Ep. 564 Coinbase’s Continued Innovation: The Coinbase Wallet

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

 

SPEAKERS

Brendan Veihman, Bryce Paul

 

Bryce Paul  00:09

All right, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls gather around, I hope you’re having a fantastic start to your day into your day, maybe we’re finding you smack dab in the middle of the long drive from work or whatever it may be. But wherever you are in the world, you’re certainly in the right place, because we’re joined by some absolute killers in the space, some crypto legends. In fact, crypto partners, there’s a very big partnership that just got announced between Coinbase and SMTP. So we’ve brought on two folks, two representatives from both to talk about this partnership and how we’re going to be increasing crypto user adoption across the map. So we’ve got Shane Mack, who’s the co founder of SMTP. And we’ve got Syd. Sidharth Coelho Prabhu, who is the Senior Director of Product Management at Coinbase. So Shane said, Welcome to the crypto 101 podcast.

 

01:05

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having us, man. Yeah, great

 

01:08

to be here as well. Thank you.

 

Bryce Paul  01:09

Yeah, we’re excited. And Brendan, do you? Do you feel the energy? Do you feel the lightning, the electricity in the air with these two? Yeah,

 

Brendan Veihman  01:19

it’s gonna be a big one, this is gonna be an exciting one. A lot of people are tuning in. And you know, sometimes they might be on the fence, especially with where the markets at. But this time, we are coming with some electricity. So get ready for it.

 

Bryce Paul  01:31

No, I’m big on this. Because this isn’t just another, you know, flash in the pan. I mean, this is truly a lasting partnership with a goal of bringing more user adoption. That’s really what we want. And so before we dive in, to what this partnership is, and how it’s going to grow the space and make just things easier for all of us, I want to get to know you guys a little bit and introduce you to the audience. And just a little bit about the background. And so Shane Mack, we’ll start with you. You know, tell us a little bit about your background, how you came to found the protocol SMTP and then said, we’ll we’ll move on to you right after

 

02:08

Awesome. Yeah, I mean, I’ve been working on messaging and social for the last 15 years of my life. And my first startup, actually, we were building on top of Twitter and Facebook data to aggregate social data and identity around email addresses, and be able to build a smarter address book that ended up growing to 100 million people in under two years. And BlackBerry bought it for 50 million bucks in 2009. And I worked on BBM. And actually BBM was the light bulb when I saw messaging on BBM, BlackBerry Messenger, right for those very messenger, right? People wanted to have their BBM PIN code, people were buying blackberries because of the BlackBerry Messenger. I was like holy crap, people’s affinity towards messaging and status. And having this device actually is because they have BlackBerry Messenger, the double checkmark came from there, which is now how WhatsApp works like all these innovations were happening. And for me, I was like, This is how the world should work. Why do I have to call a business? Like why do I have to use a phone book? Like, why can’t everything just go towards messaging. And I think for me, that inspired me to go work on my next company, which was business messaging, the first platform to ever bring businesses to Facebook, messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, Apple business, chat, etc. And I was the CEO that for almost nine years, and during that time, I was in San Francisco, all my friends were working on crypto, I had knew a lot of people building Aetherium had already happened. My co founder now was way more into the crypto space and everyone was kind of building. And the question for me in 2019, or company got acquired, you know, was, could there be a new identity? Is the wallet address going to be it? Or is it going to be a mechanism by which you will own your identity? And if that’s true, is there an opportunity to build a base layer messaging protocol that is more secure than like an SMS per se, for this new means of transferring digital kind of value between different addresses? And that sparked a conversation with Robert leshner who’s the co founder of compound protocol, and he said, Hey, I have $11 billion in a smart contract. I know every single address of everyone who owns it, and I can’t send 95% of them a message. Why can I communicate to people that are so valuable to this protocol? He said, Imagine if a bank couldn’t talk to 95% of their customers. And that was like a light bulb for me. And I was like, that’s crazy. And for me, I love messaging. I’ve always worked on that if I’m going to do something else, I might as well do the same thing I’ve been doing. And there were two opportunities. One was to build something with a new mechanism that had a better relationship with developers. So in my past, I built on top of Facebook and on top of SMS and on top of Twitter and for 15 years I got robbed I got API’s change the business model change, they pulled the curtains, the to cut us off, we had to do new deals. It was all backdoor deals, everything felt like building on top of them was so hard. And it wasn’t a mutual partnership or relationship where we were actually driving the same way together totally, because they had to build an ad business. So they needed to aggregate all the attention to the application layer, cut off all the developers and ultimately, most of those ecosystems died. Right. And so for me, that was the opportunity, really looking forward was the ability to build a new communication protocol in a way that actually worked with developers versus against them.

