DeFi By Design EP#34: How Argent Mobile Wallet will 10x User Growth

Transcript

[Music] d5 slate team [Music] what's up y'all real quick if you like the d5 state content on twitter and youtube and sub stack please please give us a like and a subscribe on this video on youtube and join our channel join the community we'd really appreciate it we're pumping this stuff out for you all as much as we can and we really enjoy the support and the community that we built thank you very much enjoy what's going on ladies and gentlemen welcome to episode 34 of the d5 by design podcast uh we are here today on tuesday may 4th a day before the uniswap v3 listing of course when you're listening

to this it'll probably be towards the middle of the month and v3 will be fully live there's so many catalysts coming up for the ethereum ecosystem in d5 um l2 we got garyvee is launching nfts tomorrow he's been hyping up so much he literally had a blog post that had how to buy ease how to get metamask just been blowing it up all over the place the market's going absolutely nuts and today we are here with itamar the co-founder of argent uh this is the first wallet i ever had in d5 my first entrance into d5 i can thank itamar for the airdrop of uni which i received

thankfully you know that was absolutely awesome just tossed like 10 bucks into the uni swap pool back in like june 2020 and here we come with like four grand one day um but anyways arjun is a mobile app all things defy and so we're going to get into what's going on with layer 2 how to use argent to get some yield what is the future of uh of these mobile wallets and kind of just all things ethereum and d5 of course here with robbie today as well um robbie what's going on happy tuesday the markets are green yo yup markets are green skies are blue um everything's looking good yes yes so super stoked to be talking to itamar um

i know they are making plenty of strides in the wallet space um it's you know your your traditional smart contract wallet but they're mobile based um and they're working on all kinds of cool stuff not just layer two which you know pretty much everyone in the industry is working on at this point but also some of the pressing issues in custody um multi-sig wallets which are gonna really come in handy when you need you know beneficiaries for your wallet and you wanna really be safe with your funds so i'm super excited to be talking itamar and um more about how the wallet space is progressing in defy what's going on ammar how you doing today hey great to be here thanks for having me and yes lot to talk about today yeah dude so how did you come up with

the idea for argent like like what was kind of the origin there like where where were you when you were like all right we got to create this uh origin story of argent um 2016 uh i have a startup uh peak brain training where the largest mobile brain training application 60 million users running a large subscription business at that time i start to hear about blockchain so quite late gerald and julian who are my two two co-founders at arjun tell me about the tech they don't talk about bitcoin or ethereum they tell me about blockchain uh it goes through one ear goes through the others i i i don't listen too much about it and we're too busy with the business then

uh december 2016 we sell the business uh to a large book publisher we get the nofak flag uh on the transfer so a big multi-million dollar transfer being frozen by u.s bank uh amounts of you know investors asking where is the money uh and so that was the first maybe a realization that you know our money is not really our money we need to ask permission to use it then the money finally arrives it was obviously a mistake uh from by bank to me to so many middlemen so many third parties in the flow that someone made a mistake and and throws the transfer money arrives um i had an employer kept telling me

about that new project in the crypto space uh we tried a theorem uh and he tells me you have to buy that thing i finally have some i never i didn't listen to him at the time of ico i didn't have the money uh i finally get some cash buy east i buy it on kraken that's the only place i could do kyc uh and that was early 2017 buy a hardware wallet literally have my my employee doing it with me i unpack it i write down the seed phrase i do this old mess i transfer from kraken to the other wallet and i'm like i i remember it was the tarzan at the time it took literally one block it was instant and it cost nothing

and i was like wow that's i just moved money uh there was no middleman it was amazing i called y'all and julian i tell them look you were right that thing is the future i've worked in payment i've worked at amazon before i've worked at visa and payment i understand payment and that money moving that way was just magic we we spent some time relearning i would say probably a full year learning about the space we knew we wanted to be very cons a consumer product uh we didn't come from finance we came from consumer having a mobile app with millions of users is what gerald and i knew julian came from security we thought about dabs and all that then we realize it's this face will not work if people need to put the seed phrase under their

