0:01

Hey, Ty

0:05

at Turban. Welcome

0:10

to Validated. Thanks for having me. Yeah,

0:12

this is going to be a nice,

0:14

good conversation on user

0:16

onboarding, wallet abstraction. I

0:18

think just kind of to set the scene

0:21

a bit here, crypto is

0:23

terrible at naming things. It's true. This

0:26

is a hallmark of the industry since

0:28

the very first days when we started

0:30

calling things wallets and we

0:32

started talking about, you know, a wallet is a

0:34

place you store your Bitcoin. Well, the Bitcoin's not

0:36

actually stored in the wallet. The wallet's just a

0:39

way of accessing it. The Bitcoin actually always stays

0:41

on chain. Oh, I'm sending you

0:43

tokens? No, actually all we're doing is

0:45

reassigning ownership in a giant distributed ledger.

0:47

Well, it's a giant distributed ledger. Well,

0:49

it's a database. It's just in multiple

0:51

places and multiple people can write to it.

0:53

The list goes on and on. And

0:56

so you guys at Dynamic

0:58

are one of several

1:00

companies that is thinking about how we

1:03

can reinvent the perennial problem of

1:06

self custody and safety.

1:08

Those are two things that, you know,

1:10

the web to world has completely given

1:12

up on almost every single way you

1:15

can store money in the non web

1:17

three world requires some form

1:19

of custody, which means there's some form

1:21

of undo button. It also means that

1:24

someone can hypothetically take your money. But

1:26

for most people, at least

1:28

in the world today, in places that

1:30

are fairly stable like the United States, that is a

1:32

trade off that they're they're willing to

1:34

make based on how hard it has been

1:36

historically to self custody funds. So really

1:39

excited to talk to you about what you guys are building

1:41

today. Thank you. Same, by

1:43

the way. And by the way, you defined it exactly

1:45

correct, which is even starting with

1:47

the concept of wallet is incorrect as a

1:50

definition. Right. It should be

1:52

that's like the wrong name on its own. And

1:54

then from there, there's like 17 other naming

1:57

that are wrong. Yeah. My

2:00

wallet does not let

2:02

me access the place I've stored my

2:04

US dollars. It literally physically holds my

2:07

US dollars. And we, by

2:09

the way, we keep making this mistake, right?

2:11

If you see on, in the EBM land

2:13

recently, a town's abstraction is, you

2:16

know, go explain to someone

2:18

what that means and

2:20

be my guest, try to like pitch that for

2:22

a couple of hours. And someone tell me the

2:24

difference between a wallet and an account, right?

