Uniswap’s Mobile Wallet: Breakthrough or Flop? | Roundup

Transcript

all right everyone welcome back to another episode of bell curve before we jump in quick disclaimer the views expressed by my co-hosts today are their personal views and they do not represent the views of any organization with which the co-hosts are associated with uh nothing in the episode is construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice you know the deal now let's jump into the episode all right everyone welcome back to another Roundup on bell curve if you got Michael's winning two Yano and miles are six men well Sports reference do you think uh you think you think Vance is getting nervous two back to back weeks sitting them out benched him

well I I would be if I was in I would be too yeah yeah Award right here at the very least you know personally I don't know if I'm gonna accept bands back on this podcast if he has any hair I think he's just gotta go bald he's got that's how he's gotta prove himself now we miss you Vance Vance is representing over and over in Japan so um his Japan trip any any Alpha from uh the other side uh only stuff I've heard so far is that uh crypto is uh pervasive in Asia and a lot more so integrated into social applications and just more

I I yeah it seems to be something that is more embraced positively over there uh which I think is a really good sign yeah he said he paid for his sushi with eth exactly why he would spend his Ethan time like this I do not know but foreign let's get into some of these stories so I want to talk uh maybe we can kick this off just talking about uniswap and their wallet being finally available on the Apple App Store so this was following a monthly review by Apple uniswatch mobile app has finally secured its place in the IOS app store um it's now available for users in most countries uh which includes the United

States according to a tweet from you to swap Labs on Thursday and unisprop has assured people that they're going to continue to launch in other countries as soon as Apple lets them so in addition to allowing swaps on the ethereum mainnet polygon arbitrum and optimism users will also be able to track their nft Collections and purchase crypto with debit cards through moonpay which was an integration which was actually rolled out I guess last December that's pretty cool that solves a big big onboarding problem but um miles I know you actually uh were guinea pig and actually installed the wallet yourself and have some some thoughts but before we do that uh Michael I think on one of the the earlier Bell cribs we were talking about the that kind of the Restriction um that crypto apps not being able to get distributed on the Apple App Store

App so what are your sort of thoughts on the unit swap Mobile Wallet making its way through yeah um so historically Apple has been incredibly difficult when anything ever touches crypto involved with an app that's under review by their App Store reveal process um and just as context you know the the review process is not something that's just there for any sort of crypto app it historically there's been um back and forth with major applications like uber I know that they got in trouble for some of the things that they've done um and really what the the review process represents for any app that's trying to get into the App Store is a Walled Garden approach where they are The Gatekeepers they get decide who's in

there who's not and they effectively set the rules when Apple has the the App Store review guidelines which are very infrequently updated and and a lot of people would probably say that they're Antiquated in a lot of ways the way to think about them isn't a constitution that says here are all the rules here's all here's how we're going to be dealing with these different types of applications into perpetuity think of it is like an auto append list of rules that they decide kind of ad hoc as they see new applications um and so earlier I think it was in October or November Maybe they came out with um kind of a general perspective on uh specifically nfts where they said that

nfts when you're purchasing an NFC in an application would have to go through IAP which is their in-app purchase mechanism um a lot of people uh I'd say the you had kind of polar perspectives on this uh adjustment where you had some people who said what the heck IAP is great but what is implicit within iip is that they Apple charges 30 percent to the seller of anything that goes through iip so if you're selling uh an nft for instance which is considered digital content Apple wants their 30 percent obviously if you're selling anything in a secondary transaction it's going to be exceedingly difficult to have 30 percent

be you know a take rate effectively that the seller would have to abide by by using this mechanism um and and so this is this is definitely um you know for nfts and it's specific to to that one category of purchasing um but it did show a positive trajectory in just Apple being supportive and having rules around crypto writ large um and so that was kind of the other perspective and and some people said hey we're used to you know game developers are used to paying 30 for any digital content that's sold within the application and in fact the the fact that you get hundreds of millions of credit cards on file using iip is actually more of a benefit than having to pay the 30 the one thing that is you know of note here is that because I I

believe you know and I haven't played around with it so Miles I'm curious to hear your perspectives uniswap I believe is going to leverage a non-custodial wallet and there's a difference between what Apple considers to be a convertible virtual currency like ethereum versus what they would consider to be digital content in nft and that that's the reason why Moon pay is um you know the the payment provider they have to whoever the payment provider is has to have money transmitter licenses to be able to facilitate transactions with convertible virtual currencies but in doing so convertible virtual currencies are explicitly outside the scope of IAP and it's not something that Apple will

support and so you won't have to pay the 30 fees but it's only supported assets that Apple will be able to or that Moon pay supports that you'll be able to use in those apps once you get the assets into the app that's when you can swap them around but you know you can imagine if you want to buy something you know that's maybe not supported directly by moonpay the the the process would go USD to to ethereum ethereum to whatever that asset is you know the user experience is plenty to say to say the least but I do think that generally the recognition of Apple having an app that's going to be as widely used as uniswap is a is a really big deal um and you know I'm I'm sure it'll get better over time but the biggest thing

that can happen for an app developer is to get approved it's a lot harder to get approved than it is to you know have changes that go on once you're approved and in the app store because it's more of a conversation less uh binary do not go yeah um I mean I mean honestly miles I'd be curious to get your take of like what the UI ux was like um just because you know on the one hand I think you know we've talked on this podcast before about like I know I'm I was in the minority when I voiced this but that it's a big deal that you can now Buy in custody at least Bitcoin and I think the ethereum is well on Fidelity so it does seem like getting access to distribution that the App Store provides is

definitely a huge a huge Boon um so I think in that sense it's it's pretty interesting but miles I'd love to get your understanding of like you know what you thought about the user experience yeah absolutely and maybe just to touch on one thing uh last thing on on Michael's point you know I'd be very interested to hear like what the discussions in the past month have sounded like between you know the uniswap labs teams and apple because it sounded like they were just getting stonewalled you know there was basically radio silence for a long time um it almost reminded me of you know coinbase shouting into the void for you know the SEC to tell them what to do um in order to be okay but yeah I think maybe at some point we'll we'll hear how those conversations went very important

