Bankless - 13 - DeFi's Mainstream Wallet | Itamar Lesuisse

Episode Date: May 25, 2020

Episode: #13 May 25, 2020 Argent is the closet thing we've seen to a mainstream ready bankless wallet. Is this crypto's Netscape moment? Ryan & David sit down with Itamar the co-founder of Argent to find out. Coming off a big week of releases, Itamar tells us how DeFi's almost reached parity with traditional finance, hasn't quite found product market fit in developed countries, but why he's incredibly bullish about the future. We cover: The why: Why Itamar's here Argent's ethos What makes Argent Bankless The walled garden approach The what: Why typical wallets suck Superpowers with DeFi What's holding us back What if Argent goes away? Collecting an email address Argent in Argentina The when: 1 billion users & Argent in 5 years Finding the Netscape of crypto Two things he wants from the Bankless community How soon until 1 billion users? Listen and decide for yourself. Before the episode begins we also talk about: Why if feels like 2016 again The BlockFi breach and "DeFi fixes this" ----- Tools from our sponsors to go bankless: Rocket Dollar - tax shelter your crypto ($50 w/ "BANKLESS") Monolith - holy grail of bankless Visa cards Aave - money lego for lending & borrowing DYDX - trade, margin, BTC perpetuals (10% off with this link) (trade.dydx.exchange/r/bankless) ----- Resources discussed: (Article) It's 2016 again (Article) How to get your first DeFi Wallet (Argent) (Podcast) Learn about the Dai Savings Rate in Ep #9 ----- Episode Actions: Download the Argent wallet & try it! Use a money protocol on Argent (how to) Share the wallet with a crypto newbie!  ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes | Spotify | YouTube | RSS Feed Leave a review on iTunes Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program Visit official Bankless website for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter | YouTube Follow Ryan on Twitter Follow David on Twitter

Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front-run the opportunity. This is Ryan Sean Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, how are you this week? I'm doing great. I'm really excited about this episode. This is an episode where we dive into a very specific bankless tool and ask the questions that we think are really important. Both me and Ryan are huge fans of the Argent wallet and how they are pushing the boundaries with the benefits of crypto while obfuscating and hiding away the friction points and the costs of crypto, making a really good UX UI experience for users. And then we also talk about really important questions, such as, you know, if the Argent wallet is as successful as they want it to be, how do we maintain neutrality in the wallet?

but how do we make sure that Argent is aligned with the Ethereum ecosystem into the future? So a super valuable episode. Edemar definitely has the right vision for what Argent needs to be. And it was just an absolute treat getting him on the pod. Yeah, absolutely. I think the entire bankless community is tiering for this wallet and excited about this wallet because it feels like the first wallet that's almost mainstream accessible. This is pretty easy to use.

I mean, my parents can easily use this. People who aren't, are completely new to crypto, can use this. It's really difficult to talk to somebody and talk to them about dye and stable coins and sort of, you know, the die savings array and talk about how great it is. And then try to explain how to use Metamask and how to get their crypto off and exchange easily and what gas fees are, right? Those are all impediments to user adoption. And Argent has just found a way to remove all of those, including, I think, one of the biggest

impediments, which is private key management, right? That sense that, oh, my God, if my assets are outside of a wallet, outside of an exchange like Coinbase, and if I lose my private keys, it all goes away, right? Argent has found a clever way to navigate around this. So, yeah, so we're going to talk to Edomar today about the concept of defy's netscate moment. So what they're doing with Argent is essentially they're creating a browser, an overlay on top of all of these money protocols and allowing those to be easily accessible. Sort of what happened to the early internet. So protocols like TCPIP and SMTPP and FDP, those protocols were kind of still in the

geek culture and not really useful for everyday people until Netscape came around and gave you the ability to surf the web, as they said back in the day. This is the ability to surf the money protocols. That really, to me, is what Argent is doing here. So we're going to talk with EMR about three things. First, the ethos behind this. So like, why are they creating a bankless wallet? Secondly, what it is, what you can do with it, some of the superpowers that are available to you today with it. And then the future, how this thing gets to maybe a billion users someday, at least Defi does, and what the wallet's role is in that process. So super exciting, super interesting episode, and we're glad you're tuned in. Before we get there, let's talk about our sponsors today, David.

So the first I want to tell you about is Rock a Dollar. This is primarily for our U.S. listeners. If you have an IRA or a 401K, the problem with it is it's jailed inside of your brokerage. So it's stuck in your Schwab account. It's stuck in Fidelity. If you want to buy crypto, you have to buy it inside the brokerage at 5x the price. Don't do that. It's a complete rip-off. What you need to do instead is break your crypto retirement account out of jail. Use Rocket Dollar.

They can help you set up a self-directed IRA, a self-directed 401K. I do this. A ton of folks in the bankless community do this. They will take care of the pain and help you break your retirement account out of jail, help you buy crypto on the spot market. To start a self-directed IRA or 401k, go to Rocket Dollar. When you use the code bankless, you'll get $50 off. Rocketdollar.com.

Use the code bankless. DYDX is an outstanding decentralized exchange in the crypto world. For those that aren't familiar, DYDX is a place where you can go and swap ETH and Die and access some of the deepest liquidity in the crypto space. Hats off to DYDX for really gathering the liquidity they need to make a liquid dex, something that is really difficult in the space. And the way that they do that is that they offer. a complete suite of services that surround ETH and Dye and other assets on their exchange.

So not only can you go to DYDX and spot trade between ETH and Die, but you can also lend and borrow both ETH and die as well as being able to take margin long positions or margin short positions. So getting 1x, 2x, 3x leverage in both directions on your ether. And something that is brand new to the DYDX platform is the ability to get exposure to Bitcoin on their perpetual contract markets. This is something that is brand new, not only to DYDX, but the crypto space at large. And so with Bitcoin perpetual contract markets, you can get price exposure to Bitcoin on margin in an extremely liquid way. This opened up just a few weeks ago, and there's already over $14 million worth of liquidity on the DYDX protocol. It comes from

USDC, and so when your contract is settled, you get paid out in USDC. It's a brand new money Lego in the crypto world. You can go to at DYDX and get 10% off of trading fees when you sign up with the bankless referral link, trade.d.dx.com slash R slash bankless. It's in the show notes so you can just co-copy that and go straight to DYDX and get 10% off of all trading fees. Hey, David, before we dig in with Edomar, we should talk big picture stuff. You know what I've been feeling like lately? It's felt like it's 2016 again. I'm 100% with you. Yeah, I've, I even feel that every single morning when I wake up and for, I'm just more optimistic about the future of crypto, not only just from, you know, the price appreciation,

which I totally think is coming, but also just the fundamentals in the space that really sets the foundation for, for a new wave. I've always been skeptical of the, of the concept that, you know, there's a new bull market coming. There's, uh, the, the idea is that, uh, there's always a, new bull market on the horizon and that crypto runs in cycles. It feels weird to be able to count on these things, but I wouldn't actually bet against it. And it does feel like we are on the cusp of a very long, slow, drawn out appreciation in ETH price that will probably inevitably turn into another bubble, which will be fun to go on the ride. Yeah, I think that's the debate in crypto, whether there's going to be sort of a slow slog to adoption. So if you look at like the

dot-com bubble and then the pop, after that, there were, there was an interim period, years until high-flying companies like Amazon fully recovered, right? It took something until like 2008, 2009. And the way it recovered was through utility. So Amazon actually delivered on some of its promises and started to recover. So some people think that that's what's going to happen in crypto. Basically, it'll sort of seep into our everyday life. And there'll be a slow growth slog as it seeps into our life. And people start realizing more and more utility.

