From Wallets to Super Apps: The Internet's New Interface (with Phantom CEO)

Transcript

Right now, crypto wallets are the most credible attempt to becoming the super app of the new internet because they started with the most difficult thing to build into a super app, which is finance and and money management. A lot of applications and social try to become super apps by adding on payments or finance as an afterthought. Crypto wallets have started there as a default. >> Crypto is basically the kind of black hole that's absorbing everything that's going on in finance. It's going to be very difficult to stop the momentum around all the network effects there. If you're trying to recreate everything from scratch, it's going to be difficult to compete.

[music] [music] Crypto wallets are basically the way that people interact with crypto today. They're sort of the interface, the first touch point, your window to the world. Brandon, you're building Phantom. How do you think about crypto wallets, what they are, and what they've evolved into? >> Yeah, crypto wallets today are this tool to help users discover and interact with this world that's been developing in the onchain ecosystem. It wasn't actually

always the wallet that people would reach to first when they're trying to use crypto. You know, when the infrastructure was a lot less developed and it was a lot harder to use blockchains directly, you have centralized exchanges who help users actually get access to Bitcoin, Ether, other cryptocurrencies like that. But as it's become more developed, it becomes our role more and more to present everything that's going on to the user in a really nice packaged up you know window which looks more and more like the consumer finance app of the future.

So we've inherited this terminology of calling these things wallets since the early days of crypto. But I wonder is that the best analogy that people should have in mind for using this piece of technology or is there a better way to think about what purpose these tools are serving? >> I think yes and no. The wallet still very much at its core is about the management and sort of custody, safekeeping of assets and currency much like what you would expect of a physical wallet. But because your wallet is in this digital form and the world of onchain, the onchain ecosystems have

been getting more and more performant and capable, the wallet has become a lot more of a tool for doing things with their crypto more than just kind of keeping it in one place and and holding it. I think the browser analogy is a little bit too broad in my in my mind. I think wallet is still pretty good in that. I do think the biggest use cases for crypto are financial in nature. So I think browser is a little bit too broad. Wallet is still actually pretty decent I think but thinking about it a little bit more the consumer finance platform. I think all all the wallets kind of started from the same place where wallet was a very apt term because the job was for the wallet to be a key manager to store and to manage your private keys

and for you to custody your assets. It allowed you to prove the assets that you owned and authorized transactions. And then that was like V0 of the wallet. And now we've had V1 of the wallet, which is more of an onchain money manager and consumer finance platform. So like now you can trade, you can stake, you can lend, you can borrow, you can make payments all within the wallet itself. And then where you started to see things bifurcate, Robert, like you mentioned, is some wallets are staking out their territory and kind of building out this consumer finance platform. Others are becoming developer platforms and super apps and are leaning more into social or gaming or other features. And that's

where you're kind of seeing the space fragment or kind of move away from the the traditional sense of the word wallet. >> So Jay, I'm glad you jumped in here. So, you've been working on a post about how you believe crypto wallets are poised to be the super apps of this new decentralized internet. This has long been sort of a holy grail for the consumer internet economy like who is going to be the next super app or be the super app. Canonically in the east it was WeChat in China but nothing quite replicated that in the west. Tell me how you're thinking about that super app thesis that has sort of long been a part of people's investment ideas.

>> Right now, crypto wallets are the most credible attempt to becoming the super app of the new internet because they've started with I think what is typically the most difficult thing to build into a super app which is finance and and money management. And I think we've seen a lot of applications in social try to become super apps by adding on payments or finance as an afterthought. And those things are really difficult because they require a lot of user trust. It's heavily regulated. There's a lot of infrastructure that you have to build. It has to be really really performant for it to work for users and for it to be multiplayer. Crypto wallets have started there as a default. And I think it's much easier to build trust with a user having become their core money management and finance platform in this

new internet and then expand outwards into social into gaming. Like WeChat, their killer feature was messaging. I think for wallets right now it's finance. It's it's trading. Nothing in crypto has really achieved better product market fit than trading and creating digital assets. Whether it's NFTTS, whether it's memecoins, whether it's the majors, whether it's on spot exchanges or pers, there's like seemingly endless demand to to trade and and speculate and participate in DeFi. So I think having started from finance and then expanding into other verticals is a much easier thing to do than vice versa as evidenced by Snapcash as evidenced by Meta's attempt to get into

