Less Wallets, More AI

All right. I hope everyone has heard about WalletConnect. I'm not going to go on and on about what WalletConnect is. In fact, I want to make sure that you know what WalletConnect can be. More importantly, what can we do better to be an even bigger presence in the wallet space.

As I was already presented, my name is Pedro. I'm the founder of WalletConnect, but also the director of the WalletConnect Foundation. And I really want to talk to you about how we could have less wallets. But what does it even mean to have less wallets? And how can we actually leverage AI or the agentic framework to bring better user experience?

So let's go and deep dive a little bit of why do we even need wallets. If you ask yourself, why do we have a wallet? You might ask and think, maybe because Bitcoin had it. But if you think about the framework of how blockchains work, you need this form of authentication to say, I am who I am, and I authorize these actions. This has happened for a lot of years in the internet world, and this happens on the server.

You have the server, and you as an application were able to authenticate email, password, social login, and you were able to say who you are and authorize actions on your behalf. We basically moved that authentication piece and put in the user's hand to give them self-sovereignty, and we called it a wallet. And then this wallet now is required for any application to interact with a blockchain. This is a big paradigm shift that came with blockchain, crypto, Web3, whatever you want to call it. And we need to fix this because while it did give us self-sovereignty, it did take away a little bit of the user experience.

So when you think about Web3, crypto, on-chain, you always have to connect your wallet, and then you have to sign something. You have this private key in your hand, in your wallet, it gives you control, but now you need to always take two actions. And it might make you think, wouldn't it be better if we had like less clicks? Like, if I did less to get the same amount of work done, we could basically just remove signing, for example. Imagine if you connect, and it almost feels like logging in.

Everyone is very familiar with logging in. It's something that is essentially not only just familiar to the broader audience, but also almost expected from any application on the internet. So how can we do that? If you think about the triangle before, the wallet is this policy, this kind of guardian for your blockchain account. The app cannot take any action without you.

And the wallet gives you power, but it also gets a little bit in the way of the user experience. So, Smart Sessions is what we have come up for the last year. It's not something that, Wallet Connect is not you come up with an idea and you start implementing it. We actually held a hackathon with all of our wallet partners, and we sat down in a room and decided, we need to fix this problem, and we need to come up with some solution. Smart Sessions is that solution.

It's something that is now available in the Wallet Connect network. It's something that is now available through some of our wallet partners as an experimental feature. And I will go a little bit deeper of what problem it solves. As I mentioned, or already teased before, we're going to try to remove signing from the wallet. The way this actually works is that, imagine a world where you connect, and you're actually prompted to have some permissions given to an application.

This could be time-bound permissions, like for a certain week, we're going to allow to do certain things. This could be spending policies, saying that you're actually going to allow this application to spend on your behalf to a certain amount. Or even could be certain functions in the smart contract, saying this application can actually interact with this smart contract and take two or three actions that I will allow it to sign on my behalf. This is exactly where the Smart Session is. And it's quite powerful because you're basically eliminating these wallet pop-ups.

So every time you're interacting on-chain, you don't have to be prompted to say, approve this, sign this, authorize that. You're also increasing the number of actions you can take, because many times, as an app developer, you don't want to prompt the user all the time. So you essentially reduce the number of functionality that you could potentially design to be a very useful application, because you want to reduce the burden. So if we reduce the burden on the behalf of the wallet, then the application developer can actually increase the activity on-chain. We can put more things in smart contracts.

But it then takes us to this AI agent world, where if we're actually automating or we're bypassing these pop-ups, then we can actually allow AI agents to do more for us, essentially automate our experience on-chain. And this is only possible, as I mentioned, because Smart Sessions allows you to set these very user-defined policies. These policies allow you to control the session without having to granularly give approval on every transaction. And it opens up a lot of use cases. For starters, imagine a chat bot, where a lot of people have interacted with Chat2BT, Claude, Perplexity.

All of these agents do not have access to your wallet. And if someone has built an on-chain AI agent, you essentially have to give a dedicated wallet for the AI agent to do something for you, which essentially fragments the experience. WalletConnect has been many, many years trying to bring all wallets together through standards and interoperability. And then we saw this trend of AI agents having their own wallets. And then, again, you now have 100 different wallet accounts, and you can't control all of them within one wallet.

So with Smart Sessions, instead of you giving a dedicated wallet to your AI agent, you define a Smart Session with certain policies. In this case, we're asking the agent to do a very simple task of, I just want to swap 100 USD worth of ETH for USDC. And the AI agent can figure out the correct path, route, strategy to do that. It could be more complex. It could decide of, I want to deposit ETH and get some assets, like stable coins or other assets as a loan.

I could actually interact with an intent network or cross-chain bridge. You can basically give enough permissions and spending policies for the AI agent to find the correct path to do so. And the AI agent would be able to also understand these policies to see what is available for the AI agent to act on your behalf. And it can take as many actions as you want as long as it follows the policies. But what about other use cases?