But I've come to think that what really happens in crypto is we get these crazy boom bust cycles. So we get like these periods of irrational examples. Zubrins and Hockey Stick growth, followed by, you know, a crash type period, followed by some sort of dead period. And then the whole cycle repeats. I was reading an Andreessen Horowitz article. So they're a, you know, crypto VC firm.

And they talked about the three previous cycles. So the first cycle was 2009 to 2012, where you had this boom bust occurrence. And then 2013 to 2016. was the second, and then the third, which we're kind of still in, or it's just closing up, is 2016 up until now. And in all of these cycles, you get sort of the same sort of pattern. There's at the very beginning of the cycle, this kind of Tinder period where all of this infrastructure is getting built. All of this fuel is getting laid down. So only the hardcore, true believers are really in that phase. That's where we are now, basically. And then there's some

kind of a spark, whether that's a narrative or a use case or a combination of both in 2016, 2017. That spark really was smart contracts and Ethereum and the Bitcoin as a store of value narrative. And then you get this explosion happened in all three of the previous cycles. It was almost like more explosive than everyone thought it would be. So there's a growth phase. And then that turned into like crazy growth and then it melted faces like with the level of growth that you saw in each of those cycles followed by a crash. And then after the crash, you started to see articles like crypto is dead. People started leaving the crypto space. The bubbles pop. The narratives are wrong. That cycle has played out already three times. And we are now in the fourth cycle.

This is the Tinder phase where all of this fuel, all of these layers of a building and structure are being put down. And I feel like it's 2016. Like we're just waiting for that spark. Yeah, there's, as you said, there is so much Tinder being laid down. There are things and developments happening that if they had happened in 2017, 2018, would have just absolutely just pumped the market, especially out of some developments in the last two weeks.

Reddit using Ethereum, an Ethereum test net to a, experiment with community tokens is absolutely huge. After just like three days, there were 5,000 different wallets just using one of the two tokens that they issued. And I think that number is up to like 14 or 15,000 now. And that's just the fact that the, I think number four, world's most popular website is using Ethereum to host some sort of community engagement infrastructure mechanism is insanely bullish. And then there's also, Visa explicitly citing Ethereum as infrastructure for stable coin payments. And then also citing how stable coins are additive to a payment network, not competitive. And so if those things had happened

in 2017, like the crypto markets would have pumped by like 25% alone. And they didn't, you didn't even see a blip in these markets today because we're still, we still have, you know, trauma. We still have fear. we're still very hesitant dipping our toes. But the things like Argent wallet, which we're about to get into, and the infrastructure that our Argent represents to host a bankless revolution is part of the kindling that is being laid down. Bitcoin just went through a happening during a period where the Fed just printed a bunch of money. That is also huge kindling. The whole Paul Tudor Jones, who has 2% of his assets, which is an insane amount. I give 2% maybe sounds like a little bit, but when you're a billionaire like Paul Tudor Jones,

like I would have expected 0.2%, not 2 full percent. Like stuff like this, the kindling is just found everywhere. And it's going to be a fun day when that match drops. Yeah, totally. You know, what's funny is everything you just named, that happened like in the last week and a half to two weeks. Like we're not even talking about like cool stuff that's happened since the beginning of 2020. money. This is all in the past week and a half, two weeks. That's like new layers of kindling. This is a dry forest floor with like leaves and, you know, twigs and there hasn't been rain in months. That's what we're talking about here. And even the Reddit news alone. So 430 million daily active users on Reddit, 64% of those are Gen Z, right? So, and one of the subreddits

that they're releasing the community token on is a Fortnite subreddit. And they're even more excited about the token and about using the Ethereum wallet and this community point system than the crypto subreddit is. They have already more volts signed up there. So like this is a massive amount of kindling. And someone asked me the other day, it's like, well, just the Reddit news, why didn't price go up? And I think the answer to that question is these events aren't. the spark. They're the fuel, right? This is the kindling and the spark is yet to come. It feels very

much like 2016. That's not to say that next year is going to feel like 2017. It could still take some time. I mean, there still could be some more Tinder that is laid before we see the spark, but it feels like that spark is just a matter of time and probability. Something's going to set this forest floor off. And when it does, it's going to be. going to be quite explosive. At least, that's kind of what I think. I don't think that crypto works because of the scarcity games. We talked about those in previous episodes, David. I don't think crypto is just going to like slowly seep into our life and there's not ever going to be a speculative mania because the next 500 million people that enter this space are going to need to learn the same

lessons as the first 50. It's the same human psychology that drives these scarcity games. I wouldn't bet against another speculative explosive growth phase. That seems to be how this whole crypto thing grows in these cycles. And after every cycle, the good news is 10x the amount of builders and users and holders remain even after the crash. So every cycle ends with a higher floor than the last one. I think we're an exciting time. Yeah. In your article, you talked about fractals. And you just said that just because this feels like 2016 doesn't mean that next year is 27. 17. And what a fractal is, it's a pattern that looks the same at different scale. And so what when we say that this feels like 2016, like all those patterns are there, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the next pattern is 2017, right? So like obviously this is not financial advice. 2021 is not the year of 100x, you know, 100x growth in all crypto assets. But it's what it feels like. Like the foundations are being set. So patterns do change.

Like that nothing is guaranteed. But I do like the illustration that, you know, these things are repetitive cycles that look like each other each time. But that doesn't mean that this next cycle is going to be a, you know, a one-to-one repeat of the last one. Yeah, exactly. Like one fractal that we see in nature all the time is mountain ranges, right? And mountains sort of look the same if you look at sort of a mountain range,

but some mountains are higher than others. And that's what we might see here, some kind of a difference from the last fractal pattern, but a similar pattern. And I do think that pattern is one of fast speculative growth. Don't know when it'll happen, but I definitely put my money on that. I don't think it's going to be something slow and gradual.

Not in crypto, man. It's too crazy for that. David, we should talk about something else that happened recently, and that's the BlockFi. There's a data breach at BlockFi. And for those that don't know, maybe you can tell listeners what BlockFi is and what happened here. Yeah, BlockFi is a company that you can deposit your Bitcoin with. And then they also do other assets like Ether, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly Bitcoin customers. Centralized company, you deposit your Bitcoin there. They lend it out and give you a Bitcoin denominated return. So it's a way to receive Alpha on your

Bitcoin. So they're offering somewhere between like 3 and 4% on your Bitcoin and your ETH, which is pretty good. Like you can't really get those rates inside of Defy. And there's no really other way to get alpha on your Bitcoin. So that's really the business proposition of BlockFi and why one would deposit their Bitcoin there. The problem is, you know, when any website like this has user information And whenever a website centrally collects user information, there is an incentive to snag that. And that's exactly what happened. And I think this is really good juxtaposition between why a similar product, which there are plenty of on Ethereum inside of Defi, kind of fixes this problem because public permissionless protocols don't care about your government-issued ID and don't care about who you are. and don't require your email address or password or any other identifying information to use them.

And so I think the whole blockfite idea is a legacy business model that is being imprinted upon crypto using crypto assets to fuel them, but they don't actually make anything new. Like the real innovation here is permissionless, you know, identity-free protocols. and this hack just kind of illustrates why that is important. Yeah, BlockFi would be what we generally call a crypto bank. So they specialize in lending and borrowing, but they do it through a custodial service. So you actually have to give up your assets, your private keys to BlockFi. They secure it.

