# What's Holding Wallets Back From 1 Billion Users? | Nick DiSisto - Trust Wallet

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2026-03-09
- Duration: 11:25
- Topics: ETHDenver, Crypto, Web3, Blockchain, Event, Conference, ETHDenver 2025, ETHDenver 2024, Bitcoin, Ethereum
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-fwCRu2aRv3c
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwCRu2aRv3c

## Description

In this session I will speak about the main problems users encounter today such as gas & chain abstraction. Would also share how we are solving this with at RPC level via active sponsorships. Also covering the user journey from CEX to self custody.

## Transcript

All right, welcome back. Our next speaker just flew in from Dubai and boy are his arms tired. Please welcome to the stage Nick Dysto, BD lead at Trust Wallet who will be talking about what's holding wallets back from 1 billion users. Welcome Nick. Good afternoon everybody. So happy to be here in Denver. Uh I think you guys were worth the flight. So luckily we're going to talk today about what's holding wallets back from 1 billion users. Um so let's kind of just jump right into it. Um I want to take a minute to just think about what's the difference between really web 2 and web 3. Um for everybody here in this conference, you know, we're kind of native web 3. We don't think about some of these holdback features that are holding back maybe your mom, your brother, your sister, someone who's just kind of new to the idea but wants to understand what's important about web 3. So if we think about traditional web 2, maybe it's a bank, a PayPal, a Venmo, um let's think about some of the differences. So for the example of Emma holding, let's say US dollars, whatever it might be, uh in a traditional app, um whether it be your Chase, whatever it might be, uh you have auto kind of lockins for a lot of these features, most of these things are predetermined. So you don't have to think about going through all the steps that are necessary in crypto. So let's just talk about it for a second, right? I move money to my bank account. I'm automatically getting yield. I don't have to do a lockup period. There's nothing kind of special about it. However, in traditional web 3, right, I download a wallet. Now, my problem is, hey, I actually have to go in and I have to stake this thing or I have to lock it up. I have to have gas. I can't just put USDT on a wallet. I also have to have some other token and then I have to know what network it is because it might be on Ethereum, but maybe I'm trying to, you know, yield on arbitrum. So, all of these kind of friction points are just making it really difficult. um this is just staking right so let's kind of run through another example here so even in today's world of sending money right the whole kind of idea here is why can we move money uh very efficiently across borders and all these different type of things um and your traditional Venmo your PayPal you just kind of put it in someone's phone number you might just say hey what's your username point click press the button right there's no kind of oppose here you can't really mess up that badly because there's verifications on both sides and you got a central authority Um, you know, the idea here is when you got crypto, first you got to know what is the asset on. So maybe it's USDT on Ethereum. Now I want to send it to my friend, but he might be USDT on ARB. So that's already a difficult pinpoint, right? Um, so maybe I need to swap that. I need to pay gas on Ethereum. So that's already another like added complexity. Um, you got to hope that the person who's resending you their wallet address sends you the right wallet address that network. So that's another friction point. And then you also have to pay for the gas to send whatever asset you were selected and then get to your friend and you got to hope and pray that you put the right wallet address in because you get one chance. It's irreversible. It's irutable. You better hope that you press that right button and you have the right address. So this is just sending money which you should be easy, right? Like we have cash today. I can hand you cash. That's way easier than doing all of this stuff. And this is what we're trying to solve in crypto. But is it really a solution if it's harder than what we're doing today? Um, now I want to talk about a little bit more just some other things really quickly. So, slippage. Um, traditional trading, you might have an order book. Um, this is kind of just point andclick. I want to buy something at this price. Someone's willing to sell at this price. You match the two. We're done. Um, not really the case in crypto. Uh, traditionally, you use AMMs, which you have slippage, which is basically an allowance of how much you're willing to pay versus what you suggested you want to pay. Um, you make it too tight, the swap fails. you make it too mahi and then you're overpaying. So like this is a huge huge uh journey entry barrier for most people and you're kind of just already complicating such a easy thing which people come from web 2 to web 3. It's just such a tough barrier and I know people in this room are thinking Nick you know I wasn't born yesterday I know how this works but I'm not really talking about the people in this room. I'm talking about the next generation of people who are getting into crypto who don't kind of have this experience. So then again uh just highlighting again if you're sending there's different types of chains some chain support assets like stable coins some of them don't and you have to know all of these things which unless you're kind of in the deep weeds or you're on Reddit or kind of the forms or you're just in the know how would you possibly know that you need to be sending on this chain to this asset and it's compatible for this wallet but not that one it's just too complicated. So what another kind of industry solutions they are kind of working on this right we are an industry we're all here trying to solve this problem um there are a few good ones um I'm not going to name names but for example there are some gasless swaps um the problem is is if I'm a user and my transaction is failing I can't swap it failing I don't know that gas is the problem now if I knew that that was the problem I could go to these D apps I could sign the transaction and then I can actually send because they have these gasless interfaces. But again, you have to know that you don't have gas and you have to know that this solution exists. So that's again educating the user on something that they shouldn't have to be educated on. Um with self-custody, you have to always worry about holding the