it does seem like mild like there there were some changes just remember when they maybe several months ago or three or four months ago talked about this app coming out and there were like nfts inside the app there was a way to import private keys there was they talked about support for for multi-chain I did notice that there's no support for multi-chain no way to import a private key I I think I haven't actually used it um and then I don't think there were nfts inside the app um there are yeah there are okay and so I mean as far as I can tell it is you know they did put out what they advertised like I can okay you have one okay then I'm wrong I was thinking maybe they pulled it like basically pulled back did a preliminary version to kind of get their foot in the door but okay

okay exactly hey everyone exciting announcement here from the blockworks podcast Network we are hiring two podcast hosts to build a show with us called Lightspeed tldr of Lightspeed is that it is a show for Builders tankers and lovers of Technology it's a callback to the Heyday of Silicon Valley where Great Tech was built in garages not in corporate fortresses and was truly the wild West Lightspeed is an exploration of crypto from the perspective of a builder and an engineer who's designing for scale and is interested in onboarding the next billion users into crypto if this show sounds exciting to you you have a background in podcast hosting or content creation go to the careers page of blockworks that's blockworks.com careers I've also linked it in the show notes here you can just

click there it'll take you right to the page you can also follow me on Twitter I'm Mike ippolito underscore you can slide right into my DMs and we'll set up some time to talk would love to hear from you we are super super excited about this show My overall you know high level take is that it is it's a decent V1 um if I had to have like a criticism I would say that you know it's it doesn't provide a better experience than existing wallets or sophisticated crypto native users um but it also you know that's one side of the spectrum but it also doesn't necessarily you know simplify the experience enough for you know brand new crypto users um I think that latter category is the

intended audience that they're going for with this wallet um they know sophisticated crypto users can are very comfortable you know interacting either directly with the protocol or on the UI um and so this is going after retail right and and mainstream retail that might have been using a coinbase or an FTX in the last cycle um and so that's basically who that's the perspective of you know uh the the user I took as I tried to onboard um and yeah I guess some high level thoughts I would say wallet creation is very easy um you know you could use an iCloud backup and Google social off login to create a you know um a wallet not have to remember you

know back up your keys um if you want to the Fiat on-ramp process is pretty straightforward and simple uh you know it took a couple minutes for usdc to show up in my actual account balance um but I would say there's a few big pain points if I was you know a brand new crypto user um who is trying this out for the first time and I'd say that you know when you're onboarding from moonpay it gives you you know all these different networks right so ethereum optimism arbitrum polygon and each token has four different versions of it right that you can on on ramp to so I'd you know first be like what the hell are all

these Network um and why is there four different versions of every token I have no idea what this room it's like is there something I should know about if I onboard to optimism is that you know does that have features that arbitrim doesn't have or does it have less features than ethereum has um so there's not a lot of Education there yeah miles what would you do would you default just to One Network but then give people the option to do others like switch yeah I I maybe I'll get to that at the end because I think it's related to the other pain points um and I think you know so I just chose usdc and and optimism um and it did show up my wallet you know a few minutes later which is great um but now okay I want to go swap that

for another token let's say you know my friend said hey you should buy this you know Lido token uh it's gonna it's gonna Moon and so I say okay let's look for Lido uh you know fortunately Lido was in the optimism asset list but I noticed that the optimism asset list is a lot smaller than the ethereum asset list you know a brand new crypto user might not know why right um but okay great I've got you know usdc and I want to swap to Lido um and now it's telling me that I don't have enough eth in my wallet and uh to pay for to pay for the transaction fees and you know as a new user I'd be like what what does that mean that's annoying okay now I have to go let's go swap for some eth so I can pay that these

transaction fees and again you know don't have enough to make that swap right so now I'm stuck going back to square one with the Fiat on-ramp and saying okay now I need to you know unwrap Fiat directly to eth so I have some gas to spend um and that part wasn't clear to me and so I think that there are like two two main things that would make this you know uh really really powerful for for rent for mainstream user first I think that you know the you need to abstract away all these networks and and different types of assets and so I would say you know if there could just be one ass one you know version of every asset

um that shows up to the user and you don't have any sort of differentiation about networks um and then you basically just say if a user wants to swap from USD to Lido this you know runs through some sort of like Ridge Dex aggregator that looks at all the you know the uniswap markets finds you you know the most efficient path to buy that based off of gas fees and liquidity and slippage and all that good stuff um and then I have it in my wallet and whether that's you know Lido sitting on optimism or lydo sitting on arbitrim or L1 you know I don't really care I have I have exposure to Lido now like I got what I wanted um and then two and I think this kind of you know leads into a bigger conversation but

with count abstraction you know there's a lot of things that would make this a lot uh this experience a lot more frictionless you know first of all get rid of gas fees like I going back to square one if I was a new user I would have probably churned right there I don't want to go through that again um so pay gas fees on behalf of users I think that's more than reasonable um and you also have you know more secure account recovery methods than than maybe this this eoa path um using the iCloud backup and you can split keys and all that good stuff too um so yeah I think that that those are the two the two main things that I would say to take this to the next level you know when you go in your coinbase wallet

right it doesn't tell you which network you know of which version Network version of of every asset you want to buy right um and I just don't I so so I I worry that V1 it's a great start but it's kind of in no man's land where it's not necessarily catering to you know the sophisticated crypto native users but it's you know and it's not trying to frankly um but it needs to you know a couple more improvements to really compete with like a centralized exchange app for sure for newbies right folks that have not ever tried this before um so that's why that's my that's my product review miles why do you think that um this is just for why do you say that they're

really focusing on like new new folks here because my understand like when I think about this product I don't think that like a new user to crypto who owns no Bitcoin and no eth like I don't think they're going direct to Unison up here um this this product feels like for the four of us where you still we the four of us been in crypto for a while own crypto still don't have a mobile experience like a crypto native mobile experience um and like I've wanted to use the Met like the metamask app for years it's just god-awful um yeah like that who I thought this product would be for that's that's fair I think the main objective is to capture retail flow with this with this app right yeah it should look like Robin Hood right it's like