And along with that comes from regulations, as you said, like AMLKYC in the U.S. and that's, you know, money laundering, essentially, laws where blockfi is a crypto bank, they're taking custody assets. They have to get your identity. So they have to log your email, your name, your ID. And that's what was breached in this, in this, in this, in this issue. It was email address. It was physical address.

It was transaction history. Which bit-puners care a lot about. by the way. Yeah, it's that's very private information because it can be dangerous, obviously, to leak that. If that gets in the dark web, which inevitably it will, that list will be resold, then somebody knows potentially all of your Bitcoin addresses or the addresses that were linked to BlockFi. They know how much you have. They know where you live. They have your email address. I mean, it's pretty sensitive information. Eric Forgey's actually, he tweeted this out and he said, the problem is with AML KYC.

It's like, why are we collecting this? Why do we have to collect it? And that's one take, definitely. But I think another take is going along the lines of what you just said, which is D5 fixes this. So if it's just a protocol, if they don't take custody of your assets, then AML KYC doesn't apply. If you deposit your ETH or your wrapped Bitcoin and something like the compound protocol, you don't need to supply your street address. You don't need to supply your passport or your driver's license.

The protocol just kind of works because you're not giving up your assets. So it feels like DFI fixes this. Is that a take you share? Absolutely. And just to harp on KYC one more time, the reason why KYC is required is because the government and the nation state wants as much insight as to who owns all the money and where the money is. Because having that access to that information is power. That is power. And so what they are doing is they are forcing everyone to say like, okay, I own this much amount of money and here it is.

And the fact that the nation state knows this is extremely beneficial for them. They basically sit at the center of the most important information ever in the world, which is where is all the money and who owns it. And so, you know, Eric Vorhe, he's a famous libertarian. When he says the problem isn't BlockFi, the problem is AML KYC, that's what he's talking about. He's saying that the government has this undue incentive to understand who owns what money. And that's what Defi does not care about. They don't care who you are. They just care that you have the money. And that's the end of the story. And this kind of just goes into why agnostic protocols

that are minimally extractive always win. Like we have always seen throughout history the transition from subjective protocols with undue costs and influence be replaced by less subjective, more objective protocols that just need the minimum amount of information to to operate. And that's really what defy is. Defy is the next evolution of money and finance protocols that only require the minimum amount of information for their for them to function. That's that's an alternative definition for defy. Well, it sounds a lot like the protocol sync thesis episode 12, right? I think you're right. So guys, guys, if you've been tracking with us, this is our 13. episode. So hopefully nothing goes wrong, David, like unlucky number 13, but the previous 12

episodes really lead up to this. Bankless, the podcast, is really best if listened to you sequentially. So, you know, one episode builds on the last. And now we're going to be talking about the first, almost mainstream defy wallet that acts as kind of an overlay to all of the the protocols and all of the money economics and scarcity economics that we've talked about in previous episodes. So episode 13 fits right in there. So before we get there with Edomar, David, we should talk about our second round of sponsors. The first is AVE. So AVE is a DFI protocol. You absolutely have to check out. We mention it in today's episode. You can actually now access Avey by way of the Argent wallet in just a few taps. So what does that mean?

mean, it means you can put your dye into it. You can put your ETH into it. Once you do, it magically transforms those assets into interest-bearing assets. So you're actually earning interest on the assets that you put into the protocol. You can also borrow from it. So these aren't just variable rate loans. These are fixed-rate loans, which is something unique to the AVEA protocol. I just saw earlier this week that AVE had passed 70 million in assets locked inside of the protocol. So it's not the fourth largest defy protocol now. It's getting a lot of traction, a lot of growth. And I think that's because they've constructed a pretty interesting protocol.

If you're a developer, you've got to check out their flash loan protocol as well. If you are a user and you want to access interest through AVE, you can go to AVE. that's Aavee.com or even just access it in the Argent app. In order for Ethereum to be stitched into the traditional world of money and payments, we need it to have roots into the outside world. And that's exactly what Monolith does. Monolith offers you your defy card, which is a Visa card that allows you to spend your die,

but at any store that accepts Visa, which is like basically the whole world. So this is a really useful tool for people that would, like to go bankless, but not really compromise their ability to live their life in a normal way, the way that everyone else lives their life. And so the defy card from Monolith allows you to be a bankless individual while still being able to access traditional payment rails through the Visa network. So Monolith, it's a smart contract wallet where you deposit your die into. And when you swipe your visa card in any store, it just spends that same amount of die from your wallet. Through Monolith,

you can focus on spending the things that make sense to spend like die instead of your ether. And this is just a great one-to-one replacement for HSBC or Revolutes. You can download the app at monolith.xy-Z and sign up and get your bankless visa card today. Without further ado, let's get to our interview with Edomar Leswis, the co-founder of Arjans. All right, David and I are here with Edomar Leswis. Edomar is the co-founder of the Argent Wallet, and we're excited to talk to you today. Edomar, it's been a crazy busy week for you guys. Can you give us some of the highlights?

Sure, thanks for Anne. Thanks, David, for having me. Indeed, big week at Argent, results of almost two years of hard work, launching Argent V1. Many people in the community knew the product, but it's really the day where we are removing that waitlist, and we really open Argent to everyone, anyone in the world with a mobile phone. So we are super excited. On Monday, we announced it to the crypto community. And then on Tuesday, we did our launch on Product Hunt, made it to the top three.

So it's pretty good to put a crypto, a DeFi product at the very top there. Yeah. So you know what I've been super excited about is the defy community, the bankless community, has really turned out for you guys, for Argent. And I think it's because we've always wanted a mainstream bankless wallet. I think that's why you're getting such a turnout from the Ethereum community and such excitement. What's your take on that? Why are folks so excited about this?

I think you said it very well. I think we started the day where it was our app, our product, let's vote for it. And by the middle of the day, people were not voting for Arjan anymore. They were just voting to put DFI mainstream, to push DFI to more people, to show to the world that crypto, defy could be super simple, safe, and still decentralized, non-custodial. So I think the language and the intent really change as the hours pass during that day. I think this is a really interesting telling example of how crypto works differently. businesses and companies in this space have communities that you just don't find in the typical world. And the other company on product hunt that you guys were in neck and neck with votes was this marketing agency

who obviously had skills in garnering votes because that's the whole point of their company. But you guys as a defy wallet, they're not a marketing company, but you get marketing all the same from the evangelists of the crypto world because we all believe in Argent and we all want Argent to do well. And so it's just free marketing from the support that comes around from the bankless community. I think it's really powerful. Agreed. First time, really, I see that in action. I mean, in this company at Argen, I didn't get the same vibe in my previous companies. There's really something unique here. Yeah, you know, I think part of the reason why is because this is more than just an app.

this entire space and what you guys are doing are part of a larger movement. And that's kind of where David and I want to start with with the why. So Edomar, why are you doing this? Why are you in the crypto space? Are you here for, you know, the entrepreneurship, the money, the fame, the movement? What really motivates you? So we know, it's not my first company. All the founders have had several companies. So yes, we've been an entrepreneur for a very long time and that's what we would like to do. And I think everyone has a different story on how they get in touch with crypto for the first time. For me, I, so when I sold, there were a few elements, I think. I sold my previous company, it was probably now more than three years ago. When we sold it, there was actually

a no-fact flag on the purchase. So the dollars, money sent from a UK company to another UK company, but it was in dollar. So some bank in the US could freeze the transfer, put an off-act flag on it. It was obviously a mistake, but it was a month where everyone was super stressed. We could access the funds. And we were like, okay, it's your money. You decide to send it to me, but actually you can't really send it to me. You need to ask authorization of someone, some bank in the US.

