This is Epicenter episode 517 with guest Evgeny Your Tev.
Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the
technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization
and the blockchain revolution. I'm Fedelikka Annes and today
I'm speaking with Evgeny, who is the cofounder and CEO of Zarion,
which is a well known web three wallet Afghani welcome.
Thanks, Frederica. It's really a pleasure to be
here. It's the podcast that I've been
known, I've known for a while, so I'm super happy to be here.
And yeah, thanks for hosting. Cool.
So you know about us, but what about you?
Tell us about yourself. What's your background?
Sure. So as much as already I'm at
Guinea. I've been in the crypto space
since roughly forever, I would say like since the, yeah, like
my first interaction was like very like early on in 2015 or
even earlier than that. But I really really got into
crypto after the the white paper for Ethereum.
That to be quite honest, I still remember the day when I was I
was on the subway just like scrolling through the Internet.
And I was I came across the white paper and I just read it
through it. It blew my mind.
So that's how I got into like the whole space basically.
Since then, I've been. I've been committed to working
in Web 3, even though it wasn't called Web 3 back in the day
and. Yeah, before that I I was still
studying. At that moment I was studying
computer science. That's my background.
I'm an engineer by education and like my first adventures, but
honestly in like in my spirit, I'm I'm an entrepreneur.
So I've been working on my own projects basically since high
school and I started like various mobile apps, chat bots
and some of them like with variable level of success.
I think the the most interesting one was actually already in the
crypto space. That's before 0 in was an app
called Crypto Trader. It had over 1,000,000 downloads
with like pretty like 0 marketing efforts or anything.
It was just for tracking whatever price was and I built
it for myself and it just scaled to to many people liked it and
before that I worked. This is how I actually found my
cofounder. I was.
Building mobile applications with like a venture studio in
Moscow. So that's the background.
When you were on the subway reading the Ethereum white
paper, what was it exactly that appeared kind of the technology
itself, or kind of the idea of what it could empower in the
long run? Yeah, so this is.
I think a fairly typical story for anyone living in a third a
third word world country. So when the financial system
basically like after the Soviet Union collapse, obviously Russia
took a capitalist approach but the financial system was not
nearly as stable as it was in Europe, for example in the US.
And 1st I was intrigued by the the.
Idea of programmable money. This is like first when I read
about Bitcoin, but as a as an engineer myself, I was not
convinced fully. I would say that this is going
to be you know, I kind of liked it.
I started reading about the nature of currency, the nature
of money, how it all works. Why is the currency in my
country collapsing and in others it doesn't?
Why the stock market behaves by but like the way it behaves?
And so this gotten my interest, but really, really got excited
when I understood that you could leverage the technology of
blockchain to extend that to essentially programmable trust.
So it's not just about money anymore.
And if we can't have this shared trust layer which is the
Ethereum computer, this is where I got, I was sold basically.
And yeah, I think there were a lot of other.
Really forward-looking ideas in the white paper, many of which
were I guess took years and years to realize.
But I think the main proposition was, yeah, changing, like
changing the rules basically And where this whole thing is
headed. Yeah, absolutely.
So after the success of Crypto Trader, you guys started Serion
together. What was the motivation behind?
I mean, basically even back then there were a multitude of
wallets, right? So, kind of What was the
motivation behind starting yet another wallet?
Yeah. So I think it's fair to kind of
took it a little bit of a D route here and talk about zeros
evolution. So zeroing was zeroing is a
wallet only for the last year and a half roughly and all the
all the time before that zeroing was kind of.
Three different companies. So we really started with even
like you can call it the Spark concept development studio.
So we were helping out the companies and with ideas who
knew what they want to build on top of theorem just realize
their things. And later I think like the first
really the story where of 0 in itself starts with the folio
tracking. When we decided that we actually
didn't want to build a wallet, there were so many already, like
there were quite a few wallets, The space was.
Pretty much starting to be filled with a magnitude of
tokens and that people really needed tools for them to keep
track of stuff that is happening, what they have even
in their wallet. And this is by the way still a
big issue for the existing big wallets.
We don't have to call them out here and we've started with that
mission to track basically everything that happens on chain
such that the users don't have to worry about it and they have.
Control, because control means safety and this is how we got
our first user base. So people were coming to zero
and just to see what they really have in the portfolio, what kind
of transactions they were making and that's been fairly
successful. And this is how we got started.
But what we realized over time is that DFI is becoming like a
big thing, and it's now much easier than ever because of
this. Access to the centralized trust
in a way we could just integrate uni swap without even like going
and talking to uni swap and people could start leveraging
that within our interface. And we soon noticed that
basically the users who are transacting using Syrian, they
are our you can you can call like super fat.
So they just love the experience.
They love the UI, they like love the combination of the portfolio
tracking with the transacting part and we kind of.