that yeah well yeah yeah what will that whether that's retail flow that is you know an existing crypto user that's a small relatively small bubble right and then whether it's retail flow that's maybe just a centralized exchange user you know that's at least 100 million people right there so that's a much bigger audience maybe this is their onboarding you know experience um and then there's like you know the the folks that have never tried anything you know crypto related before and to your point like very don't don't see them going straight to this unit swap app um but part of part of me wonders to go back to one of the things you're saying miles is just like what the conversations were and you know you submit an application they assigned you a reviewer and then you start the

conversation with that reviewer to basically say okay here's what we're gonna do here's things you need to change like it is a dialogue at twist a certain extent I would wonder if part of that dialogue was this cannot be a custodial experience in the same way that you know app Apple is preventing in a lot of ways um uh the coinbase application and or the coinbase wallet application um which you know they they talked about if they have to list all the different networks if it has to be a separate wallet where you can't import your private Keys like I wonder if these are limitations and this is kind of what I you know having dealt with the App Store review team a few times I wonder if that's just like limitations that they

said okay you want to have this this is what we need and I I also think you know the other thing too just as a blanket statement on App Store reviews is it like I said it's it's an auto append list of all the different rules and it's ever increasing never decreasing but it's also not uh suggestive that because uniswap.in with this particular format that they are able to to then build a Playbook around this and all the other applications that want app store you know App Store approval are going to have to go the same route and build the same way as uniswap it is really a specific use Case by use case for um for each of the different applications that are going through the process so doesn't mean like because uniswap got in it's you know we now have

a playbook for how to get every other app in it's really just like because uniswap.in this is a big signal that maybe there's an open dialogue that could be had yeah and and you know similar to the staking Dialogue on the regulatory side you know I think that that this general direction that we're getting now is like the more of just a you know pass through you are or like you know a way to interact with the protocol rather than you know making the experience you know doing things you know like outside of the protocol to make the experience better or smoother you know that protects you a little bit but I I would it would be you know too bad if that was actually stopping them from like doing

things that you know don't necessarily make this a custodial app like I think if you put in like a DEX Bridge aggregator something like a socket Network behind the scenes here uh I don't it's still not custodial right you're just abstracting the ux complexity away a little bit right um but if the Apple floor is saying you know it has to be kind of wonky and complicated because like that's what a true you know just passed through to like interact with the protocol looks should look like then you know we're in we're in a tough spot but account obstruction also does you know help a lot with with at least some of these pain points um you know we a lot of people focus especially in crypto right like it's

very easy to be like hey Apple's trying to throttle us and all this stuff and people focus on the 30 take rate that Apple takes in their App Store but the truth is from Apple's perspective that they're trying to you know when when apps originally you know started to get launched there were tons of scams and really poor user experiences and part of the reason why Apple has that append only list is to protect users right like they view when people go to the App Store Apple wants you to be able to trust that you're not going to get scammed and that your experience is generally going to be relatively good so to be honest with you I can actually sort of if this is what the conversation sounded like I could definitely see if I'm Apple's perspective that like hey guys like people lose their private Keys

all the time this is an insane user experience like we don't want the liability of our brand or this isn't the the experience that we want our users to have I could be wrong just wanted to call it out but I'm pretty sure it did give me the option either to create a new wallet or import um you you can something yeah you can and Miles could you sign up with um with like your with an email address or yeah yeah it's it's I because I spun up a new wallet and then chose you know the most web to path to right on board through that um that you know it was it was fairly easy it was basically you know uh sending your you know choosing a

Google account um ads you know doing a two-step verification there and then you know it's it's I think I had to select you know back up your keys with iCloud or something like that which I'm sure how does this little thing get through I just looked this up this is the only uniswap app in the app store right now it's a fake it's a that's a scale yeah yeah you're actually like click there the link of the from their Twitter post yeah that that frankly is just like a App Store uh it's so new that it hasn't been picked up by like the search algorithms yet um that happens a lot though um I I mean so Mike I totally agree with

all of what you were saying I I do think that um I mean my personal perspective just broadly not on on like apps uh specifically is that um it did start off as a form of protection to make sure that the quality of the apps that are in the App Store is as high as possible I do think and you know there are a number of lawsuits ongoing currently that uh contend that apple is extracting monopolistic power with its 30 percent um so yeah I I I agree with that the intention probably started off to make sure that the quality bar was high but at this point you know it there is no level of competition there's no opportunity unless you're in a specific category uh where they don't want to

support their payment method um where they force you to use 30 fee it's it's always a little bit of both you know I was just I people tend to view it in binary but usually there is like a good reason for that being the case and then there's probably a more extractive reason and they can both be true and so the fact that I think is the biggest one is when you are using Apple IAP to make purchases within your app they're charging 30 whenever someone's making a purchase it's only for digital content so something that effectively has a zero marginal cost to produce and therefore they feel like 30 percent is fair um but also they have hundreds of millions of credit cards and people on

the other side of that so normally are they just saying hey we're gonna sit right here in the middle and charge 30 we're also going to create the ability for the demand side to just easily onboard and seamlessly pay for things so I do think that there is a benefit to it in certain situations um but once again when you have uh selling of digital content in the case of crypto it's nfts when you're selling convertible virtual currencies like eth and usdc it it doesn't have to go through IOP that's where Moon pay steps in I also have had I don't know if you guys have used Moon Bay miles one question I was going to ask you is um did you have you previously used moonpay and did you have a traffic with them or okay the first yeah no I didn't do it yes and then a picture you know my

