Viktor Radchenko: Trust Wallet – Building and Growing the Official Binance Wallet (#315)

Transcript

this is epicenter episode 315 with guest Victor Rhett chenko hi welcome to epicenter my name is Sebastian Cuchillo today our guest is Victor rich Jenko Victor is the founder and CEO of trust wallet now you may have heard of trust wallet you might even also use it because it's a very popular multi coin wallet for Android and iOS trust wallet has been around for a number of years it gained

popularity during the ico boom of 2017 and then it was acquired by by Nance in 2018 and it's become the official wallet of the finance exchange and what was really interesting about this interview was Victor's story so he was brought up in Ukraine and got involved in IT security and effectively piss off the wrong people the Iranian government and he had to leave the country in his early 20s and moved the US to seek asylum that's where he is living now and he as a self-taught hacker and mobile developer and software engineer so I thought this was really impressive and I

think that it really informs many of the decisions that have gone into building trust wallet and definitely Victor's vision for what the wallet ecosystem should look like so the library which powers trust wallet trust core is entirely open source he's a big proponent of the decentralized web and ensuring that wallets remain open and compatible with one another and so this vision is somewhat in contrast to some of the other wallets that we've talked about on the show and you'll hear us talk about this during the interview we also went deep on a number of other topics including the future of the wallet ecosystem the appearance of smart contract wallets and different types of

key storage like threshold signature scheme whether or not we'll see key storage and while it features unbundle at some point in the future and one topic which i think is critical to the future of the ecosystem and specifically adoption and that is Apple and Google's seeming reluctance to allow wallets to include DAP stores that ecosystem snap markets whatever you want to call them but the ability for users to very easily have access to and browse different DAPs that they can interact with now within their wallet and so this is something I think we should all be watching very closely

because it will very much play into whether or not wallets can leverage existing DAP ecosystems I was very fortunate to do this interview with fredericka and with that here's our conversation with Victor rich Jenko we're here with Victor at chenko Victor is the CEO and founder of trust wallet Victor thanks for joining us today hey guys nice to be here thank you so tell us a bit about your background and how you got into crypto oh just a long story so probably split it into kind of thesis before crypto and after crypto I think my kind of history started when I moved to us initially so or no I will go

back deliver it earlier so I used to play ping pong for quite a long time so it was the best in my States I would go to different Championships and just played ping pong and then I was doing it for seven or eight years till I was 14 and then I got injured for a different reason because I was doing parkour at the same time and so I thought okay I think it's the time for me to sit at home now and then learn more about computers so since then I would like spent most of my time doing computers in the beginning it would usually be all about gaming pad in different games and trying to see like how you can game the system and so that's where I got it really interested and curious about technology itself so I was trying to dig into like how technology worked how do

you have how do you like find different ways around it and this is where I learned about you know these kind of basic things then when I was in university I was doing a few things writing my own community of security folks and at the same time I found vulnerabilities at the bank so I got hired to the bank while I was at the university just because for that reason because back then infrastructure would be like super vulnerable yeah there would be lots of sequel injections on pretty much in the website that's back in 2010 and yeah so I was like doing this three things at the same time and at some point I got in trouble with you know government for doing like security things and there was like political reasons as well and so at that

point I had to leave my country and then go somewhere else your country being the Ukraine right exactly yeah back then I was in Ukraine you know I was pretty fun I lived there for like almost 18 20 years yeah and then so I love my country I moved to us like turns out that I have a per to natee to go to the Alaska first um I lived in Alaska for about four months at the fisheries factory and then moved to Sacramento that's where I basically found my house too late for some time and then lived there eight months illegally until I get my documents here in the US well it's pretty fun times because sometimes you're going to shoot and then you know police would stop you and start asking questions about your ident

identification and at that point I would be illegal but I had the ID so I got lucky not to get in trouble with that but at the same time I was applying for refugee so this is how I got my documents hearing yes but it was pretty interesting process on how you do that that's a fascinating story huh what kind of security things were you doing when you're working within your crane I mean I know you you don't want to go into much detail but what can you tell us about the types of things you were up to yeah so usually there is a divided in three different type of security right - there's like white hackers great hackers and black hunters so usually they're kind of all interconnected because they usually shared the knowledge on

different things so whenever you do research about like vulnerabilities and different frameworks then you could be a white hacker at the same time you're going to share that with everyone else so what black hackers would do that will try to use that information against the developers so they'll try to actually upload their shells into all the frameworks so this means they get over they will get control over all those computers on the internet so that's kind of tricky part because you never know who who is back who is you know doing backpacking or white but I think your goal is usually like how do we improve security overall because the goal is to find vulnerabilities and then find a ways how we can fix it daga 2010 it was like really big situation because decided budges Willner

abilities on the frameworks itself so whenever you go to any website you know you can find different sequel injections but what the worst part was because all the browsers were so vulnerable if you're using Windows then the chances that you'll get a wire is while going to the website is like 20 percent or so because that's how vulnerable it was so if five people will go to a website one of them will get a virus that's like a really bad situation and then when once you get a virus you basically get hooked into this network of different computers so usually hackers would get all your credit card information any password to store in the local storage whatever but they'll just steal everything you have on a computer plus they can unlock put different things in the computer so you'll be part

of the botnet which you will be participating in DDoS attacks and then you would be mining different big points and then that person wouldn't even know because they just have a virus on it and then people just run different comments they need so people are using botnets to do basically leverage the people's computers to do Bitcoin mining back then you could be anything so back when I was it's not yet because it was back in 2010 or so but thinking later I would say if like people started doing it in public thirteen twelve or so but before that was usually like botnets for those reasons it depends like what kind of user it is because if you have like really fast computer then you could