mattress so this cannot be the future of finance uh or your future identity online if it relies on that we were on the we felt we were on the track where centralized exchange would win so we said we need to solve that we need to create a fully non-custodial simple and highly secure experience that anyone at some point could use and that's how that's how argent started nice and i think though one of the biggest parts of that non-custodial and ease of use experience with argent uh that i've seen is the social the social uh aspect where you can have the recovery of your wallet and kind of the safety secured through your peers um i think that's kind of like an

influential concept within the blockchain space and the and the open source just space is this this idea of like uh trustlessly helping people in this space in the community itself um you know in in comparison to just having a seed phrase under your bed or in a safe right yeah definitely that was the thing what kicked off arjun idea it was we really looked around new ways to you know to secure your assets uh and the fact that even though it's on custodial you need a safety net with your bank if you lose your card you know you can call them if someone access your contract to drains it

you know your bank is likely to call it and so it's how can we embed that safety net in the software uh and basically smart contracts were the solution we started with guardian a mix of inputs you know there were there was already at a time of bitcoin a paper from amin gun on vault and how you could use multisig bitcoin to create that kind of experience actually banker is the first team that talked about guardians i don't think many people knew that but i met one of the founders in london we started chatting and this whole concept came into into play and then we started with social recovery and when you think about it it's the same than calling your bank say hey i lost my card freeze it send me a new one

the difference is you will decide who to trust whether it's friends family whether you want to trust urgent or or you want to trust yourself with a wallet or three hardware wallets yeah yeah and i think most of our listeners are probably most familiar with metamask uh which you know is again a non-custodial wallet to hold um ethereum tokens erc20 tokens but they don't have that social recovery feature um also you guys are mobile optimized um what are some of the other features that you know you guys have over and above just a google chrome you know plug-in type of wallet like metamask so the urgent today on layer one uh is really aim at people with a lot of

assets uh everything is expensive it costs a lot of transact arjun is a smart contract so it costs to use it and so we really focus on people who want to secure a lot of assets uh and you know they're all i mean metamask is a tool i use regularly i see it as a developer tool i use it a lot if you want to store a lot of assets that's it phrase is a massive weakness and even with a hardware wallet people ask me about security of the hardware wallet it doesn't matter it's how secure is the drawer in which you put that seat first how secure or good is that ink will it disappear after five years and it's just we want a solution that works short term short term for uh users with a lot of funds but where we can imagine a long

term future with billionaire of users um and maybe a step back on how this i didn't really explain how guardian works but basically with arjun you have a wallet it's on your mobile phone uh you can transact the way you would with any wallet uh but then uh and but for untrusted actions anything that is trusted you do it immediately one top of your on your phone what is trusted is for example you can set few addresses at prostate you can say you can't pay that address you have a wallet address and maybe a family member their trusted address uh i save them and i set on chain really that i can send funds to them therefore to them you can send a limited amount of money it takes you a second

uh no effort but then if some you want to do an interested action uh sent to an address you have never interacted with you will need an extra approval you will need basically you use your guardians extra signature to validate you you are you and therefore the contracts will trust you uh to take that action and why is that important that means if i have your private key i cannot steal your funds if i have your private key the only thing i can do is send your own money to your own account on con base or send it maybe to your own other wallet i cannot drain your account which is very similar to what will happen with your bank yeah well it would take the seed right you would need the seed in addition to the private koi no even with the seed even with the seed

the arjun all the entire model of arjun is with your seed phrase you're still i'm i have your seed phrase i'm still protected if i steal your seed phrase i try to make a transaction the smart contract will say this is not a trusted action please approve it with your guardians and you don't control my guardians so it's really multisig when you need it it's not multi-sig in majority of the case it's super simple goes through and it's multisig when you take an untrusted action and this is valid for ducks arjun integrates natively in the object and put money in savings like compound ave you can stake your ears in lido you can trade with power swap and all those actions are trusted uh and therefore you go through

instantly you want to use to do some farming on adapt we have never used you use wallet connect and you will approve these actions with your guardians and this works the same with recovery you lose your phone or it's stolen you get a new phone you set it up you ask your guardians to trigger the recovery and you get back access to your wallet after 48 hours so it's really really everything is simple a few taps on your phone uh and but extremely secure because even if your private keys compromise you are protected now i guess this is kind of my last question on on actually how how arch works and how it's different from some of the other wallets that are out there one of the largest um issues that