ID and do like a little liveness check you know all that good stuff yeah exactly um and and it's debit card only um and the auth rates on those depending on what your bank rate it would depending on what your bank is um you know the off rates are you know I've seen somewhere in like the 60 to 70 percent so 30 to 40 percent of those transactions aren't even going through wow I did see that yeah it said if you use a credit card there's or if you use a debit card there's a 35 greater chance true we'll write down okay no point out um I I will say though even though it uh I think all these are really fair criticisms uh miles is that you know good on uniswap for doing this right

like I think you know historically the journey for people going on chain has been having their first experience be with a centralized exchange and then staying there for like a long time and then kind of migrating to on chain and this is I think the first like meaningful shot that we've had at just onboarding people directly onto being uh on chain which I think is definitely a step in the right direction 100 injury one one of the things that I think is going to be really interesting to see is uh how does uniswap the protocol interface with uniswap the wallet and what's the business model respectively for each of those and stakeholders is the team now moving over into uniswap you know the wallet and focusing on that are there going to be charging an additional fee on top of that and have a

decentralized business you know that was kind of you know what people were talking about when they raised all that money um it will be interesting to see like how you can have centralized businesses that are spawned out of decentralized protocols that then are extracting additional rent on top of the protocols that they originally built um I I think that part is going to be really fascinating to see if you know the competition drives that down or if they're able to build a beachhead with customers to be able to have a user retail flow actually you know derive value for uniswap the wallet uh yeah gonna be interested you know I think it's a you can make a similar like analogy to to the way that ethereum has kind of scaled and developed you know I

think you just want similar to ethereum L1 you keep the protocol you know as conservative as possible um and you you know there's very little that they're doing you know at the protocol level they just kind of upgrade it right to another version every couple years um and you drive the complexity and the the really complex stuff that's going to help you scale and get distribution you know up the stack basically and in this case you know it's out of governance but you know I would say like the the ethereum analogy is where you know you're seeing the Roll-Ups and all of the kind of abstractions starting you know on the uh that's far away from the L1 as possible and the Meb supply chain um and so I think that that's kind of

the strategy here and frankly I mean it's a lot easier to to build you know sort of these products um outside of the scope of governance and and I think that that's that's the main thing here I would say you know my other observation um is that I think it's they're going for less of you know a wallet but more of like this you know app or or super app that has a wallet attached to it right I don't think they wanna like make people think that they're downloading a wallet I think eventually they'll show up and they'll see like okay here's you know a portfolio of different uh you know things like doing apps I can use and whether or not they skim you know something off the top or

even you know Implement like an order flow uh auction sort of sort of model here um and that that that to me would make a lot of sense um and yeah I think that only occurs directly back to you know swap labs in terms of the revenue but the volume if they're successful right drives value to unit swap protocol yeah it's um you know it's it's almost like if they had optimized in their ux for retail users and you're producing a bunch of dumb water flow that'd be pretty good timing if order flow auctions become more and more prevalent right that'd be an extremely good Revenue model although again just to like take the other side of this if I

were designing the ux for this wallet one of the examples that would be burned into my brain is coinbase's launch of their nft platform which was a pretty big flop and like think about all the takes after that which was like all you had to do was replicate the design of openc and you would have been golden you know and instead they tried to make it more web Tui and who knows you know this is probably a challenge that people on the internet might remember I just wasn't around but there's probably a challenging period of time where the users that existed were like very techy users right who knew how to like use the browser and stuff like that and eventually they had to make the transition to mainstream but I'm sure there was a really tough period of time uh where you know ux and UI people were

sort of stuck in the middle but I have a mouse I had a I had a question for you actually that was um so one of the maybe challenges maybe opportunities in between you to swap Labs you need to swap the the Dow is that you've got two different instruments you know with appreciation there there's like you need the token and then there's unit swap Labs Equity so in an Ideal World you mentioned in account abstraction where it's a no-brainer right for the protocols to pay for gas fees now where would they like I would assume the way that would that unit swap would afford to do that right it wouldn't be a

permanent thing but they would do it for some period of time from uni the token right they would sell off some of their treasury in uni token or no you think they would come from you to swap Labs yeah I think I could be wrong and it you know this hasn't been implemented on one of the Roll-Ups yet um but I I do get the sense that you know uniswap Labs would basically just like you know fund this paymaster that that provides you know that like pays gas on behalf of losers like I honestly think that that's a good you know potentially a good investment a good like positive Roi for them like just can you explain that can you say more yeah so it it's basically with with in the

you know imagine this is on a roll up with you know account abstraction and you've got these are all you know uh four three three seven transactions instead of regular transactions um so without going into it too much this will basically run through its own memorable right that sits above kind of the the main execution environment and the transactions are bundled and then and relayed um over to basically a paymaster um and I believe that you can say you know set the parameters of the paymaster um so that you know any address that has been identified as a uniswap wallet address

um is you know eligible to be okay I'll pay gas for you and then you know let's say another 4337 transaction comes in that's not from you know uniswap uh wallet then they would have to pay for their own gas it could be could be Rob really honestly just started thinking about this like because we were as I was testing it out today um but to me that sounds like something that would likely come from you know swap Labs I think they could fund basically a gas account uh especially if it's on and if you default to an L2 right and that becomes the default location for where these assets as they're put in from USD originate uh in the application itself I mean I I

think that that well obviously would alleviate a lot of the user onboarding flow for for the archetype of user that you were pretending to be miles and I honestly would probably be a really interesting um test just to see you know what account abstraction actually can bring in terms of user growth uh and there are plenty of other roadblocks in the in the onboarding flows as we discussed but I think that that would be a huge one especially for someone who's never been encrypted before yeah 100 um you know I think the um motivation to or I guess the incentives to vertically integrate up the stack into your own wallet you know are really really powerful um you're you know just cementing that relationship with the user by having

them you know also be not only be app you interact with but the touch point to inter interact with the app um I think that you know prior to account abstraction and and still today because we've got probably a year until the account abstraction was really widely implemented um there's very few apps that had the amount of Leverage uh over their users and the network itself to say you know we're going to build an eoa wallet and put people like through this you know experience um and muniswap's one of them openc is the other one um and you know they've it's awesome to see like what the first version of this could look like with uh with the uni wallet but I think that you know this idea of like headless wallets uh that is

enabled with account abstraction um or another way framing it is like embedded wallets uh which is possible um is going to open this you know vertical integration or vertical expansion up to you know a lot of different apps um that that don't have that same level of knowledge and just to piggyback on that concept uh one of the dominant conversations that at least we're having with games and you know games have um probably the potential to be you know one of the largest and I think historically they also have been the largest and in terms of users per application uh on chain and as more games launch I think we'll be able to see more of that on chain but a lot of

