# How Crypto's Biggest Products Actually Get Built | Abi, Sophia Dew, Eli Engelman & Will McCormick

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2026-03-09
- Duration: 28:18
- Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-DdVSTrYqupg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdVSTrYqupg

## Description

Deep dive into AI, Infra and Much more

## Transcript

I'm blocking you these. I'll lean back. >> Check. Check. Perfect. >> Awesome. You guys want to check your mics as well? Real quick, check. >> Hello. Test. >> Test. >> Awesome. >> Good. >> Well, GM everyone. Um, it's been a funny Denver so far. So, we'll kind of get into the gist of it in a sec, but uh, good to see you all here. Um, we're going to have a panel here, um, deep diving into a few things. Everything from AI to infra to like how crypto's biggest products actually get built, as the title says. So, before we get into it, uh, we'll do a quick round of intros. And the icebreaker question for today is, what is the last crypto product you used? And it can't be the company you work at. I'll let you go first. >> Awesome. Well, I am Sophia. I am on the developer acceleration team at Ethereum Foundation. This is not fair because every crypto product I use has to touch Ethereum somehow. Uh but the last product I used was Agentic Wallets on Coinbase. I was typing in my Telegram to my agent to make a wallet and make it super secure and make no mistakes. And we'll see. It hasn't gotten hacked yet, so I think it's doing well. >> Love it. Hey everyone, uh Eli Angelman from the Uniswap Labs team. I'm on the growth team. Uh, the last crypto app I downloaded was FOMO. Uh, I think it's a very fast, snappy, fun, social, and interactive app. >> Hey guys, uh, Will McCormack from Robin Hood. I'm on the partnerships team. I've been playing around a lot with Courtyard, which is a collectibles trading. Uh, it's fun app, very efficient, really good use of blockchain, buying some Pokemon cards, bringing me back. So, I've been enjoying that. >> Love it. Okay, I'll I'll go I'll take a stab at that. I actually Jason from the EF just posted something on Forecaster and I got a notification. I was like, "Oh, I haven't used Forecaster in a bit." I just retweeted his uh his post on there, but like yeah, Forecaster is definitely interesting product. That was my last one. Um, cool. And before we get into the meat of it, I just want to get a quick wipe check from you guys. Eat Denver, I'm sure you've been to multiple Eat Den already. What do you What do you guys How are you guys feeling? What What you see the vibes at right now? Uh, quick pulse check. >> Yeah. Okay. I'll I'll start here. Um I think it's great. The venue is amazing and what I've really admired is I'm meeting a lot of new folks. I'd say a lot of ETH Denvers I've gone to in the past, I see the same few people and this time I've actually met a lot of new people. So that makes me really hopeful that there's new growth, new talent, new people entering this industry. >> Yeah, I echo that. And I think another call out is just, you know, where people are coming from. A big international presence this year, uh maybe compared to last. So, um, definitely been fun to see. >> Yeah, I like the new venue. Kind of feels like a mini birdie mat in here or something. A lot of interactive, great design. So, it feels very fun. It's a great place to hang out. So, I'm really enjoying it. >> 100%. Yeah. Uh, I also think it's it's been more like high quality cuz like I would say like there's less tourists compared to usual. I kind of like the tourists. It was nice to have like AI people from San Francisco or like you know just like finance bros from New York kind of come in to like check the vibes out. But yeah, for sure. Um, cool. Well, we'll get into a little bit of an intra conversation now. So, you're all building like very different products. You're building combinations of chains, protocols, um, wallets, consumer products. I'm curious, what's the one infra decision that you've made recently that is starting to define your strategy for this year going forward? >> I'm happy to start. Yeah. Recently, we've made the decision to externalize a lot of our execution stack. uh that has kind of come into the form of a developer portal that we actually launched a beta version this morning of. Uh so now builders, developers, really anyone can come onto this portal, generate uh their own API keys and be able to programmatically tap into unis swap's liquidity via very easy to use REST API um that supports both swapping across you know 16 plus chains as well as uh programmatic you know LP tooling. Um, and you know, that's really kind of our bet of the future is, you know, looking at changing distribution rails, you know, the rise of Gentic Trading, all these different teams looking to add swap functionality into their apps. Um, and being able to say, hey, this was kind of the infrastructure that we use for our wallet, our consumer apps, and be able to externalize that, make it public facing, really lower those barriers to entry and some of the friction points that, you know, developers were previously facing. So, really excited about that launch. Yeah, we had a Robinet chain uh test net last Tuesday. So that went great. So infrastructure is top of