We dived into this path and we started doing more and more
integrations. We were the first ever
integration of union swap, I think the first integration of
Maker Dow, the first integration of Compound V2 and like a few
other protocols. So really, really early in the
Defy journey and eventually this this whole I guess pathway led
us to realizing that this is time when we are ready to start
our own bullet because the existing wallets were still.
Lagging behind in terms of the I guess the data capabilities so
the and the UX in general. So UX I think in crypto in a big
way is build on top of good data and like fast.
Yeah like a fast understanding what was in your wallet to make
good decisions to sign transactions in a safer way to
exactly know like and how connecting to the apps and etc
etc. So that requires good
information and we had that for for a while now and.
We decided that the bullet should have all, should have it
all and yeah that's that was the whole motivation behind if I'm
moving into the wallet space eventually I think it I kind of
see it as like the the end game for Syrian.
We we were thinking of doing a wallet for a very, very long
time. We always like postpone that and
like it's much harder to compete, it's harder to monetize
etcetera, etcetera. But yeah, I feel like we are
ready now. And yeah, lastly, I think what's
important to mention here, a very long time ago, I think it
was like 2017 we even had an attempt at wallet.
We didn't put too much effort into it, but it was called
Tokinary, it was one of the, it was built by one of our
engineers. So basically like a kind of like
a sister company or speed off from Zirion and.
It was cool talking, Larry. So that was like very, very
simple wallet. It was built using the kind of
telegram principle of removing all the clutter and just keeping
focus on one single wallet, just the tokens and signing
transactions. That's it.
It was a cool thing. We still have users on that, but
we're not really doing anything anymore with this.
And obviously now zero is the main thing.
Okay, maybe. Let's talk about kind of how
Xerion handles for the user and then we can kind of talk about
kind of the spectrum of wallets and kind of what they do for you
X and kind of what you guys plan to do for you X because
obviously it's, I mean it's super apparent that user
experience for wallets has to greatly improve for this to kind
of see any mainstream adoption. So kind of talk us through if I
go to xerion dot io now and want to create a wallet, how do you
guys do that for me? Where are the keys?
How do I safe keep them? Yeah.
So I think the best experience would be on mobile still.
So we are in the process of releasing.
So for our web users, we are in the process of releasing the
extension. So this is happening already.
We're going to go public life in about a month from now.
So we're pretty much gearing for that and excited for this
launch. We still, we already have over
10,000 beta users of the extension, but yeah that would
be the milestone. Majority of our users of the
wallet are on mobile and the way it works is a very classic non
custodial wallet. So you come, you create a seat
phrase. We'll guide you through how you
should recover that we. We're obviously thinking about
other ways of custody, but I think for us the main reason why
we wanted to keep it very simple is that first we do rely a lot
on composability, so daps have to work for for the world to be
useful. And 2nd we wanted to it's you
can go like a vampire attack on meta mask.
We want users to migrate over, and we still have a pretty big
chunk of users just moving their seed phrase from meta mask to
Syrian. And yeah, the C phrase just
stays on the device and we obviously don't have access to
it. You can back it up in I cloud if
you want. And yeah, that's about it in
terms of just creating a wallet. So it's very simple, just a few
taps, yeah. And in terms of the experience,
I guess what you get is the DAP browser that works.
So you can connect to any DAP and you can site transaction
transactions. You can connect to pretty much
any network out there. So we support fully support in
terms of data capabilities, we support about 10 chains and the
rest you can just add any custom RPC and start signing
transactions. We do check every transaction
before it's sent by simulating it and giving you what is going
to happen as a result of this transaction.
I know that the safe does that too and like good better wallets
are doing that now. So that's good.
And we obviously checked the domain names for phishing and
basically doing all kinds of security checks in the moment of
transactions. And we plan to add more and more
stuff on the security of the basically interacting with the
blockchains. Okay.
We'll dive into that in just a bit.
Let's kind of just remain on the seed phrase for now.
So I assume the seed phrase is in some sort of secure enclave
in your phone, right? When you say you can back it up
to iCloud, can you also just write it down kind of pen and
paper, or do you never get to see it?
You obviously can, yes, so that would be the default way for
most people who know how to handle the seed phrases.
But backing it up to iCloud is still.
It's kind of an easy way for you to for someone who is not too
experienced with crypto but still want to give it a go.
To not lose the key. And if for example their device
is stolen or lost, in that case they might have forgotten to
back it up using like a paper and a pen.
And in that case they could just using their Apple ID or Google
account. They and plus like their
biometrics, they can restore access to the seed phrase.
So basically the seed phrase is not stored in the open way in I
cloud or Google Drive. It's encrypted with your
biometrics and stored. So basically if you lose both
your, I guess, PIN to the phone and your phone, that's the one
you actually lose the key. Yeah, but in other cases it
saves from. The most common way of losing
A/C phrase is when you forgot to back it up.