finance and payments and Instagram and so many so many others that are failed attempts at at super apps. >> So you're drawing this distinction between sort of two ways to go about achieving the super app vision. one is the sort of what had been regarded as the triedand-true path or at least like the proven path that WeChat took. You start with messaging and then you add on all these other features like financial services and such. But what you're saying is that there's actually this other approach that people are now exploring because the messaging to finance and other services has not panned out the same way in the west that it had with WeChat in the east. and that maybe there's this other way you could go about exploring the idea maze where you start with the financial aspects,

the money management and those services and then back yourself into all the other things that a consumer might expect from a super app. >> Yeah, exactly. I mean one of the beauties of of crypto is permissionless innovation and you know there's two kind of paths we've seen like one is you have wallets like the base app maybe the world app and even caster has a native wallet and they're effectively developer platforms where they are providing a mini app SDK and they are encouraging thirdparty developers to build apps and features that users can interact with on top of the basic financial things that people are now accustomed to doing in crypto and then I would argue that Phantom is maybe taking a bit more opinionated approach, building out features that they see doing really well

in crypto, whether that's hyperlquid pers, whether that's social feeds, and they build that into the core interface of of Phantom itself. The beauty of crypto is like anytime one of these things does really well, it's permissionless for these wallets to to become a front end for that protocol. And you can present whatever that use case or feature is in a really consumerfriendly way. Maybe something I'll clarify is that although I do think that crypto and certainly Phantom's position as a wallet positions it very nicely to potentially become this sort of all-encompassing super app platform.

I will say that's not something that we are really have our eye on the ball right now. For us, it's all about focusing on actually achieving that consumer finance platform vision and decisively cutting things all around that so that we're actually really nailing that because crypto still has a long way to go in terms of being used as that finance platform. But to Jay's point, I do think that our ability to really unlock the true powers of crypto being this internet first, global permissionless ecosystem is going to give us basically the tools

that we need to achieve this consumer finance platform vision and then potentially parlay that into something a bit broader. >> Let's talk more deeply about what you're doing at Phantom for people who are unfamiliar with it. What makes Phantom stand out? What differentiates it from all of the other wallet options that are at people's disposal? >> Yeah, I think when you boil it down, it comes down to placing a heavy emphasis on the user experience as a whole, usability. I think a lot of people conflate UI with UX and just think about what an app looks like on the screen.

But I think what really separates us is our ability to actually think of holistically about the user journey, how they first hear about crypto, how they get educated through that, how they onboard things like customer support and all that. Another thing that separates us is is our ability to navigate onchain trends, be where people want to be at the right time. We obviously were very early to Salana and more recently took pretty big bet on Hyperlid as well. I I think what Phantom does is they have done a great job at being opinionated about what people are doing on chain and then taking those experiences and making them available to users in as few clicks or taps as possible and with as much

delight and fun and stickiness as possible. building that experience and having like first class security is what really I think enables them to build a ton of user trust. >> In other words, what you both are saying here is that Brandon that you guys at Phantom, you are trying to go where the people are and and follow what they're doing rather than try to force them into some behavior that you're not seeing them already participate in. You're kind of like you see the heat and you're seeking it. >> Yeah. There's a lot of things that people already really like to do in crypto and I think being super opinionated about how to present those experiences in the most accessible way possible and also safest way possible is

part of that secret sauce that helps us retain users and keep them coming back day after day. Tell us about the Phantom story. You mentioned that you guys started launching with Salana early on. That was a sort of contrarian bet at the time. Certainly in the wake of FTX's implosion, there were a lot of questions about that entire ecosystem and how it would fare. So, give us the the short history of why you started there and how you got to where you are today. >> I got my start in crypto back in 2017 and joined an early stage crypto startup, DeFi startup called Zerox. That was sort of the sort of ICO white paper era of crypto.