keys like the whole idea moving off the central exchange is the power. Your key is your crypto. Again, this kind of makes it more difficult for the end user um as this is an increased risk for most people. So there are some solutions. They cost money, some are free. There's a bunch of them. I'm not going to get into that today, but I just kind of want to highlight there are still a lot of friction points in web 3. It is not as traditional as we want it to be even here in 2026. You know, this is years and years down the line and we still haven't solved these basic fundamental UI problems. So, um why can't we just have an industry solution like Apple? You know, airdrop is so seamless. I just click airdrop. Someone says boom, click accept. Why can't we just make it that seamless? So with that the idea in mind, I work with the team um to kind of develop a solution to minimize some of these friction points and just handle it behind the scenes. So for the last few months, I've been working with a company called Blink to kind of work with this out. So I want to kind of just give you an idea of a repose experiment. So in this example, I have USDT and I want to swap to TWWT. Now let's pretend someone sent me this USDT. I'm a brand new firsttime user. I don't have any BNB. Maybe I purchased um online, moved it to deposit, whatever the case may be. Now, traditionally, if I were to try and make the swap, it would fail because there is no network fee, the gas fee. Um it varies by network, but you get the idea. So, let's kind of talk about the conditions of our experiment. So, what if instead we remove this barrier and if Trust Wallet would just pay for it, so we can kind of just eliminate that barrier. So, let's talk about some conditions. Um we only want to sponsor swaps that would fail otherwise. So people who already have native token, they don't get the sponsorship. They already know what they're doing. Let's just focus on people who need it first. Um we're going to limit this for BSC, Soul, and Ethereum for same chain only. Not because it's a technical limitation, but honestly, it was quite an oversight. So I will kind of correct that very soon. Um the last point I want to bring up here is that we only want to do two per wallet per day. And this is simply to prevent DOS and different type of attacks that kind of appear on the network. We don't want any bad actors taking advantage of such a thing. So the last kind of one point is we are a business. So we're only going to sponsor swaps that are kind of profitable. So if you're trying to swap 50 cents, it doesn't make for us sense to pay a dollar to make it work, right? So we're going to sponsor only trans uh transactions that are above the gas fee versus the actual fee that's collected. So you guys are thinking, Nick, um everybody in this room knows how to do this. This can't be that big of an impact. How much money can we actually see that would have failed? So, here's some numbers. Um, and this is just in the last 300ish days, give or take. Most of these were actually in the last 60 to 90 days. So, we've been rolling them out step by step. So, on BNB chain, we saw over $120 million. Um, that would have failed due to literally pennies in BNB. I believe the current gas price is less than one penny on BNB, but all of these things would have failed. So that $120 million in volume would have failed just due to a few cents. Same same thing with Salana. Um we saw about 10 million. We'd rolled this out just a few weeks ago. So it isn't quite the same number as BNB. And then for Ethereum, we also just recently rolled this one out. There's a little bit more nuances there, but just kind of walking through the idea. So obviously there is a huge demand. Like this isn't small numbers. I mean we're seeing significant retail failure here. Um, the real question is is why isn't everybody else doing this? Um, I I honestly I don't know. I would love to see other competitors do this because I want the industry as a whole to adopt these type of things. Um, the real question is is why are we limiting to just swaps? Like why don't we just do it for everything? So, I wanted to take a minute to just kind of make this an open conversation, an open idea for everybody to think about. Um, today this is one of the features I want to speak to you about. Um, however, as a wallet, we are kind of thinking about this from a broader perspective. Maybe you're trying to stake, you're trying to earn yield on stables, maybe you just want to send crypto, and you want to have all of these things readily available. Uh, the key point here is there is no permanent perfect solution. The one I pitched to you today is just simply something I've been working on kind of in the background. Uh, just to kind of see what the actual user case here is. Um, again, these are just some of the top chains. I would like to roll this out across the board for multiple chains, but the main idea I want to talk to you today is there are still many friction points in industry. Um, I know we're all here today to talk about different type of things, but at the very basic level, we failed to get solve many of these problems and these numbers kind of highlight that like it wouldn't be 120 million if it was just five people, guys. There's hundreds of thousands of people having this problem every single day and we're just not capturing it because we know these steps exist. we kind of skip over this. Um, it's it's very important to think about the entire user journey. Um, think taking like someone like your grandmother or someone who's brand new and kind of watching them play a video game or something for the first time, it's up to us as the builders and the people in industry to build solutions around this type of player because even if you have the best technology in the world and you as people can't figure it out, they won't use it. I know some people today I saw trying to get into the conference and they couldn't even get the QR code to appear and like I love the idea of making it on web 3 and all of these different type of things but if you complicate the actual solution to the point where people aren't using it are you really creating a better solution so open invitation to kind of just bring about the idea it's hey there's actually a lot of things we could be solving at a fundamental level and I'm hoping to invite everybody else out there to think about how we can solve these and as an industry I hope forward we can push this to the point where we can all solve this as builders and get the next 1 billion users on web 3. And uh I want to thank you all for coming out today and if there's any questions, please uh see me afterwards. But thank you very much.