Wallet Infra Improvements, and Building Apps for the Next Generation by Medha Kothari | Devcon SEA

[Music] cool hey guys so as you can see I actually changed the title of my talk really last minute um but my name is MAA gari and I lead product for all of the wallet related things at Unis swap Labs so in this talk I want to cover uh some of the incredible infrastructure innovations that have happened over recent years and why I think they're going to bring in the next wave of users in crypto forgot my little thing so when we talk about onboarding the next billion users often The Narrative online is focused on blaming crypto ux for why we haven't had Mass adoption yet but what does better crypto ux really mean like if you look at a lot of our apps they're already beautiful they're clear they're comparable uh to web 2 and based on recent breakout successes for daps like poly Market or trading Bots or whatever you use I feel like it's safe to say that users are willing to overcome a lot of friction to do what they want um in my opinion what crypto often lacks is more opinionated products and what a lot of these infrastructure innovations that I'm about to highlight do is give developers optionality to build more opinionated products historically I think we've put a lot of burden of choice on users for every micro decision whether it's how they store their seed phases whether it's how they pay gas whether it's what chain they're on everything else so I find a more useful framing for the crypto ux problem is how do we make it easier for users to do more with their balance before I get into these Innovations I kind of wanted to set the framing and identify core problems to a really quick case study so for this I'm going to use my dad as an example he's a software engineer he's technologically savvy he trades a lot on apps like Robin Hood and E trade for stocks and he knows what Ethan Bitcoin are and holds some but doesn't really know much about it he doesn't really know about erc20 l2s the underlying technology anything else so he somehow finds out about a token this actually happened a few months ago let's call it blah token and he asked me for help um and so I help walk him through how to how to buy it so I walk him through the process he only has crypto in his Robin account a Robin Hood like centralized exchange account right now and so I had to guide him through downloading a non-custodial wallet explain what that non-custodial word meant and then what a seed phrase was and why it was so important and then I had to walk him through transferring his eth from the centralized exchange into this new wallet but oh turns out the asset was on base and he didn't have eth on base to pay the gas and so I had to explain what Bridges were what l2s were what gas was and then we had to bridge his eth over to base and then he was finally able to swap the asset using Unis swap but of course he had to reserve some of that eth for gas that took so many steps so much education so much time and one of the biggest issues I think all of us see in the space right now is on boarding and my dad specifically in this case was a very high intent technical user and it took him several minutes to create a wallet and was thrown so many new Concepts right up front currently I feel like we're taking High intent users who probably come in wanting to do something wanting to try out a wallet or buy an asset whatever and we end up surfacing so many friction points for them that they end up churning before even completing the action that they initially set out to do luckily though there are are so many infrastructure advancements that have been made um already that make this whole process easier there are quite a few but for the sake of time I want to focus on four so the first one is account abstraction specifically through EIP 772 so account abstraction and smart contract wallets have been in the Zeitgeist for a while now but one of the biggest issues with most of these implementations is that they're not compatible with EAS which are the most popular form of existing wallets 7702 basically allows EAS to get some not all of the benefits of account abstraction without forcing users to fully migrate into a smart contract wallet so while this isn't fully comprehensive account abstraction it does two things that I think are really exciting one is gas abstraction so in my dad's case he wouldn't have to worry about the concept of gas or gas tokens Etc and another thing it does well is batch transactions second is this growth of multi-chain Standards so it's very clear we're going through a multi-chain world block spaces are getting more and more specialized and I feel like we don't give enough credit for how much ethereum has evolved here like I remember just even a few years ago going from one chain to another was so so cumbersome but now with intense based standards like ERC 7683 which a couple other uh speakers before me talked about and with block space standards like the super chain that optimism came up with and just generally more options for different types of bridging we have way more of a unified experience for cross chain interactions that are happening on chain so now it's up to DBS to figure out how they want to represent these multi-chain interactions like how much they want to abstract and how much they don't but it is so so much easier um the third thing I want to mention is embedded wallets so as I mentioned before onboarding is a huge huge issue in the space right now and all the Innovation happening around embedded wallets allows users to create wallets in seconds and also users can use familiar Concepts like email or social off or even pass Keys which are becoming increasingly popular outside of crypto and sophisticated Traders are already taking in advantage of this Tech when they're using certain telegram Bots and things like that or daps that are using things like privy or capsule under the hood the last one that I want to talk about is AI so can't forget that as much as our industry is innovating so are others everyone I think is aware of the massive impact AI is having on consumer apps right now and I'm pumped about the Confluence of that and crypto and I think there's a ton of stuff here that I could talk about with AI obviously but the ones that I want to focus on are context and discovery so with AI we can rapidly give users more context and information on the actions that they're trying to do on chain as well as the assets that they're trying to buy a big issue another big issue I see in crypto right now is Discovery and I think fine-tuned AI can really help with this so clearly right now is the best time to build consumer apps in crypto because of all this infrastructure Innovation that's been happening so I want to end with a call to action to builders especially new Builders all of these like new consumer app devs um I hope hope you guys build more opinionated apps utilizing this tool chest of infrastructure to give users the most smooth experience possible thank you thank you MAA and we have time for a question let's see okay and there you go got it thanks for the talk it's very inspiring I would like to ask like maybe a meta question like if there's a top Street because we want consum you want to build what will be the top three you can recommend advice to build on that did you say top three daps I would recommend building did I get oh yeah yes it's more like a your want to get your thoughts on that for sure that's a great question um let me think about this um there are so many exciting things right now I would say one is just like a better information aggregator so something that's like more personalized based on your trading history and also like assets that you own in a fun way um I think that would be really exciting um another one is like a multi-chain Dap that's like super completely abstracted so I saw some demos for this um that some optimism devs did and I think stuff like that would be really cool where the end user doesn't have to like care about the chain that they're on um but they're able to interact with people who are using multiple chains um yeah thanks for the question lovely we have time for another question yes just speak oh in your opinion what's the biggest drawback to 7702 oh that's a great question um I think there's two one is smart contract risk so you're introducing just more smart contract risk since you're delegating to a contract um and then the second one is just lock in so if we don't um standardize the 7702 implementations that wallets do it could lead to a case where like let's say I have a seed for on like unisoft wallet and then um it implements 7702 and I get all these like cool features like gas abstraction but then I export that private key and put it into like let's say metamask or coinbase wallet or whatever um and then suddenly those guarantees are gone if they're not using the same 7702 standard um so that's something I do worry about thank you thank you for your questions that's all the time we have for them thanks again maida give it up for maida [Applause]