this term apart an embedded wallet is as you mentioned earlier a wallet that is integrated within an application um that allows the app to directly put actions on chain Universal just means that a user can take it wherever they want to um and here I'll just go through a couple of features that um the par team has been working on that uh we think can alleviate a lot of these challenges the first is account profiles so account profiles are a way to kind of attach metadata to my wallet but with a privacy layer so that if I connect a Google account my farcaster ID and um my my metamask address all to One account that's not something that's shared with with the public that's something that I can choose exactly which context I want to share it in so default private account linkages and web2 associations but this also gives us the very best of web 3 which is being able to bring our data anywhere that we want it maybe I um I want to use my ens handle in a new application I can just bring that wallet with me I don't have to transfer it this also gives apps The Best of Both Worlds apps get transaction privilege on applications um me meaning that if an application um is a game and they're wanting to do a bunch of transactions in the background there's not going to be a popup every time there's still going to be this smooth ux um but I I get to leverage the fact that users aren't coming in with an empty wallet every time with this High drop off funding flow and so you might be thinking that sounds really nice but maybe a bit unsafe what if I don't want every app to do whatever they want to to my wallet this is where permissions come into play so app permissions give users easy as well as guardrails that offer Peace of Mind in this gaming example a user might let an uh might let a game do transactions in the background for playing the game but maybe an inapp purchase requires a popup and a manual confirmation and maybe an inapp purchase over $100 requires 2fa so this again gives users some peace of mind along with the best possible ux that they want to allow and it gives apps the the opportunity to have this instant liquidity as well as an integrated transacting ux this also allows this trust interface between a user and an app to shift over time as users build more trust in a given app they'll allow more Privileges and most importantly everyone wins so apps get the user base with the control that they want being able to have an opinionated experience integrating all the functionality they want as well as instant liquidity and lower turn because users don't have to export a private key the second they want to do something for users this means that we can onboard once and transact everywhere without having to export our private keys and another reason why this matters um we talked about fat apps fat wallets another really new um kind of trend on the horizon is app chains um there lots of new app chains being spun up and we're actually seeing a lot of consolidation around the app layer um and app chains specifically being the central point of ecosystems this matters even more for app chains where bridging into a new app chain is something that ideally a user should just do once and then they should be able to take that liquidity around with them additionally a lot of app chains are creating app chains because they want to have this consistent differentiated best-in-class ecosystem you ux so this provides that functionality as well and then as I mentioned earlier this helps us enable product fly wheels so the three applications on um Eclipse that I want to use or on Vana that I want to use I can just go from one to the other without having to export my keys without having to manage a seed phrase I can just connect my wallet and this helps it optimize retention as well where apps don't have to worry about losing users just because they have an integrated a certain token pair yet or because they haven't integrated a gallery view users can just go where they need when they need and so we'll very briefly share um our um our solution here which is um ecosystem wallets um the way we think about this is ecosystem specific profiles that a user can choose to connect when and where they want so in the case of uh let's say I wanted to to swap that token pair like I mentioned earlier we can use the wallet connect standard um which pair of supports and pick which profile we want to connect in a given case so here let's say there's um an eclipse uh token that I want to swap I can just connect that to Unis Swap and go on ahead similar the next time I come in let's say I want to connect FAA I can do that and then let's say I am going to some brand new um nft site and I want to keep that Wallet information fully private a user can do that they can decide to provision a brand new wallet just for that experience and keep that wallet history um siloed for privacy purposes on chain and all of this of course we get that same security from App specific permissions as well as a web2 friendly login and popup free experience so we're really excited um about uh trimming the fat uh it's been so exciting to uh see kind of the movement as applications become more and more consumer friendly and are growing the pie bringing in new web to users um and we're really excited to get to a place where web 3 experiences our leap frogging web 2 um thank you so much [Applause]