So that was the first event. And then unrelated to that, I discover crypto. I bought my first E. Probably it was on Cracken early 2017, if I'm correct, in my years. I send it to a hardware wallet. And I would say that's where I could feel the technology for the first time. Gerald and Julian, my co-founders, talked about blockchain for many years. But for me, that was my first user experience with crypto.

And I could see that ability to send money. like you send an email and text message. It was really my moment. And so I think what motivates us is this idea of a future where you have, well, money and the internet is just totally open, fair. You have that global platform that is totally permissionless where everyone can innovate. And I think that can lead to basically everyone on the planet being connected to that same system.

Everyone with economic opportunity. And this ability to exchange value literally instantly across the world like you would do with a text message. I think that's really. So it started in somewhere from the tech. And we felt, wow, that tech can just be, can really have such an impact. And it's probably the biggest thing, I think we have lived. And we will see in our life since the invention of the internet was probably the first. And then I think for us, blockchain and crypto is probably the next wave.

So is that it, Edomar? Is that the point of crypto? You mentioned openness, sort of this open finance, open money layer. Is that why we're doing this? Is that the entire point here? At our general, this vision of Web 3 with decentralized internet, something we feel strongly about, but we think it's really connected to this layer of value.

So yes, blockchain is about adding a new layer to the current internet with native value transfer. When the web started, a value transfer was not part of it. It was complex. And that's why I think we ended up with massive businesses that monetize attention rather than using transfer of value. So I do think this can have a massive impact to the internet as we see it. And you need that value transfer to enable also a more decentralized internet where we all have

full ownership of our money, but also of our data. So that leads into the next question I want to ask. What are the main core goals of Argent? What are the metrics that you guys look towards to measure if you guys are being successful or not? So the way we define internally at least our mission or purpose at Arjun is really to empower everyone to control and prosper from their digital assets and identity. That's something I mentioned a lot internally. sometime in some presentation. And I think it's the everyone, control and prosper are three very important words,

which means first we are there to be a consumer product that target over time, a large number of people. So we are not there to serve a small number of whales for highly speculative use cases, which is where blockchain is at today, I think. we are there to remove friction, to make it secure and simple for anyone to interact with that space. So that's everyone. The control is really being non-custodial and staying that way and giving user control of these assets and their identity. And then Prosperer, I think, is the result for us.

It's really anyone being hooked up to the same global system can have an amazing impact, probably even more for some for the few billions of people out there that are currently not connected to any kind of financial system. So that aligns pretty nicely, I think, with the bankless ethos, which is really about self-sovereignty over your money. It's a liberating movement. And you mentioned a few attributes of self-sovereignty there, the idea of having a non-custodial wallet. which means you guys don't take control of the assets. So a crypto bank, in exchange, they would take control of the assets. They would have custody over it.

But with the Argent wallet, a user never has to relinquish custody of their assets to you. So that is a bankless feature, I would say. In what other ways is the Argent wallet bankless? In what other ways is it self-sovereign money control, would you say? So when you look at self-sovereignty, I think there are several characteristics. I'm thinking about what you just said. So there is obviously the first step. They don't give away control to us.

We are non-custodial. And it's not just that's not just a philosophical approach to things. We generally think that in the long term that's better for users from a security perspective. it will have impact as we improve on privacy. And also from a business perspective, it's very hard to innovate and move fast if you have to be a bank, basically, because that's what big custodial exchanges are.

There are big banks, and it's very hard to innovate. For us, once we had really secure and battle tested the smart contracts, we could move then much faster on other elements of the product. The one difference is before you had the choice, of either you go to a bank or you manage it yourself and you are alone, you have no safety net. So Argent brings a safety net without being custodial, meaning you are protected if you maybe send a large amount of money to a wrong address or if someone tries to steal your funds the same way that the banks protects you, but it's really at the smart contract level that

it happens. And you have method of recovery that are simple, you know, on. out of the box as soon as you install urgent. I would say the censorship resistant is another element of your bankless ethos, I believe. So it's not just that we cannot take your money. I think there are a lot of wallets which have the same feature. It's also we cannot prevent you from accessing your money. The typical and custodial wallet would work that way.

Some are in between. they might not be able to take your money, but they could prevent you from accessing your money. And that's why we build specific features so that their emergency kit, et cetera, to answer the question of what if our gender disappears? And what if our gen disappears is a big part of, I think, being bankless is you can still manage your money

and access your money without that entity. So, Itmar, I think a lot of people's first wallet in the Ethereum space was Metamask. And MetaMask does a really good job with matching the values of a crypto system like Ethereum, as in it never, ever does anything that the user doesn't explicitly request it. And so it gives the user full autonomy and full control. Like, it's a very agnostic wallet. It doesn't treat any specific app on Ethereum. You know, there's no native use of an app on Ethereum.

But that's actually different with Argent wallet. Argent wallet, you guys have actually selected specific apps on Ethereum like pooled together or compound and integrated that into your wallet. Now, you guys have stated that you want to onboard like the next one billion people into Defi. But I was hoping to get your opinion on Argent's neutrality. So when you guys choose to integrate an app onto your wallet, it becomes a political choice of sorts, especially when you have one billion people on your wallet accessing some

apps that you've decided to integrate versus other apps that you haven't. So I was hoping to get your opinion on the neutrality or political neutrality of Argent wallet and how you guys plan to add future applications and then what your criteria is for adding some or perhaps denying others. That's a very good, very good question. So Argent is definitely a more opinionated product. We have a vision, a direction where we want to go and we want to build this great experience. And we are less of a developer tool where you can control every single aspect, move every little knobs and settings and customize all of that. But first, on your very first point, I think there's something important there. A transaction

in Arjun never happens without the user explicitly pushing a button, taking, triggering, that action. So it's not like in the background we will send a few transactions. That would have been the very easy way, for example, to skip the EAC20 approved, is just send the transaction in the background or two transactions at once. We never do that. As a user, you push on a button and therefore that triggers a transaction. That was just a comment on your very early point. Then indeed, in the new DFI Hub, we chose specific integration. I think the first thing to know is, that true wallet connect, any DAAP can be connected to ARGEN. So true wallet connect, any DAB can be implemented.

It's very quick. You have this WebTree provider, and suddenly you can have a user using ARGEN interacting with that DAPS, and we are doing a lot more work on that front. So making the ARGEN experience better when interacting with a DAB on a website or on your browser is really something we are investing more. We want people to be able to use a traditional browser right now on desktop, soon on mobile, or even another native app,

and use Argent to authorize this transfer or to secure their assets. So Arjan being open is definitely where we are heading. Within the app, we have to be a bit more careful. It's a mix of U.X, security, and also user have certain expectation. So we are looking at, there are some criteria, but I think it's not the one you would think.

So obviously we are looking at things like, is it a big protocol, battle tested, maybe with a few, what's the level of their audit, et cetera, on their contract. But in this really first launch, we looked more at the user experience that would be simple enough across protocols. So interacting with a protocol in Defy Hub is in fact just buying or minting a token.