mind. Uh a lot of that core is just getting the core infrastructure providers like Alchemy for RPC nodes, chain link, uh layer zero who they had a great event last week as well. Uh so a lot of it's just been like core building the the building blocks which developers can build on. We're already seeing quite an early adoption even at the test net. So I think Johan was here uh yesterday said we've already seen like a million wallets and we're already seeing a lot of transactions. So really exciting. It's our first big onchain play. Uh we've obviously provided some, you know, swaps through Robin Hood wallet, but in terms of like a big infrastructure bet, this is a huge one for the company. So, um we have tokenized stocks in Europe already that's on arbitum, but it's going to be merging over to Robin Chain. So, that's just really exciting. I'm sure we'll get more into that later. >> Yeah, I think what's really exciting about being on the developer acceleration team is we had a prior assumption that the most of the developers or the builders that we're building for are human. And recently we've started to see that actually the new entrance who are excited about building on Ethereum and using our dev tools are not humans, they are agents. And so what we're really focus on focusing on and it's actually pivoted our entire strategy is how do we ensure that our developer tools are agent ready. And so when an agent goes in and says, "Hey, build me a DAP. Make no mistakes." It can actually pull information uh about the Ethereum blockchain, about different we have scaffold ETH on like a template for building apps. It can pull up the correct wallet providers. It can uh know the correct contract addresses. All of these specific skills that an LLM actually isn't trained on or isn't fine-tuned to have correct. It will hallucinate. I'm sure if you've ever tried building or vibe coding uh a DAP, it is not a great experience. So our initial uh thing that we're creating right now is ETH skills. This is an actual skills package that you can inject straight into any of your vibe coded projects or just give it straight to an agent. And it our goal is that you can oneshot build an app just from this ETH skills package and understanding or knowledge base. So that's what we're currently working on. >> Very cool. I'm curious Sophia. So, one of the hardest challenges there would be like trade-offs you'd have to make with like how do you set up guard rails or how do you like what providers you work with. Curious kind of like what was the learning or the takeaway as you went through like trying to build this AI native product internally at the EF. >> Yeah, I think one of the big takeaways is there's a lot of products that do similar things but with a different trade-off. And that's really where AI gets really confused when it's building. it goes well why should I use this oracle versus this oracle or do I go here or here so it there's a lot of trade-offs that you have to make I think at the EF standpoint it's not fair for us to be opinionated rather what we're trying to do is we're trying to contact all the different de developer tools and say hey are you I know you have docs are they LLM ready can people read them do you have a skills package that is easy for them to inject and then they can be biased about why they think people should use their tools and we're more just curator of hey here's all the things that exist and ensuring that all the tools in the ecosystem are AI LLM agent builder ready >> I like that and we're also still early like we think we are late but I look at the mass market and just general consumers and we're still early so I think >> we're so early >> attention to detail matters Eli you said something about the developer portal launch that sounds really exciting uh do you have something to add on top of what Sophia said in terms of like your AI strategy maybe going forward >> yeah and I think that that's you know evolving by the minute is you know agents are are developing and and technology is moving forward. I think that you know it's definitely a new meta that you know unis swap and you know other protocols are looking to you know capture flow on and I think that you know we need to be ready to adapt to changing distribution rails and so you know being able to say hey you know we're moving our existing execution stack you know away from our own consumer apps and uh existing integrations and really kind of opening it up to the masses um is really kind of our step or bet in that direction. >> Love it. How about you will like where does Robin Hood and maybe even you personally stand in terms of like how you can become AI ready this year? >> Um we're we're definitely doing more. I think our big AI product we've had this year is Cortex. It's basically um our news a news aggregator is very snappy updates for our customers. One of the things we always want in the app is just like quick information. People are looking to research with our Robin Hood. It's not just trading. They're looking at charts. They want to see what's going on that day. And now we've really made it really succinct. Uh we just launched that in crypto as well. So we're sourcing from crypto um news channels as well. Uh internally we're definitely starting to see a lot more on the