 

Brendan Veihman  05:30

Can I just say, I love that approach. You looked at it? And you said, how can we make web three better than web two? What are we missing in web three? What can we complement what’s already happening? And you started there with the problem, and then ended up with the solution where as a lot of the time people just jump in, they go, oh, I want to jump into web three, I don’t really know what they want to do, yet. They don’t know what kind of problems they want to solve. We see that with a lot of projects. But you jumped right in, you said, you saw this $5 billion problem that was just with compound, and then you started working towards the solution. I just think that approach to crypto and web three is such a strong one.

 

06:05

It’s the only thing I know. And every single person I talked to said the same thing. They would show me these dune dashboards and all these things of all these wallet addresses. And I would say what do you do with it? And they’d be like, Yeah, you know, it’s, we can see all the stuff happening between them. And I was like, but can you message them or build relationships with them, like their people? Like, what are you going to do? And it was very clear in that moment, everyone said, but if I could reach the wallet and communicate to the wallet, and that would unlock everything. And that was kind of I think, the insight that led to, you know, sit and even the Coinbase conversation.

 

Bryce Paul  06:41

Yeah, that’s incredible. And I definitely want to dive in more there because there’s so much to unpack, but said, I do want to make sure that we get up to speed on on how you became Senior Director of Product Management here at Coinbase. And really, what drove you?

 

06:55

Yeah, for sure. So I have a background in a variety of different things. I started my career in investment banking, that I went to work in government, then I was a FinTech entrepreneur. So I’ve done a bunch of different things. And at some point, I read the Bitcoin white paper. And something just like clicked in my head. And I said, this is the future. I’ve worked in, like finance 1.0. And there’s so many broken things about that model. And you know, both have worked in the West as well as emerging markets, as like, this is the future. And so I interviewed with coin base. It just so happened that our CEO, Brian wanted to launch this product. There’ll be a self custody wallet, and specifically focused on Ethereum. And it was the beginning of like, Aetherium, it just launched recently, people were building daps, and we want to build a gateway. And so he hired me to help launch the product. And so I came on board launched wallet, it was called Toshi back then. And I’ve just been working on it ever since over the last six years. And it’s been an incredible journey, because what we’ve seen is, we started with the core premise of just self custody and giving people access to their own crypto anywhere in the world. And we’ve layered on all these new layers of interaction. As we have three has been building them, we’ve been bringing them to customers. So it started with daps. And then NF Ts, and then ERC 20 tokens and then Dex trading and staking and now the ens, the identity protocol to give everyone usernames, and now all the way to messaging. And that’s really our goal is to be kind of your app that you open up. And it’s a universal banking and finance, but also social app, and you can do everything you want in web three, or within the most secure and easiest to use experience. And so yeah, I’ve been doing this for six years now, every year has been a new challenge, a new set of developments in the industry, new set of opportunities. And I still love coming to work every day because I get to work and partner with awesome people like Shane and and build incredible product.

 

Bryce Paul  08:54

I love it. No, that’s incredible. And we’re gonna dive into some more specifics about Coinbase wallet. And you know how it’s different from maybe even Coinbase exchange. But one thing I wanted to go back was Shane and kind of I love the idea of SMTP, where you could have all this inter chain messaging. And it’s more than just human to human messaging, which I think is so important because it’s really it enables secure machine to machine messaging as well. And I think that’s what a lot of people don’t really realize is that cryptocurrency is not just the future of money for people, but it’s the future of money for AI and machines. And so do you kind of see your protocol and this space developing along that way where you have autonomous, secure machine to machine interactions and payments and all of that kind of being facilitated with Aetherium and SMTP? Or is that just a pipe dream of the web three bros?