The same way that in a stock trading app, you can invest in mobile apps, in washing machine, in a net company or in a real estate company. That's what all these stocks represent. We saw it as the same here. You would get a specific token. And that specific token would be actually a lending activity or robot trade. or actually a liquidity provider token. And it's really the same flow. Every DAP in DFIHUPS follows the same flow, very simple.

You take a Ease or you take a hundred die and you put it in that. So it was actually more led by a simple user experience. And we are definitely open on that model and there will be much more protocols in the future in DFI Hub. We had to start somewhere. We wanted to look at each integration, one by one to make it at the right level of quality, and there's a lot of improvement coming there.

You know, so while we're talking about the why and while we're on the Argent ethos, one thing that I love about Argent is that it is finally a wallet that my parents can use. You know, they ask me all the time about this crypto thing I'm doing, and it's very difficult to get them to use a browser extension. like Metamask or a hardware ledger wallet. The best they're able to do is kind of keep some crypto on an exchange, a Coinbase. But it's very intimidating to move from a Coinbase into this Defi wallet world. What you guys have done is you've taken a Venmo-like experience.

So people in the U.S. will probably be familiar with Venmo or Revolut like experience. and you have incorporated all of the bankless D5 protocols inside of that app experience. I've got to ask, is that part of the core ethos and the core mission? I've heard you talk about onboarding, helping to onboard one billion people in this space. Is that all part of the design here? Totally. So when we started, I mentioned me sending money from Cracken to my ledger and found this experience magic, but it also came with the conclusion that a billion people will never

write down a seed phrase on paper. So it was either we end up with a world of now a few exchange holding everyone's money and therefore we are back to square one and there's no point in what we are doing or we have to fix that problem. That's really the starting point and that's that has driven a lot of our design from, I mean, UX, but also technical design choices in what became no urgent. Absolutely. So let's talk a little bit more about the what. So what sorts of things can we do with this?

And the way I kind of think about this, Eamore, is about the money verbs that can be accomplished. So think about crypto in previous iterations of crypto, there wasn't a lot you could do with it. So on the Bitcoin network natively, you can hold Bitcoin, of course, and you can transfer Bitcoin from one place to another. You can pay with it. Everything else on the Bitcoin network basically requires a side chain, a custodial bank of some

sort if you want to trade, if you want to lend, if you want to borrow. But in this bankless world, in this Ethereum and Defi world, those money verbs are actually manifested in protocols themselves. So can we talk about some of the cool things that you can actually do in Argent with those verbs? So you can hold different assets. You can transfer. What else can you do with Argent?

I mean, you can do, I mean, you can store, save, send, borrow, earn interest, invest. I think with this launch of Defy Hub, we are reaching, I believe, every of the the money verb, as you mentioned. I think I like that expression. So, you know, you hold your e- or your tokens, but I think holding is not just seeing them up there. It's secure them, make it extremely secure, extremely recoverable. And I think that's actually the first innovation of Arjan.

Your money is there. It's in your pocket. You take your phone. You have access to it. You can interact with it. But it is protected. Like you have daily limits. You can freeze and freeze your account.

you can recover it with guardians. The same way, the same mental model than you would have today with a good bank like Revolute, for example, all these great features are part of it. You can transfer, obviously, not only we do gas abstractions. So right now it's just free to transfer,

but you could imagine also paying fees in E's or in tokens. But transfer is not just that. It's the fact that you don't need to type a massive X address. You can just send money to Ryan the Targent, that X-YUS, ENS. So that was part of fixing transfer also. So savings or lending.

So we had compound at start, we have DSR, we have now AVE and pulled together. I could put it in that category. Again, these are probably, we started with those use cases. They are very simple. It's a very clear mental model for users. I put money there and I earned some interest rate. trade. You mentioned it, I believe, that was there also earlier on. We worked with Skyber, and we are doing actually a lot of work in the coming months to have much more, to ensure a

user gets the best possible price, whether they invest or trade, sorry, $10, or whether they trade $100,000. Investment, token set, I think, is really a very good use case that we launched it really on Monday. I think the idea of robot trading is actually quite common in the traditional financial work. So I really like what token set is doing there. And then we added also Uniswap liquidity pools. I think it's maybe a bit more complex for users, but there is an opportunity here to earn in a different way.

We made the experience very simple. You literally say, I want to put 100 die and you push on one button. But I think there's still more work to do on really explaining what does it mean to be a liquidity provider. Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of what I love about what you've done with Argent is you've stitched together all of these various defy protocols inside of an app that feels very much like a Venmo, like a bank experience.

But the difference is, you know, a user is not giving up custody of their assets. There's no intermediary. There's no bank involved. It's all purely protocols. But it's been packaged in such a seamless way that it feels like a banking UI. So I've got the Argent app open right now, and I'm looking at the defy hub. And what I could do is, you know, you mentioned token sets, but I can click on token sets. And what this is, it's basically like a folks are familiar with traditional finance.

It's like a brokerage in your pocket, but it's a protocol brokerage with like ETFs, with like index funds that you can, you know, invest in in just a few taps. So you have that power. You haven't given up custody of your assets. done it purely through protocol and you've got like a Venmo level experience here and you could do that with trading. You could do that with earning of interest. I think, well, I guess a question for you then Edomar is now that we have something like this, like a mainstream type of app, what's preventing us from getting to the next million users or even beyond that 100 million? And like what impediment are still sort of left for us.

What do we got to sort through? Is it education? Is it something else? I have a quite opinionated view on the fact that crypto didn't yet crack product market fit, to be honest. I think, yes, U.S. was one of the blocker. U.X and security make it very secure while keep it simple. Scalability, of course, is becoming a bottleneck.

Gas fees are high, but I think we're a lot. are very, very close to pretty good solutions there. I think we still need more work on cracking use cases that are mass market enough. Most of the current use case we see are still high-risk investments in speculation. There's a pool of users. There's a lot of money in that market, also in the traditional world, which is, you know, it's fine to start there. but I think we still have to do some work to really, really cut it.

As you said, my mom, my dad, they can use Arjun. It's much easier than their current bank. They don't use Manzoor Revolut. They don't use Venmo. They have some old-school bank. Arjun is easier. That's done. It's easier for them to send money with Arjun than with their current bank.

But I think the use case is just not strong enough. Sending money for obvious reason, acceptance is still limited. Investments, products are still relatively high. risk. And if you put a million people into a simple product like lending, the rates would, they're quite a lot today, but I assume they were back at 5, 6, 7%. If you put a million people there, the rate would be back to close to zero. So I think we still have more work to do on creating the right use cases, but I think it's moving insanely fast. And our job at Arjun was really deal with security and user experience and DAPS can just focus.

ignore that and focus on building this use case. And it doesn't mean it's one use case that brings a million or 10 million people. It might be an accumulation of smaller niches and where this use case appear and where we solve a real problem. I might be a bit harsh saying no product market fit. I think the entire region of the world where just holding dye rather than the local currency is an amazing use case. and literally something they are fighting for, and it's not just nice to have. It's critical to their life.

But it's not yet a completely global use case that everyone would benefit tomorrow, I think. I got it. So if I were to kind of encapsulate what you're saying is, you're saying that maybe in countries without a very well-developed financial system or poor financial system, this is maybe something that's revolutionary, right? And maybe there's large pockets of adoption there.