engineering side just make things more efficient. On the business side I'll see a bunch of tools we all love just being able to make all our lives more efficient and as we grow our team especially with Bitstamp just bring all our tools together so that we're much more aligned in a kind of a AI CRM way. But u I know we have a lot of big bets in AI coming up but Cortex is the first one but that's gone really well. So it's definitely proving a really good use case of the company that we need to do more >> 100%. Yeah. Um to change directions a bit um I think something that all of us here have in common is that we're trying to solve and improve onboarding to crypto for the mass market right whether it's unis swap with trading Robin Hood with the retail market or the EF with actually stewarding a lot of these decisions. Um and we touched on developers a bit. I think today it's been the easiest it's ever been to build a cryptonative app. three years ago the number of you know scaffolding and RPCs and nodes and everything you'd have to balance is pretty insane and if you actually manage to build an app and scale that was that was a huge sizable feed right so I think we're getting to a good spot for developers but what about users how do we solve like what are some of the biggest challenges that you know infra and generally us as a space should solve this year to make onboarding a lot easier >> I can go first Um what we've done in Europe and took stocks has been a real good use case. Um the genesis of that was we've been trying to grow globally. We've obviously been you know we're big in the US been trying to go globally. It's very hard to scale. There's a lot of regulatory issues. With Mika came along you know we found that we could actually bring stocks to our crypto only app. Um and when you're trading in Europe it just feels like you're trading at equity. So we've really abstracted all that away. Um and you know once they withdraw uh they'll be able to self withdraw once our main launches and you know get all the additional utility on chain but we're really focused on just abstracting away as much as possible and that's been most success to adoption. The more we try to throw in you know you have to transfer tokens or any gas issues that just is a blocker. So um yeah that's a real big use case we're expanding that to other markets. Um it's not available in the US yet but hopefully one day and that'll be a big unlock for the entire crypto industry. Yeah, I think adding on to that, you know, the social login, account abstraction, um, you know, uh, simplifying the gas process, um, are all like very helpful steps. Um and I think like furthermore upon that like a thing that you know brands and and and teams should be focusing on is you know the trust and reputation and you know consistency uh day in and day out you know building up those brands which is something that I think Robin Hood has done you know exceptionally well in being able to onboard new users you know new users into uh the crypto ecosystem aren't coming in and auditing smart contracts and kind of looking under the hood you know they're really kind of taking that uh you know 30,000 foot approach and saying you know who's the brand that I trust who's the one that's kind of showing up um you know in the media and is kind of earning this respect and I think that you know that is like a very powerful tool that you know a lot of teams are um you know like you guys are are are fortunate to you know have built up that reputation to be able to you know lean on to help onboard those users um in the future. >> Okay. My hot take is that users and not just not just in crypto but in any industry will probably not be using apps. the idea of going to an app, opening it up, logging in, and all of that will be obsolete in a matter of months. You'll probably just be interacting with some chatbot or some agent and say, "Book my hotel and plan my trip for me, and it does it all." And you won't actually be on apps. And so, I do think that is a huge huge advantage for the Theorem ecosystem for all the tools that we're building because our big bottleneck has just been UX. It's no secret that UX on crypto apps is awful. And the good news is if you don't have humans using these apps, rather it's agents using these apps, um that will be a huge advantage. And I think the next killer app will be an agent itself already like Austin when he's um he leads builder growth at Ethereum Foundation when he's signing a multi-IG transaction. It's an agent that signs you know one of the transactions then texts him on Telegram and says, "Hey, here's the transaction. Here's what the transaction is doing in plain English, in plain words. Do you want to pass it? Yes or no? You know, do your Face ID, passcode, and it signs it for you. What a much nicer user experience than having to go into NOSA save, connect your wallet, figure out which one it is, what chain you're on, read the little embedded code of like, what is this transaction doing? What am I am I giving it pre-approvals to drain my wallet? You know, who knows? So, uh, it's really going to simplify the UX layer and I think that we're going to have a huge wave of adoption this year because of that, >> right? It's like that the UIUX is what, you know, can get the user