ERC-7811: Stablecoin/Chain Abstraction in Production

Transcript

Hey folks, thanks for joining. It's a lot more people than I expected. Um, who's here to hear about payments, chain abstraction, something else? Who's here by accident? Oh, wow. Um, yeah, thanks so much for joining all. Um, awesome, beautiful day in Khan. Great time to spend it in this dark room here, I guess. And my name is Derek. I'm the CTO at Rion, formerly known as Wallet Connect. And today I'm going to talk about less clicks is more and basically improving some standards that that are improving the user experience in Ethereum and honestly also in other networks. And um I'm going to get to my credentials to

speak to the subject in a second, but first um do we But first a word about Rion. So Rion is a company that builds Wallet Connect. I'm sure most of you are familiar with Wallet Connect. And we have two SDKs. We build tools for developers mainly. We have an SDK that's called AppKit. It's live in thousands of applications in Ethereum and also non Ethereum. So you've probably seen this. It's a market leader in the in the space. And yeah, you can connect wallets and it also comes with an onboarding wallet um in case developers want to support that use case for for mainly for normies. And then we have an SDK called Wallet Kit that's um in over 700 wallets. Um you've probably used a wallet that supports it.

And um beyond just connecting a wallet, it also supports some advanced features like chain abstraction and which I'm going to cover in my talk today. Um to kick it off, I'm really thrilled yesterday wallet connect announced round two of the of its certified program. And this is really yeah crucial for the substance of what I'm talking today about today because basically it's a mechanism of how wallets agree on basically which standards you need to support in order to get this badge and it's proven to be a really successful tool in getting adoption of some of the modern UX standards um across the top wallet. So now, as an example, one less

click standard um is the one-click authentication standard. I'll show a video video of it in a second. And now most Ethereum users through um this program that use mobile wallets and where this is the biggest where the clicks are the biggest problem now have a wallet or use a wallet that supports these um these modern standards. So you can see a list of the logos on the bottom. So really all the top wallets in Ethereum are part of this program. and um yeah support these standards. Um doing standards is really hard and improving the UX is really hard. It's the technical solution usually is a complete no-brainer and um but then actually getting these standards adopted

is extremely hard and much harder than I would have expected when I joined the space a couple of years ago. An example is the EIP5792 standard which is Ethereum's batch transaction standard. Um I'm a very proud co-author of the standard but basically in Ethereum um you've probably seen this for a swap for instance this um user flow where you have to approve a token in ERC20 and then you have to do this in your wallet and then to actually swap the token you have to do another interaction in the wallet. So um that's pretty painful and often doesn't work. It's extremely painful if you use a multisig wallet um and where you may have multiple signers and now they need to

sign two things. And here this pie chart basically shows this adoption of that of that standard. We've reinvigorated the standard two years ago and two years later um this is how much adoption the new standard has. So, it's really early innings and I expect that it's going to take another two years until this new standard, the new delightful standard is going to take over the old one. The new standard also supports things like gas abstraction. So, the DAP can actually sponsor the gas and but yeah, I expect it's going to take another two years. We did some other standards like this, the EIP6963 standard for instance that gave users the ability to have multiple browser extension extension wallets installed. This really ushered in

competition between browser extensions. We did this a couple years ago and yeah, it also took over two years for to really be adopted by by apps. Um, one thing to motivate what we're discussing today is this one-click authentication standard. So, same story in Ethereum. Roughly 20% of applications we observed were using signin with Ethereum. So, you actually had to sign a message in order to log in to the app. So the flow was connect wallet and then sign a message. So two context switches to the wallet to actually get started.

And um yeah, I'll show a video of how this is now being done in just one step. There's an app called eight lens and I'm using Trust Wallet here in this video. So um yeah, you can see this was just one step. You know, it's a small deal, but it's actually a really big deal. And it's a big deal because this standard was the first time that we did it as a cape. A cape is a chain agnostic um improvement proposal. So basically not an Ethereum improvement proposal, but it covers all networks. Um so this was the first time we did something like this.

And um also the first time that we made it backwards compatible. So if you use an a wallet that doesn't support the standard, then it falls back to these two wallet interactions. And also the first time that this standard was part of this wallet connect certified program. So the first time that we use this mechanism to really yeah get the adoption a lot faster. And yeah now over 20 wallets the top 20 Ethereum mobile wallets and support this standard which means most users have a wallet that supports this. And we have 150 apps that already use this use the standard. Many of them probably don't know about it because they use an app SDK like the app kit SDK that we provides that handles

this for apps. And so now this is um what I actually want to talk about. This is um push payments. So the talk of the town is stable coins. Um for me a really big deal because I I worked at Venmo before. So it was also a wallet but a custodial web two wallet and we did a lot in commerce. So we integrated into Amazon for e-commerce and CVS in the United States for point of sale and and a bunch of other merchants and um basically the current today's crypto push payment experience. A push payment is a payment where the the end user just transfers some value as opposed to a pull payment which could be a

subscription or an authorization. Those are things that we're going to need that crypto is going to need for web two feature parody. Um but for now just push payments and the current push payment experience for instance on Stripe which uses wallet connect for um in their in their payments flow is you have these four steps or in Stripe's case actually five steps in order to carry out this push payment. So it's obviously um pretty painful and we track roughly 10 to 20 payment service providers that have a wallet connect integration or use our appkit pay SDK. So um this is also growing quite a lot and the volume is growing quite a lot but the user experience is quite exper quite painful.