that other people just more in the traditional space have brought up to me is that there's no um capability for a beneficiary and it seems like you guys are really tapping the door on solving that issue where if there's not you know it's a multi-sig so the person who owns the wallet still has to initiate the transaction but if there's the private keys that are passed and then there's a way for them to a way for beneficiaries to authenticate with the guardians then it seems like that issue is solved and now there's a reasonable chain of people that can really absorb these funds you know for instance if someone dies right like that that's going to happen like people are going to make a lot of crypto not want to sell it and just pass it on to people

how do we solve that issue so today right and that's one of the topic we address we discussed about very early on we never we didn't build yet an offering around that technically it's the guardians it's the same model uh so today is just something that the user would have to handle themselves so for example if you have two family members as guardians no problem if you tell them that's my will they can follow your will and then maybe your children your spouse they get a phone and they start a recovery and these guardians will approve them will approve that recovery and it will work uh you could imagine going a step further that's what i mean by a more bespoke offering is right now arjun can be a guardian

but uh so you can trust argent and say you have a key you are my guard you will be my guardian we don't have yet a process country per country that will look uh at the legality of the documents okay this is the new trustee and i will approve i will have a special process everything is in place from a technical perspective it's much more about off-chain processes to look at your main you would probably do kyc i would need to know your identity today arjun has no clue who you are so i cannot say okay this is the proof of this is the will this is the beneficiary we would have to create all those processes of chain whereas if it is something supported by the guardian model today people do it more at dark basis

they have some guardians they control adorable metamask and then some guardians that would be trusted uh trusted family member that they would only use for such a scenario right yeah that's that that kind of brings us to this idea and mental model of kind of how to uh use and manage your funds as a defy and crypto holder right so the way that i kind of see uh it it working out for a lot of people is you've got like you know your hardware wallet which is basically like your savings account you know it probably doesn't get touched much if it's connected to to your metamask or via wallet connect on any app right you can obviously use it but that's kind of like your like bank account like your savings like like your lifeblood and then you've got

your metamasks and your um your all your google chrome extensions for any different chain right those are kind of like your trading like your active active wallets that you're just using to basically make money and to invest into yield farm and stuff and then you've got like these like the uh your i guess like your day-to-day spending money and kind of like your all of your mobile d5 right and so the the way i kind of see it and the vision of what these what these three sectors allow is kind of like a segmented approach to security uh but also a very very convenient way to live and manage your crypto funds throughout

your life now right now with arjun obviously v this this concept of of paying your friends you know 20 bucks for the popcorn and the movie isn't quite there due to the l1 but as as the layer two comes along and and you know as we start to scale ethereum is this kind of like an accurate and accurate model that you kind of want to see for argent being kind of a a uh a crypto a crypto version of a cash app or venmo where it could just be used quickly on the go with friends and family um you know but you have your your hardware wallets for your savings accounts and your and your online wallets on the desktop for kind of like you're more um investing stuff you know is that kind

of where you see we argent headed we see the lines between this different type of icon blowing out so right now more and more users in arjun have like several millions of dollars we have people with more than 50 millions of dollars we have so five hundred millions of dollar in argent secured virgin and because people tend to not realize that if you are really good at ups uh upset and if really you master that well yes you can be really secure with other wallet but actually the room for mistake is massive uh you make one typo one little error in the address you send everything is lost you send you sign a transaction it happened to to a founder in london

from one of the default protocol they lost millions of dollars because they signed a transaction that was uh hacked basically of their metamask account that made them sign something else we talked we talked to hugh from nexus and he went through it a little bit and how you know it was the metamask that came up and it was it was just a someone that had previously had access to his metamask and it came through a company's email and yeah it was so really it's so opaque you have that little usb stick you're pushing in a button you don't know what to sign in in urgent the level of confidence is way higher it's actually much less stress to transact it's simple you transact because if you try to a trusted address it doesn't matter you just you do it in five seconds you don't have to worry

