Beyond HODL: How Improving Crypto UX Can Drive Mass Adoption

Transcript

[Music] All right. All right. GM everyone. How many GMs have you heard from one morning? All right. I'm H uh founder and uh project lead at push protocol and today we are going to talk about something really interesting and something that uh we always wonder and something that is really really close to our heart. uh how improving crypto UIX can drive uh mass adoption uh which is beyond hold like we all do that but we want billion users to enter the ecosystem right how to do that well before we can talk about it we need

to realize why do we care well we care because we need to understand that a billion user does not equal a million devs how many of you are devs over Awesome. How many of you have given up on programming just because documentation was missing? No one. That is exactly what a dev is. Devs like you and I, we will not give up because our documentation is not there. We'll not give up when something doesn't work. We'll probably inspect element and try to make it work. But that is dev.

When it comes to users, we need to understand users are a different story. Users are actually not there for the tech. They are there for the product. And what's the difference? Well, the difference is that a product improves users life. A product doesn't ask users to understand itself. And a product just makes sure that the user is in control and the user gets what they want. Think about all the web two apps that we use whether it's YouTube whether it's Gmail whether it's any app that we use even when it's streaming we just go over there we just do few clicks maybe login and that's it after that we are over

there we don't have to understand anything we don't have to understand how video protocol works or how any protocol works and that's the difference if we are talking about billion users we need to adopt that approach approach and before we can adopt that approach we need to know what is broken. So true story in 2016 or 2017 I was trying to go into web three I was trying to explore some protocols and what I did was I installed MetaMask and I was like okay I'm all done but very soon I realized that installing MetaMask was a step one of 10 you know what's

next I need to learn about seedwords uh okay I did that I spoke to some of the friends made sure everything is safe what's next I don't have Ethereum so I have to go to a exchange I have to do KYC then I have to on ramp off ramp and finally come to metam mask and then only I can deploy on a protocol or interact with a protocol thankfully the protocol then charge in its native tokens otherwise it was unis swap as well you see the problem over here right if I'm a user of Web 3. It's not my job to understand web 3. The thing is I will probably have 10 or 20 minutes to try a

new product out not 6 hours. And that is what is still broken. One action doesn't mean one action. It's usually 10 interactions. The second thing and this is something which is very contrarian to web3 ethos is that we tell that the user needs to know everything. that is actually broken. If I am a user, I cannot be expected to interact with a smart contract and read that smart contract out. No matter how enthusiastic I am, we are talking 1 billion users. 1 billion users will never understand coding. So, we need to make sure that the user doesn't need to know everything. And of course the last thing

something which push protocol has made its mission to revolutionize is lack of communication. Just think about it. Whenever we are waking up in the morning, we take a look at our mobile phones and we see all the important alerts and notifications from our mobile apps. Whether it's important emails, whether it's important Slack communication, whether it's re-engagement, any Twitter tweets that we have done, any post going viral or any Venmo PayPal payments, whether it's in web three terms, whether it's D5, whether it's NFT, whether it's governance, everything works in a way wherein the user is in control. The apps they send

important communication to the user and they tell the user what you want to do and that is the communication that we are adopted to that is the communication that web three needs and those are the basic pillars that are missing and how do we solve that? Well, we solved that by dividing it into four major cases going through it and started and start to eliminate all these problems one by one. So the first problem is the learning curve very easy.

We can eliminate it by improving the user experience. Uh embracing AI is also something we need to do. Of course AI is the talk of the town right now. Uh but yeah, if we really realize AI is something that we really really interacted with back I mean back in 2017 2018 as well uh through the form of machine learning in web 2 apps and we need to embrace that in web 3 removing user fiction and communication and re-engagement again we are going to talk about it. So yeah what is the learning curve and how we can eliminate it? Well, going by the example that happened to me and I'm sure

happened to everyone else, the best way by which we can eliminate that learning curve is going and embracing account abstraction. What is account abstraction? Well, it's a smart contract wallet which can do so much more. It can enable you to not remember your seat phrase because it's programmed to do something different. It can have account recovery. It can be permissionless or have permission controls and that is something that a lot of efforts that is something web three is pouring a lot of efforts to improve on. Another interesting and unique things are metransactions.

Metatransactions are essentially automated transactions wherein your wallet is not required to even have an amount of Ethereum or any other token. uh a different wallet can just sign your transaction. And how does it helps? Well, it eliminates friction because the user doesn't need to know everything. The user doesn't need to sign transactions. Anyone else can do it. And of course, automation. So automation because web 3 is very very active right now. Any transaction that we do requires manual effort and that is not how web two operates. When we go to centralized

exchange, the best thing that we love over there is we can talk to centralized exchange and we can say that place a limit order that when Ethereum is $1,000 or less, give me 100 ETH. That doesn't happen, but we place it nonetheless. And we need to do that for web three as well. And there are some examples of people and apps that are doing that. For example, by economy using account abstraction is making the journey extremely easy. Metat transaction maybe lens is a very good example of that and safe is a very good example of account abstraction and how we are programming smart control wallets to be more secure

and in the future to be more social as well. Now let's talk about user friction which is the second part. The thing about web three is that everything is wallet walled. What do I mean with that? Well, I mean that whenever I go to a DAP, the thing that I am required to do first is connect the wallet. Before I can learn what the DAB does, before I can learn what its use cases are, I have to connect the wallet.