>> That was a really early decentralized exchange. >> Yeah, that's where I cut my teeth in crypto for about 4 years from 2017 2021. >> And before that, by the way, just to not short yourself. Before that, you worked at Twitter. >> Yeah. Before Before jumping into crypto, yeah, got my start as a software engineer and builder at Twitter 2013 2017. That's where I really learned how to build apps for like massive scale, massive global scale. And my co-founder Chris, early Facebook employee, very similar experience. Three co-founders, me, Chris, Franchesco, we all found our way to Zerox during that time, you know, pretty crazy. Saw the rise of unis swap,

compound, defy, summer, all those types of things. And yeah through that time basically realized a couple things. So one the wallet is an extremely key part of infrastructure for the entire ecosystem. If the wallet's not really doing its job, then it really has a decelerating effect for everyone else because when you're an application builder, which we were at 0x, a lot of the onus of onboarding, confirming a transaction or sort of like the checkout, it relies on the wallet.

MetaMask at that time being the biggest wallet people would use on Ethereum. It really depend on them doing their job. So we thought that this wallet has this huge responsibility but no one was really stepping up to the plate and taking that responsibility seriously at least over the number of years that we had been working in the Ethereum ecosystem. And so decided hey actually our expertise is in these consumer internet apps. We think that this usability problem can actually be solved at this wallet layer and we can actually help. that's the highest leverage place that we can apply ourselves to actually accelerate the adoption of crypto. So that that was the first insight and and the second one was the world is moving to this more multi-chain format. My very

first indication of that was actually Binance Smart Chain in 2020 which was one of the first non ETH L1 chains. Seeing that actually gain serious traction really opened a lot of people's eyes, myself included, that hey, there is a whole world out there of users who have not touched crypto yet and there is an appetite to use something that's faster and cheaper than EL1. So, I think combining some of those insights together, we decided, hey, we're going to create a multi-chain MetaMask competitor. But the way that we were going to do it was to basically try to leaprog the technology and skate to where the puck is going and grab our own

home turf on an up andcoming ecosystem that we thought had what it took to really surpass Ethereum. >> So you were like Ethereum's taken, they've got MetaMask, Binance has come up, they're doing their own thing, where else can we play? We initially got attracted to Salana because we found that from a values perspective, we were much more aligned especially as builders coming out of Silicon Valley and more traditional tech companies. So yeah, you know, we found that we really jived well with Raj and Tuli, spent a lot of time with them and then decided, hey, yeah, we're going to basically choose Salon as our horse.

>> We sort of know how it panned out, but but there were some moments where it was kind of, you know, it was kind of rough. Yeah. Well, so the idea was choose Salana as our horse, you know, become the MetaMask Salana and then evolve the wallet into a multi-chain wallet with the thesis that hey, wallets are becoming the entry point into crypto. But what we didn't anticipate was like how hard Salana would pop off basically uh over the last couple years and how quickly people would respond to how the fast and cheap transactions actually enabled this very smooth user experience. But yes, obviously it's had its ups and downs. Uh you mentioned FTX.

You know, I have a little bit of a contrarian take on FTX. Maybe it's Octarian, but you know, that's maybe one of the best things that could have happened to Salana in the sense that it was sort of a canonical like mass purging event that left only the true believers essentially of the ecosystem and formed like a super genuine core that, you know, precipitated a very genuine culture and ecosystem of builders that sort of all, you know, chewed glass together. I think they gave you the jet fuel to like go for this next leg which we just saw and was continuing to experience in 2024 and 2025. You know, obviously we do

everything we can to make sure that people are have a good time when they're using Salana and it's been a great ecosystem to build in. >> What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. >> Yeah, definitely. From an investor perspective, I I'll attest that like when crypto is booming and and really hot, there are a lot of tourists just across the stack. Like there's a lot of tourist investors, a lot of tourist retail consumers, builders, and anyone that was building on Salana post FTX was very serious and very committed to Salana and building on Salana for a very particular set of reasons that if you were chewing glass in that time, there was a load of credibility that you kind of gained for sticking around and a lot of those folks reap the benefits.