those users are not paying customers they're they're free to play users that come in and you know if there is an actual uh cost to playing maybe they wouldn't come in maybe they wouldn't convert but that's probably the dominant narrative right now which is you know how do we get rid of what they call the wallet wall how do we have somebody sign up for this game there's a wallet that's created on the back end it's pre-funded by the company that's building the game itself if there are any on-chain transactions that are abstracted away from the user and paid the gas is paid on behalf of the company itself um and I think that that's going to be kind of generally how these consumer apps applications grow and launch in scale and then it just becomes a question of like

how long are you willing to subsidize the gas fees for a user who doesn't pay uh and like it's going to make the point of monetization for these users be at different levels and what we've seen for previous games or previous applications just because there is this operating cost this you know the um this cost associated with every single user that comes on chain um so it's going to be really interesting but that's a dominant conversation that's happening in the dance ecosystem right now yeah yeah it seems like it's a you know a future cost of Revenue line item for for us right um so retention in an acquisition you know what else isn't it just something that we've talked about in previous episodes is coinbase's wallet as a service offering as well so now you

might get this super potent combination of account abstraction happening at the same time that coinbase will whitelist a wallet for you and it just solves two of these enormous pain points uh to the point where app developers can focus on building their applications that people actually want to use and Miles you and I talked a lot about the the fappening which is the the fat fat happening um interesting title for Z Prime article but it's a it's it's the idea that there could be these gigantic fat apps in in crypto and you know it's kind of like who ultimately owns the relationship of the customer is it the wallet and maybe the user experience is you have your wallet and it gives you really easy access to all these different apps that you want to use so

you would like open your wallet on your phone and kind of use that or maybe it's the app that the user feels the type relationship with and ultimately starting with the app and then having a nice wallet built on top of that like uniswap is just going to ease the friction of people doing what they already want to do which was use the app and then that's kind of your Trojan Horse way in which honestly as I said out loud that sounds a lot more that sounds like that sorry if we double click into that like are you saying that an application would plug into the uniswap application so like you have a game that's downloaded or an application that's downloaded and you've got uniswap that's downloaded all on your phone on your home screen you've pre-funded your uniswap wallet uh your uniswap app and other applications will

be able to leverage account abstraction via your uniswap wallet or it's maybe that you know uniswap either through expanding horizontally themselves or by part finding close Partners right you know you log in like they are the aggregator essentially where you you you are you know out on the uniswap wallet home screen because you know they started with a with a protocol they built the brand off of that now they have like enough leverage over the user that they'll take it with with them um and then it's a question of okay now we've got you here how do we keep you here in buying and doing more and more things right um and then it's like a bipartner build sort of exercise on their end to

determine if they like pull in you know other apps that are close Partners or if they want to like you know do more Acquisitions or expand horizontally everybody wants to be the backhand wallet service provider it's so exciting it's like it reminds me of I don't know maybe like 10 15 years ago where uh everybody wanted to build like the dominant JavaScript framework to build web apps in and it was like okay we've got 12 dominant JavaScript I'm gonna build one that's going to supersede all of them and like congratulations now we have 13 dominant but I think there's a big opportunity for other walls as a service companies uh to compete with coinbase because there are a lot of companies that are not going to use coinbases while it is a service because

they compete with coinbase in one way or another yeah I I I'd say there's no shortage of them in the space right now just from having conversations it's like a very very hot very um and I think that there's a spectrum of different kind of um Solutions here with like coin wallet as a surface being on one end of the spectrum where basically you know you let coinbase also have the ability to help you recover your keys so it's almost like this I could be wrong it's like well coinbase only gives you the SDK like if you want a UI ux on top of it too like let's say you're Macy's and you want to give someone a wallet as a service but like you don't want just the SDK you wanna you want like a nice run out of the bottle like you might use

bitsky's wallet as a service or magic has a wallet as a server so it's like I think it's how much of the stack do you want to control basically right right exactly even fire blocks is getting in you know getting into all these games with with more like retail or like you know B2B to C sort of offerings um and then you know the other side of the spectrum you've got like by economy and um you know like ox pass and a few other really interesting um providers even the safe SDK is another one um that are kind of building this you know you've got like a suite of tools and bells and whistles that you can add to this you know app specific wallet that's all you know white labeled for your brand and everything like that and it's just all have all in the background

um yeah I I see that's that's kind of you know one of the big big unlocks of of um of account abstraction is this idea of you know every having an account on every app you use without having to spin up this you know painful wallet experience I I do Wonder though like every single application has an account that's abstracted for you specifically for you you have some assets that are in there maybe they're nfts maybe it's eth maybe uscc it doesn't really matter like going to the 100 different applications that you have used at some point and going and retrieving the residual value that's left in those wallets is going to be painful yeah but like there is a fragmentation issue where it would be nice you know hypothetically if there

was a single wallet and it was a white label service and everybody could just have that be the one thing and everybody's trying to be that one thing right um but fragmentation becomes an issue yeah it's either I see two solutions it's either it's like you have you know one eoa that is kind of like your your actual bank account right and then you can let you know that eoa control these other smart accounts they're like you know your venmo balance equivalent um or you've got a service provider opportunity to aggregate all your accounts on some other app right it's like if you used Google to sign in for to create a smart account like aggregate every you know smart account associated with my Google login right right I think I think I kind

of understand why I've heard uh Fred Wilson actually on podcast couple years ago he had this little little line that stuck with me which was he never really could he had this idea that actually your Google Maps or your Apple map should be kind of your uh your home screen of choice for something like uber right so instead of signing into Uber the app you would just log on to Google and then you could like call an Uber to your location or you could order food from your location but he he just kind of never really played out and I kind of think the reason for that is like if the simplest the easy you already have a wallet it's called your phone you know so like when you want to do something like call an Uber or order food I don't want to log into another app on my phone

and then go through that I just want to be able to go to it the quickest way possible you know and I I sort of think that's why it hasn't necessarily played out like that um I would also say there's just a such a huge vested interest in Uber maintaining that customer relationship that they would never want to be you know a feature in Google Maps totally and that's another good reason why like none of the none of the apps that ultimately end up gaining a whole bunch of users and they have funds and traction and all that stuff they're not go they're going to be incentivized to not just be a feature in a wall and and you could do it in the equivalent would be you could say Okay I want to leverage the Google Maps API and we're going to build the big partnership with them and