be part of the botnet if not you would be doing something else you know hackers usually try to think about try things out of the box whatever they need to do they also would run like proxies VPNs on your computers for their own purposes and you can sell that too yeah and so where your were the things you were involved in was it where you just sort of up in something that was seen by the government as nefarious or did you have political motivations or anything like that I mean both because if you have some influence because I was running community or this right so people wanted to get information about the other people so I'm a privacy person so whenever they told me to give them information about the people who are

like part of my community I just rejected it I didn't want to share any information because it's private yeah and that's when you get in trouble okay and so that's when you fled to the US okay so you you felt that you were under under risk or were you're under like were there threats coming your way from the government that led you to flee or how did that happen yeah definitely had some tracks from the government usually not even that the government tell it's the police right but they're part of the garment so that's where you have communication with yeah but I think it was definitely risky I did have in trouble I got in trouble with them and I just wanted to avoid the situation because I tend to avoid anything that and every since in my life

no I think that's generally good policy avoiding things that are risk to your to your life so he then came to the US and he got a refugee status and now even in the hood citizenship right yes that's correct yeah so I was doing the process itself in back 2011 and then it took me eight months from the beginning to the end and so once I got my documents this is the time when I started I started learning about coding so used to be a security person I would use to like research learning about how technology works but that point I never knew how how do you write code I think those are like two different things even though I know how to write scripts back then I didn't know like how do you build software and how

do you build software that skills um I think those are two different things and you you usually have seen people in crypto where they know how to write software that kind of works but it's not a software that could scale so I think that those are it like two different things on teach me in mind yeah and then since then I started the company when I was in Sacramento it's kind of interesting because I live in a Sacramento and then I was talking to different people that was around me and most of them were either like mechanics or truck drivers I don't know why but that was does it and so they told me about one problem that something was like too super annoying to them and that I heard that problem from all the truck drivers there in Sacramento they tell me like oh it's so

hard to find parking whenever I need to stop because they have a limit of like 14 hours to drive a date and then only 11 of those is physically can drive to the rest left for the rest and then do the different types of things and so at that time without like oh this is actually interesting and I was starting to learn mobile development back in like dozen 12 now I guess yeah and then I thought like oh we're cool to build an app that allows people to find parking it's like specifically for the truck drivers and this is how the company started without me even realizing because I wanted to just solve a problem to a specific truck driver and then turns out that there is a bigger problems in space itself and so we're starting with like building a small app

that allows people not just to find you know parkings at night might also find like trucks tubs weight stations and then different type of rest areas and make it even social so the social part is actually what made it interesting because other people were able to share information with other folks so you understand this better most of the people who aren't trucking they still used notebooks on paper to write down all the truck stops where they usually stay and then will like write down all the restaurants that nearby that was pretty fun and so whenever I would talk to anyone they would say like wow this is just amazing I switched from doing like writing down on the piece of paper now using a map and so what that's what kind of impressed people and and they

started using out and I was doing it for over a year and then at some point we realized that there is a bigger problem in the market so we can scale into building not just inner service for logistics to kind of plan your trips but also into helping companies and truck drivers to find jobs so what this means you can connect you know both parties carriers and shippers and allow them to ship different things around the globe or around the u.s. in this case and so that's where we started to build this platform which allows any company come in and say like I need to ship big container from A to B and then we will use technology to find the proper driver who can accomplish this job for them and that was our job so the goal

being m to have as few empty passages as possible right yes correct so think if you think about trucking right it's all about optimizations like how do you make you know this trip is the cheapest and so what many truck drivers are doing they usually go either like full or like half full so their goal is to optimize and make sure they have as much as they can in there yeah in the cargo itself yeah and so they always try to optimize because there's always you know logistical problem because there is always someone who is loading them and so they would get on the call they will try to figure that out like what kind of loads there is because it's all about you need timing then you have distance and you have like different cities that you can go over into and so you always try to optimize

like how much time I'm going to spend on this or like picking up or dropping out and so you always try to like fill your cargo as much as you can yeah it's pretty tricky business because I don't even know there's any geology that lies that you did that yet because that needs to be optimized because it's still done through cell phones so people just always give a call try to figure it out like the small details but in reality you like fill out this information and then general details are like here you go here's the most optimal way to get this work done yeah and I mean basically the that's an np-hard optimization problem right so basically it's it's really difficult to find the best solution but finding a better solution than the one that you can find you know

with a pencil and a pen on a phone is probably fairly trivial yeah it's definitely a big problem in general logistics as you mentioned so yeah and then you definitely want to optimize as well for like pricing I might you get that's what's important yeah and then most people's all the way the thing about it right they only want to drive for like a week or two in state so you also need to keep that in mind because they want to be home in like two days so how are you optimize your route to be there and then you know do all those other things on the way so you have hard constraints and soft constraints and yet so it's super difficult so is that project there going yeah so I think the history about this is that so searching myself for about like a year and a half or two and then

at some point you know I met with a founder so with a co-founder of the company so we started doing things together so we raised some money around like 20 million and then at some point we just decided that I would need to leave the company because I would be more like on a product site and then some things just didn't work out with me and the founder so I decided to live the project and do something else and then the company is still rounds we actually sold it to a different company and they still continue doing the project but not as active as we were doing and before yeah so I think it's good to have that kind of you know check mark that you previously you know sold the company because you always need to get things from A to B and make sure you have some

kind of ending to it and then you always can move to your next things to learn and build yeah one thing to mention is that yeah whenever like I'm most from Ukraine to us so this is where my mind kind of changed from being like doing security into like building things I think that's where I got interested actually and being passionate about building rather than destroying or just doing research and so how did you transition from this into Krypton yeah so I did know about crypto probably back in 2013 or 12 even because I used to live in an apartment complex with someone who were showing me how to how does he buy drugs on Silk Road tells quite interesting you're so passionate