>> Yeah. And we're seeing that now. It's definitely paid off and Phantom, you know, although it has been closely associated with Salana, you guys have branched out far beyond it. You are now multi-chain. >> Yeah. Really happy that we were able to invest in doing that multi-chain transformation back in 2023. Although it was actually very unfortunately timed actually where we had been developing it through the period of 2022. FTX happened and then we kind of had to say like, oh, hey, we're going multi-chain. But I'm glad we really did the hard thing and got over those hurdles because it has allowed us to actually branch off into our own standalone brand that people recognize as not just the front end of

Salana. >> Yeah. And more recently, they're one of the the top frontends for trading purp. >> So, you mentioned per a few times. Let's talk a little bit about pers or perpetual futures and what they are, why you've decided to add them to your wallet and uh yeah, what people can do with them. >> You know, simply put, per type of financial derivative that people can trade. So, similar to options or classic futures, they allow folks to bet on the price movement of an asset without actually buying the underlying asset. So, you can say, I think Bitcoin's going to go up. I want to profit off of that, or I think Bitcoin's

going down, I want to place that trade. And so, allows you to go long or short. And it actually allows you also to place those trades with leverage, 2x, 5x, and in some cases larger. And what's really interesting is that conceptually pers are actually a lot easier to understand and grasp than options trading. But they've typically had this reputation for being very much an advanced instrument that doesn't really cater towards retail users. And so we found a really interesting opportunity to basically apply our expertise in usability and sort of really creating dialedin user experiences specifically for a retail user base and apply that to

perks. We thought that hey actually the underlying concepts here are not that hard to understand and in a lot of ways much easier than options. Let's actually try to do the hard work of making that easier for a retail audience to access. A specific example of that is in a lot of perp trading interfaces you see these words like take profit and stop-loss. I think Phantom you guys say auto close versus opening a position you can auto close which just makes it a lot more intuitive for retail versus thinking about these terms that are a bit more native to to people who are financially and and cryptosavvy. Yeah, there's tons of those little micro interactions that we've kind of just stopped and had a second think about and just kind of

thought about from first principles. You know, another thing that we've added that's quite interesting is also this user onboarding education tutorial system that helps users understand what they're doing and then also specify their risk profile. Hey, I'm generally low risk or hey, actually I do want to go for high risk and then actually set some of the defaults around that choice that the user made. >> I actually went through the flow earlier today and it was super slick and simple to kind of understand and also slot yourself into whichever risk tolerance you you want for yourself.

>> Wallets have come so far in the last four to five years. We've come from like 12word seed phrases and a point where there was no way for the average consumer to know what was happening when they were interacting with a given smart contract. And you know, if you're a newbie, you would effectively be signing a transaction sometimes and hoping you didn't wake up the next morning with your wallet drained. Now we have like the UX and onboarding improved to a point where we have social login because we have distributed key management protocols. We have transaction simulation and spam filters and like token safety ratings. We've got pass keys. We've got biometrics. We have smart wallets. Like you guys have usernames if you're creating a new profile where for the longest you as a

user were just like a string of numbers and characters. And you know if you are my mom, you have no idea why you are 0x 45 Y 3F. And we have all these improvements on just like wallet UX that have made crypto so much more easy to interact with. Like I I think we don't give enough credit to wallet teams for making it a million times easier to interact with everything that we can do on chain. >> Yeah, it is funny. I mean, it kind of echoes some things that happened with the evolution of browsers, you know, and going from IP addresses to having sort of a domain name system where you can enter into your URL bar, you know, these sort of like human readable names to go to your destination. all sorts of cryptographic improvements so that like

people can't steal your credit card information if you're buying something online. Like it's cool to see these sorts of upgrades and improvements happen in crypto and in the wallet context like sort of speedrunning things, you know, happening in a in a much more condensed time frame. >> Yeah, I mean we've put a lot of effort into it and spent a lot of time investing in obviously the user experience. Originally the app was a browser extension. Uh we quickly follow that up with a mobile app in beginning of 2022 and now I'd say we consider ourselves very much a mobile first product. The per experience that we're just talking about was mobile first as well. And you know that's just where

crypto is going generally. >> Let's linger on this per thing for a minute. You're obviously catering to a particular kind of user who is interested in participating in the financial aspects of crypto. Like a classic use of per is like you said, you're betting on whether the price of something is going to go up or down and you can use leverage to do it. That is something that speculators love. But if crypto is gonna sort of include a whole big wide audience of people, that particular thing might be not for all comers.

