Ep. 532 A look Under the Hood at Coinbase with Will Robinson

May 2, 2023 #CRYPTO101

In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Will Robinson who is the VP of Engineering at Coinbase. Coinbase is a leader of crypto development and bringing web3 to the people of the United States and the world so it is important to hear what they are working on under the hood which is what this episode brings. Learn about Will’s transition from traditional tech into crypto and how Coinbase is launching new products like Base (a Layer-2) and Wallet as a Service. (WaaS)

— TRANSCRIPT —

SPEAKERS
Will Robinson, Aaron Malone

Aaron Malone 00:09
All right, everyone, welcome back to the Crypto 101 Podcast. It is all your host pizza mind here. And I’m joined today by the VP of Engineering over at Coinbase. That’s right, the one and only Coinbase. Will Robinson, thank you so much for taking some time to talk about all the amazing updates that are coming out over there. How you doing?

Will Robinson 00:30
Thank you so much for having me.

Aaron Malone 00:31
Doing well. It’s a pleasure. So right now Coinbase was really the talk of everything. I mean, there’s so many things going on between Brian Armstrong and the SEC and stuff, all kinds of dark clouds hanging over crypto and banks and stuff. But we’re gonna keep things positive and ignore all that. Because underneath all those clouds, there are some amazing seeds that are sprouting right now, especially over at Coinbase, specifically. So let’s talk about some of these major updates, that are not just changing for stocks, changing the company, but changing the industry as you guys continue to be leaders, even 10 years after you began. So before we get into that stuff, let’s get an idea of your background. First, give us the high level story of Will Robinson and how you got into crypto and to become the VP of engineering over Coinbase.

Will Robinson 01:25
Sure thing. So thanks again, for having me, I came up as an honest engineer and an engineering leader spent a lot of time at Google and alphabet, a bit of time at an AI startup before joining Coinbase in late 2021. And you know, for a couple years before I joined Coinbase, I would say crypto was my secret hobby. But just my poor long suffering wife was the only one who got all this stuff. For me. I wasn’t that guy at parties. But I was just increasingly increasingly fascinated by the space. And when I was looking for my next thing, and I knew a few people that Coinbase. And they bent my ear very quickly. And the opportunity to work in an area that had been my all consuming hobby for a couple of years. And also reached the billions of people I think Coinbase was ultimately able to reach was just too good to pass up my particular role here at Coinbase. I’m the VP of engineering in charge of our developer product group. And our developer product group focuses on products for developers building on chain. And we also run a bunch of our internal infrastructure for managing keys and managing wallets and things like that.

Aaron Malone 02:33
That’s awesome. So you’re a man who could literally go anywhere and do anything in the world with your experience. What was it about the crypto industry that made you decide that this was the emerging niche you really wanted to be part of?

Will Robinson 02:46
Yeah, it’s a great question. And I would answer like this, my children are growing up in an increasingly digital world, just as I grew up much more digitally than my parents, and I think this trend is going to continue. And given this trend, I honestly believe that there is a moral imperative to create the conditions for people to grow into being digital citizens, and not just digital consumers. Right now, for most people out there without crypto before crypto, you’ve got a choice of five Disneyland’s. There’s the Google Disneyland, the Facebook, Disneyland, the Tick Tock Disneyland, and so forth, nothing against any of those companies. And this is so pervasive that we don’t even think twice about it. But in the real world, Disneyland is a great place to visit for a day or two. But I wouldn’t live my life there, I wouldn’t try to start a business inside Disneyland, I wouldn’t raise my kids there. And as soon as you touch crypto and really experience what it is to own something digitally, to be free to innovate and compose partner invest on digital rails once you’ve once you felt that in your bones. And you see that this is the fundamental technological unlock that will allow us to bring society on the digital rails, not just consumer society, but society. For me, at least, it becomes hard to imagine working on anything else. Once you once you’ve got that in your sights. There’s nothing more compelling or important. I truly believe that.

Aaron Malone 04:15
That’s an amazing answer. And I really love the heart that you put into that, you know, building a better world for your children is really what a parent’s job is. And so often we lose sight of things, of what really matters in the tech space. Just because we’re either playing around with things or we’re thinking, Oh, this is cool is fun. But What world are we really building here, and I couldn’t be a Disney guy. But I really love the idea of the Magic Mountain of web three. That is coming together right now. So over there, you’re building some pretty cool stuff to unite as many different parts of the web three space together. One of them is Rosetta API. And that’s something that pretty much every Every project that integrates into Coinbase has to start with. So let’s start the conversation there. What is Rosetta API? And why is that so important to web three?