2:26

We can go down the rabbit hole big

2:29

here. But I want to start off sort

2:31

of at the high level, give me kind

2:33

of an overview of like what your view

2:35

into the current Web3 landscape

2:37

is and sort of why you guys

2:40

decided wallets and

2:42

wallet security was like the main thing

2:44

to start tackling at the beginning. Yeah,

2:46

absolutely. So maybe I'll actually start with what

2:49

we think will happen, right? The reason we

2:51

started is kind of we try to think

2:53

about what will happen in the next couple

2:55

years and based on that, what tools

2:58

are needed. The very

3:00

core, and I think probably anyone

3:02

listening would agree, crypto is this

3:04

magical thing, right? You can transfer

3:07

money from person A to person

3:09

B, you can transfer identity information

3:11

from A to B, social

3:13

information, so on in the most efficient

3:15

way. And so in our

3:17

mind, if you fast forward five years, we

3:21

think that when you open your app, your phone in

3:23

a couple years, every app on your phone is going

3:25

to have a crypto component to it. It's

3:27

going to have a way for you

3:30

to transfer money again from from app

3:32

A to app B and so on

3:34

or transfer information around gaming or social

3:36

identity. But the very, very basic level,

3:39

every app on your phone, every website

3:41

you go to will have a kind

3:43

of a crypto infrastructure component. And

3:46

if you assume that's true, then

3:48

you have to assume that every

3:50

kind of app or every website

3:52

on that you visit needs to have

3:55

kind of that outlet to crypto, which

3:57

is inherently a wallet. Right. basic

4:00

level we think that every

4:02

app on your phone or every website will

4:04

have a wallet component in it that allows

4:06

you to tap into this crypto network. Very

4:08

similar by the way to how

4:10

you know regardless of whether you

4:13

use Outlook or Gmail or superhuman it's

4:15

very very basic level we tap into

4:17

this email network or email protocol and

4:19

it lets you kind of exchange information

4:21

throughout and so the very same way

4:23

you're gonna tap into kind of this

4:25

crypto infrastructure that you transfer money etc

4:27

with a wallet being an outlet to

4:29

that. So that was the reason we

4:32

kind of that was our hypothesis and

4:34

based on that we said well the

4:36

thing missing is this interaction with

4:39

the wallet either generating one or once you

4:41

have one letting you interact and kind of

4:43

use it as an identity provider and that's

4:45

kind of the core for for why we

4:47

started dynamic. It was a very top-down what

4:49

do we what do we believe about the

4:51

world therefore what needs to exist. Yeah

4:54

so what did you guys actually built today? That's

4:57

a great question. Not

5:00

much yet. No I'm kidding. We've

5:02

spent about two years

5:04

building dynamic and the very very

5:06

basic level we're building is

5:09

developer tools for anything that

5:11

touches identity and authentication. So

5:14

when you go into any service you

5:16

need the concept of a user right

5:18

a user can have can bring stuff on

5:20

their own if they have their own third-party

5:23

wallet or they might not know

5:25

what a wallet is but the very

5:27

basic level your application or website has

5:29

users. What we're building is this user

5:31

system of records so the ability for

5:33

you to kind of manage your users

5:36

are regardless of how they show up

5:38

in your website. If they have a

5:40

wallet they can log in with a

5:42

fandom or even wallet and kind

5:44

of interact with your app and

5:46

we support that so we let you kind

5:49

of do a really fancy kind of wallet

5:51

adapter we let you connect multiple wallets to

5:53

the same account we let you kind of

5:55

gate access based on what you

5:57

have in your wallet collect additional information when

6:00

a phantom user logs in for the first time. But

6:02

then we also let you spin up wallets for

6:05

folks that don't have them. So if

6:07

the user logs in and says, I

6:09

don't even know what the script of a thing

6:11

is, that's totally fine. You don't really necessarily have

6:13

to know. And we'll talk about what

6:15

are use cases in which you don't really

6:18

have to know. But in that case, you

6:20

log in with an email or you log

6:22

in with your Google or Facebook. And we

6:24

in the background generate a wallet for that.

6:27

So at the very basic level, what we built over the

6:29

last two years is this user system

6:31

record that lets you kind of abstract

6:34

away as a developer anything that has to

6:37

do with user management and kind of wallet

6:39

management to understand. So

6:41

one of the things we've seen a lot of

6:43

companies launching to work on,

6:45

this is everything from magic to

6:47

web3-auth, is sort

6:49

of creating a system where

6:52

the user can log in with some sort

6:54

of social or other level credential and it

6:56

creates a wallet for them. That

6:59

is a system that feels very smooth and

7:01

organic. And if you didn't know it was

7:03

creating a wallet in the background, you

7:05

wouldn't know it at all. It just feels like

7:07

a click to log in or SMS code to

7:09

log in type system. But what you're describing seems

7:12

like it's kind of a little

7:14

bit more on the web3 side where

7:16

you actually have a wallet adapter that

7:20

has all these different components and doesn't necessarily abstract

7:22

quite as much away from the user. Is that

7:24

a good way of thinking about the way you

7:26

guys have designed this? So we

7:28

actually, we think about kind of how we

7:30

approach this in kind of a, there's a

7:32

kind of a chicken and egg problem which

7:35

is you go into a website, right? And someone,

7:38

you generate a wallet for some reason, they log

7:40

in with an email and social address and

7:42

they can access and they don't necessarily need to

7:45

know there's a wallet, but then they want to

7:47

take that information and use it on website B

7:49

and website C, right? And

7:51

so at that point, their wallet that was

7:53

created turns into a wallet they want

7:55

to log in with, right? So we

7:57

think about the problem more. you

8:00

know, as a user management problem versus an

8:04

been wallet problem, right? We

8:06

were trying to solve the

8:09

lifecycle problem of the user starts without knowing

8:11

and then ends up knowing what a wallet

8:13

is and starts kind of interacting with the

8:15

ecosystem. So it's a little bit of a

8:17

different layer than some of the great players

8:19

that you mentioned, by the way, to your

8:21

point, they're like really cool players in the

8:23

market. Yeah. We think about

8:25

it as kind of the full holistic user

8:28

management cycle from not knowing anything to

8:30

actually interacting with global wallets

8:32

across across sites. So that's how we

8:34

think about it. We also think, by

8:36

the way, that early adopters today are

8:38

mostly crypto users. So you kind of

8:40

really also want to support them. So you still

8:43

want to support kind of web 3 logging just

8:45

as much as you support web 2 logging. Yeah,

8:47

I kind of want to dig in a little

8:49

bit more about what that means in terms of

8:52

the product choices that you've made in sort of

8:54

the way you build this because you

8:56

guys have an embedded wallet product and you have

8:58

like multi wallets, you have lots of different types

9:00

of ways that people can use this. I

9:02

think for the complete crypto novice

9:04

coming in and is like, I

9:07

have a Gmail account, like can I

9:09

sign up for a wallet? I think

9:11

people understand that flow pretty well. Right.

