From Wallets to Worlds: Building the Next Billion User On-Ramp

EDCON 2025 · 18 Sept 2025 · 23:41

Francesco Andreoli examines how wallets can become broader user platforms through account abstraction, cross-chain user experience and modular infrastructure. Drawing on MetaMask and Linea, his EDCON 2025 session covers onboarding flows, developer examples and lessons from making Ethereum applications accessible to mainstream users.

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From EDCON 2025, hosted by EDCON.

Transcript

We will now begin the afternoon session. Now, please welcome our next pres the first presenter of the afternoon, Mr. Francesco Andreoli. Please come up to the stage. Okay, so welcome everyone. Welcome to the survival of the lunch. So, you guys have still some energy. It's great to see a bunch of folks here. So I think like my talk is all about kind of like wallets, permissionless innovation and uh a bunch of things. I have seven minutes. I don't have a lot of time. I have different kind of like slide. Um so let's kind of like jump in. Uh how many

developers do we have in the room? Kind of I can fine-tune a bit like the talk. Okay. A mix a mix. Um but the entire talk idea is about uh you know scaling uh not just wallet users getting actually like much uh stronger reach around builders developers and one things that a lot of people are uh not seeing right now and uh we came out with different kind of like announcements but you know we need to build also like an agantic ecosystem meaning aantic infrastructure and uh I've been working um uh in uh in developer relation for for quite a long time and I'm marking my fourth year at consensus. So consensus is the umbrella company. How many of you guys know

MetaMask? Um so there is this umbrella company MetaMask in Fura Lineia. We recently launched the the ZKVM uh TG. So a lot of like things are happening. I'm very passionate about privacy uh open source and open scaling. So giving instrument for developers and builders and founder to actually like build and extend the functionality of the wallet. So one of kind of like uh initiative that I've been uh helping and supporting was everything around metamas naps uh and we can talk a little bit uh about later. So the talk was about how we actually like you know um uh build features and understand which features matter the most for uh enhancing kind of

like the the user experience the crosschain experience for users right and I can talk bunch of like stuff around announcement offramping metamasard um the the AI kind of like um announcement that we are doing with uh with Microsoft and Google um but I want to focus on one main thing right uh I want to speak about you know a very specific uh sorry for for the picture one specific things about the devil how we scaling advocacy to a bigger uh community and bigger kind of like users and how we can actually like build uh communitywide instruments that are also facilitating life of aantic ecosystem.

So basically like how agent can consume information and how we can build infrastructure for future agents to scale things and then I'm asked myself okay there is a lot of things happening in developer relations we are speaking a lot of different kind of like languages and one of kind of my um focus was uh in order to speak the same language we need to actually have some rules and build the frameworks together. So basically kind of like things like oh we go to AATON we coming to headcon we're speaking with this XY Z amount of people um we're speaking about docs interaction um so one way to actually like give clarity is to speak with other people about the same language and it's not just a like you know physical language

English Japanese is actually speaking about um the same language having frameworks so I've been starting actually building framework for the past like year um and one of the main use case was Ion inspire I around oh three minutes left about snaps. So I will just uh uh go quite quickly here but um metamas naps are nothing else as kind of like a module uh framework that you can extend the functionality of what metamas does today there is a lot of kind of like different uh use case so from interrupt to transaction inside to privacy I don't know if you saw it like the solana snap and f further we announced solana on natively and there is a lot of like security and um and identity like snaps think about as a plug-in ecosystem for what metamas does

today. So, uh we can't scale with just technology. We need to build a framework and communities, right? So, Devil is key for doing that. So, there is a lot of like different things and I am asking I'm asked myself during this path is what actually true builders want and I came out with this kind of like pyramid. I don't know if you remember the Maslo hierarchy of needs came out with this kind of like pyramid of builders. So, things that you need to satisfy in order to actually like build awareness around uh funnels and developers. example, you need to be on the ground and activate developers and founders having access to resources need to be on point. Your docs need to be on points, but you also need to build this economy for uh for agents.