But in sort of the Western world where we've got some developed financial infrastructure and banks, the defy space and even Argent and everything that you've done so far in crypto with its 10 years of building on top of it, we've gotten maybe to the place where we are at parity or getting closer to parity with the existing financial system. But there's still not enough reason for somebody who is happy with their Wells Fargo account to make the switch. You know, self-sovereign, like kind of take control of your money. That appeals to a certain demographic. But for mainstream, that's not enough.

And we're looking for like that 10x improvement, something really magical, a superpower that you can do in Defi that you can't do in traditional finance. And that hasn't come yet. I think that's what you're saying. where do you think the next big growth area might come in defy where is the superpower going to come is it in interest rates is it you know something new that we haven't seen yet i wouldn't be able to answer what what's next if not uh if not i wouldn't be here i would be building it right now i think but i think the the choice is simple as you said you have two platforms one that's still a bit ahead i mean in the UK, a payment is instant.

I can send money from one bank account to the other. The notification arrives in real time. It's fantastic experience. But if you have to bet between a platform that is completely closed, usually quite local, it's hard to work between countries and where a few hundreds entities in the world have the right to innovate because of all the requirement to be connected to this system, versus a platform that is completely global,

that is fully permissionless, where most of the work is even open source, and anyone can start building, whether they're in a basement or in a nice glass tower in New York. And, I mean, I think the choice is very easy. The rate of innovation, there's no point even trying to compare. I love my Revolut app. I love, I think Venmo is probably a great product,

but I've only seen it doesn't exist, Europe, so I've never used it. It looks great. Robin Hood looks great. But all these are, this is just a layer of makeup on the exact same financial system. It's the same than my old school banking app with a bit better UiX, a bit better flows. It's still the same.

And here we're talking about reinventing from scratch, a system that that thing will, will evolve at an order of magnitude faster. So are there any countries where downloading and accessing an Argent wallet is restricted or have you guys had any frictions with making Argen as globally available as most of the apps that you would find on an app store? So right now it's simple. We put Arjun on the App Store and that's it. We don't control where Apple and Google can distribute it. It's globally on the app store. But that means it's not actually perfect. It's not that global.

because we only right now publish on the Google App Store. To be honest, it's not that we avoided others. It's just, you know, we all think at the Western World Android, we think Google we put it on the Play Store. But I believe there means some markets where it's not available. And for example, in China, I believe you would need other app store for other Android store where Apple is in China with App Store. I'm not sure Google is.

But for example, on Android, we could work on making sure we provide APKs directly to the website. So there are other ways to distribute. Philosophically, we are really a software and interface. We don't need to onboard users to do KYC or anything. So it's a piece of software you can download anywhere. So what pockets of the world have you guys seen success with? Like what countries have really adopted Argent more than others? So when we started, we never targeted a specific group.

We really put the app out there, didn't do much marketing, just being there on Twitter. But the natural countries would be really UK and the US first because we were an English-speaking app working with protocols that were popular in these markets. Then it started growing a little bit more in Europe, maybe because that's where we are. All our team members are in Europe, so Word of Mouse, etc. But then we see some time interesting behavior. So for the last 30 days, our second biggest market is Argentina.

We don't really know why. The app is not available in Spanish, and suddenly Argentina started to pick up. maybe to our maker, our friends. I know there have a few team members there that might be sharing Arjun around. But so, yeah, I think we really like to understand this behavior, to understand where can we solve problems, basically. Wow, Argentina.

So we just had Mariano Conti on, I think, a few episodes. It might have been episode nine. And he talked about the, that the, state-controlled financial system from the money all the way to the banking system and how that is a daily pressure and a daily quality of life issue for the folks in Argentina. So that might be an example more of what you're just talking about that. While in Western countries, Argent isn't yet a 10x improvement. In countries like Argentina, it's already a 10x improvement because they don't have any access to even, you know, Western, U.S., European-based financial infrastructure.

So this is already far better because it can't be confiscated by their local governments. Totally. And in those markets, we're often also holding stable coin like dye is a very interesting use case. We are probably the dream stablecoin wallet. You can have an urgent wallet with only dye, nothing else. You don't need ETH to pay for your gas fees. You can put dye and start doing payments. You can put die and start savings in compound or in the DSR.

So we are really the, I would say that we have the dream experience for stable coin-only wallet. So I think that's definitely something attractive in some of these markets. And if people are looking to get an understanding of die and the die savings rate, that's the DSR acronym that Edomar mentioned, which is basically a savings account where you can deploy. deposit your die, your staple coin, and start earning interest instantly. Check out the episode nine with Mariano. It's got all that detail. So, Edomar, with Argent being globally accessible and globally used, you guys have the option of onboarding Fiat transfers into the Argent wallets. But the traditional payment rails across the world are not all the same, depending on where in the world you are.

So how does Argent plan to enable everyone to transfer value into the Argent wallet? Because while the Argent wallet's UX is great and it integrates with all the Defy protocols, it's useless if people can't get their money into Argent wallet. So how do you guys plan on scaling up the ability to transfer value into Argent? So it's a good question because when I think Ryan asked earlier about frictions, what prevents us for having a million or a billion people. I didn't mention on ramp or frame that's actually still, I think, a strong point of friction.

So we took the decision to really focus on partnership there. It was an interesting question for us because especially since the recent funding where we have much more out of resource, we can invest heavily in more projects. we could have decided, okay, we should, let's build the right on RAM, let's build this perfect experience, and you could have some regulated on RAM within Argen

that we fully control, that would have the experience we want. We think if we do that, we cannot be on both sides. We cannot innovate there on what is a completely traditional financial business and at the same time innovate on Defi and on the Web3 vision where there is so much to build. So our choice is we will keep innovating when it comes to defy DAPS Web3 and let third parties work on the more traditional finance part, which is the on ramp and the upfront, and so we partner.

So part of the work will do is to add more partners to cover more region. That's the first step. And then if we are happy with the experience with the partners, start integrating deeper. So you could go with some of them to an integration where it's really seamless. And part of the flow, I think you know the usual suspects, but there are some great product, whether it's wire, Moon Pay, ramp here in the UK where it's expanded to all over Europe, is a great product. So there are some really good products there.

They are improving. It's not easy. I think their challenge is significant. But our strategy will be to work with those partners. So for anybody who's ever used a crypto wallet in the past, they may be sort of burnt out on how clunky the experiences and how limited some of the the experiences. But when I log into Argent, I'm doing that right now. And I go to my profile, for instance, I can do really cool things. I can set up guardians to actually socially recover my private key. So there's no need to remember

a seed word. I can have trusted folks in my circle who can act as recovery addresses and, you know, get me access to the wallet. I've got things like a date. transfer limit similar to my credit card. So if I want to set a security parameter and say only you know, 100 die should be spent per day, I can do that. All of this feels like a big step upgrade to things we've seen in the past. And crypto is, you know, 10 years old or so. I think maybe folks might be wondering who aren't as familiar with the developments here, like how is this possible now? Like, and why is it possible now? Maybe you can talk a little bit about some of the technologies that went into this, particularly the smart contract wallet, without getting too

geeky, Edomar. Just give us sort of the summary of how this sort of functionality is now possible and previously wasn't. First, I would say on Ethereum, it was probably always possible. Just wasn't exactly built that way. But I'm saying on Ethereum because it's a fully programmatic blockchain and therefore you can write any logic. So let's first start by how it works.

