Stani Kulechov I The Evolution of Crypto Wallets with Avara I Pragma Bangkok 2024

[Music] to kick things off I want to start and welcome our very first speaker for today and for this I'd like to bring on stanie from avara to tell us about how we can think about new ways to understand wallets please give stanie a big round of applause [Music] welcome GM it has been a busy and exciting week for you there's a lot of announcements that avar has made uh I want to focus on a couple of these but primarily the thing that you came out with uh a few days ago and that is the launch of the family wallet tell us more about why you decided to enter the wallet space yeah I mean this is actually quite a interesting story because um avara started and is more known from the um a protocol that the aabs uh built um over the years and um been contributing for the for the past uh seven years and has significant uh net deposits um in lending and borrowing um as of today 20 uh 25 26 billion depending on the um day and at some point we realized that um blockchain kind of is a really neutral technology for different use cases and we expanded Beyond um Financial applications um but over um year ago I met a team um the family team and uh specifically Benji Taylor who has been um before building a family uh was building a social La called honk which was really fun and interesting experience and that team um then pivoted to actually build a a wallet and wallets are kind of um fascinating concept because um there is it it's a effectively an entry point into this world that we all are here building and both Benji and and I have something that we share in common is that we feel that the um actually entry points into this world um should be more um fun um more delightful um and and also um more easier to onboard and I think there's plenty of wallets today and um that's actually a good thing and it gives diversity but something really is missing is is to figure out how we can make the experience to Common chain as easy as possible and that's what basically family team has been uh focusing on and right little bit as of Monday actually one year ago we decided to acquire family and the team joined avara um and not not just being working on Family itself but across all the products we have but the main um exciting point of that is that we were able to launch family um last Monday and we've been building it together um with with the family team now for the past uh two years and it's been taking quite a lot of time because the actual challenging part for a good wallet is the experience and design en nailing that quality um so that's that has been quite uh main factor why we think um investing and um building u a better wallet is is important as more and more people are coming into the space that's awesome I mean 2 years is a lot of time to uh perfect that experience and given how fast the space moves that's uh night and day change on the anywhere from Primitives to l2s didn't exist a lot of them so maybe what is something that makes family unique and and kind of what are the things that you've optimized for here compared to other wallets I think the main point of family is that it's really it's it's really easy to onboard and and it has this very kind of like a detailed approach into this design and experience so every single um flow or every single section of the wallet is is very detailed so we're trying to put a lot of energy into ensuring that every possible screen and every button in every experience within the wallet um feels really intuitive um and is delightful to use so so effectively when you look at Family wallet it it really feels like a product yeah it it doesn't feel just uh a piece of technology that you use to connect to on chain um I guess like going back in time you know to connect to internet you you need to get a Broadband for example and you don't really care uh what it is as long as it it connects but at some point you start to care actually um how do you make this process easier how do you get people online but also transact online uh in a way that is really simple and uh intuitive and family has a really product uh Centric approach which is actually gives lot of inspiration to lot of Builders uh in the space and also even what we're doing uh in a and and lens and all the other uh products that we have um at at AA and one important thing is that um the on onboarding experience so how many of you have now a a family wallet and have used it so there's there's quite few and something that we implemented is um a um wallet management system that we buil called pocket and that means that you can actually um log into family just simply by your email um or your phone number and and that's essentially a Backup backup service that we uh provide with a zero knowledge uh essentially so we're aiming purely for newcommerce but we're getting R of traction from existing users because it it brings just a different kind of a perspective for um Building Products in web tree out of curiosity when you kind of see this exact situation which is you're designing something for brand new people but you also have to cater for existing people do they want more advanced features or and kind of when that happens is the decision you're making to either make that less accessible to them or you want to still showcase that but you don't want to default it to be not really as customizable like how do you kind of Rectify what a brand new user who doesn't understand what smart contracts are account abstraction is or how to think about multiple chains to somebody who's like I want to specify my chain ID and I want to figure out what to do here and all those things it's a really really interesting question because um I think the way we've been building wallets and and and lot of um of the stack in in VB 3 is really like technological aspects so we're thinking of um how do you add additional networks how do you verify that it's a spe specific chain ID um and how do you swap between the networks like change choose your network essentially and how does the bridging work and I think this is a very technological approach into um The Experience whereas when you actually design it in a way where you try to kind of like give it less value and prioritize just usability um you can actually abstract lot of that um um decisions away from the users so when you look at family um if you on board into family and you buy um eat and and then you bridge some of that eat into let's say to base or arbitrum um you still see one eat but we we have a breakdown for you where that it actually exists um and then you avoid uh certain type of things that annoy me personally when you see multiple rows of uh eat um in the wallet and and just