9:14

Most people have interacted with some sort

9:16

of like embedded custodial or semi custodial

9:18

wallet design before. But for someone like

9:21

me or most people listening to the

9:23

podcast, if they come to

9:25

a DAP that has decided to

9:27

integrate your systems and they're bringing

9:29

Phantom to it, what

9:31

kind of capabilities does this unlock for the

9:33

DAP and the developer sort of on that

9:36

side? And then on the client side, like

9:38

what do I see when someone's

9:40

using your framework system as opposed to

9:42

sort of the default like wallet adapter

9:44

that's just the

9:47

web 3JS package everyone uses today? Yeah,

9:50

absolutely. So actually, first, we'll

9:52

talk about that experience in about 10 seconds

9:54

or so, 17 seconds or so, give a

9:57

gimber tape. But your point, we are we're

9:59

in So we

10:01

kind of provide a flexibility

10:03

of tools, very similar to how, you know,

10:05

when you log into the Wall Street Journal,

10:07

you might have kind of an email-based login,

10:09

but if you log into Uber, you might

10:11

have phone-based login, right? They both might be

10:13

powered by the same authentication company, right? The

10:16

experience might be a little bit different based

10:18

on what you're trying to do. And we

10:20

can see this, by the way, just maybe

10:23

examples in kind of how customers implement

10:25

dynamic. If you go to Pudgy

10:27

Penguins today and you go to their marketplace, that's

10:29

powered by Dynamic. Some of

10:31

their customers are Y2C customers. They log

10:33

in, in that case, in Ethereum land

10:35

with Metamask. And some log in with

10:38

email or social. But if you go

10:40

to Starkware, they just did their token

10:42

drop, and it's powered by Dynamic. They

10:44

make you connect an L1 wallet, which

10:46

is, again, a Metamask for Coinbase, and

10:48

then connect a Starkware wallet, which is

10:50

a Bravo store, anything like that. We

10:54

take them through that bridging slope,

10:56

right? So they're very different experiences,

10:58

both built via Dynamic. Now, to your

11:00

point, what is the

11:02

experience look like, right? So if you're, again, if

11:04

you're a Web 2 user that you

11:07

show up at the website, very similar to what you

11:09

described. You see email or social log in or phone,

11:11

et cetera, and you get the security, and then you're

11:13

not just logging into an account, you're logging into an

11:15

account that might have money in it, right? So

11:18

you get two-factor authentication, all those nice

11:20

security features. If you're a Web 3

11:23

user, think about the following scenario, which

11:25

is you want to log into a

11:27

more, let's say, a Magic Eden, right?

11:30

Over time, right, you might have phone wallets.

11:33

I'm assuming you do, right? I'm assuming you

11:35

have your Phantom wallet and your SoulFlare

11:37

wallet, et cetera, and you might, you

11:40

know, God forbid, even have a Coinbase

11:42

or a Metamask wallet, they need me,

11:44

right? But

11:47

it's a very basic part, and

11:49

as a good example, again, a

11:51

Magic Eden or an OpenSea or

11:53

multi-chain marketplace, right? You

11:55

might want to log in with your Phantom

11:57

wallet, but then connect your, you know, Bitcoin.

11:59

your wallet, your experts, and then connect

12:02

your made-in-ask wallet. But you're the

12:04

same user. You're one user. You're

12:06

not three users. For each day,

12:08

a lot of these sites, whether

12:10

it's in DeFi or NFT, etc.,

12:13

treat a wallet as a user. Meaning, today

12:15

you go, you connect your Phantom, and then

12:17

you log out, you connect your Magic Freedom

12:19

Wallet logout. The

12:22

experience here would be you log in with

12:24

one, and then you link a

12:26

second. You click a link button, you link

12:28

a second to the same account, you link

12:31

a third to the same account. And then

12:33

every wallet that you connect with, you see

12:35

the same profile. You can see your portfolio

12:37

across everything. You can see the same profile.

12:40

So think about it a little bit like

12:42

moving to advanced mode of moving from a

12:44

wallet as a user to a user can

12:46

have multiple wallets. Yeah. So I

12:48

think the first question I kind of

12:50

had with that framework is, the reason

12:53

I have multiple wallets on,

12:55

you know, Solana is

12:57

partially for privacy, right? There's one that's

12:59

linked to Fideira.Soul, and there's others that,

13:01

you know, might not be. And it's

13:03

not that I have anything

13:06

no one wants to find. It's just like

13:08

I don't want to necessarily advertise like, hey,

13:10

this is also a wallet owned by, you

13:12

know, Austin. So how do you guys think

13:14

about that from like a data

13:16

and privacy side? Because I'm sure from a from

13:18

a DAP perspective, there is a

13:20

time bomb in the entire way that we've

13:22

built user identities and authentications

13:25

in web three, where we have

13:27

basically created the world's

13:29

largest advertising data set if someone wants

13:31

to actually start using it. And that

13:33

bomb will go off at some point.

13:35

But these are sort of things that

13:37

like, get us closer to that future.

13:39

So how are you guys handling both

13:42

on the DAP level, and then in

13:44

your sort of corporate level, you

13:46

know, privacy associated with wallets? Yeah.

13:49

So first, by the way, you described

13:51

this correctly, which is you

13:53

might have different wallets, and some of them

13:55

might be more private. It's not that you're

13:57

hiding anything, but we have people with multiple

13:59

identities, right? way I interact with my

14:01

friends might be different than the way I interact with

14:03

my work, right? And

14:06

therefore, the types of interactions might be different

14:08

and I want to kind of silo those

14:10

identities. I think about them in, you know,

14:13

you might one day have a C-wallet and

14:15

you might have a Robinhood wallet. And they're

14:17

completely separate just because one is my financial

14:19

identity, one is my gaming. Oh, yeah, the

14:22

number the number of complete DJ and Twitter

14:24

accounts that have DMed me or come up

14:26

to me at like fancy functions

14:28

and be like, I'm

14:30

so and so on Twitter, but my day

14:32

job is, you know, I run blockchain at

14:35

JP Morgan. And you're like, I never would

14:37

have thought you own 45 of

14:39

these like very DGen JPEGs. That's exactly

14:41

right. Right. To your point, we all

14:43

have we live different lives, right? Yeah.