Will Robinson 05:08
Yeah, so the Rosetta API is a little bit inside baseball. But it is for asset issuers. So people who are creating a new blockchain in most cases, to express to Coinbase, and others using the Rosetta API in a uniform way. Here’s how my blockchain works. Here’s how you interact with it. Here’s how blocks are produced. Here’s how you can sort of safely and soundly make understand this blockchain know what balances are no one thinks have been spent and haven’t been spent. And this kind of common layer that allows Coinbase, or other exchanges or entities using the Rosetta API to integrate with that blockchain and bring it into their platform into like the Coinbase exchange in our case,

Aaron Malone 05:52
which is an amazing development. And I’m so grateful that this standard is now being forced. Because without it, literally every exchange and wallet has to integrate a unique system for just about everything that’s not built on Aetherium. And the engineering costs and headaches of doing all this stuff in 2017. And 18, was just astronomical. So this was a great thing to really take the industry by the back of the collar and drag them forward. So very, very grateful for what you guys have built over there. But that wasn’t enough, recently, you’ve decided to build and launch something called bass. And bass is a layer two, that is also sitting on top of optimism, which is a layer two, which is sitting on top of a theory, which is layer one. And at this point, everyone’s just confused going what in the world is this thing? Give us the high level? Just what is Bayes? And how do people use this?

Will Robinson 06:51
Absolutely. So let me start with the vision. And I’ll get to some of the technical details you mentioned as well along the way. So at the end of the day, we believe that we are entering and need to accelerate the world into the utility phase of crypto. It’s wonderful that people have easy ways like on Coinbase to enter the crypto economy buy sell and trade assets, speculate on their future value that that’s that’s an important step along this path. But the final destination has always been people using crypto in their daily lives. And as we looked at the world in 2023, we believe we had a unique role to play in trying to accelerate the world on that path. And by creating base, we hope to create a chain, I believe we can create a chain that is the safest, most trusted, easiest to use for both developers building their daps and end users, whether they’re crypto pros who have been doing this for years, or novices going on chain for the first time to play with defy to play with NF T’s to interact with their favorite web through your crypto enabled games. And that that is the fundamental vision for base for developers we are we offer a unique distribution opportunity, we’ve got a bunch of users who are crypto curious on our platform, where we’ve, we’ve got an interaction with them, we’ve got a trust relationship with them. And we can start to steer them toward things that they might be interested in. And for the end users, we provide a stack with the safety and trust that they’ve invested in Coinbase say, Oh, I’ve heard about this on chain thing, but I’m not sure where to get started. And we can provide that sort of easy, paved road on ramp. The last thing that I’ll mention on the vision before I get to some of the technical details is one critical thing is we view bass, not as an island, but as a bridge. So we hope that a lot of people will use it for many, many things. And it will be a great on ramp for millions of people to touch the real on chain crypto economy for the first time. But from there, we expect and hope that people will get interested in other chains and other projects and things that have no business relationship with Coinbase at all. And that rising tide is great for the world and the sort of highest calling fundamental way that I mentioned upfront. And it’s also frankly, great for Coinbase as business as more people get unchained this, this is great for us as well, just in general. On the technical details, you mentioned optimism, the relationship there. One thing I think is really critical to distinguish is we are using the op stack. So this is the software open source software that the optimism labs team has developed and continues to develop. We’ve joined as the second core contributor to that stack. And we’re using that stack that software stack to power the base L two, but the base L two settles directly to the theory of L one, just in the same way that optimism may net or arbitrary may not have many other l twos settled directly to Aetherium L one. So we’re using the same software stack and contributing a lot back to that stack over time. But we’re not an L three stacked on top of them in terms of settlement.

Aaron Malone 10:00
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Now, I appreciate you clearing that up. Really, when people are saying, basis using optimism, that’s the common misunderstandings like, is this an L? Three? What, what’s happening here? Why did they do it that way? Well, they didn’t. They did the recognizable way. So we can think of base as another. I guess you could either call a competitor or CO creator, like arbitrary like optimism, like scale labs like polygon, it’s in that family, is that right?