I will kind of like go through uh this is a quick paper I can I can share it a bit uh later. Uh so uh three lessons learned here educate first, be authentic and meet uh builders where they are. Um and uh I'm throwing bunch of kind of lessons to learn during those years. So uh when I share these slides also like people understand one of the second framework that I learned was uh we need to teach and not shield to developers and founders. So I came out with this kind of like valuedriven on boarding uh uh framework and basically like it teaching you to actually like start with valuedriven and not product specific activations. So a lot of ways that we interacted with snaps or the stable coin issuance for example was actually speak about why stable coin are so important

in the ecosystem and then what you can build on top of it. So this was the second framework that I want to share with you guys. Um but then the side of the metal is that all those frameworks are for for for humans right how we actually like extend functionality for agents. Uh we're starting to see kind of like agent consume docs. I don't know how many of you guys go through LLMs to actually like vibe coding things. Uh but there is a lot of things that are changing in in behind. We are also like you know mobilitating and facilitating things around uh around docs pre-built repos. So things are consumable. So what humans want and what agents want right agents want JSON RPC structural APIs predictable schema and a lot of like things around website are not actually

satisfying that. Um so um so what we kind of like starting to think is that okay what are the main war streams that for devil are really relevant right so we find out these kind of like six things that we can actually automatize around developer relation and developer advocacy and I came up with a third framework and this is kind of like the the last of the day in this kind of like seven minutes extremely fast talk this was kind of like a one hour plus but basically bunch of these war streams cannot really fully agent native automatize we it's a progress right So how I kind of define this automation uh of processes humanled, assistantled and agent native. Um so bunch of things I need to wrap up guys but um um I can share this slide a little bit later. Uh

and I just want to say uh all this future innovation need to satisfy both humans and agents. Uh we need to make sure that um we are not kind of like falling behind especially with our documentation and apps. Uh and I want to finish with this. You know we wallet kind of take our job. our human empowered agents. So basically we will be out of our job and this is a funny kind of like things I saw. They don't appear to want to take over. They just want to dance. So thank you so much ATCON for this quick lighting talk and big pleasure to be here. Thank you very much.

Next, we uh we would like to invite our next speaker, Mr. Daniel Exponent. Mr. Daniel, the floor is yours. [Music] All right, I have 20 minutes. I could have given a few to Franchesco, but we'll uh have to get through it. So, thanks everyone for joining after lunch. I hope it's recorded because some people are not here. So, today I'll uh show and present the both the rational motivation behind building the satellite expansion of the world computer. As some of you

know, Ethereum is the world computer. So, we're building an expansion of it in space as well as go a little bit into how we're building the space computer stack. So, very quick brief history of um compute stack as a whole. So originally when um compute started being developed as a mechanical or automated operation, it was still task specific and you had computers that were entire rooms dedicated to a single computer that doesn't even do general purpose computing. It does just task specific.

This is I think an image from the Bletchley labs and not long after Alan Turing came up with this concept of general purpose compute. So he basically took the rational of using in that in those years electromechanical components to execute compute. Um the motivation behind his invention was to crack the enigma code and and win the second world war. But I think that as a mathematician a part of his motivation was to introduce this concept of general purpose compute. So essentially something that can be used for any piece of code hypothetically. Then what further scaled this whole compute revolution was the invention of the

solid state transistors. So solid state transistors allowed the miniaturization the race to pack more and more transistors onto chips and and now we basically have like billions and billions of transistors in our pockets and uh Mo's law is kind of getting to its limits but yet we're inventing new generations of transistors. Afterwards came the high level programming languages which enabled people to not even have to be aware of how the actual compute happens at the machine level and they could just write scripts which is what we're doing today and ultimately the graphic user interfaces and oss which is essentially like you don't even need to know that