So yeah, that's, that's where we are.
It doesn't obviously protect from the leakage of the seed
phrase. So if you've written down some
seed phrases, that's the biggest concern.
So if you write it down somewhere and someone finds it
out, finds out, you see it, money's gone.
And obviously there are ways to rent from that, but but that
requires using completely different stack of custody.
And yeah, I think next year would probably be when that gets
more and more adoption, who, who are your users?
So basically if you kind of look at financial applications, there
are typically kind of users who are kind of happy to use their
phones for stuff. But at some point kind of at
some level of awareness, this stops, right, you're not going
to make, you know, $1 million transaction from your phone.
People just have an aversion to that.
So kind of who who is your user base?
Actually that's a new question. So yeah, I have two things on
this. So Speaking of the user base, it
starts with obviously we're not focused on a whale type of user.
So if you really want to store a lot of money and Zerian is not
the right now at least is not the place where you should be
doing that. So Zerian is primarily for your.
I would call it like a public on chain identity.
So if you want to. Mint out of T's if you want to
quickly sign into something on on a conference.
If you are trying to, I don't know, like buy some random token
or mint a sound on sound XYZ or mint a post on mirror.
So these types of actions, whether that's collecting or
like buying some random tokens in small amounts just to play
around, testing new stuff, new daps, new protocols, games,
whatever that is. And that's where we we shine
really. And the Xerion was meant for
users who are doing a lot of transactions.
So that's kind of opposed to what Ledger is meant to be or
maybe safe like I mean those is safe where you keep a lot of
funds and you try not to touch them, but when you do, you do it
like very carefully. So that would be the use case
for a Ledger and that's why like obviously Ledger is not
convenient. You need to carry it around
like. Plug in and obviously like you
won't do that in like a minute in zero and you can just like
pull it up, scan up your code or admin stuff or like test out a
new DAP on the go. So that's the main use case.
And the second thing I wanted to add is I think in the future it
would still work really nicely with these types of use cases
and for that it's just a little. A bit more time is required.
So obviously the safe integration on the Xerion end
could be one of the solutions where you could like initiate
transactions from the phone and there's not going to be any
security concerns because you would have a second key where or
like you have a friend who would need to confirm a transaction.
And even with the Ledger, we have some users who are using
Xerion mobile experience with the Ledger.
And soon they'll be able to do that with extension.
So it's kind of like an interface, so you don't have to
worry about the key being leaked in any way.
Or yeah, you can keep as much fun as you want obviously on
these types of bullets. So we kind of separate the
bullet experience from custody. And currently our custody works
for these like smaller type of like amounts of money but much
broader set of use cases. Have you looked at kind of
second signers and so on that kind of connect with NFC because
kind of you know being mobile first that sort of you know a
low hanging fruit, no? We did.
And by that you mean like kind of like a UB key, like NFC,
something like a tandem, a card or something?
Yes, they usually with all of that.
So it all sounds great and I would really love to have
something like that and I've seen tested numerous.
Parts that you need to tap to confirm transactions I even
like. I have an NFC ring like.
Here that I'm using for payment, so I'm a big nerd for these
types of things, but I think when it comes to a more mass
adoption, this is logistics, It's expensive.
So basically. If we have this much user base,
like only whatever 10% tops would be willing to pay for it,
reveal their address like their like levels and levels of
considerations that we need to take care of before using that
specific solution and it never really took off.
So I'm I think our our way is honestly software rather than
hardware when it comes to adoption.
So making things cheaper and making them, making them more.
Like available through existing technology and that's why for
example abstraction to me is more I guess a reliable way to
progress with the UX and also like the new signature, so if we
can reuse the signature from existing hardware devices which.
That they're not currently compatible with theorem
signatures. But if we can make easy and kind
of abstraction then compatible, then we can leverage existing
hardware in the phone and we don't have to even have a
Ledger. So I think that's the best
pathway for it. And yeah, for all the mass
adoption, cool. So I understand that kind of the
users that use Sareon currently are kind of like people who go
to events, who kind of want to try out different apps, kind of
have spending money just kind of like on a low barrier to entry
mobile app. What are your intended users?
Because kind of that's as a market, that's a very
constrained set of people, right?
Yeah, I think it's constrained right now, but I'm a big
proponent of the growth of the Web 3 user base and we kind of
we define our users as Web three citizens and we've been pretty
vocal about that. And I still feel pretty strongly
that we don't really have to change that.
I know that a lot of people are talking about onboarding the
newbies, billions of users to Web 3.
But to me I think it should grow from within, it should grow from
the the web three citizens themselves.