Will Robinson 10:33
Yes, I think that’s, that’s roughly the right way to think about it. But with with the additional sort of nuance that we’re fairly arm in arm, with the optimism team, we’re not a competitor with them, we’re partnering with them contributing back to the stack, and I believe very, very well aligned with the optimism team’s vision of a super chain of a number of L tos, perhaps many of them using the op stack, perhaps expanding beyond the OP stack, that all ultimately collaborate and interoperate very well. And that’s, that’s the vision that I think is great for the world and great for Coinbase over time, also, that’s really cool. How is it relating to an open source project, like the OP stack, as opposed to working all internal, like you would have over at Google or some of your past employers? Yeah, so you know, I think that this, this is a really great part of working in this industry, honestly, like, there is a there’s a lot of PvP, right? There’s, you could find everything in this industry. But one thing that you also find is a lot of non zero sum thinking, a lot of emphasis on investing in public goods, not just as a charitable endeavor, because it feels good, or it’s part of the triple bottom line mission, those things are all great. But also saying investing and reinvesting in this public good is going to ultimately help all of us who have a commercial interest in this space, as well as end users. And as a positive sum game in aggregated, at least at this sort of current, hopeful hyper growth phase. And my crystal ball doesn’t extend out 10 or 15 years. But for where we are right now, the main goal, and the main focus is, let’s get 100 million people online on web three, let’s get a billion people on web three. And all of this coming together to accelerate along that macro roadmap, really is good for each of us individually, as well. So that collaboration, that partnership has been wonderful. So far, you know, it’s always the details really matter. But I think that it’s been fantastic. And with a very bright future.

Aaron Malone 12:44
Now, the crypto and web three spaces, you know, arguably 15 years old now, you know, give or take whatever you want to call the starting point of it. One thing has become very clear, user adoption is extremely difficult. Even though we have the smartest people in the world working in this industry. Now, it’s still been very, very difficult to get the users to come over here. So it seems like the right approach now is to take this technology and go where the users already are. And Coinbase is once again taking the lead in this with your new wallet as a service offering. So brands and companies and apps that already have millions and millions of users can simply integrate web three without having to do a lot of work. Talk to us about what this wallet as a service offering is really doing for there’s a lot of people that actually have their own businesses that are listening and interested in potential integrations, give us a pitch.

Will Robinson 13:42
Fantastic, we’ll actually I’m going to use the recording of this podcast of what you just said as my pitch in the future, because I think you summed up the high level very, very well. So here’s the insight, you’ve got billions of people using web two today, coming onto a website, grabbing an app from from their phone’s App Store, trying things very fluidly. People are online. They’re just not on chain yet. And the the traditional path of trying to bring people on chain has sort of followed the evolution of the chains themselves where, you know, the stereotypical view is you sit someone down and say, well, here’s why Bitcoin or hard money really matters. And so you should have some of this asset and then this other asset as well and smart contracts. It’s sort of bringing them along in this sort of religious conversion. And then at the end, you say, now get a wallet and go use something. And I don’t know if you’ve tried that at cocktail parties, but people usually fall asleep in the first minute. You know, they’re not really interested in this religious pitch they want to get on with their day. And I think what wallet as a service gives is an opportunity to flip that around and start at the end. Start with something people want to use right now where they are right now. They’re engaging with your game. They’re interested in your or money market that your they heard they could get an interest rate on an Ave that is interesting to them and they want to engage with it there they are there on the website, what happens now they’re in the app, what happens now. And with wallet as a service, we let it as a developer facing product, the developer of that website of that application, can embed a crypto wallet self custody crypto wallet right inside their application. So the user without going anywhere else without leaving, can say, Well, I wasn’t on chain before. But I want this thing in front of me, let me get a wallet. Let me onboard perhaps some money from using Coinbase pay from Fiat. And let me start using your application All right here. And the best part is that that wallet is secured by Coinbase’s in house MPC technology, where we use for our own much of our own key management and security for our own systems. But given to these end users, putting the self custodial power in their hands, and letting them start using the chain first. And then once they’re using the chain, then they can use it for other things. And they can find out what makes it so great. Maybe they’ll join our tribe. But let’s get them using the chain. First, let’s get a million wallets out there, let’s get 100 million wallets out there. That’s the real vision behind wallet as a service.