>> Yeah, totally. You know, if you think about the consumer finance platforms that people use today, Robin Hood, Square Cash, Venmo, etc. Sort of take the union of all the different financial activities that people like to do. You got investing, speculating, you get payments, saving, storing, holding. And so those are some of the areas that we're thinking about and working on. But those are things that you should expect to be able to do in Phantom, you know, allin-one.

>> So you're basically saying there are other areas that you're exploring that you think a wider audience might potentially find valuable. >> Yeah. Well, I think it's certainly going to help make Phantom and crypto part of their everyday lives. That's where I think payments could actually really turn a corner sort of in this wave. So, earlier on in the conversation, we were talking about the landscape of wallets that are out there. You know, you've got sort of MetaMask, an early Ethereum wallet, relative newcomers like Coinbase wallet, which has rebranded to base after their L2. and you have newer sorts of wallets for maybe power users like Rabby. What separates Phantom from those

others? How are you sort of staking out a different kind of part of the universe than the other wallets that are out there? >> We don't really think much about Metamas. We're thinking about like setting the northstar competition for the company. We're thinking a lot more like players like Robin Hood actually not even thinking about the company as a wallet necessarily and more as this consumer finance platform but fueled by the onchain economy. The great thing about wallets is of all the ones you mentioned, there's nothing stopping a user from using those simultaneously. Like you can enter your seed phrase and you'll see the exact same amount of money that you see on Phantom that you would on Coinbase wallet, assuming they support the same chains as you would on MetaMask, as you would on Ravi, as you would on Trust or anything. the wallets

are really competing for like a user's trust and their belief in the security and the features that are built into the wallet and convenience like of the things that I want to do on chain which of these wallets gives me the best experience right because at the end of the day you can still use all of these wallets simultaneously yeah yeah that's a really great point when you're using wallets you can import all that very simply just by entering your seed phrase and you can bring all that information and data with you which is really kind A cool difference between the web 2 world and the web 3 world.

>> Yeah, that's sort of the beauty of being built on top of these open protocols is that it gives the user a lot of freedom of choice and allows competition in the market to really benefit the end consumer. But I will say that despite the fact that it is theoretically easy for users to move in between wallets, it's actually not something that I've seen users do that often. when it has to do with finances, money, people, they're scared to do something. They really gravitate towards brands that they trust and feel are safe. Usually the wallets that they start with, they build that sort of trust relationship with. And so my experience have actually

interestingly anecdotally found wallets to be quite sticky in that sense. I remember I think it was maybe late 21 or or 22, one of the things that really built a bunch of like goodwill with Phantom for me was seeing the transaction simulation for the first time in the the browser extension. Like I was interacting with some smart contract and it very clearly explained what was going on. In green was what would I receive and the red was what was leaving my wallet. It made it really clear and simple and easy to understand.

And I was like, "These guys get it." And they presented it in a way that would make it so much more helpful for anyone who is first getting on chain to use these products. And that goodwill compounds. And then you have things later like the haptic feedback when you're executing a trade and you look at it and you see you've made some money and it's green and the font is really big and you're like, "This is really fun. This is a delightful experience and I want to come back and do this again tomorrow. >> I'd love to know, Brandon, what your process is for engineering those moments and for having this emphasis on usability and UX, especially in an area where people have long decrieded UX in crypto and particularly in wallets.

>> Yeah, there's certainly a process aspect to it. We do do things like user experience testing for example where we do actually put things in front of users and watch how they interact and things like that. But a big part of it is creating this product ccentric productled culture where ideas can flow from the design team not just the engineering team or the sales team or something like that. Everything is very userentric and so it kind of flows quite naturally from that. Let me ask you this then. What is the hardest challenge in creating a crypto wallet app?