about it but for me at that point I didn't really pay attention to like details on you know Bitcoin but it was just interesting to learn and so he told me about like how he uses you know poor to access this websites and how he buys these things and then he told me about bitcoins and he's like yeah you definitely want to buy this even though I didn't really understand what it is at that point he said like I spent fourteen thousand dollars to buy bitcoins I was like that you crazy like how why would you spend so much but diagram Bitcoin was like nine dollars so I'm not sure it's probably 12 or 13 that was interesting to hear someone as crazy as him because at that point you just don't understand yet what it is and how technology works and then it takes like

some years until you have realization and what technology was and then probably a little bit later in 15 my other friends joined the company bread wallets or even 14 so he started working on Bitcoin so he was kind of the source for me on like just script itself so whenever I would like see him he'll explain what groupies at this point like what other things they're working on so it was kind of interesting to learn along the way since bread wallet is still you know like one of the major wallets and he was doing the Android version for quite a long time so I was learning from him quite a bit and then at some point he messaged on Facebook he's like Oh guys there is a thing coming out of the etherium he should buy it I went to coinbase but

some etherium like okay cool and then just forget about it so year after so my friends are we're going to the Def Con and so Def Con is the security conference for people who are really interested in security and also hacking and so that point they thought like oh do you want to go with us sounds like definitely like I'm super interesting as you guys know and then we went to the conference and at the same time there was lots of meetups about crypto and so this is where I learned about crypto I learned about Manero at that point and I met with fluffy pony and at that point I didn't know who he is so my friend said like he's just a big troll on Twitter and it's like that's cool and so I met with him and then they organized really cool party

back at the Def Con and so I think this is the time when I started learning about crypto but as well at this time this is where I realized I have some aetherium on my account and I was like oh wow this is interesting what can I do with them and then I went to participate in different ICS and then what I realized is because I'm mobile developer for me using mobile apps is the most in DD way to interact with the technology and so I couldn't find any apps that you can use for my tokens on the mobile device and I thought like yeah I have this tokens I need to go to my their wallets wait for a time until it looked loads all the list of tokens and then I need sometimes to edit information and like put my contract addresses decimals

values and so there was like those were like super complicated things to do and so I built something open-source in about three weeks so it was a small app that did only a few things like you know send and receive ether and then I added support for EFC 20 so I think that was the basics I built in about the month and release to the App Store so I'm really good at like prototyping and actually get things to Dan and I just like build it and open source but actually get it to the market so that's really important because you definitely want to learn from people and users and so once I get to the mark market I just told all my friends I knew about the do crypto I told them to download start using it and maybe in about like a week we already have like 200 people and most

of them were my friends so they started using the app and just give me feedback so what they really liked was one feature particularly I called it automatically tokens so whenever you load your phone it will automatically fetch all the tokens that you have only your addresses so that was like super cool feature because you don't need to ever know about like different tokens like adding them customly or manually so you would just import your wallet and just everything just shows up and that was kind of impressive for most people when they tried it because they would realize that there is more tokens that they even imagine they have on their wallets because there will be lots of ear drops or some other tokens just sits on the wallet yeah and that's kind of how how you got started into learning

about crypto because usually the way I approach problems is that I need to have a problem and then whenever I have a problem I could come up with different ideas solutions on how to solve it and then usually there is no ending to it there is just another problem just next to it and so you just kind of continue doing it until you find another problem it's really fun it's a fun process I would say so we talked a little bit about trust wallet so can you sort of describe at a high level you know what is trust wallet today and where do you think it's serving the community in a way that perhaps is underserved today like what is what is its particular

strengths yeah so I would say like the way like trust walled was designed in the beginning it was like open source and so my goal was to like how do we build technology that's easily scalable to different block chains to different technologies protocols and standards and so what currently trust wallet is is a wallet to access the centralized world that's kind of how we describe it what I mean by that is the access to first you know having access to your own private key so I think that's really important because you own your destiny by owning your private key second you have access to digital assets and it's really important to have really good coverage of digital assets because technology

wise they're hard to support because there is lots of work in Wolves into writing code for crypto and so that's what Trust does well we have support for over like 30 different block chains and different type of tokens and this part is open source so we have a library that we built for anyone to use it's called wallet core that has a standard for implementing any of the coins so if you want to add your own coin you just come and just follow the standard that we already described and then the second is like how do we give access to you know different decentralized applications staking borrowing money like how do we build all the infrastructure to make it accessible to everyone at the same time keeping security and writing everything on your phone because

phones currently considered to be one of the most secure devices itself because they using like securing clave and then there were operation system designed to be secure by itself because every app that you're on on your phone already sent boxed so you don't need to care as much about like some things it just meets security much better for the end-user and so based on those kind of descriptions that's what we're doing currently trusts wallets is that trying to build this like infrastructure that's available for anyone to build even though we don't own we don't open source the mobile apps itself the UI parts but we do open source everything else that we'll need to your attention in terms of gene security audits so if you own a security like audit the code it's all

available in the github everything regarding like transaction signing you know me mining generation all of that is there right so you've all been sourced the essentially the the library which i think is called trust core yeah wallet work dirt wallet core right so yeah we'll link to that in the show notes how many users do you currently have and can you say how much value is stored in instances of the Tres world so we don't track any of the kind of information that we we recently just added support for doing crashlytics which was a big painting yes because we couldn't actually track like what a crashes happen in the mobile app so we had to install some analytical tools to see

what crashes are happening and where they happening and so we just recently started some getting the data in terms like how many people actually used Ross wallet and the thing it's around like four hundred thousand monthly active users or something around that and then you know the information is not secret I'm happy to share anything we learn from just building trust but that's kind of what the numbers are and I don't think they're growing as much like in terms of the growth itself since you know 2017 I think what happened back 2017 we're able to get to like 150,000 monthly active users just providing ear c20 wallet and that happened pretty quickly because there was a big need in terms of just you know participating in token sales but now what I see is mostly