It also allows us to do some interesting recurring scenarios. Like, this doesn't even require an AI agent per se. This is quite a simple use case in crypto, dollar cost averaging or DCA, like many people call it. Imagine you just want to automate actually having every week for the next 52 weeks, buy 100 USD worth of ETH every week. And you basically have a very clear and well-designed policy of how much you can spend every week.

And then your wallet never has to sign any transactions. Now we actually have one of the most popular features in crypto exchanges that only works because they're centralized crypto exchanges. But we can do this in a self-custodial way that is powered by the WalletConnect network in any wallet that you would like, whether you want to use Trust, Metamask, Varian, SafePile, TokenFox, you pick your wallet. This is the big philosophy for WalletConnect, that we are here to provide choice, control and composability. And again, like a lot of people talk about gaming in Web3, why hasn't it happened?

Because either you end up having to give users a different wallet for each game or you have to have a pop-up for every interaction. And if you want to play something as simple as an arcade game like Pong, you wouldn't want to have a transaction for every time you hit the ball in the Pong game. It doesn't make for a great on-chain experience. With smart sessions, this would be incredibly easy because it would be a single smart contract call defined in a policy that could have a spending policy around how much money you put into a game and you wouldn't even notice that it's happening on-chain. And finally, a lot of the times we talk about scalability being a problem for not having the best DEX.

And sure, DEXs are perhaps not in parity with centralized exchanges, but if you have to take an on-chain action every time you're trading, you really can't build a great user experience from a self-consolidated wallet, and that's why many traders end up in a centralized exchange. Breaking these barriers in terms of user experience means that we can move more activity on-chain. But this is not just helping users. Even you as a developer, you can have a much better experience designing your application because it can be as simple as a single line of code that says, for this chain, I will use this public key that is my signer, and on this interval, I will have this asset with a spending policy of $9.99.

So now I actually created a very simple policy that has a subscription. Imagine Netflix, paying for Netflix with USDC. It would be this easy for a developer. Like, we can recreate many popular use cases, like I mentioned, and even very basic ones like subscription payments. This is what we're enabling with Smart Sessions.

It's a very simple standard, but it creates a whole world of design because now we completely broke our understanding of what a wallet is and what a wallet cannot do. Basically, when you think about the previous layered structure that I mentioned, like, instead of you having the wallet get in the way, you actually allow the AI, the agent, the automation take over. But it's not really taking over because you still have this triangle between the app, the blockchain, and the wallet. But what you end up doing is that the AI is now the interface between the app and the blockchain and is empowered by the Smart Session that the wallet has granted. This is something that is really cool, and we actually have worked with many partners, both on the app and in the wallet side, to improve.

And we're still doing many other improvements in terms of spending policies and more granular control to make it easier for users to feel empowered, but at the same time, allowing app developers to have as much flexibility as possible. And it's really, as I mentioned, about giving more choice, control, and composability. You as a user, the only reason you would want a wallet is because you can choose to do as you wish. It's not about you having a Facebook account or a Google account or an Amazon account. It's about you having your account.

It must feel yours. It must feel like you're in control, but it also must feel composable. So these Smart Sessions are not a feature of a single wallet. This is part of an ecosystem initiative across all wallets that are participating in the WalletConnect network. And again, like I said, WalletConnect is very focused on this user experience, and even though we've been working for seven years to build the biggest network possible with all the wallets, we're also trying to redefine what we think a wallet is and what that wallet experience should be.

And in my opinion, we today work too much. We do too much work to be on-chain. It takes a lot of steps. It takes a lot of initiative for us to do something on-chain. And if we want this to be such a big, pivotal, societal change, we need to let one chain work for you.

It means automation. It means allow AI agents to do things for us. It needs to feel frictionless. And I hope, and I really think so, that through our partnerships, we have achieved a lot of progress to these Smart Sessions, and we make for a better WalletConnect network for everyone. Thank you.

Any questions? Can't actually see because of the light. Just wait for the mic. We've got one question over here. Where are these agents, IE agents, running?

On my PC or on yours? That's a very good question. And if the clicker works, I'll explain to you that one of the interesting parts about the developer experience is that while we are allowing for the developer to gain permissions from the wallets, it is still responsible for the finder. And we have seen different use cases. So, for example, when you think about this simple line of code, it is embedding a Smart Session that is delegating permissions from the wallet.

And then this signer is the key component that can actually be designed in multiple ways. We've seen, for example, in mobile applications, actually using the secure enclave in your phone to actually store this key. We've seen in web browser applications where they use actually pass keys, where the pass key actually held control over the Smart Session. Or in more pragmatic use cases where, like you mentioned, the AI agent, it's actually stored on a server. Sometimes it's actually using something like lit protocol that is a distributed network or even something as simple as the preview vault server keys that allow to actually have ownership over this subscription or this policy.

And then that key is managed by the developer that actually has the AI agent. But the most important part is that the Smart Session is designed such that you don't need to care about the key management solution that happens on the session. What you care is about how much risk or how much permissions you have given to it. In this example, you know that at every month, you will be able to spend $999 USDC. So whether that key is compromised or not, you know that this has as much risk as you've given this AI agent for, whether that's a pass key or a server key or a secure enclave key.

Awesome. Anyone else? Fantastic. Thank you so much, everyone.