And we really want to support the use cases that are actually
working and useful in Web 3. And that's why we we want to
kind of what we're focusing on what people are doing now in Web
3 because that kind of gives us early hints of what could be
useful for the rest of the market when it when the time
comes. So yeah, I don't think, I don't
really believe in us kind of deciding like someone finding
out randomly that this is what people would want.
And I think the UX of the wallet is no matter how bad it is, we
need to find the use cases within the Web 3 space that will
attract people. And once we have that, and I
hope we won't miss that. So as these narratives are
created within the Web 3 ecosystem and zeroing supports
them, then all the new users who are going to come to Web three
and become web three citizens, they would be the ones like they
would try to look up to all the web three citizens who were
there and they were coming. They would be coming for the use
cases that we've developed. So that that's my point of view.
So I'm not like again a big believer in copying something
and just putting on on Web Three and and making it like look like
it's Web 2 because because why? Like it's the same, but just
more expensive. And users would probably come
for maybe some incentives, but that's it.
They would just leave next day. Okay.
Then maybe looking at the wallet as it is now, not kind of at the
user experience as you wanted to develop in the future, what are
the challenges of building a wallet?
So kind of I assume there's kind of like you need to run archiver
nodes and have like databases and so on for several chains.
But it walk us through the details or there's quite a few
and and that really depends on what kind of we're talking
about. So first of all, none of the, I
guess like very, very few wallets run archive notes just
on even notes. Even though we do a lot of focus
on the data, we don't run our own notes because this is like
someone else's business. They do that better for us.
I think that speaking from like the product perspective, I think
the biggest challenge is really understanding what's key to have
on the wallet level versus what's what should live on the
DAP level and that's that's the balance.
And I think every, every wallet is really going through that.
So some some wallets were like OK, we have to do things very,
very certain way like this. This is the only way you can do
stuff this. These are the only Daps you can
access and being very restrictive.
There are wallets that are completely kind of removed from
your experience and they just say OK, that's the key.
Everything else is like up to you.
I think Madam Mask is probably on that kind of that spectrum.
So they don't really make any decisions for the user.
They don't try to net like help the user do the right decisions.
That always I think we sit somewhere in the middle.
So we are being more pragmatic I would say about it.
So we know that spam for example is a big problem.
So we do work on our end to remove spam because this leads
to phishing, it leads to people losing funds.
Same goes to anything when it comes to like signing off the
transaction. We want by default to have
protection for our users. So stuff like that is where we
take a stance, but we don't want to limit the user and that's
another reason I've mentioned that already.
We wanted to go with C phrases because we want users to be able
to access a wider range of things.
So whatever that they want to access, we want to have that.
Yeah. And I think that's on the
product level from I guess the business angle obviously is
monetization. We will talk about that I guess
later. But yeah, modernization is
obviously has been a pain for most of the wallets with an
exception I think of 1 or maybe 2 Okay, two Ledger we can call
Ledger, Madam ask as like the ones who were not struggling
really with modernization. And lastly I think on the infra
side, I don't think it's a, it's a really hard thing like a
challenge, it's more of hard work that we need to put into
into that. But I hope that pays off.
So. If you think about kind of the
decisions you make for the user, so kind of what dabs to display
in your wallet, for instance, what's the approval process and
kind of if I'm a Zarian user, can I make sure that these are
kind of audited or trusted or that there's at least so and so
much TBL that kind of hasn't been.
So I mean what are my assurances?
That's a good question. We actually on the on the DAP
list side, we don't do any kind of restrictions so you can
access it's more like a Google live interface and this is where
we're different from I guess majority of OS where which run
like a mini marketplace of the approved Daps.
We decided against that for for the sake of openness and
basically we don't really want to recommend any particular app,
So usually users would come with an intention in mind of what
exactly they should do and we provide that with that.
What we do though to help users kind of make slightly like
basically not to go to a different uni swap, maybe
mistype. We have a small blue check mark
so if they start typing uni a few options would show up and
uni swap would have the blue check mark.
But that's just a list that we maintain of domain name
associations and that's a pretty exhaustive list of non spammy
non phishing depths. Yeah, we don't have a process
for this one. So it's currently just managed
internally we used to have. So for the tokens we do the
same, but the process there is a little different.
So we are relying on token lists.
So token list is like the centralized effort for curating
legit tokens. So we rely on that.
With apps, there's no such thing as far as I understand right
now. We would want to have that if
that's available. And honestly, we don't want to
make these decisions for the user.
That's something that we think users should be on their own
when making stuff like that. How do you think about kind of
the Attack Attack vectors that kind of come with being a front
end to kind of other people's smart contracts, right.
So basically if your front end were to be hacked, kind of your
users could be kind of siphoned off by malicious sites and so
on. So what kind of security do you
have in place for that? Yeah, this is I think a very,
this is somewhat of a more solved problem in a way.