 

09:47

Not at all, I think machines to machines talk to machines all day every day, right? I think it even goes further than that. If you think about every single identity as having a story, every single Go wallet has a story, your ability to actually talk to any address. In a world where the AI and chat GP teas are coming online, you can even imagine human to human machine to machine, human to machine, right? And so if you go even further, every single identity on a blockchain has a history. And the history is actually fascinating of what’s happened, what’s transferred? Where did the things go? Who are the other people? What are their histories? What are they interacting with? What are the overlaps between all these communities, and the ability to actually communicate from peer to peer machine to machine or even people to machine? Yeah, plus, with everything coming in the future with AI, I think all those are totally possible. And even more that we’re probably not even thinking about, which is why working with developers to go explore and build all these cool experiences is amazing.

 

Brendan Veihman  10:50

And Shane, can you explain the concept of digital identity, because I know we’re going to be thrown around that term as we continue to dive in here. But everyone listening might not understand exactly what a digital identity is, and the significance of it.

 

11:05

I mean, did as they are called right DIDs. Digital SMTP actually is an identity agnostic. And we actually work with many partners, like Coinbase, who has the cb.id identity, right? They enable people so you could probably talk about it better to get that identity, and own that identity when they join Coinbase wallet. And I think the major difference for me is just instead of renting your identity from Instagram, or Twitter, or any of these platforms, the ability to own your identity in the future, so that no one can take that from you. And you can use that across all of the applications in in all of the space is the shift, you’re not just using your one Instagram handle on Instagram, you’re actually using the identity you own, to talk on WhatsApp, to talk on iMessage to talk on Instagram, but in our world, it’s different products and different services. But actually, now they all work together. And that ability to work together and you own it means that the owner of a platform can’t watch your Twitter handle and just take it from you. And I think that’s a huge and very important shift that needs to happen based on the last 15 years of the internet.

 

Bryce Paul  12:19

Oh, yeah. And it totally empowers like, you know, you and me and just the average user to say, Hey, I’m building a following on Facebook, and then, you know, I could bring that following to the next new platform and bring it to the next new platform. And I’m not really tied down to to one platform, which you know, completely subverts the the economics of the, you know, the web to, you know, kind of ecosystem that we’ve been in. So, yeah, it sounds just, you know, really, you know, beyond incredible. And, you know, I think that, you know, said there’s, there’s a lot of things that Coinbase could be working on. Why do you think that this is so important? identities in particular? Yeah, exactly. identities and really like kind of solving it in this way? Do you think that, you know, of all the things you could be working on, this is like the one that needs to be solved?

 

13:06

Yeah, I think it’s one of the core primitives of select, let’s take a step back, right, we’re seeing this like bigger story arc, where people are now like, building their lives, or at least some portion of their lives on chain. And so what that means is, they’re not just buying crypto and trading it anymore. That’s kind of very like five years ago, what we’re seeing now is a little bit more of like, you buy NF T’s and you join the community. And now you represent yourself as being someone in that community, you have, you have opinions that you share in that community, you may do the same thing for other assets that you own. You may be transacting with people online. And maybe you do business online, and you get paid in crypto. And so you want to you want to share out like a handle that people can know you by for all these reasons, you’re basically becoming like a citizen of web through your citizen on chain citizen. And if you’re doing that every citizen has a passport or you know, your citizen of any country have a passport. We want to give that to people. And you know, right now people have this world where if I wanted to send you money, Bryce, you would probably send me a 14 digit address, and I’d have to copy and paste it and be really, like clunky. And if I made a mistake, the money would get lost. And also, you know, if you do kind of have a personality on on Twitter, for example, and you have people that follow you, maybe people want to see what you’re buying and selling and, you know, they want to see what communities you’re a part of, there’s no real way to share that unless we all adopt a common sense of identity and a common protocol and standard. And so about, I want to say a year and a half ago, we worked with the ens foundation and you know Ens is probably the most widely adopted username protocol and system out there. And we said you know what, why don’t we try and pioneer together a free ens that’s similar to the dot eat system. It’s the same system it’s it’s compatible with it, but you know, with dots, you’ve got to pay money. got to pay money on Main net can cost anywhere from $10 $20 to $50, depending on the kind of the gas fees at the time.