like ooh Uber you know Google Maps wants to actually now have have us be a feature within their map it's like okay great we'll just go to Apple Maps or mapbox or any of the other providers and after the same experience like like competition ultimately will drive this in the direction of I think where you know probably the best outcomes will exist and and frankly Uber would not be a service uh they wouldn't be able to test different applications they wouldn't be able to test different services that they provide um if they weren't their own Standalone application so I I'd much rather have Uber be a standalone app that you know versus a feature within you know a Maps application even though that may be you know in some ways a better user

experience but I think the best user experience is having a sustainable business that can provide Power Services um you know as a standalone application I think the big difference there is that like uber can actually you know block people from you like the only way you can use the Uber is through their own app right where I would say like there will be you know like an Ave right like they can't block people from using all they you know by saying that you can only use it through like the office specific app or wallet in this case um so it's a little bit more challenging to kind of create those moats I would say um and and really you know own the

relationship here because there's so many different entry points to interact with these protocols I wonder if another challenge too just from a marketing standpoint is you know Netflix does an advert when it's advertising or doing its marketing Netflix doesn't go around and say hey subscribe to Netflix what it does is it advertises its shows so you're like hey this show looks good I want to go watch that show so if you're only a wallet the way you get people to sign up is hey we're a great wallet download our wallet and then me immediately my reaction to my head is like I don't want to download something else I already have so many apps on my phone I'm loaded up with apps here but if it's a if you start from the perspective of uniswap and I'm like oh I want to trade oh and they have this

wallet like yeah I'll just do that you know and I think it might just be like some it's eliminating a step instead of adding something else on your on your I think that's right I was also going to say uh you know not to like put the cart in front of the horse here but like okay great you've loaded up your wallet uh you've loaded up your unit swap account you put some cash on you've traded some some coins around like what next you know is it you know sort of the miles uh description of like the app store within uniswap that has the uniswap back end for the app for the wallet uh maybe account abstraction eases the onboarding are you able to take those assets off of uniswap easily and use them in other applications like from iPhone app to iPhone map and like

that it does make the question as to and and you know definitely have done my fair share of trading uh crypto tokens but you know what next I think that's kind of the question that I I get to because that's not like a you know come back every single day sort of right activity right you'll get them there but then you need ways to to keep that engagement up and I think that that's again yeah I think that's probably expanding horizontally into like complementary products um and whether or not they just you know they like you know compound you can come on this now or whether they decide to actually you know build out these the stuff themselves is will be interesting yep can we talk about the Saga solanus phone because actually that kind of segues

into or Michael you're gonna say before we go I was just gonna say the the one thing that I do know that Apple hates is app stores within apps that's true that's true interesting or it's the Monopoly yeah but uh let's talk a little bit about so Solana a little while ago announced Saga which is going to be their foray into uh their own Android phone um and it's got kind of a it's sort of the first swing at a crypto friendly mobile stack um so the reason we're talking about this now is they just announced that uh The Saga is going to be available for customers in the United States EU UK Canada Switzerland Australia and New Zealand you can be able to order the phone starting on May 8th um and the whole point basically is

you're trying to integrate web3 into a mobile experience which the majority of users in crypto are mobile at least just designated by kind of web traffic and and stuff like that there hasn't really been a great mobile experience so far and having being vertically integrated into a phone and a full full stack uh sort of mobile Suite that allows you to do things that you couldn't do if you only controlled the software so there are four kind of pillars to Saga um which are it's got a seed you can uh it's like kryptonit you can store your your seed phrase uh Mobley there's a vault that's uh built into the phone um there's a mobile wallet adapter there's Solana pay and there's a salon

adapt store so kind of in reverse order there you know Michael you're talking about some of the pains right that you that these apps are gonna have going through the Apple Web Store well now Solana has basically got to take matters into its own hand and they have their own dab sword that comes native on the on the phone um they also have Solana pay which is kind of exactly as it sounds like think about like Apple pay or venmo on your phone how easy it is when you just like use up which I use all the time now Apple pay I use it almost exclusively but you just go like ding it at a register or something like that the theory is you could do that with uh Solana as well so I think it sounds super cool it's definitely like a big bold swing at

something um which I always report when people do big bold swings I think that the challenge is there's a big difference between being a software organization and then a hardware organization which is like definitely more Capital intensive more operationally intensive and definitely folks have have struggled kind of trying to do that in-house so I don't know what you guys think I think it's basically it would be very cool if it works it's definitely going to be a challenge as well though I uh as an antidote I was actually having dinner with uh one of my good friends Ashley the the guy that introduced me and Vance uh originally um last night and uh he has been working he he works for a uh a large uh technology company based in Cupertino um and he has been working on a project

for I think over seven years at this point he and I were actually interns there in 2011 which is how we met um and uh has been working on this Hardware project um and working his butt off too for the last uh you know number of years and I I think the thing that you know you you don't really necessarily see um is how hard Hardware really is especially when you're going up against behemoths you know like the apples the metas of the world where like when they are doing an r d project their budget for r d is unlimited it is infinite um you know it is you know something

where there's no like venture-backed company that can come close to competing um even meta to a certain extent has had to shut down you know the a lot of the Oculus stuff that they were working on when they started on their costs reality Labs exactly um the the whole like all of the things that are you know in the in the components of soccer I I hope you know like that their phone is good enough because I completely agree with all the all the directions that the phone could be taken but it is just so hard to build good Hardware at scale um and have that be something that's usable so such that I want to be carrying around this device to be able to pay for things in person um and I think that's just ultimately

going to be the biggest challenge how you can build a hardware organization and yeah the other antidote I have um is when I was at snap one of the big things that we were working on was the spectacles um and that was a completely separate team that was a completely separate operation uh and frankly they had to be completely separate because you had to run the company completely separately and it's not something that you can mix and match you know or it's very incredibly difficult to mix and match hardware and software and there are probably only you know a few examples uh Apple being one of them that has done it well um but it is just an exceedingly difficult technical problem as well as organizational issues so I I hope the best frankly um but those

are those are the roadblocks that I foresee yeah I I agree with that and I I also think like it's great that they're taking a big swing at this um I can see the rationale right we just talked about like the Apple Store issues right and and how that is really you know a potential a dependency risk right for the for the growth of like mobile you know crypto apps um and do if you just look back at you know the apps that have driven the most usage on Solana for the most part they're they're gaming very you know retail friendly apps right um that are that are best you know uh interacted with on mobile uh and I would say like maybe the so you know that that's generally what

they're going for they're trying to reduce dependency risk um and and they're trying to make the you know these I would say web 3 retail you know focused um apps as as good as possible um but I would I I did get the sense that a lot of that activity was coming from Asia um it was at its peak and so I think it is it is interesting around you know I don't see be wondering I would be curious to know how much of like that those users are actually in these countries where this will be available um because you know Apple's just got such an enormous moat um in in the US at least and you know Android's a much more common um in other parts of the world and so if

