WalletConnect 2.0: To Interchain and Beyond!

Transcript

monday good morning everyone like welcome to lisbon i hope you enjoy the city like it's a beautiful city where it will welcome you all to enjoy this crypto journey together and the lisconne organization has done an amazing job putting this venue together so if you don't know walla connect volcanic is an open protocol for connecting wallets to dapps and my name is pedro gomez i'm the co-founder of wall connect and i'm here to tell you why wala connect exists how it doesn't even work and where we came from if you've been around ethereum before wall connects it was very much desktop first and you had to use metamask for everything and then you had the option of using dap browsers on the mobile but

it always came short of the real browser experience and wallets ended up spending more time developing browsers than focusing on their wallet capabilities so wallet connect basically enabled that thousands of mobile wallets could connect with apps without having to build their own browser it creates a secure connection to your browser so that your wallet whatever your favorite wallet is can be your wallet that you use for every single doubt how does even work if you use metamouse before you've seen this approved flow where you get this pop-up and you get to approve a app to access your wallet he basically exposes your accounts the same way but on mobile by creating a secure channel

this secure remoting signing protocol is fully interruptable with all of these wallets and we open source it from day one since 2018. we use a end-to-end encrypted json rpc transport that goes through a relay infrastructure that uses pub sub to relay messages across different providers so you can use your favorite app with your favorite wallet and it will all do it encryptedly and be interoperable without any limitations it uses qr code scanning basically you have this qr code sharing just enough information to establish the secure channel that you can then connect the mobile dab the desktop dab to the mobile wallet but we actually have gone further

with wall connect v1 and we also supported mobile linking where you can use your mobile safari or mobile chrome with all the advantage of a normal browser with your favorite wallet and it does this by creating a deep link that establishes the connection across two mobile applications and we have even done this with between two desktop applications you can have for example gnosis safe that enables you to connect your multisig to any mobile dab between two browser tabs and we have even other desktop applications now like encrypted inc that you can install on mac os and it will connect through wall connect to any browser whether it's safari chrome or firefox

we've seen an exponential growth since the beginning and we're now over 40 000 this screenshot is from july and i definitely need to upgrade this one to show you how many demos are happening right now volcanic is growing and the community has shown in the great support because they believe that the connection between a wallet and adapt should be open to everyone and provide as many competition as possible and that's why we see today over 70 wallets and more than 200 applications using wall connect it has completely taken over the ethereum community where you can always connect with metamask the wall connect is always there as an option to you for you to use your favorite wallet

we've seen the rapid progress and adoption since the first prototype in 2018 and when we launched beta we had greater wallets like trust wallet argent rainbow and others adopting it very early on we finished our beta last year where we already saw a lot of wallets and dabs and this year we're introducing version two where we already have beta testers in production using the much better version that builds on top of the experience of years of production that we learned from the feedback of different projects and applications so what's new with wall connect 2.0 vola connect 2.0 introduces probably the

most exciting feature everyone has been asking for this since the first day it multi-chain support whether you want to use ethereum cosmos polka dots cello solana or near you will be able to use wall connect 2.0 with your favorite wallet it will be truly a multi-chain application because no matter what wallet and no matter what chain we will be able to support it multi-chain applications is something that we really believe will become the future where we really change the pattern that we have today of a single chain application and your wallet can connect to multiple change and expose exactly the change required for the dap this pattern would require a permission system that we built where the dap will

request the wallet to meet compatibility so that the wallet can then expose the right accounts and provide the signing methods that are necessary and as you can see when you actually request for signing we can target specifically each chain that is requested for that transaction so you can be connected for example to an ethereum chain and a cosmos chain and you send the transaction exactly to the right chain every time this uses like what we call the chain agnostic improvement proposals it's a set of standards that allows us to have a neutral organization where we build like the most low-level components that are shared between all chains we started

with blockchain identifiers where we created namespaces and different blockchain references to identify different chains and different ecosystems and then we expanded this to account identifiers where we ended up like appending the blockchain to the accounts and the cip adoption has grown immensely a lot of projects has already implemented these patterns which means that wall connect 2.0 will be fully interoperable with these projects from the day one we also improved a lot of the user experience there was a lot of caveats with wallet connect where you had to scan the qr code every time you need to create a new session so we decouple the pairing that allows you to actually connect once and instantiate as many