people who are staying in app they actually use it quite actively every day pretty much because used to be the time when people just participated in token sales and then they kind of gone now I don't see them often it's probably like 10% of people who actually left and so now what do we see what kind of activity we see is the people who are actually actively using for their own purposes and there is like so much to explore in terms of different applications that already built I think that's kind of what the current status is in terms of like data and users so on your website you say that the that trust wallet is secure open source decentralized and anonymous describe what you mean by you know what what what do those different adjectives

mean to you and what stands behind those things yeah so if we talk about decentralized right so I think the one important topic to bring is like okay you don't be a private key but the second question is like geez follow standards because if you don't follow us standards then whatever like something happened to your app then the question is like can you restore this on some other application so if you don't do that then you know you're not so discharged because you can break some things in the people not available to restore their wallets and some other devices so what do you mean that adds that like you own everything pretty much and then you have access to those applications that also decentralized you know things like you know some our

contracts they're not gonna go away so you can easily interact with them in this centralized manner so that's what it means security wise I think security is about lots of different things that could happen right so it's all about like do you open source your code that does all the like magic with crypto second do you have all the tools on the phone itself are using correct like using secure and play by using keychain do you store all the data security dialogue people to set like passcode to make sure no one can just you know get into the app so I think here it is all about like those small details that allows you to sleep well at night and not to worry about someone you know getting in trouble yeah so the anonymity aspect is that we don't really collect any information about the users so we

don't collect their addresses any of that information either we know who they are so most of the other like centralized wallets they would usually collect information about their like you know first name last name emails and different types of information but we try to stand stay on the side where we dunno the user and we're just building a product for them and so that's what kind of decentralized markets will do is that you don't really know who that person that interacted with you but you know it did so I think that's kind of how we need to design our systems is that TV on the side where users control the data they don't expose unless they want it to so I'd like to stay on one of the aspects you mentions that you talked about decentralization and the importance for users to be able to take

their seed and import it into other wallets that would adhere to the same standards and so this is a topic that you know different wallets have different approach is when it comes to this so you know a couple of weeks ago we had the CEO of Zen go or yellow lion on the show and you know they're building a different a very different type of wallet they're leveraging threshold signatures in order to secure users private keys and his point of view is that the wallets will will create their own eco systems and that in the future because of the layers of complexity to build on top of wallet applications it will become harder and harder to ensure compatibility between wallets so in your

view this is something I guess that's quite important this ability to for wallets to remain compatible how do you see this going in the future do you see a future where wallets are their own sort of walled garden ecosystems or where all the wallets are compatible or is there some other scenario that I'm missing here yeah I think it's a trigger question to answer but in general like being compatible is a big thing in technology right so you want to make technology work well you want to make it compatible I don't think it's a bad thing to actually explore tss part I think TSS technology is actually proven to be really good and I think it's good that Sango is doing it I don't think it needs to be compatible from the beginning it could be compatible in the future in general because yeah you're

not gonna have the same like well words in general to like imports into TSS or anything like that well what's really important is to always try new ideas you never know what you're will work so if you think like oh yeah we need to stay compatible with twelve words then charcoal signatures would never happen so that's why I like we definitely want to try that and see if it works and then if you think about the wallets you know even twelve words will disappear I think she'd think about technology that's not really intuitive for the end-user and it's going to be old abstracted away and then all you would need to do either like use your biometrics or some type of data to login into your wallet and then this is going to be all stored into your iCloud where everything authenticated with your own data so in generally the

unmooring part or the security of your own private key will be abstracted away for the users so which is quite nice because you know less work for you to do but the second part is are the walls will become you know closed communities that also depends on how your company is run so if you have investors then you got in trouble so you're gonna have lots of investors who will be pushing you into creating this closed ecosystem because if you don't then people could easily leave to other apps so you always need to catch up and make sure you stay on the top of the product I think it's a different use case for because we currently part of the by Nance so we don't have that incentive to kind of make money and our goal is just to implement a adoption and so by that

that's the reason why we're like open source lots of things and we build them as modules because we do want to people to create lots of walls on top of it and there is already like hundreds of walls being created just using the library itself and so that's kind of where we're trying to be really good at not just help ourself as others but then the second part is like the ecosystems so if you think that you have investors right like the best thing you would do you probably want to create this ecosystem that's probably closed because people not going to leave other products easily so they will always stay with the product and then on top of it you can hook up with different services that will allow people to buy sell crypto exchange and the more people say with your product the more profits you will

have at the same time because wallet would be the interface to access different decentralized applications and this is where any wallet is able to monetize because if you're the front-end for buying crypto you can charge small fees if you allow people to know exchanged crypto then you can also you know make small cheese and that's what the exchanges are doing I think if you want to build successful business you want to do change that's kind of what the current state is because otherwise it's really difficult to find any business model that works well this super interesting and that's a lot to unpack yeah I really want to get back to the by Nance ecosystem in in just a bit beforehand though um can you talk for a little bit about smart contract wallets

and how you see them yeah I think you generals Mark Wallace good technology but there's limitations to it it's definitely good that you have different customization features you can customize your daily spending limits you can add different guardians who has access to your you know wallets itself it's definitely a good future set I think there is also limitation soon so there's like a features right and there is a bunch of them that you can set because it's all programmable so if you can program your smart wallet that's actually pretty cool and then there's a problem with like being compatible which is fine I think being not compatible is okay but you trying different technology that's now possible just to connect it together in a way

but there is a limit to how many different currencies you can support so it's not easy to support both the theorem and Bitcoin at the same time so you definitely want to choose whichever you want to support but you think that you know there's going to be a couple of winners in the end you know there's going to be couple platforms that kind of have lots of volume and usage so it may be make sense just to focus on one try to polish the experience and maybe in the future you can even change your product that would be a smart smart wallet for one blockchain but it would be not that smart on like a Bitcoin for example so you can always you know customize because you know some of the things could be encapsulated or abstracted away from it for the user to make it like look simple so in the