So that's not novel. It's something that every
startup is running into that runs any kind of front end.
So I think it's, first of all, it's a little, yeah, it's a
smaller problem. And then that just takes good
hygiene in terms of cyber security.
Yeah. And we just do testing of our
own infrastructure. We've employed white hackers to
poke around and like try to find stuff.
The attack vector is still fairly limited because it's
basically we only need to safeguard the deployment of this
new up like the new versions of the front end.
And the biggest risk of me see is where the keys are stored.
So deployment of extension, deployment of mobile apps and
that a big portion of that security is on the Apple and
Google side. So they help you not to make
like basically if there's a deployment happening, we would
all see that and it's a, it's a fairly removed risk I think for
us where we did pay out bounties for example, where you can call
them like informational attacks. So I still remember like one big
case where we had to pay, it was like $40,000 or something were
lost. And that was because someone
created a fake balancer pool that looked like a regular
balancer pool and had and they faked that pool to look like it
has a lot of tbl. So it showed up in in Syria and
people were like okay this, this is like a legit.
They thought it's a legit pool because it has a certain amount
of tbl and we didn't check the factory contract that was
created creating that. Since then, we've started doing
that, but that was a bug that we didn't anticipate.
So it was put up on the front page with like high TVL.
Someone put somebody that lost it.
So we assume that this is our mistake, even though obviously,
like it's you have to verify everything.
But we, yeah, we didn't mean to show this pool anyway.
So yeah, that's these are some learnings we didn't go through
like a massive breach of security.
And for us, I think like not sending a seed phrase somewhere
where it shouldn't be, that would be the only thing we
should worry about really. And for that we just always do
the audits. I think it's been, yeah, like
6-7 already and we keep doing that.
That's going to be a big expense.
Another attack factor is kind of having transactions you can't
read, right? So basically human.
Readable transaction code rather than kind of like the ABI that
you kind of get. How do you feel about that?
Because it's a difficult problem to solve, kind of generally.
But if you don't know what you're signing as a user, it's
really difficult, right? Yeah.
So for that, I think what really works, I would say, well is the
simulations. So that's been getting
implemented across the board. So I think it started with a few
extra extensions that were that you need to run in parallel with
like whatever matter mask, but now it's integrated in zero and
obviously in the coin based wallet and save.
So I think that saves you and kind of allows you to do a quick
check of what is actually happening.
It's still not perfect because sometimes the daps would be
asking you some signature that is the you have.
You don't have any idea what can happen.
You have to have a more yeah I guess like a secures adapt to
you understand where this signature can be applied.
But I think this is going to be solved over time as well.
So we do for specific signatures.
When when you are issuing a permit for some contract to
spend your your USDC or something else, we would also
recognize that and and show you in the in the human readable way
that some DAP is trying to you know spend this much money.
Is it something that you really want to be doing or not.
And yeah simulation I think really really helps.
So if you weren't your intention was to min to NFT.
If this is what you see as a result of simulation, then most
likely that's correct. I think in the future this is
even kind of better than in the web two world.
So in web two world you just plug in your credit card and you
you leverage the trust network of all the POS connected to
Visa. And they do like all this fraud
prevention if they see something iffy.
But you have to rely on someone else doing the job of verifying
that you are actually doing something legit.
And not every every transaction supports like 3D security with
cards. So in crypto you can have
basically deterministic outcome of the transaction.
In most cases you could see exactly what's happening.
I think the security when it comes to signing will just keep
getting better and users won't even need to know what like ABI
is. And I really hope that they
don't. Absolutely.
So I think if we can't make that happen, this is going to remain
very niche. So what networks are most of
your users on? Good question.
It's been changing honestly and we've been very positively
surprised how the adoption of layer twos is growing.
So we had like during this year it went from roughly like 70%
Ethereum domination to now Ethereum being.
I don't, I don't want to be like I cannot give specific numbers.
I didn't rehearse them but we have it's it's a lot of the
change. So you can you can see it's it's
full list of transactions that are made being done all
different chains and they roughly similar.
I think the biggest one is still Polygon but it's kind of
shrinking in comparison to ZK saying for example transactions
or base transactions optimism, arbitram were historically
growing pretty much every months and the theorem is kind of like
at capacity. So it's it just sits there and
everything else is growing. So it's very exciting to see and
we do believe really like we kind of refocused our attention
from D Phi protocols more towards supporting more and more
chains because we think that in terms of the primitives were
pretty much there. Because like I think regionally
people were thinking that D Phi would create you know,
thousands. And we were one of the believers
in that that like that we're going to see at least hundreds
of different, I mean meaningfully different protocols
in D Phi or just the outside of D Phi.
But it turned out, I think that we have a pretty stable set of
primitives that people use and everything else is more like,
yeah, forks or just slight adjustments of what we have.