sessions so you can scan the qr code and go to multiple applications without having to scan again this basically built on top of the permission system that i mentioned before each application gets a own permission set and then from the same connection you can scope out what each application can read from your wallet and what can sign on top of this we improve the experience by creating a single socket where the messages are acknowledged and we have a much better message delivery from our infrastructure and some sessions some users complained about sessions stalling indefinitely so we created explicit expiry times to ensure that sessions have a very

guaranteed behavior for everyone the clients also maintain multiple sessions so you no longer have to create multiple clients for multiple sessions which means that wallet will have to instantiate the single client to manage all their wallet connect connections and we reduce the bandwidth quite significantly this will help with like the scalability on our infrastructure where we saw on d5 summer and other peak times where infrastructure went had outages and we optimized for that to make sure that we can onboard millions and millions of users and we introduced perhaps what many people didn't think as a priority and some people thought it was actually one of the biggest

problems of all connect we have the decision decisionalized infrastructure first we renamed what we considered the bridge server to a relay server so now we think about the server as simply a mechanism to relay messages or a mirror for you to bounce messages between two applications but then we started thinking what if we enabled like each application to connect to its own relay server that's why we started using waco waco is a decentralized messaging this is developed by status and wallet connect will be the first application outside status to use waco in production we will use waco to allow relays to share the messages allowing people to connect to whatever

relay they want so that projects do not have to agree in what services they want to use this again allows for more interoperability without constraining people to accept the system and reach consensus we even allow people to broadcast messages directly into the waco network where you could use a lib b2p client and you can actually broadcast directly and you could even have the wallet also broadcast directly and not even have to use relays at all however we have experience with this a lot we have learned a lot in the last three years and we have run quite a significant infrastructure to put this in place and we believe that for the time being in the next one or two years we'll be seeing relay servers still

acting as proxies for the waco network for better availability and performance so how do i run my your own relay for wall connect you don't have to yesterday we just launched wallet connect clouds wallet connect cloud allows any developer to register an api key to access our proxy servers that will enable you to connect to the walk connector directly and use wall connect 2.0 today you just need to sign in and register an api key and you can have as many projects as you want we basically just created this develo this platform to allow us to monitor our infrastructure and prevent outages as it happened in the future

and at the end while connect cloud is a predecessor to the future wall connect network we believe the infrastructure we have today can be improved as a permissioned system where we can provide very low latency relays on top of vacuum similar to a layer 2 network where you can think of different service providers allowing messages to be relayed and still maintain the best user experience as possible so you can go today to wallaceconnect.com and you can subscribe for more product updates but most importantly you can register for an api key to prepare for wall connect 2.0 we have launched beta tests for javascript sdks

yesterday we saw swift doing the first demo live with the javascript sdk and kotlin sdk has also stabilized the first message encoding which will soon be able to also connect to the javascript sdk wall connect 2.0 builds on top of a lot of years of experience and we believe will set the standard for what it means to have a multi-chain application and with wala connect cloud we allow our users to have the best experience while still building an open protocol that is interoperable with everyone so what do we look forward from walla connect as i mentioned we have the version 2 protocol the cloud platform javascript clients swift and content clients and we

want in the future to allow people to actually build web3 analytics for their cloud users so you can monitor the usage for your own applications and have a better understanding of your own users of how they actually use your and on top of that we want to build notifications notifications that allows your dap to connect to the wallet and allow to have a much more interactive communication with your users on their wallet how how would you notify your user if you don't have an established session with notifications outside of the session you would be able to grab a user's attention to be able to

act on something quick that needs to be signed because webtree is so interactive we still need to build the tools to actually allow people to be more in charge of their own applications and in the future we see all of these services being part of the wallet connect network not just the message relaying but all of the other services that the cloud will do will be part of the wall connect network and while a connect cloud is just an allow us to actually test and understand the necessities of the system so that when wall connect network is available other services providers can build on the experience that we built so that they can have run this smooth system part of our big family

so to recap what does wall connect 2.0 bring multi-chain support with the capabilities to connect to multiple chains not only just on ethereum but cosmos polkadot solana cello and near a decentralized back end where our servers are connected to the waco network and ensure that every party on the waco network is able to relay messages regardless if it's run on our infrastructure improved sessor management where you have expiry times you can create multiple sessions on top of one pairing we have faster connections given that we use a single websock with much better with reduced bandwidth and ensures better performance and with our cloud offering we maintain

a much better reliability for our cloud users so i invite you all today to go to wallconnect.com and sign up for an api key thanks a lot for your time and i hope to see you around and feel free to ask questions if you see me around you