AllWalletDevs #34

Transcript

Hey guys. >> Hello. Hello. >> How's it going? >> Good. You? >> Yeah. Can't complain. >> Seems like things are uh getting busy and heating up lately. So >> Oh, yeah. >> I I just see a lot of movement and on a lot of fronts. >> Yeah. I have I have something I guess maybe to discuss. I didn't add anything to the agenda and uh I just saw your message sounds so I figured I wasn't planning to discuss it but I saw your message. Um so from the 1 trillion security initiative um quite a lot of work has been done on

um a lot of the feedback has been around UX and uh how to improve UX uh from a security point of view for uh for for users in the ecosystem. And um one idea that's been been had is to have some kind of some type of a standard similar to L2 beat. Um I know there is wallet beat for example, but I'm not entirely sure where like the um ratings come from. But I I was imagining that this call could perhaps

be a good idea at some point to uh to discuss like what what are what what the wallets feel should be in this kind of rating guideline like what should be in order to have uh different stages of a wallet from a security point of view basically. I don't know if that's something that's been discussed in the past in this call, but that would be interesting. >> Quite a while ago, I think it was Coinsspect that was they came on and proposed like a criteria for wallet ranking and they have a they have a GitHub with that information published in it. Um, they have some hidden criteria as well because I guess they didn't want to let people game the

ratings too much. But yeah, there's a document somewhere in the Discord that has all that information. Um, and then the Wallet Beat uh group is on Farcaster. I don't know if you're part of the the channel, but um I can probably give you an invite if you want. >> Yeah, I'm not part of it. So, yeah, I would appreciate that. >> Okay. Yeah. Uh shoot me your whatever equivalent of a username is for uh Farcaster and I will send it your way. >> Okay. Yeah, I'll send it to you.

>> Cool. Um, yeah, I'm actually really interested to see what what comes with the trillion dollar security kind of initiative. Um, it really does feel like wallet UI has a lot of room for improvement, especially for non-cryptonative people and um, yeah, kind of excited to see where that goes. Yeah, there's probably going to be an update in uh in two weeks. Um, basically showing a bit of what's been done and what's been being worked on. Um, and the UX part is is the one thing that's going going to have quite a bit of focus. Um, but yeah, there will be more info in

like two weeks. >> Oh, looking forward to it. Yeah, I don't really have too much to talk about today or anything really and I think it's just been like two or three months since the last call. So, um yeah, if anybody has anything they want to chat about, go for it. Otherwise, hang out for a bit and then uh we can call it. How are things on the MetaMask front? Uh yeah, I was just going to say that we are close to launching an experimental um new wallet API pattern. Um we call it our multi-chain API. We've been we've I

think we've brought it up a few times in the past. Haven't really heavily gotten into the details of it, I guess. Um but uh but now that we're we're close to actually having an experimental version available um probably makes more sense to to share more about that. I'll uh post a link here that's kind of more the like um has all the like technical references. You can also check out our our documentation. But basically the idea is that um the multi-chain API uh shifts away from the pattern of having a one chain at a time model to having calls from the DAP side that are explicitly

um directed to a particular um chain and and then can be routed accordingly. Um so sort of different model there's some um yeah different patterns but uh it also has some other side benefits around being able to um identify different capabilities of um like wallets like the the networks that they support in a more dynamic way versus I think today there's a lot of like kind of hard coding happening um and also ideally we move towards more of a design where um DAPs are designed to gracefully degrade

when the wallet has doesn't have a certain feature. Uh that way we can we can actually innovate a little more uh without worrying about kind of like just breaking things. Um, right now I think there's a bit of a chicken and egg situation where um, until there's like broad wallet adoption of something like no one wants to integrate it. So it it I think it slows things down a bit. Whereas I think if we had a more of a model where you the DA the DAPs can check for a capability or a feature or an endpoint uh if it's there then they can use it and take advantage of the feature. Um and then if a wallet, you know, if they

find that a certain wallet doesn't have that, then they just gracefully degrade. That's that's kind of a a pattern we're hoping to shift towards as as an industry as well. So um so that's just to wet your appetite on it. Um yeah definitely take a peek um share your feedback. Uh we will have it live. It's currently live on our on the MetaMask extension. So already something that people can play with there. Uh and then we should have it live on our mobile app soon. Um uh so so we'll there's a there's an opportunity give that new interface a try. Um