One more intimate anecdote. Before this, before VMO, I worked at Amazon and Bozo famously always said that 50 milliseconds represent roughly a million dollars um lost and this is 10 years ago. Um so my personal bias is very much to improving the latency of experiences like this. And for payments, there's some prior art. There's ERC681. It's three digits, which means it's pretty old. that was basically um a single chain and a single token and there's Solana Pay which is also a single chain and a single token and now there's Cape 358 which is pretty nent if you want to contribute to some standards then this is actually a good one to

maybe leave some comments and and contribute to to get your feet wet and um EIP can also reference capes um doesn't really mean a lot but in the theorem world and standards world it means a lot that you can put up a EIP and just reference something else. And this standard, it's very simple and on a technical lay layer, but once adopted could be a really big deal because unlike Solana Pay and ERC 681, here you can the DAB can just send many tokens on many different networks and that enables really the wallets and the end user and the wallet to just decide, okay, I'm going to pay on this network and this token. It also enables chain abstraction

like when the when stripe says hey send me I don't know 10 USC on on base and you don't have you only have USDC on on polygon or something then if the wallet supports chain abstraction you can just fulfill that. So most likely currently we're working with wallets and the world connect council um on whether this is going to be a requirement for the next round of certified um which it's going to look like. So, this means that most likely um early next year, most Ethereum users will have will have a wallet that supports this one-click push payment checkout experience, which I think is a really it's going to be a really big deal for real world adoption.

Um currently, for instance, in New York, you can with shift 4 now, you can pay in I think it's called the Tao nightclub or some of the nightclubs you can pay with crypto. The use case for them by the way is um because they get some people from abroad who have so much money that their credit cards can't pay these nightclub bills. So um now they can use um so that's a real world crypto use case where they they have credit cards it's just they can't they can't fulfill a $20,000 I don't know um champagne bottle in the nightclub. So um yeah solving problems not sure if solves your problems doesn't solve mine but you know it's very important to way to get there um and it's yeah obviously both relevant

for e-commerce which the left image here wants to depict but also point of sale. So in the town nightclub for instance, it's not four steps, it's five because the first step is you see a QR code on the point of sale. There's no NFC and then the QR code opens in your in your phone browser. And yeah, Rion have an SDK as part of our appkit SDK that makes this smooth for payment service providers. So they don't need to handle the fallback and whatnot. And you can also pay with custodial funds. So that's Cape um 358. Again, if you want to get your feet wet with some standards, uh, put it in chat GBT and, um, and see what you can improve.

Um, and the next thing I'm going to talk about is chain and stable coin abstraction. So, this screenshot here motivates the problem a little bit. Um, myself, yeah, I use multiple stable coins. I'm maybe not the average Joe, but um I looked into it and 15% of USDC users have USDC on multiple accounts and the the numbers also trending up. So, this is actually a real end user problem. Obviously, there's a plethora of stable coins coming out now. The Robin Hood announcement um from yesterday with the I think it's the global dollar alliance shows that end users will have not just USDC or USDT.

So it's a real problem and um I want to show a solution that we have and then outline the problem a little bit and how standards also um come into play here. So here you can see a sample app using the RION appkit SDK which has an embedded wallet which supports chain abstraction. So and you can see um that the app can actually show the end user that they don't have enough funds to fulfill the transaction. the end user only has 45 cents on this network, but now you can see that it's just basically pulling the funds from base and um yeah, that was it. So basically a chain abstracted experience plus the app was

aware that the wallet had the capability of chain abstraction and the which is you know again it's actually pretty simple on the technical side but it's really hard to get this adopted and what you need is um a wallet that supports chain abstraction. In this case, this wallet that you saw uses the Rion wallet kit SDK. Again, that's in over 600 wallets, but they don't all have this enabled. And then in this case, our technical approach is very naive. It just figures out, okay, you don't have enough of the target um token on target chain. Um you don't have enough of that, but figures out that it can bridge and swap to get there and then yeah,

basically just bridges and swaps and then fulfills the original intent. So this is pretty naive, but the solution also has the benefit there's no vendor lock in and you don't need smart accounts. It doesn't have to be C 7702 which is all amazing stuff. Better better end user experience, better latency. But um yeah, this is at the other end of the spectrum where it just works everywhere. And then what you saw in the in the app, basically the capability of the app to understand that the user has funds on other networks was done using the ERC7811 standard. It's called wallet get assets.

And basically when the wallet connected, it disclosed, hey, I support um this this method. And then the app was able to check, hey, um, how much of UCCC on this token on this network do you have? And then the wallet responded with a aggregated balance basically with everything that they that the wallet can yeah bridge and swap over. So again, the technical this is very simple. The the diagram is very simple. Um, it gets a bit more complex when you take into account that the wallet in many cases is actually not online. So you can't just call this. So there's a wallet service in between and whatnot. Um but yeah, the standard itself is very simple, but it's

going to take years to to really get this adopted. Now, there's a few apps that already support this. Um but yeah, I expect um this is going to take a few years. It's a really big deal though because in payments like currently um like obviously if you hold I don't know five USC on every network and you want to buy a coffee for if you live in New York $20 or whatever a coffee costs are now then yeah you want to probably not have to bridge and swap back and forth in order to do that. So it's a really big deal just going to take a long time to get adopted. This one too it's not in final. So if you want to contribute to a standard and this is a good one to look at. And that's it. Any questions?

[Applause] Um if you're going to ask a question, we only have room for one question. Um we ran a little late today. We have a speaker here in four minutes. Um so just raise your hand and I'll bring the mic to you. speaker. Oh, we got one. You got one. Okay. Can we save this uh question for outside then? Yeah. Um, thank you so much, Derek. I really appreciate it. Oh, thank you. Thanks all for joining today.