 

Bryce Paul  15:08

And then not to mention some of these eat dot ens names are 1000s of dollars I’ve seen, you know, yeah, absolutely

 

15:13

right. And so that’s a vanity. It’s like a vanity license plate, right? Like, if you want one, you’re free to go buy one. But what about like really like going mainstream, emerging markets global reach, we said, let’s give everyone a free username that’s compatible with this broader system that everyone is buying. So maybe the analogy I’d give you is, you know, in the early days of the internet, you if you wanted your own email, you will probably like very, very early days, the internet, you’d have to buy your own domain. And then you know, set up your email on it right with your own server. We said, No, let’s do let’s have the Hotmail moment where we give everyone a free username, all you do is you sign up for Coinbase wallet. And right in the onboarding, you just type in your username you want. And it’s actually not just a username in our system, it’s a universal username. And you know, you can use it in any other wallet that supports ens. The daps will recognize it, because it’s all built on one protocol. That’s the power of protocols, right. And we’ve done that we’ve actually now given away more free ens based similar IDs, then there are actually at one ens dot eats. And so it’s been very, it’s been hugely successful customers love it. And, and so we’re pretty proud. And, you know, for customers that do want like the full, like the experience of buying their own username, we support that fully we support the dot eats its native inside wallet, but we also give them this free option. And so that’s, that’s just the base, right like that, that makes it easy for people to send and receive crypto. But we’re also seeing people now building their identity. So if you go to profile.coinbase.com, you can look up any ens in the ecosystem, whether it’s a dot eat, or similar ID, and you can see that the broader strokes of their profile, right, like what else you what else kind of identity are they building? Which NFT is do they own? Which assets do they own. And now in the future, you’ll also be able to message them. And that’s easy. All the layers are coming together, right? You can you can pay them, you can message them. And so all of these puzzle pieces are coming together into like really rich experience for web three citizens.

 

Bryce Paul  17:12

Yeah, and it really This isn’t like a question more of a comment. But it does seem like it it’s you know, reinventing the social network. But also insofar as we’re not gonna, like have a bunch of these impersonators and all that kind of stuff like on Twitter, you know, I’ve got a small following, but sometimes there’s these impersonators that have my same picture, my same bio and all that stuff, but it’s off by one letter one. And you know, people will be like, Well, why do you just friend requested me? Didn’t you already follow me? That’s like, that’s not me. And so in this new paradigm that you guys are building, that kind of stuff wouldn’t wouldn’t really happen. I imagine.

 

17:46

That’s exactly what I did. Just think about the case. So you know, the in the NFT community, right? There’s a lot of like trading and bartering that happens. And so what will usually happen is like, you’ll have someone who’s like popular, like a bit of a, like a crypto trader, character, personality, they’ve got a following. Someone will now go into discord of that community, and send a message pretending to be them. And you know, because it’s discord, it’s not, may or may not be blockchain verified. They now say, Hey, I have this NFT you want to barter it? Here’s a link, click on the link. People, I Oh, that’s a great deal. They click on the link, boom, they’re all there. And if he’s gone and the scammer, you know, then they go back to Twitter. And they’re like, oh, look, look at what happened to me. If this was to happen inside Coinbase wallet with SMTP. When you see someone messaging you, you tap at the top, and you see that that username, you see what they hold. That’s all based on like what’s on chain, there’s no, there’s no fooling, they’re like, like, in order to like,

 

Bryce Paul  18:37

you have to trust their ad test station. Yeah, you have to verify that test station

 

18:41

for them to for them to be able to first send you that XMPP message in the first place, they’ve got to sign it with their keys that control that wallet. So now you know there’s a one to one relationship. This can be someone who’s spoofing or pretending it’s very much like what you see is what you get. And that’s a really powerful, like, trust boost for the ecosystem. Because it’s certainly not where we are today when you look at what’s going on on Twitter and all the scams out there.

 

19:04

And this is also where verified messaging was the thing we saw as the most important first use case, because of all the scams happening across the space is the ability to message someone and know that the person you’re talking to owns what they say they own, because the identity is actually tied to the account number changes so many things for everyone, including the idea that a message is signed by the actual private key for that wallet. What’s cool about that is think about sending wires today and the biggest interactions on the world that happened when you just send across this money to this random address and you send six cents and eight cents before to make sure that they actually got the wire send that whole interaction when the message is signed by the same key that signing the account is gone. I would literally just say, Hey Bryce, this is This is Shane Mack dot eath. And the message is guaranteed and verifiable that it came from that wallet that solves such bigger things that I think people aren’t really seeing or thinking about yet. But everyone’s felt the pain of

 