14:45

And to your point, we want to

14:47

separate them. The way we think about

14:49

this is it's

14:51

a very basic level word DevTools company, meaning

14:54

we have no aspirations to

14:57

help with anything besides user management. So

14:59

that means a couple things. First, that

15:01

means that any data that you connect

15:03

on website A is siloed

15:06

from the data connected to website B.

15:08

Right. So if you go today, if you

15:10

use tokenproof as an example,

15:13

right, that's an app that leverages dynamic.

15:16

If you connect multiple wallets on social

15:18

proof, and then you go to IYK,

15:20

which is building these like magical physical

15:22

digital experiences, mostly using dynamic, those

15:25

connections that you made are separate, right?

15:27

And then you go to Doodles, which has

15:29

flow wall, EVM walls, and again, and we use

15:31

the dynamic to link them together. Those are separate.

15:34

So in the very basic level, we say,

15:36

okay, this information is siloed, meaning

15:39

the information you collected on website

15:41

A is completely separate from

15:43

data on website B and website

15:45

C. Over time, we'll

15:47

do two things. First, internally, we have processes

15:49

around how we keep them siloed, right? We're

15:52

soft-to-tech to compliance. We have

15:54

very clear terms of service for

15:56

how we use and how we don't use

15:58

your data. By definition, we don't collect data.

16:00

like IP. And so we have kind of

16:02

audits around this. We are a DevTools company

16:05

at a very basic level. My goal is

16:07

a single goal, which is to just give

16:09

software tools. Now, over time

16:11

though, you might want to broadcast to

16:13

the world that these two wallets are

16:15

connected. And at that point,

16:17

I might give you the end-user tools

16:20

to publish those as did

16:23

in verifiable credentials and essential

16:25

identifiers for registries put on online

16:27

where you can kind of declare

16:30

to the world these wallets are

16:32

linked. Very similar to again, in

16:34

EVM land there's delegate cash where

16:36

you can declare this wallet is

16:38

the hot wallet that controls these

16:40

other four cold wallets, my ledger

16:42

wallet, etc. So we will give

16:44

you the end-user tools. We might

16:47

give you the developer tools, but

16:49

at kind of root, this

16:51

information is valid. It's for

16:53

an end-user's benefit. But

16:55

to your point, with the minimum likelihood,

16:58

let's not recreate the problem that we're

17:00

trying to solve the web to essentially.

17:03

I'm kind of curious about like the VPN

17:05

companies I think are probably the only

17:08

companies and then maybe you know, brave,

17:10

there's a few of them out there

17:12

that have been able to build a

17:14

business that has been resistant to the

17:16

advertising and data mining forces. So I'm

17:18

kind of curious how you as a

17:20

founder who clearly seem like you don't

17:23

want that to happen with the data

17:25

you guys are collecting, have thought about

17:27

like what choices and challenges it

17:29

means to have to build a company in

17:31

a way that it isn't susceptible to those

17:34

sort of pressures in the future. Yeah,

17:36

absolutely. So first, look, by the way, even

17:38

to your point, even VPN companies, I think

17:41

there's a very long time ago,

17:43

a VPN company was sold to Facebook that

17:45

did exactly that, right, that use

17:47

that to understand trends, right. So at the very

17:49

basic level, we look at a couple kind of

17:52

key. So

17:54

I'll say two things, which is first, at the end

17:56

of the day, we're a user management company, meaning we

17:59

provide your user database. And on top of

18:01

that, developers can decide to say, okay, what

18:03

do we want to do with these users,

18:05

right? So other companies can come along and

18:07

say, look, I would give me your kind

18:09

of, you know, wallet data, and I will

18:11

kind of, you know, use that to better

18:14

understand your users. So I wouldn't, I

18:16

think you'll be wrong with me saying, hey,

18:18

that can't happen. We're seeing that happened in

18:20

the natural market of companies

18:23

becoming more sophisticated, wanting to understand more about

18:25

their users, and kind of, you know, as

18:27

a result, give them better services or things

18:29

of that sort. And part of it relies

18:32

on the user system. Right. Yeah,

18:34

for us as dynamics, we really

18:36

think about ourselves very similar to like an

18:38

off the zero, or a

18:40

segment or a twillium, right?

18:43

Which is how do we

18:45

really stick with providing developer

18:47

tools and build that into

18:50

time business? Right? I look at,

18:52

I'll say this a different way, which is

18:55

fundamentally believe that in five years, everyone has

18:57

kind of a wall of opponents in every

18:59

one of their apps. And that

19:01

is a gigantic market on the channel, right?

19:04

There's so much level of complexity be

19:06

beyond in that single sentence of what

19:08

needs to be built. That

19:11

that's a lot of work for us. We're going

19:13

to focus on that for, we

19:15

can have this conversation again in a couple

19:18

years. But that's fair. I do feel like

19:20

I have to point out that segment was

19:22

bought by Twilio and Twilio now actually sells

19:24

customer data via customer data portal. But I

19:26

get what you're saying. I think by

19:29

the way, on that point segment, I don't know if you

19:31

saw it now spinning out of Twilio. Oh, I didn't see

19:33

that. Oh, that's great. Yeah, so it's exactly but that I

19:35

think you're right. Right? Like, which is, I

19:38

think it's we would all be, you

19:40

know, a little bit naive to

19:43

assume that companies that they grow don't

19:45

necessarily see all these forces. I

19:48

can tell you my intent in how we're

19:50

thinking about building the business and where I

19:52

hope to build a business. But again,

19:54

it's actually been five years and now you

19:56

have a recording. So, you know, let's have

19:58

this conversation again. Yeah.