background you could run you know the smarter wallet functionality but in the front-end the UI itself it will be just simple as using any other app so you definitely want to try it out and see which one will work but you know there's a couple of wallets it's ignacio's wallet argent those are the guys who are doing smart contract wallets I'll definitely look and talk to them and see what they billing just gonna get a touch just get a sense of like what's out there yeah but in the end it's all about like who's gonna build a better product and you never know what things will work well until you actually try and ship it to the whole world so I'm curious what you think is so the future of wallets and key storage like at the moment these things are mostly in most applications I

guess sort of bundled right you have your your key storage system whether that's you know twelve words or tss or any other like hardware wallet or whatever right there's there's some form of key storage solution there smart contract wallets also and then there's all these service layers built on top so simply storing coins is one service then you have things like you know defy applications then you might have things like it like like it decks built into it social recovery and these sorts of things so these are all like feature sets built on top of key storage what do you think the future looks like do you think that perhaps these different layers will be unbundled from unique

applications or will they can you need to exists as like a vertical and within one app yeah I think if you look at any kind of market what happened before so usually what happens any company would they will try to do they will try to build the product first so that's kind of how you always want to think about like let's do the product first and then how we can help develop yourself words and so I think we're the point where we built a product the base and then what we feel would be really useful to build now is how do we expose the interface for people to interact with trust well easily and that's what mini-worlds will do the same time in the next couple of years is that how do you expose your methods for anyone to use the app itself and so that's where we

see you know lots of usage will happen on the deep linking site so if you can imagine this as more like a Facebook SDK type of thing where you just say like I want to log in with a wallet and then you don't really worry it like which wallet it is because then we will work it will just identify which wallet is installed and we'll try to open the wallet signed transaction and then you just get back to your app so I think all those apps will be definitely a bundle but to be honest there is nothing to unbundle yet all the mobile apps that they're just so limited um there's only a few apps that didn't build so what if you that should happen is that we need to definitely unbundle the part and we need to build the easy interface for anyone who's like mobile developer to

come in and say like you want to build a defier here's how you do it and then you don't need to worry about the key management because the world will handle it for you as a developer it makes it easy for you because you know managing private keys is like super hard and so what they will get a focus is building a product itself and utilizing the SDK to sign transactions and so I think there's going to be also some time until you know these htps will come on the application layer and maybe even couples Lee years later will see this happening on the operational system level as well so then even Samsung already doing it for Android so now you will be able to access your wallet on the iOS level itself so you don't need to even have wallets installed they just be utilizing

the secure and clay from Samsung itself easily and I think that's the proper way to do it itself because you want to unbundle that as much as you can so you build those building blocks for any developer to come in and easily built carry integrations because if I wanted to build a defy app at the moment then I would need to build all this like things that you mentioned like a wallet and your security built in and all of that it just too complicated and most people don't have enough resources to even explore those ideas yeah I think I agree there I feel like in the future increasingly key storage and key security will be unbundled from you know all the defy applications that that exists and then yeah I guess the wallet

space will will become more of a service layer where you download an app and then that app connects to you know different key storage solutions that you might have key stored on and then from these apps you can interact with D Phi services and it's it's kind of like banking services layer I guess on top of key storage and key storage is just another layer on top of that and like there are different players operating at these different layers that yeah you guys at gnosis have built a smart contract wallet I wonder what your thoughts are on this idea of unbundling and if this is something that you think about we most certainly do so we do actually see the wallet as kind of an entranceway to the ecosystem kind of

like the browser was you know in the early internet days just with an inbuilt payment channel and that's currently what's missing in you know traditional web browsers now I very much like to speak also about the finance and the ecosystem so defy is very much the the hot topic du jour at the moment and everyone's talking about daps and everyone seems to be trying to build some kind of dap marketplace but there is one barrier that many in the ecosystem are pointing to and that is that Apple and Google are not very receptive to having DAP marketplaces in their app stores in wallet apps I'm

curious if you could share your insights because Trust while it does have a DAP browser but at least when I tried it on my iPhone nothing comes up so I'm on Android and for me it works perfectly so I think this is is an apple problem okay so yeah well describe describe your experience working with the different mobile platforms yeah that's definitely an issue for us since I'm like iOS developer as well so I'm really into just ups or ecosystem itself I think if you look at Apple itself they being always really strict about like the rules what's allowed what's not and then there's a few things to mention that's not usually encouraged by Apple publicly but one important thing is Apple you

know they're the ones you have a business model that works for them and then what happens right now is all this mobile how's it being released they kind of against the business model for Apple okay so I just hold we have two issues with Apple to the past the years so first issue was back in 2018 regarding collectibles and so the main problem was that cryptic IDs will list it inside app and they were like mentioned somewhere in the code so Apple found that and they said like no you're not allowed to mention anything about collectibles neither you want to show any suggestions to the user itself like work to find them how to you know just get and get access to them so that was the first problem the second problem what happened is you know Intel's in 18 early this year well we were informed that that

browser it's not something that Apple likes and so I think what they were really against from is not giving access to damps so we used to have lists of different application that user can just press and explore and so that's kind of gets the business model for Apple because whenever you lose those apps user can go and buy collectibles and so this is where Apple would want to have 30% cut which doesn't happen recouped it because there is no way to even charge this neither most dev developer is willing to pay for that percent and so that's where the problem comes in and then even communication about this problem it's pretty tough so whenever you try to reach out to Apple sometimes you want to get response within a week so sometimes it would be pretty