And when I connect the wallet, the best thing is that MetaMask or someone else will prompt me make sure you know what site you are interacting with. So you see the chicken and egg situation over here, right? I don't know the product and to connect the wallet, I have to understand the product and the wallet itself is saying that only connect to the website you trust. And therefore a lot of web3 protocols and product they basically go for branding and they basically go for brand awareness because only then they can ask the user to trust them and that will make the user connect their wallet and go inside that is wrong

on so many levels just as an example uh YouTube is a very favorite app right and let's say connect wallet is just like signing up. Uh YouTube doesn't tell us to sign up. YouTube will give you the exact thing that you want which is watching videos. Only when you want a personalized request or only when you think that you need to upload a video which essentially translate to only when a user wants to do something will YouTube say okay sign up. And that is the interface that we need in web 3.

And probably the only example that I have over here which is doing it well is unis swap and unis swap because of that is probably the number one dap. You don't have to connect your wallet to do anything on unis swap unless you are transferring or swapping your tokens and this is what every needs to embrace. On that note, we also need to embrace AI but not in terms of AI tokens. Uh in terms of what AI does in web 2 and we need to realize and transform that to web 3. Uh again and a very quick example is that AI can simplify the

interactions. Uh first thing that we do when I interact with a smart contract on MetaMask, I'm getting this hexadesimal string or a random u mumbo jumbo letters of what I'm interacting with and I'm trusting Metam Mask and I'm trusting the DAB because that's the only way I can interact with the function. Uh, of course there's a hot wallet, there's a cold wallet, and I'm doing whatever I can to make sure that if a smart contract is fishy, I only lose a little amount of ETH, but that doesn't really help, right? In the end, even if I lose 0001 E, that's a bad experience.

What we can do to improve that? Well, AI is actually one thing which can work very well over here. I I remember when I was judging at ETH India, I saw a product which was so so clever. All it did was it made sure that the smart contract is decompiled and through Metamas snaps whenever I was interacting with uh a smart contract. It will run that function call through open AI and chat GPT and it will just tell me in a human readable way what that function is doing. something very simple made everything very easy and still secure and that's what we need to see when we are building our products

pattern production is again something AI does it very neatly every Spotify song that we listen to adds to this pattern production and because of that we love Spotify and whenever we are playing music we just hit play and we leave it at Spotify to predict what we'll like Next and that can be used in web three as well. Imagine a world wherein based on the NFT collections you have AI tells you that these are the NFT collections you might like instead of we going to open AI or watching on a scan what are the NFTs that are coming out. Even better, I can ask the AI that I want to b buy a board ape and the AI can tell

just wait for the beer market and you can buy it at one of the cost. And that is why pattern prediction and AI can be so so cool. We can also use it in terms of development. Think about the pre- audits. We all know or at least all the smart contract developers they know that the audit time is the most unknown time that we have whenever we are building a protocol and AI can reduce that because at least it can eliminate some of the exploits that are very common and GitHub copilot and all those efforts are going on in that direction.

again an example. So this is actually a product I judged and I loved that how they translated or how they did this very unique very creative thing which made it very very easy for us to function. But yeah, coming back to one of the most crucial pillars, one of the things that we do in our everyday life when we interact in web two is that we communicate and we re-engage or the apps they communicate to you and they re-engage. Think about it. All the notification scenarios, even when it comes to messaging, we are not

talking to our friends on WhatsApp as much as we are talking to our friends via WhatsApp, via notifications. And that is what push is all about. Push is about creating all the communication tools that are in the web two world, but making sure that we are creating it in the web three native way. and making sure that any protocol can use it because these are decentralized protocol stack and that is what we started doing when we started back from ETH global 2020 as a hackathon project and we saw that everything that a user does is done by a

notification and that's what pushbot to the table for web 3 by making sure that we invent notifications for web three. Why a notification of web 3 is different from a notification of web 2? Couple of reasons. Well, the protocol that we interact with, we interact with our wallet addresses. Therefore, our wallet addresses are web three usernames and these web three usernames are shared by multiple protocols because we don't change a username in web three. uh for instance when we login on Facebook or Twitter different username different server but when we are using a protocol of uniswap or using a protocol like a um

same wallet address and therefore you have a shared web3 username and now after push for the first time all these protocols are able to send critical notifications to you. So whenever your loan is about to be liquidated now you can get a notification whenever you have a governance proposal coming you can get a notification whenever you buy a NFD and that NFD creator launches another NFD collection you can get a notification in general everyone gets a notification you get the point uh something about the technical stack of course we wanted to do it for the entire web 3 not just Ethereum we are live on Ethereum,