Brendan Veihman  20:15

I mean, definitely, it’s been a problem in crypto for pretty much as long as crypto has been around. And doing that would solve one of the biggest gripes that people have in this space, right? Because we have these outside sources. And that’s what they always like to kind of pick at crypto with. But if you have the solution to eliminate that problem, and it sounds like we are very, very close to getting to that point, you know, that brain,

 

Bryce Paul  20:41

I would say we’re here. I

 

Brendan Veihman  20:42

mean, we’re here that would remove the biggest, I would say like withholding point for a lot of the people that aren’t in crypto, if you have this just like safe haven option. Anyway, I think it’s awesome. I think it’s cool. I have a question for I guess both of you about like, once you set up your, your decentralized identity, is this now cross chain, you know, say I go through? You guys, is this now a cross chain identity? Do I need to set up a new one for theory and a new one for Solana and so on and so forth? Or is this cross chain? And the same goes with the messaging as well? Am I able to do cross chain messaging from something like Aetherium to a salon identity? I’m just curious how you know the different cross chain aspects work in this.

 

21:29

I can take the wallet piece in the movie shame fake the messaging piece, right? So I’ll give you the very real example of Coinbase wallet, right? So Coinbase wallet is a multi chain wallet. We support Ethereum and the entire EVM LT ecosystem. So all of the you know, the 15, different altos and more so we support all of them. We also support Solana, and then we also support Bitcoin. And so you can see we’ve got all the top blockchains on one app for our identity system in particular, we picked a we picked ens. And EMS is kind of like a an EVM centric identity system, right? It’s actually logged to the Ethereum blockchain. However, it does allow you to add addresses for other chains. And so it’s a good hybrid approach where yes, Ethereum secures the protocol. But it lets you address different block chains. And so for example, with your CB ID, it’ll have your Aetherium address. And it’ll also have a bit one bitcoin address and one Solana address. So if someone wants to send you crypto, they can send you any of those different, like, you know, like coins on any of those different chains. And then the messaging aspect is blockchain agnostic. And so maybe Shane off over to you the handle that piece.

 

22:40

Totally, yeah, like I said earlier, XMPP is identity agnostic, it is also chain agnostic. And that is very, very important. Our focus on the go to market has been around the EVM ecosystem, and all the development partners to make that work. But that’s all the infrastructure, we need to then be able to communicate to any identity in any wallet address in the world. And really any identity in the world. That’s really, I think, ultimately the goal. And because the consumers to go to billions of people, I just want to share my digital ticket with Bryce, I might not even know the name of the chain, I might not know the name of the technology, the URL to any of it, I might not even know SMTP exist, what I need to know is that I can send a verified message and a digital asset or a digital ticket or a digital kind of signature to another person. And so we’re very much focused on that long term vision to bring a lot more people in the space.

 

Bryce Paul  23:39

Yeah, no, I love it. It’s funny when you say it like that, it makes so much sense because, you know, we, you know, we watch Netflix or HBO. And we’re not thinking, Oh, well, is it coming from an optimized server? Or is it coming from AWS or you know, what? Web API endpoint or socket, you just care that you’re getting the content delivered, you don’t care really how it’s done in the background. And so, you know, with something like you know, what you guys are building, it really abstracts a lot of that confusion and stuff away from it. And so you just get, basically the service and the product that you want. I guess one of the questions that comes up naturally here is blockchains are totally public. Are the messages totally public? Or is there a way to encrypt them or make it so that the person you’re messaging is the only person reading that it’s very

 

24:26

important to kind of separate the two so the messaging is private and encrypted, and it is not on chain, got it. And the thing that is on chain is the public identifier that allows for the encryption and decryption to happen with your private key. And so that is kind of the differences of the two we use your public wallet identity to be able to route messages and send between wallet addresses, but the messages themselves are stored off chain, fully encrypted. And privacy and security are very important to everything we’re doing.

 

Bryce Paul  25:05

And kind of along that same line, I’m curious just about like, how is there a way like for the inbox, is there a way to determine who could message you with like white lists or a spam filter, those kinds of things that just get developed over time.

 

25:18

Totally. And we’re working a lot on this at both the protocol level, and the application level Coinbase already in their wallet has an approve, just like a DM you would get on Instagram or Twitter, they already have if you’ve never gotten a message from someone before, and no past interactions, you have to approve that message before it actually is able to send you push notifications or land in your inbox. And I think those kinds of controls will be very standard. And there’s also things we can do at the protocol level in the future, to help give more information to applications to better sort, and innovate on the inbox and how to help users control their inbox. And I think both are actually very important to ultimately give users more control over their attention.

