Unifying Ethereum’s UX with Abstraction and Intents

Transcript

[Music] Well, hello. Hello. Hey everyone. Uh, my name is Alex and I'm the CTO and co-founder of Zerion and we are building an EVM wallet and we are trying to build the best possible UAX for the Ethereum ecosystem. And I'm here today to talk a little bit about the current state of the UX and where we are right now and which things work and which things I need I think need to be improved. And let me find a clicker so that I can actually change the slides if someone

can help me with that. I'm sorry. Can I get a clicker? Yes. Can I get a clicker uh for the slides? All right. All right. While they figure that out. Uh is it this one?

Yeah, just this is the pointer. Okay, this is Oh, okay. Perfect. All right, thank you so much and sorry about this. Uh, so as all of you know, I think the Ethereum ecosystem is very fragmented right now. We really tried to scale it hard, but it has just broken into pieces. So what we have today it's more than 170 according to my knowledge L2s and L3s barely connected to each other. Bridging is very painful. It's very confusing and to be honest it shouldn't exist at all. And for any new person who tries to join and use that like they just want to like you know use some dove

or like buy some assets is like really really complicated and the existing users who are OGs in the space they have their assets like scattered across like tens if not hundreds of chains and it's like unmanageable and funnily enough this fragmentation has actually brought lots of consolidation because what's happening right now is that builders are pretty much incentivized to build where most of the users are and that actually creates a very strong network effect and we've seen lately that more and more builders start building on the biggest chains and even though so many new chains and L2s are launched it's very hard for them to attract users and it's kind of creates

this loop we see about half of all transactions in the EVM space happening on base and five largest L2s have more than 1 billion in TVL each and that's more than 80% of total TVL combined which funnily enough brings us back to square one we created this tons of L2s and L3s that we're supposed to scale our throughput but the way the incentives are for the builders actually bring all the activity back to just a handful of chains and now we can basically process as many transactions as base can. So we didn't really solve anything and at the same time we created

a very painful UX for the ecosystem. So I really think we can do better and yeah so the painful reality if some new asset launches on some chain ax there are lots of steps for the user to access it. They need to bridge they need to wait then they need to swap and that's not even talking about figuring out gas fees and the gas tokens and like extra bridges. So that's a lot and in my opinion to overcome that three things need to happen. I think first step is account abstraction. Second is intense and abstracted execution layer and finally it's UI and UX on the wallet side so that users actually benefit from

all that underlying tech. So I'll just briefly talk about each of those. So step one account abstraction like to overcome these challenges of fragmentation we really need to decouple gas management from execution and signatures and all that stuff and it's actually kind of there. The technology has been around for a while but the adoption has been painfully slow. uh 4337 was like the big promise that was launched more than two years ago and it did not really find too many users and the main reason because people are just used to their wallets, they use their eways, they have assets in them and it's

really hard to migrate away. So that's why 7702 of course very exciting just launched a few months ago uh might just do the trick because now instead of forcing users to migrate to some new addresses and new paradigm they can simply upgrade their existing accounts which should be quite great for the UX and hopefully less scary. It's still pretty new but I think it's a great step. And then speaking of intents, like what users really care about is that they want to buy some 100 meme coins and they don't really care how they don't really care where they are. They just have their assets and they just want to spend them. They are

not used to think that there should be some obstacles on the way. And I think intense can really solve that because that's basically the new paradigm of the execution layer where the user just says hey I want that by that time and I'm willing to pay this much and then solvers kind of figure out how to achieve that without the user thinking about all the execution path. Uh there are some limitations in the combination of 7702 and intense because private key is this still the master key that's why we can't do like real resource locking so it's not going to work as fast as we wish I mean it's actually going to work fast but there are either some additional risks or as

needed but I'm not going to dive too deep into technical details but I will say the combo of 7702 plus intense will solve maybe at least 80% of the UX challenges the ecosystem is experiencing now. However, for all these things and underlying technologies to work, we really need to do better on the UI side because you know right now any wallet or any DOP, you all have seen that it's constant network switching. It's bridging between the chains. It's like having scattered balances like your Ethereum on 15 different L2s. It's paying for the gas fees. All of that just should not be there. And I think

the point I'm trying to make here is that while we already have the underlying tech, we have the account abstraction almost working. We have all the major providers out there building their own intent driven architectures. We have unis swap. We have across one in cow swap. Plenty like most of the swap providers in the space already moved on to that. The problem is that UX is just not there. And I think that's the bit that is lacking behind a lot and slowing the ecosystem down because even if the underlying technology evolves very fast and we have all the pieces, we kind of need to combine them into the user

experience that users can actually access. So I think that's the missing bit and that's what we're trying to solve. And that's my talk. And if someone has a few questions, happy to answer them. Thank you everyone. Merci. [Applause] All right then. Thanks everyone and enjoy the rest of your day here. Thank you.

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