because if it's not a trusted address even if the ui someone i don't know hack your phone and show you a certain address on your phone but in fact you're sending to another you know what doesn't matter the smart contract will block that the smart contract will say you're sending to an untrusted address it's not going through so you really have the security of multisig when you need it and multisig is where more i mean the biggest institutional funds uh large companies all the you know the dub you use they store their funds on multi six the ethereum foundation starts their fun on multisig and now you have individual users with a lot of funds that can have the same security and so we don't differentiate any more cold and

hot storage that way for us it's more l1 l2 l1 if you have a lot of funds where it's worth transacting and maybe you will need the very latest uh d5 protocol l2 at starts you will have limited subset maybe a functionality is not all defy protocol but that becomes cash up and that's our vision we we don't like that what we are doing is limited is very exclusive today uh but it's a step we all know we know what the future will be we know that we are talking about the non-custodial decentralized financial system that is global permissionless that's what we are all excited about it's how do we get there on l1 we had to make concession on that on l2 we are becoming this fully

decentralized cache and that's where the fun begins i would say yeah so basically then in that instance when you when you get to this l2 right as this is growing and you've got users being able to send transactions quickly um you know effectively gas free uh what kind of happens when say i'm going um to do something with a friend who i don't yet have on argent and say you know i i want to have them be paid you know 20 bucks for right like a popcorn and a movie but they're not in my address book yet will will will my guardian then have to approve such a small

transaction um but or is there a capability in which we'd be able to uh set like okay if the transaction is under x dollar amount then there's no need for guardian approval you know in this much time span or you know how do you tackle the problem of new addresses for like small kind of day-to-day transactions so what to describe is exactly how arjun used to be two weeks ago and then actually it's been a few months it doesn't happen people do not transfer 10 20 anymore it's not worth it on l2 we are starting differently so on l2 you will not need garden approval for transaction it will be much you will be able to transact the way you want and guardians and the whole l1

model will be there mostly for recovery so still no seed phrase uh because we make the assumption that that star people do not have a million dollar on l2 uh and then as the case we are working on the casing they're adding uh smart contract capabilities we'll add more and more of this of these functionalities uh and so the goal really is for two to be super viral super easy you should be able to pay uh to share pizza with a friend and as you pay him you are you are basically inviting them at the same time uh to the app and making payment all the use cases we were excited and we saw them because arjun in the early days was paying for gas it was super cheap and we saw we remember the imr it was amazing

and it was amazing for us not because just uh we got users because everyone was using their wallet every day people would do this one dollar they if you removed we had removed every freak that every friction except uh the cost right now if you if when we had the cost uh down then really people were using constantly 90 of our users would they would use defy if they got tender in their wallet bomb and put it in compound it was fun people loved it they were spreading that and without too that's where we want to we want to get back basically yeah and one thing andy brought up about kind of the segmented approach to security there as we start to kind of um lay those those layers on top of each other the l1 solution

l2 do we lose that segmented approach um you know or if because the reason is if everything is in origin right and arjun allows us to split between these layers is this still segmented because we're between l1 l2 different rollups um and maybe even different l1s or is it you know really isolated by everything being in argent so on day one we are still relatively segmented you will have your a new type of account you have to account and then you will have your vault that you might not the current original one wallet you pay for it to deploy your smart contract that's really the premium highly secure offering uh not everyone will have it but it's very segmented at

start we see a world so we are starting with the casing natively in the wallet you you launch our journey you will be in as a kissing wallet but we believe there will be several layer two we will likely at we'll sell probably through wallet connect allow you to interact with the like of optimal market from all the starcraft implementations so the white dx imitable we that's that's the plan to have really all these options and they will be relatively segmented we see a future when then we can get all of that into us a more a single unified experience but that will take more time yeah and then you can even start to think about like the multi-chain world now you know kind of argent aside but of course it's it's still relevant to to this thesis is um this decentralized

smart contract infrastructure that we're creating is obviously big on ethereum right we you know we all hold a theorem here we all do define ethereum right arjun is built on top of of ethereum but ultimately the name of the game of decentralization kind of it forces a multi-chain world that is literally the like the the i guess it's like like the actual definition of decentralization to me is like multi-chain it's like you can't just have one chain and have call it decentralized because then the people don't have a chance to you know get to other chains i i guess it's like what i'm getting at so the point is this decentralized multi-chain world you know is that something that that you firmly uh like agree and align with or are you kind of like