for the fact that they're different in the different networks and if you think about just how internet has been built um there's a lot of connectivity there happening and a lot of um transitioning between networks but that doesn't actually reflect all the way to the end user what's actually changing between uh the networks in terms of um informations um so I think that's like a really uh concrete example there and I was really focusing on newcommerce um quite a lot and that was our team's Vision that family will be a wallet for for newcomers who are joining so if you are a uh crypto user and you're experience maybe family will be a wallet you that you recommend for your uh friends and family but what we actually noticed is that um the more experienced users are actually excited family as well um recently bonch basically tweeted about uh family being really um intuitive uh wallet and it was surprising to me that um a lot of users from defi are actually excited about it and you kind of just highlighted that like so far when we've seen wallets or just applications in general the focus has been on infrastructure but what you're kind of doing is in a way showing that not only can we make the ux better for all these things but effectively building f as a wallet is also a way of showcasing that things are being made for Consumer applications um broadly kind of speaking do you think that we're we're ready for a consumer application world or do we still need to kind of build some things that uh kind of get us to that starting point where kind of do you stand on infra versus actually building applications people use we're in a good very good place I I think um maybe like you're going one year backwards uh it wasn't the same actually because a lot of the scalability is is basically coming now um with with plenty of updates um like the The Blob space and and also l2s are giving a lot of breeding space for scalability at the moment and that has been the trend for the past uh couple of years so I think that's we're reaching towards a direction where consumer transactions are possible and you can even go beyond rollups with Sol like validium and using data availability layers so I do think that we're kind of in a point where it's actually possible and we have Solutions like embedded wallets or what we did with pocket in in family um and we have account abstraction um we have a lot of tooling actually to uh to abstract away the the complexity of of of the blockchain and um ability to focus on on experience that equals almost like using online applications and that includes abstracting away gas um and even gas and signing and everything that is really just a um bottleneck because eventually you should be able to use onchain the same way you're using online today um I mean I I totally agree and and I think just this is one of those things where it keeps getting better and better over time and then it's also a a constant iteration game because once you you kind of get more users in you kind of figure out what the new bottlenecks are and you kind of improve that and you continue doing this um the thing that I'm kind of curious about is avara has been kind of the new Focus where you've introduced a suite of products family is the latest edition here how do you kind of think about all these products talking to each other are you going to add uh kind of special interfaces for lens and and a to to family or do they kind of get treated the same as everybody else how do you think about a better unification for all the products that you're building yeah now I would say that they don't really talk that much to each other because a lot of these products are quite new um except for um a and a protocol that they've been more around but eventually I think um onchain is a really good place for compatibility um and it's much more easier to to actually have vertical uh integration so now we're moving towards our next step which is essentially making these protocol to talk to each other um and benefit more the user so some of some things that we're working for family is actually making ability to use and Supply into a um that's one of the priorities that we for example have um we're also thinking about lens especially with the new lens we V3 uh release which includes uh individual Primitives that could be used in family um and also obviously the this type of ACC Compass ability is really important and we are trying to integrate it it very natively we still have um a block Explorer um in the app and I think that's a way to access the whole web tree but the native experience is is very valuable and and we're trying to figure out ways how to get as much of uh that as possible because that's where uh we can actually have more control over the experience and have a bit more opinionated approach and and and build something unique uh for the users how far out is that like is this like we're going to see that immediately or eventually kind of how do you think about feedback versus what you want to actually kind of present and then see how people react I think it's going to be extremely opinionated um I think the family team specifically is um they have a particular way of Designing um and and Building Products um and that type of uh uh aspect is um also um we're observing that into our other products but it's going to be very opinionated so U there's a lot of things you won't see in family um but there's a lot of very interesting things that you will see and I think that's going to make it a really nice product because we're not going to integrate everything that exists in in web3 it can be available uh to an Explorer but our goal is actually to figure out what the users need and and what they should do in the future and I think that's a really um interesting approach here because um it also um allows allows us to um affect what kind of uh products and and features um are us as much use in the future but getting obviously feedback will be really always helpful and and if anything even kind of seeing the ux interactions we've seen from from Benji um whether it's on Twitter or just uh the documentations you've pushed on for other products uh I can really see the the thought that's been put in to making that experience really really perfect so I can imagine uh how the openness is actually going to be a good thing here because you actually get to direct them to where you want them uh to go and I think um it's like I think the hardest part is the the the last smile on on design and and experience um and usually most most teams they they don't do the last mile necessarily that well and it can be time constraints some sometimes purely um um and I think that's where we're going to differentiate is that um