there is a code you just click stuff and interact with it in the uh the same way that you do things in life outside of compute and Then came the internet. Uh this is two anecdotal moments of of history from the internet. One is the IRC chats. Another one is uh the at the time the leaked video from Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee that became overnight the most viewed video in history at the time. And it kind of demonstrated the power of both the fact that compute systems became commercially available and ubiquitous as well as the interconnectivity suddenly unleashed commercial applications that we just

didn't foresee happening before. Definitely Alan Touring didn't envision that this would be the first application for the compute. I imagine and over time we became really good at digitizing trusted parties which is already going towards the the crypto side of things. So we essentially started having systems that provide us services whether it's banking services whether it's eventually e-commerce social networks and then rather than having to run um servers on our own or or operate website and offer services on our own in servers at home we basically could rely on those very convenient entities that provide us with the

specific applications But this also meant that we have a centralized trusted party. It was all looking good, right? Until it didn't. And basically that was kind of the call to action to start what today we call crypto. Um that's the famous quote that is in the Bitcoin Genesis block where the chancellor is on the brink of second bailout for banks. And essentially then we go into a new rabbit hole of comput stack which is the cryptoeconomic compute systems and cryptoeconomic comput system um essentially it's

trusted party except it's distributed it's no longer a centralized trusted party and then it's a on top of that it's a computer rather than having a um a server that is the computer we have a distributed network that function as one unified computer. So let's take a quick look at the um the timeline of innovation in the distributed computer stack and how the trusted party served there. The first one was Bitcoin. Obviously Bitcoin was supposed to be a task specific computer with a single application being money.

So peer-to-peer electronic cash system nowadays as uh we know nobody really uses it for payments. But it landed on the use case of store of value. So today Bitcoin essentially is a task specific computer for go digital gold. Afterwards um there was some uh a bit more avanguard and uh innovative approach. So similar to the concept of expanding from task specific Vitalik came with the idea of expanding the distributed computer into a general purpose computer with Ethereum. So essentially a touring complete distributed computer environment and we have all of the wonderful miracles that we're using today whether it's DeFi Dows

NFTs and all the shenanigans and interestingly since Ethereum actually there wasn't something really novel that was invented right like if it's the new networks that we're seeing out there typically all that they tout is that they're faster or they're cheaper or there's better casino applications on them but actually there's nothing really new right nothing fundamentally new so to that four of the areas that I believe are massively under addressed in crypto privacy which we'll talk about after this talk in a short panel inclusion so essentially accessibility to the frontier of um global innovation and and

the economy for areas that cannot otherwise participate resilience so whether it's resilience from a game theoretic point point of view or if it's resilience from attacks and and hardware vulnerabilities etc. and then security which kind of relates to it. Um those are areas that are massively under address and we always hear about edge cases where they are constantly being exploited. So the question is, is the world computer the final frontier or do we have more to explore?

And my argument is that the next frontier is the reaceleration of the space race. So if we're looking at only in the last two years or so, we launched more satellites into orbit than in the entire 50 years combined of previous century. So essentially there's more and more satellites being launched, more and more applications being uncovered and with the talk of Starship recently we had the experiment of um what was it called splashdown I think where they demonstrated recovering some of the boosters or what we're talking about expansion of the payloads of more than 400 times so like orders of magnitude and that means that the launch

cost is going to be converging to something like tens of dollars per kilogram. So that means it's no longer something like space as a domain is no longer only relevant for state level actors. It's something that a couple of people in a co-working space can start looking at building for space. Right? So a lot of new innovation is going to be unlocked in the space frontier and some of the things that we're already familiar with. So whether it's GPS that everyone uses today, whether it's for um location based services and applications on your mobile, remote connectivity. So Starlink Idium personally I live in a remote region and I rely on uh those services in order to connect to the internet and by virtue of having those services you suddenly have the remote