And we've decided that OK, we have to support this set of
primitives. But really where we should
spending spend our time is, you know, the number of tokens and
chains that are being created because we had kind of
solidified the architecture I would say, of this world
computer. So we have all the bits and
pieces in place roughly, these computers can now talk to each
other. So now we just need to support
this network of computers as the wallet.
How do users go between different chains or between
Ethereum and then L2? Do you guys kind of have?
In those bridges that you kind of offer as a standard interface
or how would I go about it? Yeah, we actually support socket
dot tech, so we've integrated them and they are in aggregator
bridges. The way it works is just they
find the best rates across different bridges for any kind
of swap, and the users just go and select the bridge that they
want to use. So they could optimize for
faster transaction, faster settlement or just cheaper
basically like matching how much they would get on the other side
of the bridge. I would say this experience is
suboptimal. Yeah, we've been even
calculating the number of steps it takes to bridge to like a new
chain. So switching to new chain is
very simple. It's like a few taps, but if you
want to move money, you need to go and do probably 15 different
steps as far as I remember. And it also requires a lot of
waiting time and it's not transparent.
Even in Syrian we do as much as we can in terms of tracking
assets. But the bridging experience is
not optimal because you kind of have this moment where money is
gone. You have it in banks all the
time. But encrypt is unusual when you
don't understand what is happening with the money because
it kind of it went away and you just like wait there and hope
that it's going to come on the other side.
So we really want to optimize that in the future and the way
to do that would be basically and that's a general principle
of moving away from multi chain to 1 chain UX as we started
describing it inside Syrian. So when users already need to
understand the differences between chains unless they want
to and you can seamlessly move and transact on any DAP on any
chain without really like going through bridging first and then
doing a transaction. So kind of bundling these two
things together, inciting them all at once.
So I think that's the future and we, I don't know when, but we're
definitely gonna get there. What are the steps kind of
necessary to get there? Kind of the seamless bridging
that kind of just goes on behind the scenes without the user even
realizing. It's a good question.
I think it's first, it's obviously some UX work that we
have to do and we need to have more universal guess adoption of
signing either signing multiple actions on it with one tap.
So that's some ball. It's already started doing that
before, the convention was that you will have to sign
everything, like every transaction 1 by 1, but with
approvals. That kills the experience
because you have to sign multiple things.
Permits are not universally accepted, so that's an issue.
And ideally, yeah, we can bundle a few transactions together and
the bridges are fast and they could execute on that other
side. Yeah, I think these are the
necessary steps. I don't know what would be the
guarantees between moving the for just to work between
different kinds of and different versions of roll ups.
So whether it's going to be the same security guarantees to move
from like an optimistic 1 to the ZK one, I'm not too sure about
that. But yeah, I think that would be
what we want ultimately as the goal.
So basically you also cover some chains that are not Ethereum L
twos, right. This was you didn't call it an
experiment. We've added support for tracking
Solana addresses but that we all know the FTX story.
But really it was I think we're not like our users don't really,
they're not Solana users in short and to be quite honest we
have one of the zero values is is done be a Maxi and that's
just like a you know the whole company value and we wanted to
explore other things we wanted to to see.
So Solano was obviously getting a lot of traction.
So we wanted to support it and we did since the the FTX and
just overall we didn't see a lot of traction in it and we haven't
really put any more resources. Personally, I'm a big EVM
supporter and believer and because I feel that we're kind
of past the threshold where it's easy to compete with EVM just
simply because we have so much code written down and so much
investment done in security. I think we were never maybe like
someday a new Apple will be born that is going to use a bit of a
different architecture. I don't think that's anytime
soon it's going to take. Years, I would say.
So EVM is the way to go and we've been basically the whole
infrastructure that we've built for tracking assets, tracking
positions is built on EVM and specifically for EVM.
We touched upon it earlier just a little bit.
How do you think about account abstraction in MPC?
Right. This is a, this is a long
debate. We've been researching both for
a long time. I think it started obviously
more with MPC and the counterstruction became a more
recent theme. I think NBC is a little.
So there there are many things I can say I guess on this and the
short answer, it depends what we're trying to build towards
when it comes to experiences that remove the basically the
wallet from the picture completely.
So like applications that kind of integrate the world inside.
I think for them NPC is the only way right now to manage that.
I think in the future though, NPC has much less flexibility
than account abstraction for anything related to user
experience, like recovery of phrases, making actions on
behalf of the user. So with NPC, I think there are a
few attempts how you can implement the same
programmability really of NPC. But this is a little so
complicated and it's hard to see like how that's going to
necessarily get all the traction.
So it feels like to me when it comes down now, now we can talk
about the count obstruction. So with the count obstruction, I
think in the current form there's still problems.