20:01

But yeah, to kind of go back to some

20:03

of the other stuff you were talking about before,

20:05

I think that layer of being able to link

20:07

up wallet addresses to social addresses

20:10

to GitHub addresses, I mean, we've seen

20:12

GitHub contributors be like a major component

20:14

now in some airdrops that are coming

20:16

through, and people are having to build

20:18

a lot of custom systems to do

20:20

that sort of thing. So where

20:22

do you sort of see the scope of

20:24

space you're trying to sort of step into

20:26

here? Is this sort of the type

20:29

of thing where a company that actually is like, hey,

20:31

we're going to do a token airdrop, and we need

20:33

a way for people to link up accounts? Is that

20:35

sort of part of the vision there, too? Yeah,

20:38

no, absolutely. So literally, you can see

20:40

this from the last week. So Starkware's

20:42

airdrop is powered by dynamic.

20:45

Well, if you go to provisions.starkware.io,

20:49

and you click to connect your L1 wallet,

20:51

or you click to connect your L2 wallet,

20:54

that is a dynamic product under the hood.

20:56

Yeah. And that is a very good example

20:58

of, you know, and

21:01

I don't want to speak on behalf

21:03

of Starkware, but I'm assuming that they

21:05

have so many challenges with kind of

21:07

how to manage a drop,

21:09

right? There's so much complexity here

21:11

that thinking about user management is

21:14

one thing that, you know, shouldn't

21:16

be in their mind, right? The

21:18

way we originally pitched dynamic was, hey, no one

21:20

wakes up in the morning and says, let me

21:23

rebuild this indication with my two best engineers, right?

21:25

Like, it's not like a pitch you make to

21:27

your best engineers to say, hey, you know what?

21:29

Spend the next couple of weeks rebuilding,

21:32

thinking about better walls, thinking about third-party

21:35

walls, and that's where we come in.

21:37

So a good example is tinto.xld, which

21:40

is an L2, also uses

21:42

dynamic for how people can claim tokens

21:44

or things of that sort. So, yes,

21:46

it's definitely use case for us. And

21:48

that's where the flexibility comes in, which

21:50

is you can use dynamic as

21:53

a crypto company, like provisions at

21:55

Starkware, where you can use dynamic

21:58

for a crypto-enabled experience. It's like

22:00

a token proof or an IYK, which completely

22:02

objects the way crypto. So it can be

22:04

flexible in both of those sides. So

22:08

how are you thinking about sort of

22:10

the long-term user grow up journey

22:13

in this place, because I think there's this sort

22:15

of idea of like, oh, people come in with

22:18

maybe an embedded wallet first, they transition to

22:20

some form of hot wallet. And

22:23

then most unfortunately don't transition to

22:25

a hardware wallet when they, they

22:27

probably should. So how

22:29

do you sort of, you know, are you guys

22:31

thinking that that is something that, you know, you're

22:34

getting into the space of, of trying to

22:36

actually do direct integrations with hardware wallets as

22:38

well and sort of carry users on

22:40

that journey, or is that sort of not the

22:42

scope? No, no, it's exactly,

22:44

I think you're exactly right. That is

22:46

right. The, the Holy Grail is

22:48

that once you have a wallet, you

22:51

can start interacting with other things. And

22:53

then over time, uh, when

22:55

you happen to wallet dictates the level

22:58

of security and the level of things

23:00

that you should consider with a wallet,

23:02

right? It can be anywhere from, if

23:04

you're buying $1 kind of, you know,

23:06

or doing micro transactions or playing a

23:08

game, you might not care about any

23:11

of this stuff. Right. But if all

23:13

of a sudden you have a million dollars

23:15

in your wallet, because you kind of participate

23:17

in some sort of social fight thing, or,

23:19

or you're running a business on top of

23:21

this stuff, or you're paying contractors, right? All

23:24

great use cases on global contractors, great use

23:26

cases of crypto, you might want to start

23:28

thinking about to a say, or even alerts,

23:31

notifications, and how to think about policies

23:34

or kind of multi-sig saying, right? And

23:36

so our goal is to actually help

23:39

you, the developer offer all that entire

23:42

suite of tools, right? And we really fundamentally

23:44

think about it being kind of three steps

23:46

of the problem. Right. The first one is

23:49

how do you, are more the user

23:51

that doesn't have any understanding of crypto

23:54

and might never need to have an

23:56

understanding of crypto, right? If I, you

23:58

don't really need to know anything about

24:00

crypto. to use Farcaster. Exactly, that is

24:02

a phenomenal example. That is a great

24:05

example of like you get the benefit,

24:07

the social network is being built but

24:09

over time you can kind of leverage

24:11

the fact that you have shared rails

24:14

of kind of a Farcaster social graph

24:16

that people can build on top of,

24:18

right? Or in different use cases, I'm

24:21

transferring money to you and you're in

24:23

Argentina and I'm in France, we

24:26

just need the most efficient way to transfer

24:28

money from one to the other. The

24:30

fact that it works through crypto is irrelevant just

24:33

like the fact that you shouldn't know what SSTP

24:37

is or like you shouldn't know

24:39

what OAuth is when you click login with Google,

24:42

it should just work for you. Now

24:44

to your point, we kind of think about these

24:46

three problems. We think about okay, how do I

24:48

have shaft that away and let you log in

24:50

and complete the action you want to complete, whether

24:53

it's game action or whether you want to buy

24:55

kind of a tokenized assets that you couldn't access

24:57

before, right? It might be that you

24:59

want to buy land, the easiest way is actually to

25:01

tokenize that on chain, right? And you shouldn't really care

25:03

about that, you just want to buy land or energy

25:06

or anything of that sort. Second

25:08

step is okay, now that you have some

25:10

sort of wallet, does that wallet and whether

25:12

you know about it or not need to

25:14

interact with the outside world, is it kind

25:16

of siloed or is it global, right?