 

Brendan Veihman  26:02

And said, I got a question for you. I mean, what, um, what other ways? Are you hoping to see decentralized messaging and payments use? Like, is this going to be something that you see being used for alerts and announcements and businesses and different kinds of automation? There’s so many different ways that pretty much the system can be applied? So I’m curious, like, what what’s going through your brain? Where do you want to see this stuff really kind of play its part long term?

 

26:30

Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s something we wrestle with all time and very closely with chain as well. I think it’s very clear to me that in the in the medium to long term, it’s everywhere, right? The whole, the whole point of like a decentralized protocol is that it’s general purpose, it can be used for so many different things. And in the beginning, though, as you try to, you start going zero to one, where the best places to look for early adoption. And so some of the like, green shoots we’re seeing is like the some section of users that do want to be able to message other users securely. And you know, they’re already in the crypto ecosystem, they were three natives, and they want to be able to know that when they message another web three, native, they are reaching the right person. And then you know, when they send money, they don’t like send test transactions and everything, they can first see that the identity itself and chat with it for free, and then send the money that they want to send or do an NFT, trade, etc. So very much the peer to peer kind of messaging and transacting component. There’s another component, which is also in the peer to peer space, which is, you know, many of the of the existing finance apps that that you do peer to peer payments, they all tend to be very geo restricted. So you know, like cash app, I think is very like Western and like, you know, it’s only in a couple of countries. Same thing with Venmo. I think there’s another angle here where both messaging and payments for peer to peer are global in in self custody wallets with SMTP. So like coin base wallet, anyone in the world can message and now send money to anyone else in the world. That’s very powerful. That’s still in the peer to peer realm, complementing that. And separate is the DAP developer influencer, like to and you know, like, create a user stream. And so the idea here is, I think, you know, Shane mentioned this as well, like guys like Robert LaShana, of compound, don’t have a way to reach their users have a thriving user base hundreds of 1000s of users, they’d have no way to use them to reach them. So that’s another way and I don’t see these as being very different use cases, they both help grow the network, they both help grow adoption. In an ideal world, you open up your wallet, and you see some critical alerts from your DAP, you also see a couple of messages from people that you know, in the ecosystem. And those are very complementary sitting in the same inbox. And so those are at least two of the ways that I definitely see a little bit of adoption. There’s also an angle of communities, right? Like, over time, do you actually have your communities participating in similar forums. So it’s like more of a multi dimensional graph. And people are like chatting in a common community, and then they break off and in one on one chats, because they want to connect about something that someone said in an open forum. So that area we haven’t really seen, I think that we’ll see that eventually. But right now, I think it’s the peer to peer use cases, the Adapt to user use cases.

 

Bryce Paul  29:13

And this, you know, honestly, to me, seems like an extension and an improvement. Honestly, going back to a longtime earn, you know, that Coinbase acquired from Balaji you know, where you were able to, you know, give somebody $5 to get to the top of their inbox, or you can set your price say I want to spend, you know, spent, give me $20, and I’ll answer your email and like, that’s another thing that you guys can apply here. And it just seems so relevant. So you guys are just, you know, continuing to expand on greatness.

 

29:45

There’s so many use cases that one applications can innovate on that totally right. So imagine there’s a request box like you have on Twitter, but because it’s built so connected to a Wallet platform, the ability To attach $10 to open this message, and a application like Coinbase wallet could facilitate that type of request inbox that actually gives value to the end user and the wallet itself. Right? There’s so many versions of that, that I think, can really help to drive more value towards the end user, which I think is ultimately the goal of the entire space. Yeah,

 

Bryce Paul  30:26

no, there’s, this is actually bringing to mind kind of a big new trend that just kind of caught fire this last couple of weeks with friend tech, and a guy, you know, iterating on similar concepts that, that, you know, almost you guys and earn were, do you guys have any general high level thoughts, you know, kind of open it up on on what that system is, or, you know, we could breeze over it. I’m just curious if you had seen anything about that sitter chain,

 

30:51

I’ll let said respond. Because I’ve I’ve haven’t used it enough. But I just love seeing people innovate on user value models, new models in which people can exchange interaction and kind of like, value between each other or even like investing in others at a people level. And then to see a built on base is also like, super cool. I also think what’s cool that they did is they built it in a way to do commerce and an L two, with kind of a messaging and peer to peer investing thing outside of the app store, right. So to see them do it in a Safari browser, and you download it as part of the onboarding and installs an app, but it’s really just a bookmark on my home screen shows one how like, much work they had to do to even make it work and to, I think maybe can start showing apple and the others, like how much value there is to be captured here to start working together on making it possible to innovate in this space at an application level.