in the door. The infrastructure is what kind of keeps them and and and keeps them going forward. And, you know, the teams that can thread the needle on both are, you know, the ones that are going to stay around. >> Totally 100%. And I think like the interesting part here is like I had this aha moment myself kind of what uh you mentioned Sophia where I asked an agent to just build you know a a training bot and I see through X42 and through other protocols that we're starting to build from the ground up. The process of you know SAS traditionally is almost broken in the agent model. I call it like personalized SAS where it's like it knows what kind of data it needs. it queries like the top APIs or the top you know like providers for that and then automatically does the execution for you where your goal is to drive the strategy and to actually think of what problem you're trying to solve right I think that's magical versus before it's like you need to understand what vendors are out there do a bunch of research get compliance and it's like I think the basically the buildout process is starting to become as fast as has ever been um maybe internally I'm sure you guys are doing this a lot at your teams like what what's what's the biggest unlock pain with agents and with AI internally. >> Oh, that's a good question about internally. Anyone else want to start off? >> Um, I think internally like we've used some systems like we have like glean which is just making entire life just finding out everything across the entire org. You know, we're I think we're almost 2,000 people now. We're onboarding new people. were acquiring, you know, new exchanges and onboarding a lot of these new people. Just being able to have access to the entire wealth and not having silos of information through there. That's very much like I'm sure that's the same for every intro every organization. I'm sure you're seeing it unis swap. Um, we can I think there's much more we can do, but I think it's something which it's taken a while for companies to get used to. But I think now it's like you have to use it and now it's accelerated in the last like 3 months. I'm seeing the entire or just use it for much more efficiencies especially on the business side. make our life much easier just like meeting notes, building presentations. Um it just g us much more time to do focus on the the high impact stuff which has been a delight. >> Yeah. And I think within our organization, our design team, our product team have been using AI tooling a lot to iterate a bit faster. Um I know that the Claude and Figma partnership there's announced earlier this week. I'm sure that you know a lot of teams are going to start looking to towards you know new tooling like that to continue to advance it. But um yeah, agree with the will. Like on the BD side, just internalizing um you know, notes, action items, things like that. >> I just joined uh Ethereum Foundation a week ago. So I'm still like I don't even have an email set up. I'm not even in the Slack channels. I'm just kidding. We don't use Slack. We use Mattermost. It's a decentralized to Slack. Uh and so I haven't figured that out yet. I do know that um some other teams like the public goods funding teams, grants committee teams, they use a lot of AI tooling to actually determine uh you know grant allocations or data and that whole aspect and so that I'm excited to learn more about. Yeah, >> 100%. No, I I think for us as well, I think the biggest unlock has been seeing I guess the lines between being a technical and nontechnical person is starting to get blurred. So like we have our you know support engineers building the best in-house tool that would have been a SAS CRM that we'd previously buy and purchase ourselves, right? So I think like the unlock has been people starting to be more on like a level playing field where your ability to execute faster is actually what makes you valuable. Um yeah and that's I think that's fascinating. Um one thing that I see and this is a question that I get asked a lot is like how do you work well with institutions? Um you guys announced your Black Rockck partnership was that recently right at the unis swap and obviously will you work with a lot of institutions at Robin Hood and Sophia I'm sure a big part of your role and also me within Xerion right like we we are in a way also educating institutions on how to better adopt crypto rails be it fintex or regulators. So like for infra more specifically and also just for an industry more broadly like what have been some of the learnings you all have had um to anyone here you know who wants to work with institutions or enterprise right like how do we as an industry change our reputation or maybe even evolve our reputation to be more institution friendly. >> Yeah and I don't know if it's like uh we need to change our reputation or kind of just change the framing and pitch. I think that you know institutions are trying to come on chain. Um and I think that something that's kind of worked well for our team you know over the last one one to three years has been you know kind of explaining onchain markets as a third execution venue. You know traditionally you had centralized exchanges you had OTC desks. Okay now you have this whole thing called onchain markets. What