and yeah, let us let us know um what you think in terms of applications and uh yeah, more to come on that front, but we're our hope is that it it helps improve Ethereum UX and developer experience too because there's a lot of like kind of error handling you have to do with when with chain switching and all that. Um, so we're hoping that there's more of a shift towards um, DAPs that kind of control the the networks that they're that they're interacting with from the DAP side. The users, we've already made changes in the MetaMask wallet to pair with this API. So, we're kind of training users to just look at

particular transactions rather than assuming that they're in some like network context for everything uh in the wallet. Um, >> yeah, the modal design for wallets I think was kind of a bad UX decision from the start, >> right? It was a lot of uh kind of like, hey, you're you're everything you do is on this one network, right? And so uh that I think that's already started to break down. Uh and I think we don't we didn't want to constrain DAPs to be limited in their design because of the wallet's design choices. So what this API does is really sort of takes everything off. The developer can create

a DAP that like has interactions with multiple different networks. um has its own UI for kind of uh picking networks for different interactions and then also potentially also getting multiple like interacting with different accounts at the same time too. So the UI of MetaMask still is like one account at a time um context, but it doesn't mean the DAP has to do things that way. And uh they can even trigger transactions on different accounts and that'll all just come through in the wallet. Uh so the user just has to kind of be more aware when they when they get a confirmation. they need to actually look at um the networks

and and the accounts that that um are being requested for that confirmation. >> No, that's super cool. Uh is is this kind of like a a alternative or or um replacement for the cape that looks similar? >> It's an implementation of Cape 25 and it's all the whole family of things that branch off of Cape 25. Um so yeah it's it's uh chain agnostic. Um we're using it for that right now too to even go outside of the Ethereum domain. But um we think that it has benefits even uh you know when you just look at Ethereum kind of above and beyond the um EIP193

provider interface patterns. So yeah, we see some like um as an alternative to EIP193 provider and there's been some chatter about potentially reflecting that into some sort of Ethereum proposal, but not exactly sure how that how that like where that would go. It's like is it an EIP? Is it some sort of likeformational EIP? Uh because it's sort of defined in these like chain agnostic standards. Um and and we have if you look at um there's also MI there's MIP5 which is

like the general generic um pattern that's kind of like not specific to Ethereum. I'll share that here as well. Um but yeah, we think that there it's like really useful for uh in EVM space because of chain switching in particular. >> No, the value is definitely there. I don't think uh I don't think you need to convince anybody that it's a very useful thing to to do. Um no, that's awesome. I'm really glad to see that MetaMask is working on this. Um, and as for like how if you want to bring it into the EIP's world um it'd probably be best as just an ERC and then um

yeah, put it in there and then eventually it' make its way into the execution APIs, maybe. Um, that's actually something we we talked about briefly before and we might want to talk about again at some point is creating a uh like a common place to document wallet APIs. Um, because right now it's mostly like the MetaMask API documentation, the Alchemy API documentation. Um, it'd be nice to have one that's just common for everybody and then you could have like a a support table on it for the different wallets kind of like MDN. Um, we've talked about that in the past. Um, I don't know if that's something anybody would be interested in pursuing, but uh, probably should at some point.

>> Yeah, I think it would be great to get some more guidance on on uh, where some of this could go and how to reflect it. Yeah, it it also seems like sometimes if it's not in some kind of Ethereum document, then it it's like the awareness is is low as well. Yeah, I mean, if it's just about getting like a a subdomain on ethereum.org, I don't think that would be too much of a problem. Um, especially if it's just like documentation. So, great. Yeah, I can I can definitely look into that and see if we can spin up a repo or something.

Yeah, I've also um yeah, there's some folks in the chain agnostic forum who had some ideas there. So, I can consult with them again and see if they have a perspective on what the best approach is to reflect some of these chain agnostic things back to if if there's some benefit in the Ethereum domain, like how to reflect that back. Cool. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for uh >> uh checking it out.

Yeah, thanks for bringing it up. I'm always excited to see stuff like this happening. Um yeah, I guess um anybody else have anything they want to chat about or are we good for today? >> Cool. Well, sounds like we're good for today. Um thanks everybody for coming out. Uh short call, but you know, good content. Um we'll talk to you all in a month.

>> Cheers. Thanks.