Aaron Malone 16:16
I think it’s a great vision to finally have that kind of gray area between fully custody wallet on an exchange and the self hosted wallets or a cold wallet that you know, the more experienced users will eventually get to, you know, as we say, in this industry, not your keys, not your crypto. But that’s been the biggest barrier to entry. In my opinion, there’s nothing more daunting than saying Okay, try this new technology. Now write down these 12 words, write them down again in the correct order and spend, you know, 20 minutes through the setup process. And by the way, if you lose these, your life is over.

Will Robinson 16:52
Yep, it’s best if you put the ball on steel, don’t trust the safe deposit box. I mean, yeah, someone came to me with this pitch cold. I nod and smile and think how do I get away from this person, right, and I get that, I get that. And so providing something that has many or most of the same safety characteristics, I can go deep into the technical details. But the take home message is we’re trying to square that circle, give you to self custody, but with a more gentle curve of how you onboard how you’d recover the keys, while still really empowering you and putting you in the driver’s seat. And that’s what we’re trying to achieve here.

Aaron Malone 17:29
And is this just something that you know, the average web to user can log in with their email and password the way they’re used to, and then have access to their crypto wallet?

Will Robinson 17:37
Yeah, so we’re exploring a bunch of different authentication mechanisms to and also seeing what the market is telling us. So we’ve gone to market in a public preview of this on test net, just within the last couple of weeks, we’ve had several 100 developers sign up, you can go to cloud.coinbase.com. If you’re a developer, grab this free account, provision some wallets start playing around within your app, see how the API’s work. And we’re gonna see what the market is telling us about, well, what sort of logins to our users want, what sort of MFN key shard management really makes sense for them. So it is still fairly early for us. But I think in the fullness of time, we’re going to cover pretty much the whole range that we can while still staying in it in a true self custodial regime at the end of the day.

Aaron Malone 18:23
What do you think some of the biggest problems are in terms of security in this space? Is it the fact that there’s so many, let’s be honest, junior developers, that are out there making amazing innovations, but they don’t have the experience to properly secure them? Or is solidity? Just an insecure language? And we shouldn’t be building define it to begin with? How do we really think of the security problems we’ve seen in defi that resulted in billions of dollars hacked? Likely just because of one or two characters being out of place? Or something, you know, really simple that even audits miss sometimes? What’s the deal here?

Will Robinson 19:06
Yeah, it’s a really, really important and really deep question, I think, and I’ve got it. We could have a whole podcast just on this.

Aaron Malone 19:15
Well, you can take over the rest of the podcast with these thoughts if you’d like because this is something that I’ve been wondering about for a really long time. And I have these conversations with many, many people that really don’t have an answer, but if you do, the rest of the time is yours.

Will Robinson 19:29
Well, I’ve got I’ve got maybe part of the answer and no silver bullet solution, certainly, but part of the diagnosis, let’s say. So one thing that I think is pretty clear, is if self contracts, or sorry, smart contracts are operating in a very PvP environment, dark forest, you know, whatever metaphors you’d like to use. So if there is a flaw, if there is an exploit to be done, there’s an incredibly strong incentive. have to find it and it will eventually be found. In addition, the the fundamental one piece of the fundamental magic of these censorship resistant, instant settlement chains like Etherium main net, is there’s no take backs, right. And so the failure modes are incredibly, can be incredibly sharp, incredibly harsh. And this puts you in a, an engineering regime that, frankly, only a very, very, very small minority of software engineers, let’s say, are used to or have dealt with before. It’s much more akin to writing aeronautical control systems to run your passenger jet than it is to writing your front end code for Gmail, or Google Maps or tick tock or something like that were bugs are annoying, they might lose you money, you know, they’ll lose you money until you fix the bug. But the failure modes are still fairly gentle. And in this sharp failure mode, hyper adversarial environment, smart contracts, the level of paranoia of rigor of testing, of things like formal verification, like these techniques that you’d use on an aeronautical control system, they feel much more appropriate. And it’s just less of a natural muscle for the vast majority of software developers out there. It’s not something that people can’t learn. But it’s not the starting place for many devs that come from other disciplines. And so I feel like that’s a set of techniques of cultural norms of tooling, that we’re still developing, frankly, as an industry. And we should be honest about that, I think it’s very easy to get caught up in the excitement of where all this could go. And that’s important because it keeps us going. But we also have to be really clear eyed and honest with ourselves and our users about where’s the industry now? How much risk should you take on and in what ways, so that’s on the developer side, and then on the user side, and I never want to blame the victim. But I think that part of the difficulty, as people are encountering this space for the first time is it all feels like magic. And part of what you and I learned as you as you soak in this space for years, as a user, as a, as someone who’s working in this space, is what’s the real magic, and what’s the BS magic. But as a new user, on day one, it’s really hard to distinguish, right? someone hands you this technology and say, you can send any value to anyone across the globe, knowing only their address with instant settlement and like seconds, that that’s magic. Nothing else works that way. What else could this do? And say, oh, you know, you can you can engage with these defi protocols. And you’ll get these interest rates on this money market or, you know, do this lending or whatever, right? That’s also seems kind of magical. What else right. And then someone else comes to you and says free money. He said, well, that feels magical, too. But all this other stuff felt magical as well, maybe I should leap into this. And then you get smacked in the face. And I think that trying to educate users and and just give them a sort of safe and gradual way on. So where they’re not getting FOMO they’re not getting ahead of themselves. And getting that tuned intuition of what new things are unlocked by this versus what is just people selling the same snake oil they were selling in ancient Egypt, right just now. On the blockchain. That’s that’s a tricky thing. And that user education piece is something we think about a lot at Coinbase as well. Yeah.