exactly is that? How do I execute? What are the steps to you know fund an account? What are the accept steps to actually go you know find a a marketplace to swap? you know, I don't have to have, you know, prefunded accounts through an OTC desk or pay these spreads and pay these, you know, high fees. You know, what does liquidity look like? You know, projects are tging coming on chain. You know, institutions don't want to wait until exchanges go through these formal listing processes and, you know, build up liquidity and, you know, they just want to be able to access and trade these assets. And so, you know, kind of positioning it is is this new execution venue or is this growing execution venue and saying, "Hey, you don't need to move 100% of your stack on chain." But if you're not building the infrastructure to get on chain today, you're going to be missing out when everything rolls through uh from a regulatory standpoint and everything really starts to continue to evolve and and pick up. >> Um I think the the genius act this year really was a signal. uh it was just stables but obviously stables are a huge part of just like moving money and also building infrastructure on top of it. Um we acquired Bitstamp I think closed uh around the same time GDAC pass their institutional alarm. Since then you know the the demand has really picked up. Um we've also done some real operational efficiencies. So we moved our crypto settlements from uh you know banking settlements to to just stables and that saved us a huge amount of money, a huge amount of time, less credit risk, 24/7 trading, just much more efficient. And I think what's that's like a real proof of efficiency versus just like speculating and research. We've all spoken to big institutions and they always have like a research team and they're kind of staying on top but uh you know on top of it. They're not really building products but they're doing partnerships. But now it's very much like okay this is the green light you have to do it and you're seeing what happen with like you know Stripe and Tempo moving crypto payments on real um onchain uh and especially now with lot like Robin Hood we're going global there's a lot of other companies who are going global as well and it's just like a much more efficient way to do it with payments and operational efficiencies. So that's the first step but then they're going to see what what's um really benefiting them and they'll explore more. We're seeing a lot in DeFi. Obviously, I think institutions really seeing what's happening with like uh the onchain onchain lending with the sofa rates of going down. So, um on the yeah, on the USD side um and I think that's a big trend we're seeing for the rest of this year. >> Yeah, I'll just quickly add the more institutional adoption, it adds other institutions and enterprises to also it creates that credibility and creates that flywheel. And what's great about the Ethereum ecosystem is it's definitely the most trusted by institutions and enterprise globally. And so it already like you know 65% of every single world uh real world asset onchain uh is settled on Ethereum. And so that will probably just continue to kick off the flywheel. No one's going to get fired for choosing Ethereum as their infrastructure from an institution standpoint. And that's a good place to be. >> 100%. I guess uh credibly neutral, trusted for sure. Um so what I'm hearing is I guess this can be a hot take, right? Like is the end game that a lot of these institutions and some of their end users use crypto without even under realizing that it's crypto under the hood. Is that is that kind of the vibe check that I'm getting from from y'all? >> I think that's going to take a while. Um but I think that that you know shares the direction that things are moving in with you know even just things like social login face ID login and you know account abstraction all these fintex adding it into you know existing workflows. I think that is like a a great future end state but um I don't know if it's going to happen in the next >> year or two. >> Yeah I would say I wouldn't say that's the endgame as in a singular point. I think what's great about Ethereum ecosystem is we have a plurality of perspectives where we think this technology can go and it's diverse and big enough to allow all of those perspectives to shine and take it into that direction. Um ultimately it's not just a finance 2.0 tool. It is a tool that enables trustless commitments that enables a lot of things like finance 2.0 um but also rewriting how we create software as a whole. So, um I don't think there's one singular point for an endgame, but go in whatever direction is you're the most excited about. Go in that direction and if everyone does that, it'll be good. >> Yeah, I think a Robin in particular um we're unwrapping people just even investing and then crypto as well. So, for us, it's really important to abstract it away so there's not that drop off. But what we're trying to do is you know they they enter crypto they see the benefits of it they go deeper then they go on chain they start playing around with Ethereum and then there's other products out there. So uh we are adding more things natively to Robin Hood like we launched staking last year a lot more plan. Um but you know once