 

31:52

Yeah, and it’s funny, I was just tweeting about frantic over the weekend, it’s definitely like, so excited to see. I mean, it’s really fun, right? If you’re in this space, you want to see like fun experiments in it. Like the experiments themselves may be short term successful or long term successful. But some of these ideas that they create them spin off new launches and new products. And so a couple of the things that are really interesting is just the idea that like very spontaneously, these decentralized markets could pop up, right? And you people were just able to just like come on board, import the identities, and a market would spin up around the identity and their level of influence. And you would have these bonding curves that would just automatically price like the, you know, based on supply and demand. That’s really innovative and, and you know, you have this underlying blockchain that can like help make all this stuff easy to build, and provably secure, that you wouldn’t have in a web two system. And then the other piece is like, you know, I also the other thing I was tweeting about was, this is actually brings me back to the biology on inbox right where you were creators would set a price for how much they could be reached at with the bait inbox. And now with friend deck, it’s just something that’s dynamically priced based on supply and demand. So I thought that was pretty nifty, do

 

Bryce Paul  33:10

ya very clever stuff. No, while have you guys both, I wanted to see if I could get some clarity on a topic that’s been eluding me a little bit. I honestly haven’t given it that. Too much of a deep dive. But it’s the concept of account abstraction. And I think this is a new term that people have been talking about, and it’s gonna make wallets a heck of a lot more understandable and easier to use. Said, could you kind of give crypto one on one listeners a high level gist of what this is? And why, you know, the Aetherium Foundation’s kind of pushing for it. Yeah, absolutely.

 

33:45

Well, very excited.

 

Bryce Paul  33:46

Are you guys gonna use it?

 

33:49

So I am personally very excited about account abstraction technology, I think the simplest way to explain it is that today, your wallet is when you think about what a wallet is, right? It’s it’s an app that you install. And then the app, the app deploy, it manages your public and private keys. But then all of the other logic that you see around recovering your keys, backing up your keys using daps, etc. All of that is really just the code that’s running on your phone. Right? So all those rules are written by in our case, it’s written by Coinbase. If you’re using another wallet, it’s written by the developers of that wallet. And it’s all running like this. What if you could take all of that logic and actually write it as a smart contract actually put the code of the wallet itself and write it as a block as a blockchain app? And what would that enable? And that would enable more sophisticated and maybe even easier ways to manage your keys for example. So what if instead of just having this 112 word recovery phrase that secures your wallet and if you lose it all your funds are gone? What if you could actually set up so that hey, I have two friends and they can help me recover? Three friends can help me recover my wallet In case, you know, I lose my phone. All right, now you’ve got to have things like you’ve got to add gas to your wallet, right, and you’ve got to manually do add gas to your wallet. And then you know, if you run out of gas, you got to go get more gas, etc. What if you could just not have to deal with gas anymore. And when you want to send crypto, you could just send it with the press of a button and the gas is just handled abstractly behind the scenes because you give permission, wants to some like a paymaster contract or some you know, kind of some blockchain infrastructure that took care of it for you. So all of the little like, like quirks and weird stuff about what you have to learn when you want to start using crypto today. You can smooth out a lot of those wrinkles, by using a account abstracted wallet, it’s just a you know, it’s a wallet that’s designed to like take care of a lot of the the quirks of blockchain today. And that’s why I’m pretty excited about it. I think however, there is an adoption curve. The ecosystem is innovating, building learning, seeing what works, what doesn’t, it’s expensive to deploy these things, you’ve got to deploy them individually to each blockchain that are each, you know, l do that you wanted to work on etc. So there’s some, it’s, it’s not a slam dunk to say we can launch it tomorrow, it’s gonna take some time for us to really like, get to a point where we’re like, hey, this makes a lot of sense to bring, you know, millions of users and billions of dollars into play. So that’s my, that’s my, that’s my hot takes on account abstraction.

 

Bryce Paul  36:30

Love it. Greatly appreciated.