proactive so whenever we have any issues we usually try to contact them via the phone and it's probably the most effective way because you can just ask direct questions and discuss anything you want and so I have a person this example now where it can collab and just ask questions regarding problems we have and there will be pretty explicit on what they want from you so there would be explicit that you know giving access to taps is against their business model so and I turned understand that because you know you definitely have the problem at the same time it's at this moment it's small what they want to avoid is having this problem to grow because if they're not going to stop now it will be it will come up much later and they will

have bigger consequences so that's why I fell is trying to be pretty strict on this trying to like cut down on any potential threat in the future but do you think that you may at some point if that's you know gained some significant traction do you think that they'll need to change the policies I mean if you think back to three four or five years ago yeah probably about five or six years ago cryptocurrency wallets were not permitted in the Apple App Store and you needed to have an Android phone if you wanted to use cryptocurrency and then after some time Apple opened up and now you can you know now there are cryptocurrency wallets in in the Apple App Store do you think there will be some shift at some point what would need for that to happen yeah there will be

definitely some shifts I think what will need to happen is the adoption right is the user demand if user demand something Apple will find ways how to make it work and so yeah I definitely like Bill might come up with some way since they're like yeah you would need to pay like you know some cuts from doing payments or you know paying for digital content so what Apple is okay with is payments they feel that payments it's not something they willing to charge like percentage charge because it's not easy controllable itself but what they don't want to happen is the digital content to be sold without them you know getting the percentage I think that's what the issue is but the same time if the any technology will get adoption you know there's always going to be some business

models and built on top of it and so that's what Apple is pretty good at so there's one thing to mention which is how Apple kind of look at different apps at different regions which is not really fair in my opinion because they have lots of leverage in some countries but not the other um so here's one example that actually kind of what it is so ok alcohol doesn't have much leverage in China because there is not many people using an iPhone and in order to make it work you need to have you know lots of iPhones being deployed in China and the reason how you can get that adopted if you have V chat installed in the App Store or you have V chat installed an iPhone's itself and so what happens via

chat wants to have access to different mini applications that they run inside but apple says no we are not allowed to do that and so what happens in then apple doesn't have a choice as not just to let them list those apps because otherwise no one is gonna buy iPhone in China that's kind of what it is and then if each other is not installed on iphone it's pretty useless in China and so for that reason Apple has different rules for China companies so if you go to like I'm token you will be still able to use the apps and then other services that's not allowed in like for example trust wallet and so this is kind of the market where it's changes on territories so Apple is okay with that as long as they have leverage to some things so it's very tricky question but it's definitely

not clear in terms of guidelines for Apple because for some apps that would say one thing for the other app different things so it's kind of tricky to find the balance where it what's a lot what's not because it's not very well defined in their guidelines and do they say this is for the purpose of quality control so do they say basically it thinks that offered in the App Store you'd expect you have to be a reasonable quality and not to be malware so basically if you create an app store within the App Store we have no control over what you let users installed through your app is that the official line yes that's the official line and I I tend to agree with this based on conversations with them it sounds like

yes they're okay with you listing different applications inside your application but wanting to keep in mind whatever you submit application you would need to list all the applications that you already have there and you need to provide their developers at the Apple developers ID so as long as you provide that information they would be able to review and make sure those applications gonna meet their standards so in this case because there is so many tabs and they're listed on different kind of domains and then there is a way for you to send me list of those applications because there's just so many and you don't even know who running those and that's kind of the point of crypto you don't really know who runs the website yeah for sure so how did you get around the case of the non-tangible tokens because I know

that trust wanted em supports yes C 721 as well as 1155 right yes correct so I think at this point because they're not publicly accessible until you see one so apple okay with that because you need to find somebody who's gonna send it to you or it there's a way to buy it so that's why they were trying to cut down on usage of taps because if you don't know how to use tabs then you don't know how to buy collectables so that's pretty easy for them so in this case they kind of limit it for you to ask them quote so and lets them let's segue into another topic so you were acquired or trust what it was acquired in 2018 by by Nance can you tell us how that came about

yeah so it was pretty interesting because you know I started trust fall back in 2017 September so that's when I started writing first line of code and then around March or February I decided to go full time so I wasn't even full time for about like six months or so and the reason why I had to switch full time because there was so much demand for you know different product features and just support so I had to like switch my time to it um and then at that point I started thinking like alright so we need to raise some money because you know I have like a team of two three people now so we need to definitely stay afloat somehow and then find a way how we can monetize ourselves in the future because wallet itself don't have a really good business model from the beginning unless

they have lots of users so you can think of it as like Chrome browser right which doesn't have a business model by the same time it kind of fits other purpose in the ecosystem it just provides good access to the Internet so the same thing is here is that we want to build that kind of interface with the blockchain itself and so I started raising money so we want to first into the route of raising money for the token sale so we wrote on something about trust platform which is a platform which allows people to access different applications with different you know token economics and other things so I was able to raise money for that and then at some point you know I started talking to finance and they'd been mentioning about like dinner just investing money into the company itself

not the token because I was going for the token because it's usually easier to raise money that way and then while talking to finance I realized that how powerful the company is in terms of like what they were able to achieve and just a short amount of time and then they also profitable which makes these are for a company to stay and grow because if you have money money you can always reinvent them into technology and just grow business itself and it was pretty difficult for me to kind of work on different problems you know I'm not a big fan of like running HR doing business side all those in a company that could happen so for me I'm all about the product like that's kind of my passion and I don't want to do or deal

with anything else and so we're talking to finance and then you know I went to match CG so once I met CG I think the deal basically got closed because I realized you know how good the person is like he's really like open person he like really passionate about crypto and what I realized is that like I would want to have such a leader working with me to actually make the make things happen and since since that's you know I decided that we need to join finance and just kind of keep forward keep moving forward in terms of development for crypto and you know it's good because you know we have a single focus to kind of like focus and distance like finance and just walk built a wallet that allows you to access