you want to go deeper you have to go to uh DeFi. We I think as we grow as a um as we grow our footprint more in DeFi I do think it will be very much an abstracting away. But that's I think that's unique to us just because we have a lot of customers who haven't tried it for the first time. But the onchain ecosystem is getting a lot better and especially with like trading apps like FOMO you mentioned they're just making and like Moonshot's been great at this just making it really clean and simple and the UX really straightforward. So the ones that are doing it well are really benefiting and we're all seeing that. >> Yeah, 100%. I think like quick take from me is like we've been working a lot more with like I guess like fintech or like even e-commerce companies where they come in with like a stable coin or a payments native use case and a lot of times they want to abstract away the entire you know crypto flow to their end users. So I definitely see that trend picking up and I think like as an industry it's up to us to actually like educate and onboard a lot of these products in the best way possible. Um cool well we have a few minutes left. What I like to do towards the end is actually have a little rapid fire section. So, you know, it'll be a quick set of questions I have you can answer. Some of them might be, you know, controversial, but uh I'll let you let you like determine how much you want to share. First question, what do you think is the biggest unsolved problem in crypto right now? >> New talent entering. >> Yeah. I don't I don't know if it's the biggest problem, but on the like execution side, I think that you know like um the economics problem. I think that there's you know uh teams that you know take positive slippage or have you know uh you know agreements on the side in terms of like routing preferences and things like that like best execution uh in my opinion should be best execution for the end user and not you know kind of like best terms to get that execution and you know I think that kind of being very transparent with users is you know of huge importance and it's you know really important that the industry gets this right over the next uh year or two especially as regulation starts to you know take shape and and form a little bit more. Um otherwise we're going to slide backwards. >> Um I think uh on ramping in DeFi um just is especially for like you know we've all been there. You just want like $1 of gas, you hit a KYB, you're like screw this, I'm done. I still think that's like a huge drop off point. Um see a lot more Apple Pay which is just makes life so much easier. There's still a lot more we can do there especially internationally. I think US we're pretty well covered but outside of that I think that's still a blocker. We need to all do better as an industry to make the UX better. >> Yeah. No, I like what you said. I think for us it's like abstracting away the UX of like chains and you know like what networks you're on and like gas. I think that's still pretty much a big pain point and it's only going to get more complicated. So like we need good standards for that. Um next question. What is the most underrated city in the world for crypto builders? >> San Francisco. I live there so I'm biased but it's genuinely where so much of technology is being shaped and I encourage everyone to come out there and share your story. share uh why this technology, why you work here out, those people need to hear it. >> I'll say Sa Paulo. Uh we were down there for a week last year and uh met with a bunch of really talented teams and really cool builders. Um and and definitely see Sa Paulo driving and and Brazil driving the, you know, LAM expansion for years to come. >> Uh as a S San Franciscan, I I'll double on that, but uh also my bias Dublin, Ireland's where I'm from. Uh I went back there for Christmas like a set up an office there. Huge amount of engineering talent especially on like the hardware side software we have silicon docs there. Uh it used to be a very small community but like ETH Dublin this year was popping. Uh so very excited to see what's going on there. >> Yeah. No for sure. I would say like somewhere like Europe gets a lot of I think. Um but definitely London and Lisbon I spent a lot of time between both places. I think they are still quite underrated cuz you know even with the regulation and with the challenges they face the tailwinds there. I think there's a lot of really cool teams and builders. All right. Um, next question. Claude or OpenAI. >> Uh, Claude. >> Uh, whoever ships more faster. Uh, but I'll say Claude right now. I've been using OpenAI, but I need to use Claude more and everyone's not me much more on it. >> Yeah, I guess I just use cursor and just use whatever model is best there. Um, cool. To close one sentence each, like what should builders in this room focus on in 2026? UX >> think understand that distribution rails are consistently changing and you know continuing to keep up with that >> that technology is changing so fast and they actually have agency right now to shape it and the Ethereum ecosystem is for sure one of the best ecosystems industries in the world for talented high agency people to thrive and make it mic drop >> thank you all this has been great give a round of applause So,