Aaron Malone 23:48
It is really unfortunate. You know, just before we started this recording, I put out a tweet talking about the five most brainwashed communities. And, you know, I said, you know, it’s not that you’re not going to make it, but what you’re holding isn’t going to make it. And it goes back to the whole magic. Of, of all that, you know, there are these coins that have trillions or quadrillions of tokens and supply. And people think, well, if this ever hits a penny or $1, you know, I’m going to be which rich beyond my wildest dreams. But if you do some basic math and understand how the token omics, or the space really work, you realize it’s an impossibility. And if you didn’t get in the first week of this stuff, like any Ponzi scheme, you’re going to be the one left holding the bag. So we try and educate people the best we can to make responsible choices. And there’s still plenty of upside to make generational wealth, by investing in good things that have proven themselves over time. You’re still early, but you’re not going to be early for much longer, because of things like this world as a Service Movement, and a lot of other things coming from all sides trying to onboard the next billion users into web three, which I think is going to happen in the next couple of years. But you mentioned, you know, like with Aetherium, there’s no take backs. And that’s been an issue as well in confidence in this space. But you’ve got something now called the Coinbase recovery tool. What does it do? And what doesn’t it do?

Will Robinson 25:15
Yep. Great question. So this is something we’re really happy that we’ve been able to roll out this year. There’s been a problem for a while, that users have told us about and that we really sympathize with, which is Coinbase supports many L one assets, many sort of base level assets, and also many tokens, like ERC 20s on blockchains, like Ethereum, but we don’t support all of them. There’s hundreds of 1000s out there, and you can create a new one yourself in three minutes. And Coinbase supports only a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of all the digital assets that exist. And there’s a bunch of reasons for that. And over time, people have occasionally said, Oh, I’ve got this digital asset and Coinbase can receive, let’s say, Aetherium, over this address, I want to store this on Coinbase as well. And they’ve tried to send or they’ve sent that digital asset that we don’t support to a Coinbase controlled address that we would use to receive Aetherium or some supported asset. And that unfortunately, has left these assets in limbo until the release of this tool. So with this tool, you can now log into your Coinbase account, paste in the transaction ID of the transaction where you sent to the unsupported asset, sign a message with your self custodial wallet to say, Hey, I’m me, I really control this wallet, push a button, and we will send that unsupported asset or those tokens back to you. And you can recover that asset and go about your your merry way. And we’re really proud to say that, since launching this tool earlier this year, we’ve had 10s of 1000s of people recover more than $150 million worth of assets that they had accidentally sent to these Coinbase addresses that had been sitting there. And going forward. We are working to add support for additional networks. So we got a theory a main net launch now. And that’s launched to 100% of Coinbase retail users. And we know that there are some of these tokens that are in this limbo state on other networks as well. We’ve heard you that this is a tool you really appreciate we’re trying to support it as broadly as we can going forward. But for now, we’ve got the support on a theory may net.