25:18

Do you want to let it connect to you

25:21

know a magic Eden and trade assets there or

25:23

do you want to let it connect to some

25:25

sort of RWA

25:27

aggregator, right? And kind

25:29

of you know, that's step

25:31

number two. Step number three is okay, what

25:33

are the policies and is there

25:35

a policy engine that defines when

25:38

you start thinking about additional

25:41

security methods or when you

25:43

start thinking about kind of 2FA or learning

25:45

or that type of stuff. So we kind

25:47

of think about these three steps of the

25:49

process which is onboarding kind of

25:51

expansion of interaction beyond the

25:53

siloed app and

25:55

kind of the security policies involved, right? We

25:57

also think about to your point, Hardware

26:00

wallets is one option, right? But MPC in

26:02

kind of, you know, not having a single

26:04

key or point of failure is another option

26:07

or thinking of multistake is a

26:09

third option, right? So it's not a kind

26:11

of a silver bullet, but rather flexibility based

26:13

on the use case that you have. Yeah,

26:16

that's really interesting. I mean the way you're kind

26:18

of thinking about why

26:20

these components fit together. I have

26:22

to imagine you guys are also thinking about KYC

26:25

as more and more types of different blockchain

26:28

usage, whether that's you know,

26:30

private forks of networks or subnets

26:32

or, you know, using token extensions

26:34

on Solana, plus all the exchange

26:37

integrations that are capable there. Are

26:39

you guys thinking about launching KYC

26:41

services or partnering with

26:43

someone else to do sort of a more

26:45

portable KYC architecture? Yeah, absolutely.

26:49

It's a topic very near and dear to our heart.

26:51

I think it actually we mentioned KYC

26:53

in our original kind of deck probably

26:55

a month into starting the company. To

26:58

your point, there is a couple

27:00

really fascinating topics there,

27:02

right? Of tokenized KYC to your point, which

27:05

is, can I KYC once

27:07

on website A and carry it with me on

27:09

website B? Right,

27:11

and so we're thinking about those. We're probably

27:14

transparently six to nine months away from actually

27:16

kind of, you know, stepping on the gas

27:18

there. But absolutely, right? Like

27:20

in a good example, let's actually take

27:22

that as a into

27:25

a real example, which is I

27:27

am a trader in Utah and

27:29

I want to I'm a accredited investor,

27:31

right? It's not just KYC accreditation

27:34

is also a type of kind

27:36

of, you know, verification. You might wonder,

27:38

I'm an accredited investor in Utah

27:41

and I want to get access

27:43

to assets that I couldn't access

27:45

before. I want to easily with

27:47

one click buy kind of

27:50

land in Arizona and

27:52

I want to buy energy assets

27:54

somewhere else or I'm an Argentina

27:56

and I want access to treasures,

27:59

right? And I am and the current master

28:01

of passable information, I should

28:03

be able to keep my secrets, complete

28:06

an accreditation of once

28:08

as well. I

28:10

have that assigned to my profile and then

28:12

go to the energy website like a Jasmine

28:15

Energy and buy energy tokens

28:17

there and then go to Maple

28:20

Finance and buy kind of, you

28:22

know, treasury there and go

28:24

to kind of a fabric

28:26

of land and buy land. And with

28:28

all of those, I should be able to

28:30

reuse the same credentials. So,

28:33

short answer is absolutely, it's a key part

28:35

of what we're thinking about. It

28:37

is like our real hope

28:39

for the future because I hate

28:41

going through KYC every time. I

28:43

get the value is critical,

28:45

but the process is not where it

28:48

shouldn't be. And so that is

28:50

a big topic on our mind. Yeah,

28:52

I think it's also one of those things too where we

28:56

see just in like, you know, the

28:58

Sauna Foundation does KYC and every grant

29:00

recipient, but we also do KYC on

29:02

like delegation program recipients and those sorts

29:04

of things. And not on

29:06

grants, but on the delegation, the

29:08

amount of KYC fraud we see is

29:11

very, very high. Specifically

29:14

with people using things like AI

29:16

tools nowadays or just manipulating images,

29:18

fake documents, etc. And

29:21

one of the interesting pieces about that is

29:24

it's really hard to make a better,

29:26

more robust KYC system because

29:28

it would require everyone passing KYC

29:31

spends 20 minutes on it. And

29:33

if you have to pass KYC

29:36

several times a month, that becomes a really high

29:38

overhead. Whereas, you know, if I have to pass

29:40

KYC once a year and it takes a half

29:42

hour, whatever, because then it's portable out

29:45

to everything else. I agree

29:47

with that, right? To your point, there's a difference

29:49

between doing

29:51

the KYC process for the sake of

29:53

doing a KYC process versus really

29:56

proving that you are who you save. Right.