okay let's let's keep everything in one smart contract ecosystem um and kind of decentralize it from there like i guess what i'm asking is where like how do you align on the decentralization spectrum when it comes to multi-chain world so on one hand so we're not married to ethereum and that's the only option and and closing all the other doors for us technically i mean implementing layer two order and one is is similar kind of work uh so we are building a lot of the abstraction layer within arjun from all the tech needed so we can launch more layer twos but that could apply to layer one uh however what we are not doing is just adding every chain opportunistically

uh because arjun's mission is really to give everyone everywhere in the world ownership of their digital assets and identity so we believe in a permissionless decentralized financial system uh and our bet is that our best is permissionless because permissionless anyone can launch a product that and that means it will there will be a hundred times more innovation in the traditional financial system uh but for that we need a global financial settlement layer we think right now ethereum is by far the best uh shot at it so what we are not doing is for example implementing every l1 just to have the native token we don't even have bitcoin uh because there is not much you can build on power

and therefore right now it's not a priority uh most of the new l1f smart contracts of course it's very interesting but the decentralization is is important we don't know what uh and it's just not people think it's philosophical user don't care yeah totally true user uh first yes when you have a thousand percent yield they might not care but security is something you you only work you only care when bad thing happen and decentralization should be replaced by the world security uh it's about how secure is the chain all censorship resistance is the chain and censorship can be government they just just be a private company so i don't know if if ease will be the winning l1

i can tell you that uh government across the world and banks across the world are unlikely to use for example binance chain as the l1 and i don't think binance believes that they agree that there was a need for short-term solution they provided that's great and so that's why we made our decision today on l2 around maintaining ethereum security and finality and that's why these rollups were important for us that's valid for starkwear for the casing optimism arbitrary there are other hermes one of them and so it's really having uh maintaining that security and that we have today another one with the ethereum level of decentralization and security yeah

and then when you when you can combine that that uh ability to have a super uh strong and secure and robust network with ease of use and convenience with layer 2 i mean you've got everything that you really theoretically need um you know and and and in my ideal world uh once l2 is on arjun and it becomes kind of this cache app of crypto you know i i'd like to see start to be able to use this uh app you know at stores at the grocery store at at different at different you know places where they either accept crypto or some sort of dollar way now i know there's like crypto uh credit cards and debit cards and obviously there's not a lot of places that accept crypto right now

um but do you see a world where you know i can go to the convenience store with my argent app and either use some sort of argent card or use some sort of like uh transformation on arduino where like it like converts to dollars or something and then spends you know at a at a store like is that is is that something that you've thought about as far as applying you know using the app not just in d5 but also in the world and you're giving users a way to be able to go to stores you know and kind of fulfill that vision yes so you couldn't be more spot on that's definite i'm smiling because that's something probably we've discussed in the last 48 hours again uh

and in some way i believe there is a bigger company so a l2 payment that starts with silver costs and gas can still do 100x from now uh over so it will cost a few cents and i think it's actually more competitive when you think about in-store payment compared to peer-to-peer peer-to-peer you need to be free to pay friends you really need to be free cash up then all that uh in store when you start comparing to interchange and fees for visa master card etc uh layer two payments also be very competitive i think things we didn't believe would happen a year ago i things are moving very fast and what happened in the last few months is really that crypto gain

a new level of legitimacy i think the world has accepted that crypto is here to stay and things are really changing now people see this and therefore for yes i think payment in store is really something that uh that can happen and i i target that's really what we care uh yes we did this world of pure speculation and let's be rich very quickly yes i know it's euphoric and we're all excited but that's not the end goal and we see our layer two launch is important for us not just because it's um you know broadening what we can do and the user base it's the end of a certain era at arjun we see it as spacex trying to fly the rocket and landing back and once

they did once they knew it was possible and for us we are still working on all this very foundational tech around security around the core wallet once we have l2 we can start to have fun we can start to think about launching all this feature user wants about paying friends in restaurant going in a store around all the coolest experience for defy protocol all that's actually easy to to build for us compared to what we are doing now but we are so focused on this foundational tech and this year is really the end of that phase of foundational tech and we can the the level the speed to which we'll be shipping feature to user will will really increase tenfold because we'll we'll be done with the hotter part basically yeah and you know you guys aren't going to