Aaron Malone 27:26
Well, thank you so much for building that tool, I 100 and $50 million worth of value. Thanks you greatly for it. And counting, I guess. I just have a thought while we were chatting and it’s not on the approved sheet. So forgive me, if you can’t answer it, you know, that’s fine. We can always edit it out later. But I was thinking how cool it would be if there was a decentralized exchange built on base that was essentially mirroring the centralized Coinbase exchange? Is that something as an idea that sounds exciting? Or are there a lot of reasons why you might think that would never happen?

Will Robinson 28:08
Yeah, you know, I think is is a really interesting idea. And the complexity, as usual, is in the regulatory relationship there. So it’s not something I have the best job in the world. Because I get to work on all this on chain forward looking stuff. And I have deep deep respect and appreciation for our trading business or exchange. It’s where we make the vast majority or money today. And also, it’s not really my domain. I know there’s a ton of regulatory complexity there where liquidity can and can’t express. So I don’t want to over speak or over share there. But I think that let me zoom out from that particular idea of some sort of exchange that mirrors a Coinbase exchange because on chain like I really don’t have an opinion on that. Nothing to say about that in particular. But I do think you’ve hit on something. That is a great general point for Coinbase. One of the things one of the reasons that we created base in the first place is as we look product by product at what we do and ask the question, should part of this or all of this actually be on chain? Would this be a better product? If this was on chain? With surprising frequency? The answer is yes. Oh, that’d be amazing. When can we start which chain should rebuild on? Right, uh, one of the reasons why we got conviction that now’s the time for us to create base, as we said, we need a natural home for Coinbase as products or parts of Coinbase as products to live on chain. And we’ve found as we’ve gone product by product and asked this question internally, that it’s an unlock and a superpower for us. And you’re gonna see a bunch more on chain features and products rolled out from Coinbase over the coming year. And I think if we’re guessing right about where the world is going, we’re just a bit ahead of the curve. And you’ll see every large and small software maker over the next 10 years have an on chain component From Microsoft or Adobe down to a two person startup, you know, one of the rallying cries we have internally is we want to let people build on chain by default. And one of the things we say a lot externally is, hey, on chain is the new online, right, catch this wave. And so whether it’s our exchange or other parts of our business, I do think you’ll see us moving more and more on chain over time. And I couldn’t be more excited about that.

Aaron Malone 30:22
Do you have any plans that you can talk about, as far as digital identity goes, because that’s one of the other missing pieces is to be able to have on chain credit. And kind of be able to do some more things that you really just can’t do? In a totally anonymous environment?

Will Robinson 30:41
Yeah, it’s a great insight, nothing specific that I can talk about today. But I will say, I agree with your insight and your observation, it is something that we think about a lot. When I think about the delta between defy and traditional finance, for example, and some notion of identity, some notion of credit worthiness, some connection to the other systems in the world, like the legal systems that exist. It is missing today. And Coinbase as, as a as an entity that has a lot of user relationships, and a lot of user trust. I think that there is a place for us to play in that space, and try to hopefully help push that space forward. The exact form that that will take, you know, we’re still noodling on. But when I look ahead 10 years, or you know, even two years and say, How does defy let me open a laundromat. Right? Like, how does it fulfill that that function have tried fire compete with that function and Trad phi, I think you’re not, you don’t want to restrict laundromat openings, just to people who have a big enough stack of eath to collateralized to take out stablecoin loan and buy a bunch of washing machines, right? Like, we do need to incorporate more and more connections between the on chain world and the rest of the world. And I do think that in general, whether it’s identity, Fiat rails, other things like that Coinbase is perfectly positioned and in the West, I think uniquely positioned to do more and more of that off chain on chain bridging. And that’s just going to add so much more utility to all on chain players, including Coinbase.

Aaron Malone 32:23
Yeah, I definitely agree. I do think that Coinbase will have 100 million users, potentially a billion. And being able to simply use that the way we use Olof to log into web two websites today, whether it’s using Facebook or Google as our simple identifier. I mean, just that one little piece of the puzzle has made website management and usability so much easier. I remember in the early 2000s, I’d stumbled on all kinds of interesting websites. And oh, well, you got to sign up and make an account to view this content, I would just simply leave. Because the last thing I wanted to do is give my email and password to another company, trust them with this information, have to remember it. And it was just a nightmare. And then once I could just simply log in with Google or Facebook like, great. It opened up 90% more things to me. Yep. Just because I have to have that barrier.