29:58

The hurdle is. slightly

30:01

higher at the beginning, then you can

30:03

reuse that. Everyone benefits, right? Because the

30:06

folks can prove you are what you say you are,

30:08

but then you as an end user don't have to

30:10

reprove that every 10 minutes. And

30:13

that is, I really hope that's

30:15

the future, right? You see this across

30:17

industries, right? If you ever bought

30:19

a house, I'm assuming you've seen all of this

30:22

type of like redundant work that you have to

30:24

do. It's not about reducing,

30:26

I think it's actually increasing the bar

30:28

of keywac, while reducing the friction around

30:31

conducting KYC. That's what I hope where

30:33

I think crypto can play a

30:36

huge role in that. Yeah,

30:38

I think there's a really interesting future

30:40

for that too. So looking

30:42

at sort of pass keys, have you

30:45

guys like, there's a lot of buzz

30:47

right now about pass keys. They're, you

30:49

know, from my perspective as a one

30:51

password user, very little difference is just

30:54

still stored in one password. But you

30:56

know, there's other types of situations like,

30:58

wallet logins and other things like there

31:00

where pass keys are sort of becoming,

31:03

you know, the preferred solution from it

31:05

seems like security providers as well as

31:07

users. What do you think the

31:09

role of pass keys might be in the future of,

31:11

you know, web three wallets? I

31:14

am a huge, huge, huge

31:16

advocate of pass keys. I hope I said enough

31:19

times that I'm a huge advocate of pass keys.

31:21

Look, at the very basic level, and

31:24

to your point, use one password, so I think

31:26

you'll get this really, really quickly, which is think

31:28

about it's like one password, but for everyone. Yeah.

31:31

Where it's a very basic level, what

31:34

are pass keys? They're one time invisible

31:36

password, super long invisible passwords that you

31:38

generate for everyone. And

31:40

they're locked to your user account.

31:43

And oh, by the way, they're automatically backed

31:45

out, backed up to your iCloud or Google

31:47

password manager or your one pass. Right?

31:50

So it's a very basic level and not, I'll

31:52

say this a different way, which is, it's

31:55

very rare in offline that innovation

31:57

comes along and really changes. And

32:00

past keys are the first time in

32:03

like 20 years where innovation has come

32:05

along with the support of these like

32:07

giant players, Apple and Google, etc. And

32:10

it's actually changing. At

32:12

the very, the root of all evil

32:14

with anything authentication is the concept of

32:16

a password. You're giving

32:19

someone, you're like telling someone to

32:22

give you information that's on the one hand

32:24

hard for you to kind of

32:26

break, but not on the other, it's easy enough for

32:28

the user to remember. And

32:31

so this concept of not having

32:33

to like think about past keys

32:35

or passwords is this magical, magical

32:38

concept. I am

32:40

really hoping that we

32:42

adopt this as soon as humanly possible.

32:45

You can, if you go into

32:47

the Firefox form, you will see

32:49

me posting there frequently and asking

32:51

when they finish implementing it, which

32:53

they did. Like at

32:55

the very basic level, it's this

32:57

like really important concept. Now it is

32:59

important in off-land, right? When you log

33:01

into a website and it guards your

33:04

information, it is doubly important

33:06

when it guards your money, right?

33:08

And so it is a concept

33:11

that's critical globally and even more

33:13

critical in web3 land where, you

33:17

know, you want to create a secret that

33:19

only an end user knows and you can't

33:21

replicate in any way. So that

33:23

was, you know, we can dive into the details

33:26

here, but there was a very long spiel as

33:28

to how much I think past keys

33:31

play in a huge role of our

33:33

future here kind of, you know, hopefully

33:35

within the future of our web3. So

33:38

how have you guys thought about network support

33:40

and building that out? Because, you

33:43

know, different networks have pretty different requirements

33:45

in terms of wallets from everything on

33:47

the signing curve to, you know,

33:49

on Solana, a wallet is asked to

33:51

do a good deal less than a

33:53

wallet on Ethereum is asked to do.

33:55

On Ethereum, they're responsible for transaction forming.

33:57

On Solana, they're just responsible for transaction.

34:00

simulation. That's right. Yeah, I

34:02

think so it comes back

34:04

to a point that we talked about in

34:06

the past, which is flexibility. Right?

34:08

Dynamic can be used for

34:10

websites that never talk about crypto and

34:12

can be used for crypto heavyweights. And

34:15

so in the same sense, my value

34:18

proposition to developers and the very basic

34:20

level is please never have to

34:22

worry about this stuff every day. Yeah.

34:25

Oh my god, if you have to like, my

34:27

goal is to remove that pain that

34:29

is kind of wallet login from your

34:31

list of pain points that I'm sure

34:33

you as a developer have like, like

34:35

50 cent. Right? What

34:39

that means is that over time,

34:41

we support more and more teams. Just today,

34:43

we actually announced Bitcoin kit, which

34:46

is essentially kind of all the wallets

34:48

on Bitcoin, you can easily implement a

34:51

very similar to how you would in

34:53

this salon and waltzing or waltzing that.