we're trying to close that last mile that actually can make a big difference um so if you H if you haven't used family today um obvious the best way to actually like um explain it or or or um experience it is is to downloading family um family.co download is where you get an iOS version and you can actually try the onboarding experience and I really want to hear your opinion on that because it's um we put a lot of energy into making it it as smooth as possible um but if you have interesting features in mind or things that family should include we're always happy to also hear about it amazing um on the kind of topic of wallets one thing that uh I think it's been top of mind for a lot of people in this space especially anybody in defi has been stable coins uh and just kind of making payments more and more accessible and out there and wallets obviously are really good first inter phace to to that experience and uh kind of one thing that we saw recently was also that immediately after the election in the US you kind of saw a massive surge in uh stable coin Supply just kind of going up I think it went like five billion or something in like a few days and the thing I'm kind of curious about is uh you've obviously been interested and involved in this space too with with go um how do you kind of think about the stable coin ecosystem right now and and what what do you think the opportunities are yeah I mean the stable coins are in Peak demand and that's really amazing to see because I think stable coins has particularly this this um effect that the bigger they grow the larger the network effects are and the more we see adoption so the network effects are really tied into that adoption and I do think that there's going to be a lot of stable coins coming from um traditional like U more like fintech type of uh um companies and and and tokenizing their um deposits but eventually like the the Big Value add from all these different stable coins are that it creates um an actual yield market and yield opportunity in Defi and I I think that's really um powerful um but also the the the payments use case is going to be really significant and this is what we talked about earlier about the infrastructure that the infrastructure are in a place where it's getting at to a point where you can actually start uh transacting in real-time payments and with the existing transaction cost you can abstract gas away um so you can actually do interesting things in terms of payments uh on chain and this is something that really didn't exist a couple of years ago um so for example if you building Defi and and focusing on uh stable coins the payments area is is a really fascinating um part to build and hopefully you build on go which is also the Ava native stable coin I have to mention it but um it's a really um interesting so so kind of two questions to that uh one is like kind of what's your best kind of understanding or theory on why we just saw a massive search recently in stable coins uh given that we haven't really seen a super direct correlation with the prices of the rest of the crypto going up or an event where suddenly just more and more people got on boarded to crypto um and that's kind of an interesting thing uh and the second thing will be just for audience uh give us an overview of what go is and why you decided to create a stable coin yeah I mean go came from um more from the product perspective um actually than than sing kind of like a larger uh stable coin problem because there's already stable coins in uh in in defy and and and so forth so one of the big challenge in in a was that um all the rates on a are variable rates meaning they fluctuate based on supply and demand so it's an algorithmic system that works by itself the only thing that the aid da that is covering the a protocol has to do is to uh periodically tweak some uh risk parameters but mainly the the interest rate curve is is working quite um well based on supply and demand and something that our users uh effectively wanted is to have more predictability on interest rates and the way to actually do that is is by having ative stable coin um that is governed by some sort of um um algorithm that brings more um the predictability into the interest rates or Dow governance uh rates and that's that happened purely by a a borrower's uh demand and it's been quite interesting so go is relatively small stable coin it's a little bit under 200 million uh in issuance but it provides a significant utility to the um AA users and for the Ava da uh it's quite interesting because um 100 million worth of go uh is earning to the avow the same amount of um 1 billion usdc um is earning because it doesn't have LPS so it came from that uh product angle and I think this type of um DNA is across our company where we're trying to constantly innovate and and think how we can accelerate the space more through Innovation um and I think From aest perspective we'll see more Innovation coming with av4 uh improvements into to go um and there's a lot of opportunity to to actually build on top of this Technologies and I think carting I mentioned this um um even last time is that I think like a lot of innovation for example in defi will happen on the kind of like a application Level so I think that the back end of the defi has been relatively well built and now there's opportunities to build these application Level um use cases um that actually brings more of these users uh into a space and grabbing a lot of market share and that's actually fascinating because if you're able to build a really good application um that is using Define the back end you're actually owning the end user relationship which is really powerful um I think that's a really actually I learned something new here too I didn't realize that was the primary reason for creating go and and it makes sense to actually introduce a stability plus you kind of make a simpler unit of account um on just kind of how to think about interest rate or just borrowing power um so that's actually super cool I learned this new a new thing um maybe we get into some of the the alpha leak stuff here but obviously you've been working on avv V4 and uh I'm kind of curious to understand kind of what has been a goal for what to optimize in V4 and and does that actually now affect what go is also going to uh evolve into and anything you can share about how that gets better over time yeah and always like when we think about a the the goal is it's very boring it's making and making a more Capital efficient and making a more um creting better risk management at in in the protocol level so those two drivers are the most important for us and then focusing on thats it it clears a lot of um kind of like a mind when when