I were them I'd be you know thinking about going to those users um but I I think there's a lot to learn uh I think there's a lot to learn from the the Amazon phone so in um in 2014 Amazon released the the fire if you guys remember that and they were trying to compete with so is the iPhone Galaxy and the Google pixel and um there there are two main reasons I think that that failed the Amazon phone failed first is um like Michael was saying they spent all this time on Hardware uh and like features that were like really flashy and sexy but didn't users didn't actually want and I think their big thing that they're really focused on 2014 was um was 3D uh and then this and and so it turned so that made the phone really expensive but then once they

released it they realized that no one actually needed needed or wanted those features um and then the second thing is that they um they Fork the Android operating system and and they came out with the the fire OS operating system and so what that meant was that uh and and their thesis for doing that is they're like oh this is going to create this huge ecosystem of apps and like app Builders and developers who want to come build these new experiences on top of the fire OS uh ecosystem but what ended up happening in reality is a year after launching it was basically just a dead ecosystem and there were no good apps so like a year you know a year after launching there's still like no Google Maps competitor on the fire OS um and so I think that like you can make a comparison to the Solana phone

so we we played around with it at the blockworks office today the the like flashy feature comparison could be like they're all these really cool things you can do in it so like you you can take a picture and immediately mint that picture as an nft and like that's something I'm like oh that's cool but like I don't I don't really know if people want to do that um so and there's like a lot of those kind of features in there and then the operating system too it's like yeah they have their whole dap store um and that's just like if if there end up being these like use cases on top of Solana and like on top of kryptonated like people build fun things to do on crypto rails then like yeah that booms but it could also be a an ecosystem that like there's not much action happening

so about so I think it's I think it's I think that's a decent comparison to make is looking back at the the flop of the the fire phone to see what went wrong there I mean keep in mind Apple did not open up the app developer store uh or the ability for third-party developers to to come onto the platform for two years it was only the official Apple oh I didn't know that I didn't know that okay it was only the official app Apple apps that were approved and then I think in 2009 was uh was the first year with the first yeah you're saying Apple not Amazon uh the apple apple uh didn't allow third-party developers onto the onto the App Store until the I think it was the iPhone 3G which was uh

two years after the first uh first gen um so you know the I think there is an element of like you need to prove out the hardware you need to prove out the use cases but you know here's a different question you know what are the probably like most um most used applications that you have in crypto right now foreign yeah I'm saying like daps but the point is like if they if Solana was to have uh those dapps as applications that were in their adapt store as opposed to specifically Solana applications would that make it more you know useful like my my take is yes like the advantage here could be just having an open

ecosystem for dap developers to get into a mobile experience a mobile mobile hardware and not necessarily have it be limited to a single blockchain uh that that could be you know kind of what I would say like that is yeah I like that maybe I I agree with that I do too I also you know people don't really talk about it like this a lot but if you were able to and by the way every point taken there Michael that it's very it's very difficult in terms of to execute right on Hardware versus software but if you are successful in manufacturing uh Hardware devices people actually want to use it's really effective distribution uh like people forget like that's how Microsoft kind of you know they they cleaned up back in the day doing exactly that and I have

heard um you know it's hard for Zuck to you know bemoan at all how Facebook has played out but I also know that part of the reason why they've invested so much in reality Labs is you know there's a strategic decision to be only software for a while and they kind of regret it never having the hardware and the vertical integration there so again it's kind of like if you can execute it it might pay off super well um but it also could be a big bet and yeah that's the I don't know I always I always just like to support big bets that are taken I'm rooting for it too I'm definitely rooting 100 yeah yeah yeah yeah um guys I know we talked about this last week but it does you know this is

happening in basically one day we got chappella coming up um so Michael I know you had you know some initial thoughts there I don't want to you know keep hitting the audience with stuff we've already talked about but what are your sort of updated thoughts on Bella uh my updated thoughts are kind of what the narrative is on Twitter right now which is it seems to have gone decently well there's some talk of uh some of the blocks are are not or I don't know what death was going on um but it seems like some of the uh mining pools are missing proposals um which suggests just some network issues um but I do think the big thing to note is uh the withdraw queue is probably not as large as most people suspected uh it

was interesting to see that the Woodrow leading up to the actual hard Fork um was about half the size of what was signaled for withdrawal after the hard Fort happened which it just kind of tells me people maybe forgot about it and and maybe you know they saw what happened and they said oh now now signal for withdraw um but yeah generally it looks like about 150 million of eth is going to be able to be withdrawn per day um and that will probably take another like 10 to 15 days to process um um unclear whether or not that's desired to sell or whether or not it's just movement of assets um one thing that we were talking about was uh attached a is officially five days away from when we're recording this

so you know there could be some element of that um interesting timing to have the withdraw queue available um but yeah I I'd say um probably a lot less than what we expected is 10 of the summary um from our end yeah I don't have many updated thoughts I I sort of agree with all that yeah me either um it'll be interesting to see just how fast the withdrawal queue kind of returns back to what could be like a more normal level going forward and and what that you know time actually looks like to withdraw like is it you know a couple days or is it two weeks I think that actually does impact like the pricing for for lsds um yeah

one additional Point um I did see uh uh some and this was last night so the data may have changed but uh it looked like almost 70 percent of uh the assets that were in the Woodrow queue were coming from Kraken specifically which if you remember then they are required to uh send back all of that if withdraw all that eighth um so you know even the numbers that we're seeing could be over inflated by specific actors in in situations like that yeah you know I think I I generally think that crypto underestimates the likelihood of bad things happening so I sort of tend to come into these sorts of events with a negative bias and but I I do think that people generally kind of overstated the that concern and the question that I