>> I think the hardest challenge has been choosing what not to do in crypto especially. There's so much going on that really our job is actually quite similar to an investor where it's like developing a very good detector and like intuition for how trends are going to develop to literally place bats of resources and capital towards Yeah. The biggest challenge is like how to navigate the trends such that we're not chasing what is just the flash in the pan and that and that has gotten increasingly more difficult and staying really truly long-term thinking especially when there is a lot of money to be made in trend chasing and you see

folks doing it >> for sure >> and just recognizing that sometimes those short-term gains are not worth the damage long-term damage to the brand for example or like making those types of trade-offs. What are you investing in? Where are you placing those resources for whatever trends may come in the future? >> Well, definitely a couple different areas. Swapping and trading, those are some of the bread and butter core interactions that people do on crypto. So, always investing there. Obviously, per hyperlid also very interesting and dynamic ecosystem and environment.

Social is something that we've also been experimenting with that we're going to be investing in more and more. The way that we think about social is more in terms of taking things that people already like to do like trading for example and help supercharge it with network effects using social mechanics. Not necessarily bringing messaging to the app or bringing social media posts to the app, but it's more about infusing what people already like to do in the app with social mechanics.

>> Make that concrete for us. What exactly do you mean? >> Yeah. So, there is literally a tab in the app where you click on it and it shows you all of your folks that you followed their most recent actions on the app. So, for example, my friend at Nick, he bought Salana and you know he has an unrealized gain of X%. There's some light reactions that people can do like thumbs up, heart or whatever that help the sort of discovery algorithm like surface things that people are engaging with. You scroll down, you might see some more generic network activity like six whales participated in this prediction market

or something like that. Scroll down and then you see, hey, five of my friends, they just participated in this per product. And so that really helps supercharge the entire crypto ecosystem by helping folks discover the next thing to do. That's the discovery problem has been a huge issue in crypto generally where people get into one thing and there's no golden path to figure out what the next thing to do is. It's usually some amalgamation of like find the right people to follow on Twitter or get on Discords or something like that.

And usually that's to find some recommendation of what coin to trade next or what DAP to use. And so if we can bring those recommendations directly in the app. That's kind of concretely what I'm talking about. Yeah. This sort of parallels some features that other consumer fintech apps have done in the past. You know, Venmo got very popular with their sort of social activity feed. You could see who was paying who, you know, who's going out to dinner and all sorts of things like that. And then kind of e Toro came in the mix I think early on with like a social feed like a Robin Hood style thing but you could see what people were betting on. So you're incorporating these sorts of elements drawing from more from the consumer finance world and adding those features

over rather than maybe from like the pure social networking social media world like uh Twitter or Facebook or something like that. Yeah, I think I think the Venmo comparison is is pretty close in structure. It feels like this alive network. You can see what everyone's doing. But because the payments angle is so one-dimensional, it just didn't end up like crossing that hump where it's like really became like entertainment. But because the onchain ecosystem is so diverse and there's so many different things going on.

Obviously on top of payments there's the trading prediction markets anything that can be born on crypto can have a representation in this sort of like social discovery feed. So that is yeah the vision for it and how it's very much a a feature that multiplies everything else that's going on. I think increasingly trading and I guess investing are becoming like entertainment products. And so I think that's why it's so important when you have a social feed because trading with your friends is more fun and might drive you to do more trading. And then let's say you layer on the fact that all this is on chain and you have programmable money. Brandon just 100xed a coin and maybe I go trade that and I make money

on it and then I want to deposit my profits into a vault where I'm going to earn some yield. Like then I'm bundling this thing where I'm having fun and I'm managing my finances and that is a really really powerful and sticky product and I'm doing it with my friends. Like that's really cool >> and that's something that has never really been possible until the last few years. Yeah, that's a great point. And and Brandon, you had mentioned like your comp is Robin Hood, which sort of started with stock trading and then they've entered into crypto. You guys started with crypto. And where do you go from there?