regions of the world connected in a competitive way to the economy. Um, Starlink in 2024 launched 7,000 or more than 7,000 satellites which in in uh history it's basically unimaginable numbers and these numbers are only growing. We're looking at probably quadrupling it over the next few years. Planet Labs uh is basically uh already a very widely used service for different whether it's governments or supply chain applications. So you see that more and more the space domain is becoming important for the economy. Now how can the world computer concept be expanded beyond the bound of earth? So

these are some of the two like some some of the examples we're working on in space computer working with developers to use cosmic radiation as a source for randomness. So randomness beacon based on um true cosmic radiation. And one example is a password generator. Another one is a raffle. So uh essentially a kind of a lottery and yeah I'll I'll go now into some details of how we're building the space computer and what is the space computer. So space computer in a nutshell is a high security guarantees based on physical isolation. So essentially you have a temper resistance computers aboard satellites that each of them serves as a space T stands for trusted execution environment and eventually

we'll build a node network based on them. So what is space computer in a nutshell? It's a robust layer one in space, a network of those space T nodes that is supporting SP smart smart contract and ultimately aims to serve as a marketplace for payments and for satellite services. Now taking a little bit of a deeper look on where we're at today, we have already uh access to one satellite. So we're starting to look at a single node and single node that functions as a TE. For those that are less familiar with TE, the rational is that you have a secure environment separate to the typical CPU.

And this secure environment can also remain secure even if the hypervisor is is hypothetically malicious. And what we have today is that you're interfacing to the satellite via a space compute gateway. So if we're looking at it, you have services that support users on earth with high security guarantees whether it's for the layer ones, the layer 2s and then ultimately looking at uh relying on more than one communication provider. So um it can be abstracted whether it's interfacing to Starlink or to Idium or to anything else and essentially you can look at it as some kind of RPC aggregator for space gateway.

Um yeah so so orbitport is currently the somewhat uh hosted service that we're operating with applications being the cosmic to random number generator and eventually expanding to more features and ultimately we want to turn it into something more trust minimized than being hosted and operated by us. So uh that means that we'll we'll look at multi-node essentially moving to a network constellation uh that consists of those um services each satellite services whether it's randomness whether it's um MPC so that satellites can be assigners in a threshold scheme and uh yeah each of them essentially functions

as a te uh to scale that we'll be looking at uh either the optim optimistic or the ZK roll-ups. So, obviously there's trade-offs with each of them, but a part of building that stack will rely on um on those existing uh existing components that we're familiar with from today how Ethereum L2s function. Uh essentially the L1 in orbit is somewhat of a capacity constraint network like Bitcoin. And then in order to augment the performance, we're looking at using the similar technologies that we have today for the Ethereum network.

and uh some some rational for how it works. So we basically have here an example of relying on the satellites from a company called Optos orbital for the randomness and then a user essentially interfaces to those satellites via the orbit port space comput gateway and then the actual randomness is being fed through the gateway and applications consumed here on earth. Um I guess I have not so much time quickly on uh orbit port as the the gateway for space compute. We're currently enabling the uh CTRNG. Ultimately we look at custodial wallets and then uh some of the interesting applications for people

who are network states. So imagine that you have a Dows that are doiciled outside of legacy nation states. Essentially, you don't have a country host for a jurisdiction or you have a programmable cryptography toolkit that you're able to um interact with that would be deploying contracts directly on satellite and then eventually once you have a full constellation you can start looking at bridging all compute services from different satellites. Um these are some of the applications. So whether it's space vaults, defi and dows that that are running on satellite dimension and programmable cryptography some of the road map. So with one satellite today we're soon completing

the specification for the protocol. So we'll be looking at how to actually operate a consensus and execution clients aboard the satellite then um build the earth component stack for uh interfacing to it from earth. um ultimately scale it with the L2s, ABS's and then eventually work towards the constellation that would enable the full uh space T network. And yeah, with that, if you want to connect and and you're interested, please uh reach out. I'll be here for the rest of the couple of days. Cheers.

Do we have time for questions or it's not the All right. >> So, any questions? Not much. Okay. We can just move to the panel then. >> Thank you very much.