different financial tools on top of it so it kind of worked out for both of us because now Finance has you know something to offer for their users in terms of decentralized access and then you can also store money on finance if you want to but you also have your own way of doing it so it's good to have the ecosystem at the same time it's not limited because anyone could use the app itself on your website you say that you have a deep integration with finance infrastructure what exactly doesn't mean yeah so we do have lots of integrations in the app itself so one of the things you wanted to give access is to decentralize you know Dex's so we currently support to providers one of them is fiber network

allows you to swap any years to 20 token pretty much so that kind of makes it easy to swap all the tokens that you got into like token sales but the same time we provide like hooli pledge exchange for Beynon stamps so you can think of khyber as a swab from one token to another but for the binding snacks itself we you have all the functionality to do orders so you have order book you see details about like all the incoming order books so it's kind of nice because this is kind of the beginning of building all this decentralized exchanges and I believe there is going to be way more in couple of years and I'm really looking forward into other companies building them so we would be really happy to support like Xerox or any other protocols that will be out there because as long as they provide

good technology for us to integrate it would be happy to support all of that because we already have the interfaces we already have like art architecture built in to support multiple providers what do you think the future of custody and self custody looks like I mean basically with finance being a bigger exchange in a custodian of other people's assets and trusts wallet being you know the the nun has told you little brother so to say how do you see that evolving in the future like my vision on this is that we kind of I think technology trying to compete with each other right in terms of like how easy to use and how secure they are so it's

competition between custodial and noncustodial and I feel like the casino solution is still better for the end-user because they're much easier to use they're cheaper usually and then you don't really need to worry about anything because the company will take care of it for you but then on the other side noncustodial is definitely a better option if you think in terms of security but it's not for everyone I think the technology is not there to basically state that it's so secure that you're not gonna lose your keys you're not gonna lose your fonts you're not gonna get be like hacker anything that so I don't think we can claim that for noncustodial because it's not as good to claim that but what we should happen is that we need to definitely improve technology on non-custodial side we're

from like you know there's a different type of wallet as well is that like what if this is a harder wallet how do you make sure you never forget your recovery phrase because if you had it written down somewhere in your table and then you know your ledger or trouser is gone and then the phrase itself done to it so like what do you do right so it's actually the issue of the user itself but how do you protect to that like how do you build those social wreck harbors right into the heart of wallet and how do you build that right into the software wallets so I think the challenge still on the technology side rather than you know something else so I feel that we just need to improve that part of technology to make it easier for the user to use it and then there's

definitely benefits to that so how are you intending to improve that and basically what's the roadmap like if I trust wallet yes I think we would like to improve that on using you know the current technology in terms of like using different securing claves so what do we feel that other companies should build like Apple and Samsung is to have you know easy access to be secure and claim information and then also social state recovery built in because on the other hand Trust wall doesn't have to be a key store for older your private keys I think what would be a better option is to be the interface to all the crypto instead so basically that's our mission to just allow easy access to the crypto services like digitalized finance and so

all the part regarding the keychain side it could be done by the OS level itself at some point but because it's not done yet we need to build our own technology for it but I think this will switch over as we discussed maybe like a couple of years but that's where we would like to be on is that like how do you build that easy access and I worry about like the keys itself you know anything that will happen that will try to improve that would definitely add up but what we can do right now we can build you know better technology in terms of like stirring your keys encrypted somewhere on your iCloud account that allows you to always like exploit those keys those kind of things we can utilize and those solutions could work on other platforms as well so it's possible to do that on

Android so we'll just try to build those integrations and see which one work well you can also utilize different biometrics to use that to encrypt information it's not allowed to do by default itself so you would need to use some third-party SDKs that allows you to do face recognition that's what Zengo is using currently I think those are cool ideas to try and you definitely want to have can centralize way of growing technology where everyone have their own way of like doing technology so then we can learn from each other and see which things work which not do you think that them starring seed phrases to the iCloud account is a good solution for most people because basically if you look at the passwords of the typical iCloud

users they're often super weak right so busy do you think people have enough of a sensitivity to the issue that if they lose that key oh if they lose their seat phrase they lose access to the money yeah it's a tricky question because you always need to kind of pay attention or like how much is storing and so if you're serving large amounts of money you definitely want to go like hardware wallet to make it secure but I think most part of like software wallets will be made for you know simple security most people currently on earth will probably have less than $1000 did they own so in this case it might actually work for most people to just have encrypted version of the password and you can also enforce how strong you want

the password to be so if you enforce really strong password then it will be encrypted that no one can like even decrypt it easily plus they need to also get access to their Apple account this is all like layers of security right so you might have a strong password on your Apple account but you might use like a password manager that has a weak password so it like you one has to secure basically every layer of of security so that like whatever key is be and then you know you might have a simple something as simple as like one's computer being compromised where they anyone can have access to that so I I feel like there's different layers of security here which for most people is too complex to even comprehend that you know where the weaknesses are in that in

there are curse or personal OPSEC yeah exactly and also if you look at the bigger picture as those that those are the things that should be coming from the providers itself so Apple needs to like put like better security probably on those accounts because if you think about the wallet right so you can afford some of the things but if the platform itself is broken like it would be hard to build any applications on top of it so Apple is really good at like keeping superior of the Apple accounts even though like there is some you know weak passwords could be done but at the same time they try to avoid those situations but it's tricky question because most people still also store like their recovery phrases in one password so one like if you get access to one password then you get access not

just to like your exceed phrase but also 100 other accounts that out there that you can utilize so it's definitely lots of weak points I think an interesting business opportunity for a company like Apple would be to provide some form of of key storage solution or even like the ability for someone to generate like a tss share and then have Apple generate the other one and maybe you have like a third one as a backup somewhere but sort of like a big go situation but where you know they're you're leveraging TSS and Apple as a trusted source like as a trusted third party holding part of that