have to sacrifice security when you start making these scalability improvements um you know like you said you already tackled the uh the tough security issues that were probably coming up firsthand and um the the more mainstream user that's only sending 20 you know 30 dollars at a time they take that for granted and they don't really realize what's happening behind the scenes um which is super cool to see uh we got a question in our telegram chat um just to switch gears just a bit um and andres is curious when an integrated browser um is coming for arjun so you gotta have on the table we've always uh we've always kind of

pushed back on that uh a few things i mean first let's be good is question prioritization we've been working on such from the fundamentally important pieces uh of tech that we never got to really dive into that but also we're not convinced that the right experience uh we know wallet connect today is not perfect uh wallet connect v2 is literally around the corner uh is really in alpha there might be some beta testing happening now it's really there and it really changes the experience and we don't think i mean i agree short term it would be very convenient but in the future i don't think people should pick their browser based on the backend infrastructure the website uses you don't have an aws or google cloud uh

browser and a theorem is just that for you will be in adapt okay you need to log in with arjun it will open arjun you log in you are back in it the what wallet connect can achieve i think is really the right experience and it works in chrome it works safari it works in brave whatever browser you have and you shouldn't have to change that uh i i know we're not there but i think give it a few more months and and uh and the experience will be there just real real quick um you we might want to connect you with our friends over at pocket uh because they are removing that that data layer from uh like aws and and removing that central choke point to a lot of these

projects that claim to be decentralized but ultimately rely on cloud fair and aws um so yeah if if you're not familiar with this yeah i suggest checking them out yeah they just got a bunch of funding i mean people love the idea it's obviously a little bit uh early stage over there um it's not as easy as it sounds to just you know completely overhaul the aws ecosystem however it's a it's definitely a step in the right direction for uh kind of a permissionless and unstoppable ecosystem um you know i think you mentioned a bit there itamar the speculation that's been happening in the markets i mean that ultimately is crypto right safe moon went like a thousand x um in like a month due to some like tick-tockers and

just all sorts of stuff so we've got almost 8 000 tokens right now or more on coin gecko and coin market cap um you know at this point there's just projects popping up left and right with uh high valuations and token sales um but you guys chose not to create a token you guys chose to focus on utility convenience um and you know creating a product rather than you know creating a token-based community now you guys still have a growing community on discord a twitter audience you know all that stuff i'm kind of curious what your what your mindset is towards uh the creation of tokens for uh you know protocols that may or may not need it right like

you know what what's kind of gone through your head as you thought and i'm sure you've you've you've received the question like when argent token you know like like like what's kind of your thought process towards creating a token for argent and just like tokens in general for protocols that may or may not need it so we do get that request uh once in a while i would say one every minute uh once every minute and i think for us okay there are some principle we we want to create we we think arjun can be literally the operating system of ethereum and for us they there are tensions there in the sense

what we don't want we didn't want a token that had no utility a fake token uh and there are too many of those so a token that server use a proper use use case yes in many case a governance token is actually there there are areas that people pointed out oh you could have a governance second there there and there but for example you could upgrade the contracts with governance second but that would decrease the security right now arjun cannot upgrade your smart contract they cannot touch it you are the only one rob is the only one who can upgrade his own wallet that's the bad that's properly decentralized a governance circle on that would decrease the decentralization uh and often uh governance you yeah you

the comm actually i think our user would worry are there is a community that can control things versus no it's programmatic it's written in the smart contract so i think it's really about finding the right to scale the right economics and of course if you end up where your token is just equity you have a problem uh and with people yes so just oh let's launch governor stoken and now you have the right to write something in a forum in erp uh it's yes it's it's short-term gain we're not saying it's impossible but it's something we'll be thinking very deeply for a very long time uh it's not should arjun have a token or not it's can arjun be owned by no one can argent

be owned by no one and everyone by the community and how do you do that uh there is so much so we started with our smart contract being it's the central i mean it's there open open source anyone can fork them it's fully everything all the security is unchanged that part is it's not decentralized we still have mobile apps we select backend infrastructure how do you decentralize that especially on the backend it has no security role no custody role but uh all the convenience comes from a lot of the work there with layers with pricing service but you could imagine a world where anyone can build up an instance and and start to decentralize more of the building blocks