>> It's all about doubling down, tripling down on on crypto. Crypto is basically the kind of black hole that's absorbing everything that's going on in finance. Then that's the direction that Robin Hood and most companies are going, right? How do I get into crypto and how do I get exposure to like all the excitement? Our angle is always going to be like how do we harness the power of crypto and onchain ecosystems to really supercharge the app and leaprog competitors. Like one big thing is truly being able to access a global audience. That's something that most tech companies Robin Hood included has had difficulties doing. But yeah, I do genuinely believe that the open open and permissionless and global nature of it,

it's going to be very difficult to stop the momentum around all the network effects there. If you're trying to recreate everything from scratch, it's going to be difficult to compete. >> Obviously, you know, tolly and in the Salana world, there's this big meme of internet capital markets. How far along are we toward achieving that vision? >> You know, I think we're getting pretty close. There's all different vectors. Think about how close we're getting. There's the technology and the scale. There's the mainstream acceptance, mainstream institutional acceptance. And the trends are definitely accelerating to get there. I mean, things are getting more and more digital and becoming more and more online. And this is kind of getting to some of the digital state stuff, but like you actually are seeing

factions of online communities who have true like geopolitical power. This is uh Balagi Serrina Vasan who yeah uh you know wrote a book the network state and formerly was a GP over here. >> Also I think people don't necessarily appreciate the accelerating nature of technology the compounding nature then once you once you throw in AI and all of that it can get there pretty quick. >> I'm glad you mentioned AI. We had Ilia Pulukin the co-founder of Near on our show. You know, one thing that he was saying that really stuck with me is this idea that he could imagine a world where apps and websites kind of go away and where everything is sort of mediated by

AI agents. I wonder what your take is on that thesis and whether you're planning for a world that could look like that. >> Yes, it remains to be seen how AI is going to shape how consumers use internet products. Obviously, there was the iPhone moment where things got shifted to this mobile form factor and that that had really huge implications for all industries. >> Yeah, that was the leap from websites to apps app first, mobile first. >> For AI, it's not exactly clear to me yet how it's really going to change things.

Whether you're going to have some AI agent for everything you do, it's autogenerating you a UI or something like every time you want to do something. that seems a little bit too futuristic, I think. And then I think when you layer on also touching on what we were talking about earlier, this whole trust aspect, especially with finances, I think you may see a little bit of a slower uptick potentially of folks trusting agents with their finances. That being said, I do think in a world where AI agents are performing financial transactions, the obvious choice for them to interact on the internet with money is by using

crypto. It's just the most frictionless, lowcost and like internet native borderless medium of exchange. So just by sheer law of physics, I don't see a world where like agents are not using crypto as their primary transaction vehicle. >> I like Ilia's take. I feel like it's at least a couple or a few years out. Perhaps the most obvious opportunity for wallets in the context of AI is curating and kind of like editorializing the apps or protocols that are made available in the the wallet UI itself. kind of like Tik Tok decides what we watch and Spotify decides what we hear. There is maybe an opportunity where users can opt into a wallet deciding like what lending

protocol do you use. Maybe we move towards this abstraction of of protocols that are all integrated into the wallet. And maybe the best wallet is the one that does the best job and has the best trained models on being able to curate that for a given user given their, you know, their familiarity with crypto, their onchain history, their risk tolerance, their preferences, all of these sets of conditions. And that's probably somewhere in between where we are now and and Ilia's vision of like agents just fully transact transacting on our behalf. I think some things that look so obvious are actually still very far away from most people even knowing what that is. That's actually a little bit of a sometimes a drawback of being so deep. It's like it's hard to really step out of that and get that

perspective. So, wallets potentially becoming a more and more important interface as we move into this decentralized crypto first internet potentially a contender for the next sort of super app or everything app as Jay has argued. And um I'd also like to underscore something that you said Brandon which is that crypto is kind of like the black hole that's that's eating everything [snorts] else eating traditional finance and and all sorts of other things. We're at a really interesting inflection point right now and it's going to be fascinating to watch how these trends play out.

>> Absolutely. >> Awesome. Well, thank you guys for coming on the show and sharing your thoughts. >> Yeah, so much. >> Thanks, Brendon. [music] [music] >> [music]