share and then while the developers could basically say ok we're like we're leveraging the Apple TSS SDK and building our wallet or whatever infrastructure on top of that yeah I think that's definitely something that should happen I don't think it will be happening from Apple anytime soon like in not in the next couple of years unfortunately yeah of course but what would be interesting to see how Samsung will do it because Samsung has a bigger one of the biggest players in Android space and if they do it and then Apple what basically thinking about how we actually catch up that so I think it's all about this kind of game where if something works then other companies will come as well and then will change their minds even though Apple said they're not interested in crypto it doesn't mean they're not going to come

to the market so if there's going to be lots of demand and we're gonna build enough technology to get to the point where we kind of crossed a Charles knee and then now it's the time to adopt it because you don't have an option people is gonna be buying Android right so trust wallet has is kind of unique in that it supports many many tokens and it seems like you're adding new tokens all the time and like if you you know if one follows your blog there's always new features being added to the ad so through the wallet why are you taking this approach and what do you think the future of interoperability looks like yeah regarding tokens I think we try to add as many tokens as we can because every other token is the community so this is

a community of people who would like to have support and I definitely think that it's needed sometimes in order to like test out technology you actually need to have it in in your hands so I think in the end there's gonna be like a few winners most likely who will be like running like it would be like one central kind of blockchain that handles everything there is lots of different applications different block chains inside of it and so it's gonna be like pretty massive thing but at the moment we're just trying to like expand support for different in our crypto usages yeah that's kind of where we're going into that how much is that strategy is directed by by Nance you know by Nance also supports many many tokens in in their exchange and their decks but also

some people have sort of criticized them for your taking money to to list those tokens how much is that strategies coming from by Nance and do you take money for supporting tokens on trust wallet we don't ask for any money it's actually pretty clear so we have our own website people developers that trust worldcom we stayed exactly what's required to get listed on trust wallet I think the rules are pretty simple you gotta be on top 50 in coin market map the reason why we have this rule is because if we don't set this then it makes it hard for us to add lots of points that's like super small and it makes it hard for us to manage they're like nodes and running the infrastructure for them and they're the usage would be super small and so it

just we just will spend too much time managing our resources does the reason we try to like to set that bar higher than other companies but besides that it's all free to integrate and then you can see exactly all the integrations on github so it's pretty clear all the companies that did integrations the past like three months it's probably five gem companies they created pull request they followed all the guidelines and then it just gets integrated so they're doing their own integration essentially and you're just adding them in exactly so it's not even us adding the is what we try to do we try to just look guide them and also do code review and make sure like everything is good and secure but besides that we just let other companies to do it because they

know their technology much better than us what turns out to be is that the winner we want to integrate any coin it just takes more time for us to learn how every detail works and then we'll just spend more time in doing integration instead of companies coming in and then you know doing everything themselves okay top 50 in the coin market capita are there any criteria for determining you know if these coins are scams or if you know is there anything like that yeah so there's a little bit more criterias but usually if you're on top thirty fifty usually kind of follow automatically so one of them is make sure you have really good documentation because without documentation we won't be able to attend a review code make sure everything's good we need to have

stable access to all the notes because notes writing is super hard so you always want to have notes to test and then have some backups um you want to make sure that team is good we would always kind of do some background check and make sure like the team who is writing it is fine yeah that's probably would be our like the priorities but in general we're just trying to see which one has the most usage if there is people you know we definitely integrate it even if it doesn't follow those like rules that we mentioned so are you running any of these notes or those projects are running nodes yeah so currently we try to ask for those companies to run notes for us by the same time yeah we just run most of the notes ourselves yeah we do have them as

the backups as well just to make sure there is always a fallback okay this carries quite a cost I just I presume this Truswell intend to make any money or it's just is this just a service that finance feels it needs to have in order to maintain its ecosystem and is carrying that cost yeah I think for the wallets is just difficult to have a business model at the beginning you can have a business model but and I don't think you will have big like big growth it's it's hard to kind of balance both but thing for us right now the focus like how do we build more technology and then just make it everything as free as possible for anyone to use but like regarding business model for

wallets I think there is lots of interesting ideas to explore so one of them because we started doing staking recently what idea would be if you wanted to go this route is to run your own note and to let all your users to validate into your note so in this case you could be making percentage based on how much being delegated so that's one idea and then you can have also different access the different application like the apps where you can charge a small referral fee those kind ideas and then plus we have a fee up gate so we have integration with simplex Monta wire so we could be charging fees on that but for us it's not as Greater called a moment because violence itself is profitable and then it's good that we have this opportunity just to run the

team built technology and not to worry about the business model um so I don't think many companies have that ability but I'm just happy that we have this so and we'll just utilize it as much as we can cool well as we wrap up where can people learn more about trust wallet and all the different things you guys are building yeah I think we just recently lunch community so that's where we would like to share more announcements or more ideas on what are we working on but in general we're pretty accessible and Twitter I think that might be the easiest way to kind of get in touch but otherwise on trust wall comm I'm pretty open so I will always do it out about trust wallets I talk to anyone who has interesting questions cool thanks for coming on Victor yeah thanks so much for

having me Thank You Victor yeah thanks so much thank you for joining us on this week's episode we release new episodes every week you can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes Spotify YouTube SoundCloud or wherever you listen to podcasts and if you have a Google home or Alexa device you can tell if to listen to the latest episode of the epicentre podcast go to epicentre TV slash subscribe for a full list of places where you can watch and listen while you there be sure to sign up for the newsletter so you get new episodes in your inbox as they're released if you want to interact with us guests or other podcast listeners you can follow us on twitter and please leave us a review on iTunes helps to be behind the show and we're always happy to read them well thanks so much and we look forward to

being back next week [Music] [Music]