when we're innovating there's going to be features that really um makes it possible to actually price the liquidity much better um in the a protocol So currently if you're borrowing usdc from from a you're paying the same exact rate as everyone else regardless of your risk position in the protocol in V4 um we have a feature called uh liquidity premiums which means that we can price the liquidity based on the risk position and meaning the collateral composition so if you're supplying only e and you're borrowing USC your actually rate is going to be lower on the borrowing side than you will be uh collateralizing rra steak eat uh for example and borrowing usdc and this pricing um just makes it more accurate um and it creates a risk curve so the more riskier position on accepted Spectrum you're uh providing to a um the higher you are on the RIS Spectrum um and then on the other side what we're trying to solve is that how do you move on the yield curve within a as well so obviously now if you supply usdc you earn the same as anyone else um but we want to enable the ability to move higher on the risk curve and and basically um subscribe to different types of uh risk categories and then there is a better Integrations with with with go directly um iv4 has a lot of exciting features so if if you want to know more um you should check the proposal of of av4 because there's a lot that we are building and we're building it completely in public so we have every month a developer update in the a governance Forum that you can actually read and and follow the progress nice um want to start asking some uh some kind of closing questions but I do want to tie this together uh one thing you kind of made um a comment about when you were talking about family was how we kind of see a lot of other wallets sort of just not really be smart about showing what your assets are um the kind of core are I want to ask you is like how how does go behave in a multi-chain world like is are your aspirations to be on every chain how do you think about prioritizing what to do how do they all work together with the supply of the the boring and lending on a markets and how should we think about the future of multi can go yeah I mean AA itself is is in 13 different networks um evm networks and we're also working on non evm implementations but evm is where most of our so software is um which is quite interesting because AA is something that kind of belongs to every Network so if there is enough financial value that can be then used as a collateral and trade it um it's a potential um place where a can be deployed and in terms of go go is currently only on Main net and arbit um but there's a couple of other proposals to expand go into Bas and Avalanche and uh we believe there's going to be more networks and go is going to live in multi-chain uh world and we're also excited and interested to get go into uh some sort of a validium solution uh to enable large scale um payments uh use cases as well down the line the challenging part about go is that every Network that is expanding to um there needs to be some sort of a liquidity pipeline there um to move go uh we're using for the messaging we're using chain link ccip um and that has been really easy tool for us to to expand but the harder part is actually to build up that liquidity uh and demand um but it's also uh quite interesting because on Main Nets on ethereum go is uh you can borrow it as a um more predictable rate but for example in arbitrum it's listed as an asset where you can earn variable rate uh and borrow as a variable rate as well which creates some Arbitrage uh opportunities nice I mean that's going to be a very interesting world because uh you will kind of see unintended fragmentation but it's not really fragmentation is just uh the ability to kind of not be able to tap into that much liquidity even if the the global Supply kind of supports that yeah and the the whole liquidity frag fragmentation is interesting because um the way that ethereum is scaling with l2s um it kind of looks like there's liquidity a bit everywhere and and there's you could assume that there's liquidity fragmentation but in most cases users are specifically using certain networks um and they're not using most of the networks at the same time so each L2 if it's purposely designed is catter ing a specific um user of course you have uh users where they're operating in multiple networks and capturing that Arbitrage opportunity on all the assets on chain uh but those are more like a professional market makers usually users are sticking to one or two maximum three different uh networks so I'm not exactly sure if there's like a challenge of uh liquid fragmentation at the moment that's fair actually that's a interesting take that I feel like like deserves his own special uh chatter discussion um maybe to kind of close my fin final question is kind of wrapping all this up you talked about kind of how you got um to where you are with two years of work on on family wallet um and you kind of did hint about the new Integrations that are coming in from um especially a and overtime lens um what can we also expect in the future about how we expect the family and just Mobile Wallet experiences to change and uh anything else that you're excited about on how to make better wallets yeah I mean our road map is going to be very um exciting so there's going to be frequent updates um and improvements and and and things that we want to ship things that are really fun um and and very delightful um and defi is going to be big part of also family and and in in a very interesting way um but we also want to continuously seek of uh non-financial use cases as well and I think that's a very big area and I earlier mentioned that blockchain is kind kind of like a use case neutral technology so there's a lot to build that is non- financial um so we kind of like a want to see the steer wall uh come together um so yeah if you haven't tried family um you will be surprised how um en joyful it is um and hopefully um uh we can earn you as a as a user um and if you are hacking uh doing the hackaton um you can back on everything we've we've built and to your point of of of building something and being a Founder I think something that I learned is that it's very hard to um achieve something really great um in a short period of time so you have to have a lot of resiliency um and this space is a long kind of a term um space so you have to aim also kind of uh in the F future of the future of time so I'm wishing everyone really good luck as well amazing that's a perfect note to end this on thank you so much St for for this amazing conversation and uh look forward to having you again thank you thank you part [Music]