and so i think a token needs to come with that in mind with that roadmap so the short answer is we need to think much much more about that uh we prefer to do it late and well then then you know you can move back move away once you've done it it's too late so we'll we'll take our time uh we think about it but it's not our top priority right now yeah yeah well it certainly sounds like there's no rush and it makes sense because you mentioned how arjun right now is programmable and it's it's hard in the sense of security um and not malleable to uh to change so yeah it really seems like there's there's um

like there's an intention of what arjun is trying to do um and and how it's trying to get there and it's not necessarily um it's not necessarily community focused it's more individual focused um in the sense that the the individual has power over who they trust um and who their guardians are and ultimately where they send money and the the power of control over their own smart contract and with that said aymar is that going to be the case for us to be able to choose like which layer 2 solution we use like how is that going to look on the ui when you know we've got optimism arbitrary side chains um you know kind of the different roll-ups that are going to be available

um what's the selection process for the argent like like the inner team that you guys want to choose to to provide and then you know what's going to be the selection process on our side so when we launch on step one zk singh which is really native meaning the whole upper version right now you will have the same the same app for the casing origin within the same app and you will be able to switch the same way you would switch from a current account and a savings account or current account and trading account so this would be accounts which are very clean very simple we keep it that way at start rather than merge it to really avoid mistakes people need to be very clear on which layer they are which network uh we see that more as an acceptance

network you are doing an ach transfer or credit card transfer and when you transfer from con base you need to make sure you're on the right uh payment network basically uh with then once we add them we'll start by using this pattern so it will be very clear in which layer you are but with wallet connect um these other accounts will be mostly useful through wallet connect and with wallet connect v2 you don't have to worry about that so when you connect to adapt in v2 of wallet connect they basically can tell you which chain they need and you are automatically on that chain uh on that layer so it will be uh seamless for users yeah that's gonna be super important it's it's obviously there's a lot of room for error when it comes to uh doing the migration

back from um from you know l1 l2 and then kind of just like the education of understanding what is even happening is going to be crucial um you know for for all the guys on the marketing side which well we'll be happy to help get kind of some articles out there perhaps just about like you know oh okay what is layer two actually and like what can you can and can't you do and how do you get back and forth because i've already seen just posts on twitter about like getting stuck in bridges and and and sending eth to an avex wallet and then having this you know so it's just kind of like there's definitely a lot of room for confusion there but the education is going to be key for the user base and then just yeah making it simple as possible um is going to be here i mean i think

that's the future of of kind of bringing d5 to the masses if that's if that's what this you know great envision is of okay can we can we make it so our users are going on an app like cash app where it is literally so simple but in the back end we've got a bunch of geniuses who who've got these l2 and smart contracts and everything all this deep you know um strong and technical stuff happening at once um you know and i think there's a lot of room for improvement right now in the ui space for d5 yeah and i think it's really a step there are several steps there but for a lot of new users things will be easy they will be able to buy their crypto straight on layer two

so in arjun they will just put the credit card or connect their bank account and they won't go through layer one they will not have a layer one wallet we really think the next millions of users should go straight on layer two they will they will not interact with a thousand different protocols some will will but a lot with just one savings or staking maybe in twist to for interest and then back to the bank account at a later stage so for many users for the majority things will actually be very intuitive very simple yeah sorry rob you were saying oh no that was great i i i think the the fiat straight to l2 uh is gonna really just help push mainstream adoption um it aiden made me think uh excuse me andrew made me think of uh

just a narrative that is really gonna to me play out and it's all about scalability where uh um they'll finance so that uh essentially the rich are are receiving the same type of finance as the main the mainstream and um that takes a massive amount of scalability and removal of intermediaries that is is coming to fruition but certainly there's lots of work to do so yeah i i think as these layers start to become more and more composable we'll see more and more people move through those layers are you guys planning to like integrate with some exchanges to onboard directly from exchanges to argent layer 2 wallet like is that a