34:56

Right? So for the first time, there's now a

34:58

sport on the Bitcoin side. Yeah. And

35:00

that's important because you want to kind of

35:02

help accelerate across teams. So short

35:04

answer is we really care about this stuff.

35:07

Today we support all the VM chains, starkware,

35:09

obviously Solana, which we started

35:12

with, by the way, it

35:14

was the first thing to

35:16

support Bitcoin flow, cosmos in

35:19

algorithm, and we'll add more

35:21

in the future. There's some fascinating kind of

35:23

animations in the land of kind of flee

35:25

and access. And so there's

35:27

some really interesting stuff there. But short answer is we

35:30

really think about it holistically, how do I

35:32

extract this away from anyone who works in

35:34

web3? Yeah. And so,

35:36

you know, when you're designing, you know,

35:38

companies and systems like this, that's a lot of

35:41

maintenance, it's a lot of engineers. How

35:43

does monetization work for you guys? Yeah,

35:46

so you're right. There's by the

35:48

way, a third party, there's a lot of testing,

35:51

right? There is, we think about ourselves

35:54

before monetization, just the way we think about

35:56

ourselves internally is a little bit like reverse

35:58

plan. which is Plaid had

36:00

to integrate with a bunch of banks. And

36:03

they're huge and they're super complex, but

36:06

there's very old tech there. And it's not

36:08

like the banks kind of roll out new

36:10

techs every day. And

36:12

so there's one set of problems there

36:14

which is dealing with really sophisticated old

36:17

techs that you have to integrate with. In

36:20

web three, there's the reverse problem, which is every

36:22

wallet is a startup. And

36:24

every wallet wakes up in the morning

36:26

and tries to kind of innovate and

36:28

change how they do stuff and break

36:30

each other safely. Right,

36:33

and so we have to deal with

36:35

this completely different set of problems, which

36:37

is how do you kind

36:39

of handle dozens or hundreds

36:41

of wallets that break each other's things all

36:43

the time? So we have

36:45

a lot of work that

36:47

we do around testing to just make

36:50

sure that doesn't happen, right? There's also

36:52

competition, right? Wallets have an incentive to

36:54

a little bit poke each other in

36:56

the eye sometimes and make

36:58

sure that they kind of take over. And

37:01

I think by the way, Solana has been,

37:03

I think on the easiest

37:05

side to handle this with phenomenal

37:08

work around the wallet standard, right?

37:10

And it was done in UVM

37:12

land. There are recent activities like

37:14

EEEAP 1663, which

37:17

kind of let injected wallets play

37:19

nicely together. But before that, everyone

37:21

just pretended that they're made of

37:23

it. And that's being put

37:26

aside on kind of

37:28

testing, how we make money. At the very

37:30

basic level, we are again, coming back to

37:32

this, we are a standard fast dev tools

37:34

company. We make money based on

37:36

monthly active users, our business volume, we

37:39

say this in calls with potential customers.

37:41

It's very simple. We provide a service,

37:43

we get money, and everyone's kind of

37:46

happy. And that's at the

37:48

very basic level of what we do, which

37:50

inherently means we give you a service, you

37:52

pay per monthly active logged in users, per

37:54

kind of wallets that we generate. And

37:57

at that point, you are

37:59

hopefully happy. and we are happy. We

38:02

have not innovated on our business model

38:04

that much versus just looking at how

38:06

Web2 authentication companies do this with Auth0

38:08

or Stitch and took

38:11

some friendly inspiration

38:13

from those. Awesome.

38:16

Well, if folks want to learn more about what

38:18

you guys have built, where

38:20

can they both learn more about the project and get in

38:22

touch with you? Yeah, absolutely.

38:25

So folks, give notes to dynamic.xyz.

38:27

If you're on Fargaster, you can

38:29

follow me at itai. Just I-T-A-I

38:32

on Fargaster. I'm the only entity there,

38:34

which I feel very proud of. So

38:36

no other itai can go into the

38:39

protocol anymore. But at the very basic

38:41

level, go to dynamic.xyz. Follow us on

38:43

Twitter, dynamic underscore xyz. And as does

38:46

anything, at the very basic level, we kind of like to

38:48

geek out about this stuff, right? Like, this

38:51

is all like extremely fun for us. So

38:53

anyone's curious to learn more, our blog post kind

38:55

of goes into our blogs, go into a

38:57

lot of detail. And the last thing I

38:59

would say is poke around some customers that we

39:01

mentioned on the site. I think the key

39:03

thing for us is we get

39:05

to have this really cool front row

39:08

seat for a lot of innovation in

39:10

the industry. Where's the like the boring

39:12

side of crypto? There's so many cool

39:15

companies that are being built on top

39:17

of these tools right now that are

39:19

kind of the building these full crypto-enabled

39:21

stacks that let you build anywhere from

39:24

kind of a doodle-like experience to a

39:27

more lighter financial thing. And

39:29

so that's that's a poke around some of

39:31

our customers. I think that's where the really

39:33

interesting part is, which is just seeing how

39:35

people are innovating in crypto today. Awesome.

39:38

Well, itai, thank you for joining us today

39:40

on Validated. Thank you so much for

39:42

having me. Validated

39:47

is produced by Ray Beli with help

39:49

from Ross Cullen, Brandon Ekter,

39:52

Amira Valiani, and Ainsley Medford.

39:54

Engineering by Tyler Morsett. you