Traditionally, wallets have all followed similar model. You have a private key. The funds are attached to that private key, and then you have to store that private key in some way. That's the seat phrase that people make you write on a piece of paper with origin. And you can compare that to having a wallet in your pocket with cash. If you lose that wallet, it's lost forever. If someone takes your wallet, they have your cash.

lost forever. Arjun, when you don't know Arjun, what's happening is a smart contract gets created for you. I don't like the analogy, but in some way it's like you have an account, a bank account in the middle, but it's not a bank account. It's a piece of code that it's yours. Only you control it. Arjun cannot change it, cannot upgrade it. Only you can do it. The funds are on that, on that smart contract. And then that smart contract is an owner. And that's the key that is it stored in your phone, and only that key can control that wallet. But then you can define what we call guardians, and you give power to these guardians, not to access your funds.

You give them power to tell your smart contract, hey, there is a new owner. This owner, your phone is just a remote control. The guardians can tell the smart contract, hey, Itamar lost his phone, set up a new owner, that's itamar, new phone. This will take 36 hours. It's enforced on chain. No one can change it. It's engraved in that smart contract.

Someone cannot hack it and change that value. And so for 36 hours, that's the security period. 36 hours later, you will have access. What is nice is your guardian can also put a lock on your wallet for five days. So, for example, you are worried that you can't find your phone. Maybe it's not lost. Maybe it's somewhere in your house, but you can find it. You could put a five days lock on your wallet.

the same way that you can freeze your card through some of the new banking apps. What's important is this guardian mechanism, although often people call it social recovery. It doesn't have to be other people. So it can be literally friends and family. And I think there are markets where that works, where really people want friends and family. And if they are as savvy as them, I would say technically, it can work. There are markets where people want pure.

self full control. So they are their own guardians. And by that, it means another Ethereum wallet, can be another phone, can be Metamask, can be a hardware wallet. That's usually for more advanced user. Or they can trust third-party services. So Arjun has a guardian service.

You do two-factor authentication with us and will trigger that transaction. But the beauty of the model, this is just a framework. It's any Ethereum address. Anyone can create a guardian service. And so maybe the world is not fully, bankless, maybe banks will be great at doing this process and have keys to start a recovery.

Who knows? So it could be your lawyers, it could be really anything, anyone, any system can act as a guardian. And you as a user, you decide to trust them or that device to do that recovery process. So speaking of recovery, what happens if Argent just disappears? What happens if the company folds or goes away? How does that meaningfully impact the people that use Argent to store their funds? So Arjun is built to be non-custodial. That doesn't mean that everything stays exactly the same.

The Arjun, our infrastructure, is there to make your life easier, to make it smooth, to send you alerts, to coordinate complex orchestration between parties when you have several guardians, et cetera. But at heart, there is a private key in your phone, there is a smart contract on the blockchain, so you have control. So what we build is quite simple, is what we call the emergency kit, which has been live on iOS for a while, only more recently for Android. You have funds in your wallet.

You unlock the Arjan app. All that is on the client, on your phone. You send your ease to an address. The difference is that we can't use our relay or infrastructure, because we have disappeared. So we have a conservatively infrastructure, meaning you sign a transaction will relate to the blockchain

and that's how we abstract the gas. You can't do that. So instead, you will push the send button but leave your finger on that button for 10 seconds. That's it. So instead of pushing the button, you leave your finger on it for 10 seconds. There's a piece of data that appears on your screen.

You copy that. You paste it in your browser in any type of wallet. It can metamask. to enable to a data, could be my wallet, my crypto. You pay that piece of data. You send a transaction, so you need some ease to pay for the gas. You send that transaction. The transaction now is rooted to your smart contract, your wallet,

and things go ahead as normal. It's obviously not as slick, but you have access to your funds. The current stage of our emergency kit is that if we disappear, people would have access to their funds, but they would likely drain their wallet. Meaning it's not like Arjan is fully decentralized and everything is beautiful and great. No, they would probably change,

remove all their funds and move on to a new wallet. The only grail would be that even if we disappear, they can use different services for relay or different. We already let you, for example, pick a different node on iOS. And the only grill would be that they keep life as usual just by picking other services for the internet. these difference building blocks. And I think we can get there. But right now, everyone can remove their funds. It's safe. It's under the control. So if Arjun goes away, everyone still has access to their

funds as long as Ethereum is still in existence, as long as Ethereum is still running. Yes. So you mentioned something there. You say, you guys, you're a centralized company. And so there, there are risks there. One of the things that go along with being a centralized company is that you guys require an email address and a phone number to sign up. Is that the way that it's going to be? And why do you guys need that information? I'm surprised you waited that long to ask a question. So, and it's a very fair question. So when we started, we had phone, straight up, mandatory phone number, email, this phone number and these emails were used for, I would say, three reasons, one civil resistance, we didn't want someone creating a million wallet and suddenly draining all our

gas because we pay for each wallet for the gas. That was one element. Two, security notification. So if there is a large transfer, if there's a recovery, if anything happens on your wallet, anything security related, you are alerted through these channels. Second thing. And three, these are used for the Argent Guard service. that at the beginning it was not by default,

not anyone who download the app by default has the Argent Guard service, they can fully recover their wallet, then they can customize that. So the civil resistance is something where it's fair to say there were other solutions, and one of the solutions we worked on was implementing what we call Create 2,

so we don't have to create the wallet in real time, so you need to put funds for the wallet to be created. You already have an address. Once the funds are there, the wallet is created. It starts to give a cost to someone. If someone wants to create a million wallet, they need to pay gas for a million transactions. Therefore, it would cost them a lot.

So I would say we're starting to be at the point where we have some decent protection there. Yes, you can create three-four wallets, but probably not a lot. And you could rate limit to different ways. So we are getting there. Where we are very opinionated, is still on the email.

So the phone now, we are at a place where you can skip it. It's not obvious. We are debating that regularly. We don't want to encourage people to not use it because it would make by default things a bit less secure. So for us, privacy is about consent. You need to have control of what data you give to who and what is done with your data.

We are very transparent. I'm sure we can improve, but we don't use your phone. your email for marketing, selling it to third parties. There's no such thing as data harvesting to profile you. But we have accepted that phone

is quite different in email. After mostly talking to users in very different countries where the N.U.K., where really they said every phone number is tied to my... I can buy a SIM card on Amazon here. But for them, it was no.

Every phone number is strongly tied to an identity. I can't have two numbers. on my phone, and they were generally worried, and they wouldn't want that. So now we started to make that optional, but you still need to tap on the privacy icon and then read the text and skip it. But we didn't make it the default,

because also it makes Arjan guard less secure. Giving us this two factor of email and phone is still a much better experience, especially because Arjun is not subject to SimSwap attack. That's not how our model works. The email, I would say we are much more opinionated. An email is there. You are creating a relationship with Arjun.

You want a certain service. And for that, we need a communication channel. Saying push notification is not the same. Not everyone enables them. It's not as reliable. In a part of our model is being able to warn you if there are problems, if a large transfer is initiated on your account, if a recovery is initiated on your account.

And that's why users come to origin. We have, I would say, security. We want a fully recoverable model. We want to be able to alert you. And we have a line we don't want to cross from a security perspective. If you want a less secure wallet, then that's not with Arjun.

We will not compromise on that. And email is easy. It's so easy to create another email. I think it's also, again, important. And we want people to push on privacy. And we had people on Twitter yelling at us for screaming at us about the phone number and then we improved. We did some work. But we are not storing, for example, an email and a password and some ID data.