So we started a long time ago with this idea of let's replace
all the existing accounts and with with mark on checks on the
protocol level. And I think it was like EIP
2000, something I don't remember exactly, but that EAP was not a
priority for the community and for the protocol developers.
So it kind of was worried and now everyone is talking about
ERC 4337 which is making a kind of abstraction kind of on the
application level and without necessarily being hard for it.
So I don't think this is a way to go for a theorem at least
because primarily because of the costs associated with that.
And I think the future of account obstruction is really on
L2S where L2S make this hard choice and basically implement
it on the level of the protocol when we actually remove the need
for users to upgrade and move their assets from private keys
to account obstruction obstructed worlds.
So I think that's the way to go. And I know that there are some
teams that are working on for example Gelato team, they're
doing a roll up as a service. So they are thinking about
implementing that for all their potential launch partners such
that this becomes a more of a standard in the space where
every account is indeed an account abstracted wallet.
And in terms of possibilities, I think one would be ideal.
In terms of the Uxs, as I mentioned previously, when we
support the same cryptography on account abstracted worlds
together with account abstracted worlds being in the protocol
level, I think that's where we get all the flexibility that is
needed and it's not going to be associated with an increased
cost for every transaction and we don't have to do this massive
migration. I don't know what the theory is
going to do though. It's tough.
I think majority of value is already on account on smart
contracts, which is fine. Probably no one will just use
the theorem with private keys support at some point and with
ethere will be just for roll up transactions and block
confirmations. But we'll see.
Yeah, I think that's our current view on the whole thing.
We are exploring more native support for count obstructed
votes in Syrian without necessarily launching our own
version of it. We kind of see it as in a
current form it would look like a 0 bolt in some way because you
still need to have a private key stored somewhere and that would
be the first step. And we actually already enabled
some of the standards for construction for tracking.
So you could plug in if you have an account you can plug in and
get at least the full your value over time for these wallets.
We haven't done on, haven't done transacting with these wallets
yet, but we are ready to do that.
Yeah, let's leave that there for now.
I think there's something I want to come back to later, but let's
talk about kind of the business models for wallets first.
So kind of monetizing wallet has been notoriously difficult in
this ecosystem and with the two notable exceptions that you kind
of you mentioned earlier that and meta mask.
What kind of business models exists and why is it so hard for
wallets to kind of monetize? It's a really good question.
So we've researched them all. I would say at this point at
least like everything that's available on the market right
now. I think there are a few things
that really work, but they require skill and they require a
bit of a if there is speculation and market movement, obviously
trading fees work and that's been working for Meta Musk, it
kind of does. Still because they have a
massive user base, they're obviously earning a lot less
with the bear market, but all sorts of fees.
They work because users are ready to pay for convenience and
trust. So as they develop trust to your
product, if they store enough money in it and they kind of
been using it forever, they're OK with paying fees.
We took a bit of a different pathway here in comparison to
like some other wallets. So most of the wallets they
don't have any option for more advanced users to stop paying
fees and we took it one step further.
So we allow allow you to basically hold a certain
specific entity SO0IN DNA with premium that allows you to not
pay any kinds of fees and that's basically our we wanted to be
using zero swap ourselves internally as a team and for the
majority for like actually big charge of our users who are
pretty active and they do a lot of transacting.
It makes sense to have the same good experience but not pay you
know very high fees for swaps. But at the same time, this works
for less experienced users who are OK with paying fees for the
sake of convenience and trust. So that's the one model that
works. And yeah, but I'm not really
excited about it. And the reason is that training
fees and all kinds of like breaching fees or stuff like
that is all driving the wallets, the words, the financial use
cases. And we see less and less
transactions specifically for token trades or stuff like that.
So a lot more activities on maintaining or doing some
governance, so people are doing more things with their wallets
rather than just trading. And I think that drives away the
value of this business model. So we don't want to be like
Robin Hood and that like Robin Hood selling options to retail
users just to boost the bullets. So for us like another big thing
was API. This is something that is not
accessible for majority of other ones because they are just the
front end. We provide the data for the
wallets and we've we support quite a few wallets out there.
For example Rainbow is one of our clients since 2020 they've
been relying on Syrians data and they are ready to pay for that
data because this powering the user experience and we have more
and more bullets who are using and leveraging outlet data.
So that became, you can call it like a bear market, the rescue
in terms of revenue and monetization for us.
And lastly, I think the way to go honestly a long term vision
is to ideally own the whole stack.
So moving to monetizing pretty much any transactions that user,
any transaction that user does and the way to do that is either
the applications or the chains share revenue with bullets or we
primarily work with our own change or layer twos and we
direct users to layer twos that we can monetize.