possibility yes so that's not something we have to deal with directly because we only deal with the casting is one of them but that's definitely uh the goal i think there are a lot of i i i do believe we might see uh exchanges connecting to the casing optimism and others uh if not early 2022 that would really be uh uh my my hope uh and i think these are discussions that are happening and i think there are high chances for that to to happen awesome well edamar this has been absolutely amazing i think we should hop into some quick rapid fire questions rob can come

up with some i've got a few on on my mind here and then we we can wrap it up um so yeah i guess i'll go first my first question is uh what is the coolest thing that you've done in crypto the last month or so uh um let me think that's a hard one i mean the last action i took was probably sticking my ears in lidl then putting my st is plus e is in curve and then locking that in the gauche uh i don't know if it's the coolest thing but uh that's really profitable big idea exactly all right i'll laugh and were you part of the any uh nft wave and

if so what is your coolest looking nft i i'm afraid uh i wasn't part of that uh i would and i honestly i missed it i would have loved it uh and i i have a few nfts but mostly sent to me by my team i have a lot of team member pictures on on my app but now nothing uh nothing worth a lot of money yeah is is argent ever going to have an nft kind of display tab or option so when i'm at the bars and i'm talking to hot girls i can i can show them my cool art gallery so i didn't mention that actually on a recent launch

but actually arjun is making a big push uh on nft so first we have a gallery i can see i have my my poap nft from hcc paris uh so at the end of you see all your assets and you see all your nfts it's all looking actually really great that's a part of the pleasure of having having it on your phone but arjun now is really the only place you should consider storing expensive nfts because they uh they are subject to the same security rules as assets meaning you can send your nft to your trusted addresses so your hardware wallet yes but anything else would require guardian so if the if the one the person with the people

69 million people is out there listening really arjun is where you should store it is by far the safest place for for your nfts nice um i think this is the last last one i got um if okay so so the rest of the crypto ecosystem if there is one thing that you think needs to be solved or you want to see solved uh that isn't that arjun is not working on well what do you think the crypto ecosystem needs so one thing i know we will need is probably uh crosstalk two uh no seamless crosstalk two bridges uh i know there are a few teams working on that so i'm quite

confident but that's a big uh milestone also for why arjun took a more segregated approach between altoos to start uh so bridges would definitely be very important um [Music] on-ramp improvement that's also friction pawn on-ramp and off-ramp but i think they're a really good team uh working on the space so again i'm confident that that will happen uh and i think we the building blocks are there we are now very close being able to offer an experience uh that would work for a majority uh of users and for many new users in the space to to really solve actual real-world problems

beyond speculation so we're looking at remittance uh we are looking at trends like the organization people with high inflation currency wants to hold all our uh like in latin america for example where we had we saw a lot of users uh coming in in the past so there are thing real world problem that now we should start addressing now that we are completing this more technical foundation phase yeah and crypto and d5 is really just is taking on a new wave of competitors cash app then it's starting to move into that market yeah it's awesome which is good it will help adoption it's totally fine my last one for you itamar is if you had to be in an elevator with any celebrity

any famous person any rich person anybody in the world and give them a half second pitch on argent why they should either invest in it or download it or use it or promote it and everything if they were to partner up who would it be and why would it be them who would it so i would tell them look we are reinventing money we are reinventing the global financial system so you might want to be part of that journey uh that would probably be we i tend to not pitch crypto i don't want to tell people buy assets and then be rich so i think it's more big part of that journey uh and i don't think they are more they're probably you know people

trying to colonize mars people trying to solve climate change cure cancer and i think crypto is not far out there reinventing money is a pretty ambitious one uh and then who would you want to tell this to who would it be i'm trying to look if i have uh uh who would i want to tell that to uh i know uh if someone i'm wondering someone from the central bank someone from the fed uh a president uh i think more than anything else i think crypto needs to really gain legitimacy and and play we need regulation that is clearer more open to crypto uh and so i don't know who would be the

right person to try to convince them yes somebody out there who is yeah exactly it could be biden but i don't know how open it would be to that so but you know what bernie sanders i would say that i would love to be in a lift with him just tell him just to beat the lift just tell me your s your sbs buddy and uh you helped him on the five-nil donation and then he'll listen to you uh good stuff itamar will hey that was absolute pleasure man awesome yeah it was really fun thanks for having me thank you and mark for sure