Will Robinson 33:26
i That’s access to absolutely agree. And I think there’s a next step in that evolution, where instead of saying, Well, Google or Facebook, whoever they know everything about me and every website I’ve ever logged into, you know, but at least I just have to think really hard about how much I trust just Google. And that is a step up from a million passwords and a billion websites that, you know, that I’ve got a direct relationship with. But there’s a step beyond that, which is nobody knows everything about me. Right? My my wallet has zero knowledge information that I can share in a faceted way with you know exactly what this website needs to do just what I want them to do with me. I want to buy some alcohol and prove that I’m over 21. And they don’t really need to know anything else about me. And I think that once we’re living in that world, we’ll look back on even today’s regime and say, Oh, well, Isn’t that silly?

Aaron Malone 34:18
Yeah, exactly. And being able to have a Coinbase account and connect it to any other financial app, simply would let that financial app now okay, this user is not on the OFAC sanction list. He’s KYC he’s been given the thumbs up. He’s good to go. Or she’s good to go. And that’s all they need to know.

Will Robinson 34:38
Yeah. And that there’s some really exciting possibilities there for both Coinbase and the space at large and, and for something like this to work, I think. You know, if if Coinbase creates a six Disneyland that everybody’s stuck in, please have me back on your podcast and yell at me right like that is not the destination. We think we’ve Got a lot of value we can add. But this is all ultimately about empowering the end user letting them own and control their own digital destiny, if we’re providing great identity services or anything else, awesome, but we’ve got to earn that spot and keep rerunning it and improving products. And the user is ultimately in the driver’s seat, it could choose a different identity provider in this world, things like that. So I think that that is that is one of the really exciting things, right? It’s, it’s harder work, to to not have your users locked into a permanent network effect or whatever. But I think that that’s ultimately to the great benefit of the world at large, keeping us all honestly competing for end users business, instead of just seeing well, who can we? Who can we entice to live full time in our Disneyland?

Aaron Malone 35:50
Yeah, I love that. I really do. You know, we’re building a trustless network and web three, a trustless, world economy. But we still need some trusted bridges and on ramps, and people we can trust to do those things the right way. So we’ll thank you very much for being one of those people, and continuing to do things the right way. I’m happy to be a Coinbase user, and support her and all that stuff. You know, it’s one of the very, very few things that we actually recommend to our community. It’s literally less than one hand of the exchanges that we recommend that we consider safe. So thank you so much for all your role in being one of those things. And before we let you go, give us one last word of advice for any developers that are interested in entering the crypto space, what should they know before they start building apps or platforms or anything else that users are going to be interfacing with?

Will Robinson 36:45
Yeah, so for developers entering the crypto space, I think I’d go back to what I was saying before, you’ve got to put on a different tint of goggles almost in how you see things the level of how adversarial the environment can be how sharp the edges are. I would say actually, one fun exercise, if you’re a nude smart contract developer, is go back and read post mortems from the last five or 10, big, splashy, defi hacks and it’s not going to give you a comprehensive knowledge of everything that can go wrong. But just having those concrete examples in your head saying, oh my gosh, this kind of reentrancy attack or whatever it may be. This is the sort of environment that I’m playing in here. It’s not what I’m used to. Hopefully, it’ll be exciting. But you’ll also start feeling that responsibility that you have, and the different set of instincts and tools that you might need to reach for.

Aaron Malone 37:35
Well said, Thank you so much. Well, and where can we follow you for some more of your great insights?

Will Robinson 37:40
Thank you so much for having me. First of all, you can find me on Twitter at I believe it’s Will Robinson 23. I’m a late comer to Twitter. I’m not very social. But you can find me there and really love to have engaged in the conversation with any of your listeners.

Aaron Malone 37:57
Thank you so much. Well, we look forward to having you back on anytime you’ve got a new announcement to make or you just want to come here and rant about the world of crypto with us.

Will Robinson 38:06
Thank you so much, Aaron. It’s been a pleasure.

Aaron Malone 38:08
Thank you and we’ll be back with another great episode of the crypto Antoine podcast later this week. Thanks for tuning in.

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