 

Brendan Veihman  36:32

Well said, Shane. Oh, yeah, let you go, Shane.

 

36:35

Yeah, I was just gonna say, account abstraction, for me is something even bigger, because when I saw a demo of it really early on, someone showed me logging in with a Twitter handle a phone number, and email, or a GitHub, and wallet addresses instantly associated with it. And in my head, I was like, Can my Twitter handle now communicate to my phone number? And we’re like yet. And all the sudden, while this idea of the walled silos of WhatsApp of Twitter, DMS, of Instagram, DMS, of SMS, I was like, Holy shit, could I have a single app? Even Coinbase wallet that allowed for talking between a Twitter handle of WhatsApp ID my phone number and DNS name just because account abstractions exist? And then I was like, the answer is yes. And I was like, Holy crap, what else could happen and for me, every identity in the world, including the ones I have today, can now have a wallet address underneath it associated with it. So if you go out even further, iCloud is just going to add wallet addresses underneath it. Whether I have a dot ether, not my email in my iCloud, my phone or my phone number, my iCloud but also I could have a CB ID in my iCloud or not. But those could all have wallet addresses and the ability to own digital things now associated at a device level. Wow, what happens then? Well, now my iCloud can communicate to Coinbase wallet inbox. What if in the future, there’s a black bubble inside of iMessage not just a green bubble, that is a secure, interoperable layer, but also can send payments. That’s possible. Wow, that’s a that’s a that’s a very much possibility of how do you give secure interoperability to every messaging platform in the world that also can do more things than just send messages.

 

Bryce Paul  38:38

The future’s here, that’s all I can say, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a bright future. And it’s coming a lot quicker than I think a lot of people expect it. It’s it’s not somewhere, you know, way out there. But you know, it’s coming, it’s coming fast, and

 

Brendan Veihman  38:50

it’d be an electrifying one. But said, Shane, before we let you go, for those that are listening out there, they’re getting ready to either get into crypto for the first time, or they’re getting ready to get back into crypto they’ve been in the space before, what’s something that you want them to know and walk away with as we go into this final part of 2023.

 

39:10

SHAN you want to go first?

 

Bryce Paul  39:13

Yeah, you could make it as simple as like, you know, just a word from the wise, you know, what are some things that some crypto, you know, new folks can kind of keep top of mind to stay secure to use the best products, anything like that?

 

39:27

You know, I would say for me, being someone who really, I’m not, as OG as a lot of people in this space, probably naive to some to compare to many of them. But what I see being built now is real utility is better user experience that makes lives better and can do things like send global payments for free, which just can’t happen today. And when I see use cases like that, I get excited. And I think what I would say is crypto isn’t about speculating on tokens and driving these completely irrational token markets that I think have driven the space for the past decade. And actually, it’s moving to true value true utility, and building things that make people’s lives better. And that’s what I’m excited about.

 

40:14

And what I’m excited about is and especially, you know, if you’re new to the space, I think everywhere around you, you see examples of I think, you know, Shane, for example, mentioned the, the example of someone’s twitter handle being taken away, because x wanted it, or UCP comes back as being taken away from them in certain countries, or, you know, there’s the whole world is full of examples of why the idea of like self sovereignty, and the idea of like controlling your own funds, controlling your own identity, being a global citizen have never been more important. And I think crypto technology enables that. So I would, I would strongly encourage everyone to experiment with storing your own crypto onboarding friends and family, showing them how easy it is now we’ve we’ve made such leaps and bounds in terms of technology and user experience is genuinely easy enough for like any one of your friends and family to try out crypto today. Teach them how to send crypto anywhere in the world, teach them about stable coins, about you know, fast free payments, like Fred said, there’s a lot of cool stuff happening. So yeah, I would encourage everyone to try it out and experiment.

 

Bryce Paul  41:16

Love it. And first and foremost as well. Download Coinbase wallet and see what what’s cooking over there between this amazing partnership. So Sid and Shane thank you for your time and thank you for being such you know awesome contributors to the space.

 

41:31

Hey, thank you for having us. And if you do download Coinbase wallet, please send me a message at Shane mack daddy.

 

41:37

And me too. I’m sad going God II look forward to chatting with you all securely and privately.

 

Bryce Paul  41:42

Awesome. Love it. Everybody at home listen and hope you enjoyed. Take care