have to you guys is because this was the sort of strong consensus going into this like one or two months ago that we've talked about a lot is there's going to be this initial dip as people unstaked and then there was gonna go back up but my question to you guys is like how much withdrawn eth do you think people would need to see to be satisfied that withdrawals actually work do you know what I mean like there's some amount of okay I actually want to withdraw my state so I can pay my taxes or because I have a liquidity in a number of years but also just as likely is it could be likely that over the first couple days you see some amount of eth successfully able to be withdrawn the market decides wow this has just been de-risked right I've seen or I've

heard you know my friends or this fun that I know and people tweet about it publicly they would through their eth so then actually the deposit queue ends up you know it ends up netting out sort of positively and people there isn't really even that period of of dip um could happen like that too I don't know Kraken withdrawing a billion dollars should you know they can do that then should have pretty good confidence that it's beautiful yeah and so I think we should check back on the numbers in a week from now and see uh see where everything that's out from because I I did see at certain points there were large um uh large deposits as well as you know the consistent withdrawals um and at certain points in time before I think Kraken really got into it uh

they're actually more deposits in than the world withdrawals maybe maybe just as a closing um just as a closing story here there uh I'd love to give you your guys thoughts on this idea of like the us falling behind in crypto so a16z kind of put out this this report um and you actually saw avicho Garg over at Electric Capital kind of you know raise the raise the alarm Bell or ring the fire alarm or whatever analogy you know what have you that the US in terms of developer activity is actually falling way behind and for like a good portion of at least my time in crypto I've kind of heard these calls that the United States is falling behind in crypto but I haven't really seen much

evidence of that I would say until recently there are kind of starting to emerge like real signs that that we might actually be in danger of of losing this race and it's not like some overwhelming you know tsunami of information but you know anecdotally here and there you know I see less funds that are being you know formed or domiciled in in the US I see more like Dows you know to be constituted outside of the U.S like more of the interesting projects that are getting funded are based in Asia it seems like Abu Dhabi and Vara it being like very very serious about their desire to attract crypto Talent even Hong Kong seems to be making a real play at crypto which tacitly I think we can understand to be China

saying at least hey this is okay in our sort of regulatory sandbox playground so you know I I think it's definitely still too early to call but it really actually does for the first time at least since I've been in crypto seems like it's genuinely shifting outside of the US so so uh Rob leschner came on Empire and one of the things that he mentioned because he does a lot of investing out of uh robot Ventures is they you know advise Founders not to be in the United States anymore he's like yeah it's just not worth it um and he's like look if I started compound all over again it's like I wouldn't I wouldn't be over the states again it's part of our evaluation criteria whenever we look at an investment wow so we'll say more about that Michael so

like you'll still get like a ding if they're based in the US it's going to be more difficult yes so you have to understand you know what that uh implies um you're going to be operating with one if not both hands high behind your back and um uh regulation by enforcement is you sort of like uh you don't want to say anything because if you're too loud you might get clipped um so there is an element of uh I would say simultaneously and this is what the the presentation goes through is like there are actually positive uh regulatory perspectives that are happening in Singapore Hong Kong Eastern or Western Europe like there are places to go where

you can have this company operate in the way that you want it to that are not you know out of left field countries that you'd have to move to and it would be a crazy place to live the these are very well established and even some with major tech centers so that's largely where a lot of the decentralized protocols that we look at for investment you know are coming from just because they recognize the same things that we do now Michael art do you notice that these are like most of these teams you talk to or are expats that have like you know left the states or less friendly regimes or they for the most part you know um folks from that from these regions I I would say

um not necessarily from those regions in particular but probably from somewhere that then moved to that region to be there um I would also say there's a huge difference between the um the breakdown of the team versus the founding team you know where are you getting uh engineering or design or product resources uh you know where where are they from originally um versus the founding team you know that that is a difference as well um but yeah usually it's the founders uh you know where are you based is a question or are you you know willing to be based elsewhere is a question it's interesting um now I've always gotten the sense that Salon ego system was very Silicon Valley you know kind of based um and so you

know I think ethereum we rarely meet in the teams that are that are located like uh the legal entity has never like headquartered in the United States right nutrients um but oh be curious to know like you know some of these web 2.5 teams that they're they're feeling the heat too uh with without Clarity and I'm I'm not a lawyer nor do I pretend to be one but uh you know without Clarity it's just it it's not worth it um and we've already started to see some of these enforcement actions uh specifically going after U.S persons uh it doesn't matter whether or not the company is you know came in or or what have you you know if you're you know living and working in the US they can find Nexus there oh

yeah well maybe um you know it's definitely not not over yet but if there are any Regulators or policy makers that are listening to this I think I want to speak for everyone on this call but I think I can say we all want this to be a us-led industry right like I would love it if crypto flourished in in the US but definitely it's not it's not Destiny right that it has to be based out of here so yeah and and last thing I'd say is um like we we do think that we will get two Clarity at some point in the next year or two there's there's a lot of push in DC to at least have some understanding of what the the regulatory situation will look like um and you know this is what Brian Armstrong talks about all the time it's

give us a Playbook and we'll be able to operate and run with that um so I don't get me wrong we are not hopeful that this continues I think we just need to know where the black and white lines are and stop living in this point of Gray yeah agreed all right Fellas on that slightly somber note we can we shouldn't we can maybe end it um but this was a good one and uh I I got a in my I was in Texas for this this last week and I got a special t-shirt for Michael looking promised that he's going to wear it next time which one is the question of where whether or not I'll wear it I'll I'll I'll I'll tell you I'll read you out the the slightly less the less controversial

one because there were there were a couple that were would not be atom approved let's let's put it like that but it says uh Noah was a conspiracy theorist then it rained [Laughter] I actually think that's a pretty funny one so that one that one might be a better Advanced t-shirt but you know yeah right honestly Advance with that and the tinfoil hat I think would be that'd be a real winner that could be a nice little get up but 100 all right balance [Music]