So for example, like launching our own layer two would be an
example where we can monetize any transaction with like
sequencer fees. So that's I guess the path
forward potentially, but it's a little too early and we haven't
seen. So this is like very
experimental. There are no bullets currently
who have their own layer twos. Madamus is kind of with idea is
kind of moving in that direction.
I think that's what consensus once at least that's the feeling
that I'm getting. But this might be an interesting
Ave. Have you looked at kind of
becoming even more of a service provider and kind of abstracting
fees away from people and kind of having them pay like a flat
fee or like a service fee that kind of because?
Kind of what account abstraction also in principle enables, it's
kind of abstracting the gas away from the user, which I think
kind of if this kind of if this were to become more mainstream,
this is I think where we have to go because I mean this is kind
of the Web 2 experience. No one would ever say you're
browsing to my website, please cover your part of the AWS bill
sort of thing. So do do you think kind of
abstracting that away and then having people pay for the
package, do do you see that as viable?
We've researched that. I think first of all, from the
UX perspective, you're completely right.
This is definitely how it it will work.
So we'll abstract away the fees and I think we're not too far
off from that. I think when it comes to
monetizing that, it's a little different.
So what you're suggesting is that we add a certain amount of
like margin on top, so we make users pay more for the
convenience and? Or you just charge them a flat
fee per month, right. So basically kind of like, yeah,
kind of like you do for kind of a regular bank account, kind of
you have like €5 per month kind of in fees and but then you
don't have to pay for like every transaction, right.
Yeah. But even with banks, right, like
most of the banks now provide this service for free.
So it's kind of like a race to up to to zero with these types
of fees. So you would ideally want to
charge users for the added value and not for just maintaining you
know the Ethereum, for like running Ethereum if they're not
transacting like basically covering our node and node
costs. So most of the services on Web
two, you would pay premium only for the features that you really
want and not just like them running from the AWS, sure.
So I think the analogy here is similar.
So we are moving, we are releasing this premium kind of
in the more finalized state this, yeah next month as well.
So that would be we'll see basically what our users are
interested in paying for like if we provide them with premium,
can we provide them a few transactions in months for free.
But these are all more of the economics questions and we need
to test how it really works. Yeah, I'm more excited of like
basically if we, if we have the chain, so users are interested
in paying for transactions, right.
So that's pretty much universal and currently all of that
revenue goes towards the chains themselves and none of that goes
to wallets and this is a problem.
So that I think that value distribution have to switch.
So either chains start sharing more with the originators of
transactions or yeah chain or while it's become kind of like
more vertically integrated with their own chains.
I think that would be. That's my prediction for the
future, cuz this revenue stream exists, the users are willing to
pay a lot of money for fees for settlements.
Yeah, absolutely. I take it it's not on the near
term roadmap, but kind of where would you see that in terms of
like future developments for Xerion?
I don't think it's so we are very agile still as the startup.
So first of all, you never know. I think that that's the short
answer. We we are convening with
basically a portion of our team later in October to talk about
what we should be focusing on really in 2024 as the big
priority. So for 2023 the the goal was to
build the bullets the best world for our pre citizens and we are
almost complete with that. So with the extension release
that would be basically what we wanted to achieve.
And yeah, the next phase is a little up in the year.
So we'll we can talk about that probably early next year.
OK, cool. And what else are you excited
about in the ecosystem there are quite a lot of things actually.
But honestly this whole up chain movement is what I'm really,
really interested in. It's not that like we haven't
known that already, but with I think we're getting, we're
opening up an Ave. with with scalability we're opening up an
Ave. for more types of applications that are feasible.
So I think D5 was only possible because like only D5 as possible
because block space was extremely expensive so only
financial applications that run for Wales would work.
But now we can see for example with friends, tech or like even
lens a little earlier this year that people are excited about
social use cases. For example with all the publish
shake with mirror or sound XYZ where artists can directly
connect with fans. These are the use cases that are
very new and only were possible because of the layer 2 adoption
and kind of acceptance of layer two as also feasible Ave. for
for settlement and I'm I'm excited to see more stuff that
is very much web three native that is built using the
capabilities of more scalable networks.
That's that would be like the short answer.
Fantastic. So where will users learn
whether Serion Chain will be launched?
Where can they follow you? Is it on Twitter or do you have
a Discord? We've been the router for a long
time. We have actually over 100,000
people on our Discord. So yeah, whatever your
preference is Twitter. You can type in Zerion or
Discord as well. I think the ideal way is just to
go ahead and try our wallet. If you are still using Matter
mask we call Health and Switch, we have a bunch of people being
super happy about it. If you want to provide feedback,
you can ping me anywhere on Twitter for example, and I'll
add you to the better test service group so you can shape
the future of Zerian together with us.
Perfect. Thank you, Evgeni, for joining
us today. Thank you very much.
It was a pleasure. Thank you for joining us on this
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