Polygon and Binance. But the vision is still very very big. This needs to power even nonthereum notifications and communication stack. Which means that in the future a user of Ethereum can talk to a user of Bitcoin or vice versa. And even a crypto wallet of Ethereum can show all the notifications that you have from all over the web three world. How do we do that? We do that by making or creating a decentralized protocol that enables any smart contract, any DAP, any backend to send onchain, off-chain notifications or any form of communication right to your web3 wallet.

But we didn't stop over there. Next game, push chat. Of course, when I spoke about notifications, notifications are a way for protocols to pull their users back into the app. But when it comes to chatting or messaging, that's a social form that we all know and love. And that is what push created next. We created a protocol that enabled you to do wallet towlet messaging. Not only that, you can do a web three native group chat, Bitcoin B token gated and FD gated and so on. Think you are a part of the DAO. Now all you need to do is come to a web three native push chat experience and if you have those DAO

tokens you will automatically be admitted in this autonomous group chat and of course the SDK is out now. The idea is that you can build discord talk in dows negotiate NFD and so much more but then we were having too much fun. So we went a bit ahead and we saw that eventually Zoom and eventually all these communication tools and stack like streaming or Google will come to web3 and that made us create push video which essentially used notifications to provide a Apple FaceTime like experience which means that whenever someone is calling you your phone can pop a notification that um Vitalic.eth ETH is

calling you. And when you say yes, a notification can be used to carry your peer info and give it to Vitalic and vice versa. And now you have a pure P2P push video experience. And just by these three tools and product alone, Push has now gone on to empower more than 45 million notifications sent over to 95,000 subscribers and has over 650 plus integrations. Some of which are from the likes of Uniswap Polygon Gitcoin Bankless Ernify, Socially, and so on.

But yeah, what's next? Every year around Eid global events, just because we came from Eid Global, we launch a different communication product tool. We launched push notifications back at Eid Global 2020. We launched push chat at Eid Boota 2022. Push video came at Tokyo. And what's next? And for that, we have a very cool video. Awesome.

Hopefully you guys liked it. [Applause] All right. Yeah. Introducing for the very first time push spaces a web three enabled Twitter type of space-like experience. What's different? peer-to-peer of course, but it can be access controlled as well, which means that listeners can be token holders or NFT holders if you want and even more access controlled in the future or even when someone is about to speak, they can only speak when they have a particular number of tokens or particular number of NFDs. So, it's going to be very very

cool, very web free experience. And one thing that we did further was we didn't only enable it for wallets. We enabled it for all type of identities including polyolygon, crypto, any NFTs that you might have and more. The idea that you as a user can express whatever identity ties to you. On that note, we also announced messaging with Unstoppable and Polygon uh like two days back and now push will be powering 3.6 6 million users of Polygon and Unstoppable Domain for messaging.

We think it unlocks the space for so much more. Some of my favorites web free social interaction, virtual gated classroom, NFD gated conversations and more. The SDK is out now for every hacker to build. That's what we do in global alumni. So we launch it out for every hacker. Having said that, you can also find it at push.org by the end of today. All right, I don't think you guys need Discord link or live workshop, but yeah, I am here to take any questions or answers you might have.

Does anyone have a question? Um, thank you for presentation from a user experience like are you thinking into like dividing into multiple app or something like this or just keep on building like a super app because I feel like as much as each notification is useful on its own the chat the space like the video I feel like on my phone I'm so used to have it from like different application because like I don't handle notification for like defi the same way I handle like a chat where I want it all the time.

That's a awesome question. So let me build a little bit about notification. So what we are building over here is not a super app. These are all protocol level tools and that means that whenever you are going to receive a notification you can receive it from a crypto wallet or any other app. It's very interoperable like Ethereum is. Uh just for example, Ethereum ties your account data to your wallet. Push basically ties your communication data to your wallet and then because it's done in a secure way, any crypto wallet can tab and show it to you. Another question that you had it's about the notifications and whether it comes from a same u source. Well, it

doesn't. What happens is that whatever protocols they want to send notification, they have to activate themselves on push protocol and then you as a user you go and you basically gaslessly sign a consent to receive those notifications. So if you consent that I want unis swap to send me notification only then unis swap channel can send you a notification out. So it's basically like a very web two experience wherein you install a app and it says allow or don't allow for you to receive notification and only when you allow will the notification make its way onto you and the notification they come from

different channels so you know that unis swap is sending you a notification coindes is sending you a notification and so on. Thank you Har and thank you all. Thanks everyone. [Music]