It's a communication channel. And this communication channel is important, bring security. And it's so easy to create an email with proton mail or other. So we do not want a less unsecure product because we can't communicate with our users. Yeah, totally. I was actually, I tweeted just a challenge to the crypto community is just, you know, if maybe you're in the Bitcoin community, you haven't yet taken a look at some stuff on Ethereum, you take a look at Arjit.

You have five minutes, right? Like just download it and see what you can do with it. And some folks said, you know, really excited. UI looks great. but they got me on the phone number and email. And I think a great response to that, like a way around that is, as you said,

you can skip the phone number and you can create an anonymous, pseudo-anonymous email, like proton mail or something, and you can sign up that way. So I feel like that sort of preserves what you might need as far as privacy while getting around like some of the concerns

that folks might have. Do you think we'll get more uptake in the Bitcoin community? I don't, so, no, I don't think it would make any difference, to be honest. I think that element is not the blocker. The, I think it's very, I appreciate the crisis on phone number. If we make it optional, I think it should be clearer how we make it optional. It's too buried, it's too unclear, and we will just alert and warn the users that it's less secure.

We just don't want a person that doesn't have good obsec, that doesn't understand the implication of not using the phone number to do it. But I don't think, to be honest, we can count on the figure of my hand the number of complaint there. I don't think that's what will make Bitcoin suddenly explode. I mean, or Bitcoin users suddenly jump on Argent. I think the most big, users are savvy enough to know that they can create an absurdo anonymous email.

So I think that's fine. And I think it's maybe more the issue of do we have a good trustless Bitcoin token in the Ethereum ecosystem. And you have some very interesting project coming soon, hopefully. But right now we have Rabbitcon that is still custodial. And I don't think that might be more of a philosophical issue or genuine security concern for for the Bitcoin community. Yeah, absolutely. I think that is key,

getting some good decentralized, trustless as trustless as possible Bitcoin asset options on the Ethereum network will probably be pretty important around that. One other question that's just been asked in the bankless community is how Argent is monetizing

and plans to sustain itself over time? So right now we do very little on that front. We get affiliate fees on cyber trades. So you get K&C when you send trade to Kiber, you get KNC token back. And that's, you know, a small, I mean, it can grow. We're starting to trade several millions in value every month. So that's a revenue stream.

That's the only thing we are monetizing right now in our gen. And monetization is not something we'll be working on this year, to be very honest. we see ourselves a disrupting tens of trillion of dollar-sized market. I mean, it's the entire financial industry. There will be room for monetization. The only criteria for us is transparent monetizations, meaning we don't like, for example, advertising or take something that is free and suddenly make it paid because in some way you capture the user and your platform,

they are stuck and suddenly they have to pay. But the area we are considering there are transactional monetization and the exchange is a perfect example. There is direct consumer subscription so, you know,

Revolut, Robin Hood, etc. They have premium features where users pay a monthly for subscription. So I think there's definitely something that can work. Again, where the user has a clear choice what I get for free versus what I get for a monthly subscription. It's something we might start thinking about it end of next year or maybe the year after. We are not in a rush there.

This space is so small. We need to be so much bigger before any kind of monetization is worth it. The only monetization that really works now in that space is to take massive trading fees or on-ramp fees and it's not something we want to do right now. Can you illustrate for us what Argent would look like if it was maximally successful? If everything went right and in five years from now you guys had the perfect product that you envisioned today, what does that look like? Time frame is always the question mark.

But I think what elements will we have? We will have instant payment. I think that's a given. In five years, so we need to have instant payment, payment privacy. being able to see every third party to who you send money is probably a big blocker also for massive scale. So payment privacy, instant payment, core, I would say, financial primitives.

And that's a thing we are getting there. And then what I would call identity solution, not from a legal identity, but being able to log in with your origin wallet to a new website. I would say these are core elements. you will also have the ability to have Arjan anywhere, meaning any DAP developer, any third party should be able to create an Arjun wallet, disconnected from our app.

A game console should be able to create an Arjan wallet, or a point-of-sales device that the merchant should be able to create an Arjun wallet so that the merchant has secure storage for their crypto and can receive payment, but it doesn't mean they need to use the Arjan app. So I think five years, it starts to be an interesting timeframe, but I think that's the kind of time frame we need to think of for entire communities to use crypto. I don't think it matters if it's urgent.

Everything should be fully interoperable. But entire community using crypto for their day-to-day needs, payment, investment, and there's no more question of un-ramp our frame. This is money. Yeah, and there's really, it seems like a symbiotic relationship with everything that the Ethereum economy is producing all of these DFI protocols. because what I see Argent doing is essentially acting as a user interface on top of that, and a nice seamless app experience on top of that.

So to a certain extent, in five years, doesn't it really depend on what the defy and Ethereum and the crypto community cook up? Totally. We are totally dependent on the ecosystem. We are a bit like the browser. We are an escape. We make it accessible and save to internet. interact with these products.

At the end, everyone needs to contribute, and our job is to make it possible for apps to focus on use case. And that's why we are betting on an ecosystem that is fully global, that is fully open source, and permissionless where anyone can come and innovate. So we are not too worried about that. I think when a few billions people have the right to innovate on a platform, you tend to have amazing outcome. Absolutely. So Edomar, it has been an absolute pleasure. I think you mentioned DeFi's Netscape

moment. You talked about Argent being sort of like a Netscape browser. And Netscape came about in the early internet in 1993, 1994, and just sort of shook everything up because it layered on top of all of these really interesting communication protocols, something that was much more mainstream accessible. And that's what you're doing with Argent is you're making these money protocols mainstream accessible. So I want to thank you and your team for your work in doing that. I guess my final question is this. How can the bankless community help you on your mission to mainstream open finance? So I think specifically for the bankless community that tends to be a lot of early adopters, I would say talk to us.

find us on Twitter, come in our Discord, tell us about your experience, what works, but especially what doesn't work. We know we have so much more to improve. So we want to know that there's a lot of work coming, whether it's on RAM, whether it's performance tracking of your Defi investment, more Defy protocols coming. So the best you can do is criticize us,

be nice with the team, but tell us what's wrong, tell us what to improve. and then spread the word. I think that would be amazing and you have already done it. The last 48 hours have been amazing. The bankless community has been really awesome. You've heard of bankless community.

Edomar wants your feedback. He wants to know how he can and his team can improve the product and then he wants you to spread the word. Edomar, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining David and I today on bankless. David Ryan, thanks so much and keep doing the amazing work you do. Fantastic.

Guys, as far as action goes, we have a few for you in this episode. The first thing you should do is go download the Argent wallet and give it a try. That will be in your show notes. A link will be in your show notes. Try a money protocol. Pull together is a good one to start with. That's a no loss lottery. If you want to add some funds, some die funds to the die savings rate, you can do that too.

Try one out. And then, thirdly, tell a friend about this. Maybe it's that crypto skeptic in your life that thinks crypto is just about speculation. Maybe it is a parent who previously has kept all of their funds on an exchange and hasn't really embraced the entire bankless lifestyle. This is a great place for them to start. You can start slow. They can download the app and you can send some die back and forth or some ETH back and forth and have some fun with it. Guys, risks and disclaimers.

This, of course, is not financial advice. thief is risky, crypto is risky, defy is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everybody, but we are excited that you are with us on the bankless journey. Thanks.