On The Brink with Castle Island - Itai Turbahn and Yoni Goldberg (Dynamic) on wallet-based logins (EP.336)

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

Itai Turbahn and Yoni Goldberg, the founders of Dynamic join the show. In this episode we discuss: Itai and Yoni's professional journey to starting Dynamic How Dynamic is addressing wallet based authentication Views on how standards will evolve in the blockchain ID category The evolution of decentralized identifiers The types of businesses that are early adopters for wallet-based logins To learn more about Dynamic visit their website and follow them on Twitter.

Today in the podcast I set down with a Thai turban in Yanni Goldberg, the founders of Dynamic, a Castle Island portfolio company that's focused on wallet-based logins. The concept of a universal cryptographic login has been a space that I've been fascinated with for some time. And a tie and Yanni are definitely at the cutting edge of this category. I enjoyed this conversation. I think you will too. So without further ado, here's my conversation with the Thai and Yanni from Dynamic. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures.

All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are sold. their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have

been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. All right, Italia and Yoni, welcome to On the Brank. You've just told me that this is your very first podcast appearance. So I am very glad that we have the pleasure of that being on the Brank. I'm sure first of many. We're very excited. First together. For the record, I had a podcast which was called B Function years ago, but it was before podcast won't cool. It was electronic music and tech, but they're talking about 10 years ago, but it's the first interview with Etai and

first interview in a while. So we're very excited. I will just add to that that the podcast, I think, was it while you were at MIT, right? It was like at 3 a.m. in the morning and Yoni would ask me to wake up and listen to it. And I would, for the life of me, I told them, I think for years that I listened to it. I never listened to the podcast. Well, I thought that was the thing about podcasts is you can listen whenever you want. So I guess you are really early to the game. Don't tell them that. Don't tell them that. That's a secret. Because live radio and later there was podcast. So it was on iTunes for a while, but I think it disappeared like in the last couple of years. I did it with Rachel, just my wife now who used to be, yeah, it's been a thing. But yeah, first one in a while, for sure.

Well, I'm excited to have you guys on. And we recently invested in your company. So I'm excited to hear more about dynamic. Why don't we just start off with a little bit of a background and you guys, maybe a quick introduction and how you came to start this business together. Yeah, absolutely. So this is I Thai. We can share a little bit more about our background. So Yoni and I are both Israeli, grew up in Israel, served in kind of different units within Israeli Army intelligence for a couple years. Then Yoni moved to Boston. So started at MIT. I moved a year after. We actually met at MIT. You know, there aren't that many Israelis at MIT. So we, we've met there and we've been friends for a very long time. They're actually like two Israelis at

MIT. So we had to be friends. It wasn't really a choice. And we did our undergrad together, you know, in computer science. Yoni continued as a master student. It did his master's in computer science and this thesis at Google. And we kind of stayed best friends for the last 15 years, or at least I would like to think we're best friends. Yoni might correct me later. But we stayed kind of friends for a long time and we always hacked things on the side. We would have ideas for side projects. We have, I think we applied to Y Combinator unsuccessfully in like 2012 with a terrible idea at the time. And we always try to kind of think about ways to start a company. After graduation, Yoni continued on the engineering track and kind of ran

software teams and across multiple companies at Guild Group and even financial as a VP and at AQR. On my end, I mostly stayed kind of the product side. So I work in kind of businessy stuff, So I worked for BCG for a while, worked for IBM research, then did my MBA at Harvard, started a startup company called Vili, and then worked at Zenefitz. And so, but across all these, Yon and I kept kind of trying to come back to how do we think about kind of starting something together. And at one point, we kind of just said, okay, this is it. We got to go for it.

And now we're here. And we can talk more about dynamic, but that's kind of the very quick overview of how we got started. I'm always fascinated with people that come at crypto from different angles. And so you guys presumably had been familiar with blockchains for a while and had been exploring it. But what was it about this idea that really got you guys to go full time in the space? Yeah. So we've been passionate about crypto, I think, for 10 years. I think if you were to record the conversations between Yoni and I for the last 10 years, I would argue that like a disproportionate amount would be crypto-related. But the thing is about this idea and how it came to be, as you interact,

and everyone I would argue on this podcast has probably done this, the first time you go to a uniswap or an OpenC and you kind of connect your wallet and all your things show up is this one-way door, right? It's this magical experience. You can't unsee it. It redefines how you think about things because it is fundamentally a better way to interact with a website or an app than kind of creating an account and adding your information and redoing everything. The fact that your information sits with you and you move it across sites is this like phenomenal experience. And so for us, that triggered an excitement about, okay, how do we make that happen for everyone, right? Not just necessarily Web3 companies or crypto companies or DAPs, but how does everyone move to kind

of this concept of wallet-based authentication where you have things. things on your wallet, you have things that are with you, and you can choose what to share with the site or how to interact, but the information belongs to you, and you can move it from website A to B, the state of portability. I think that we saw this, we were early in the Solana NFT game, and the fact that you can wake up in the morning and put something on digital eyes or Solan art, and then kind of take the same thing and put it on Magic Eden is this really cool thing. It's this, like, fascinating thing. So that's how we started with that.

It's that realization that wild-based authentication is amazing. Yeah, and I think one more thing that I kind of glance on is that we spent four years thinking about identity before we worked together. And we spent four years thinking about identity and what it means to identify users across different markets. We did KWC across 20 countries and we did it to millions of users. so we really spent a lot of thinking, what does it mean to identify someone, knowing that someone is really them. And I think with the decentralized world and doing it on the blockchain, it's like just opening another world of thinking and possibilities of how to implement it

and what we can do there and how to improve the overall experience on web trade. As you're talking, I'm smiling because I had a very similar experience the first time I used an Ethereum-based wallet. And I even think back to the first time I used Bitcoin. I mean, I read the Bitcoin white paper and I wouldn't say it was something that immediately clicked for me. But I made a Bitcoin transaction for the first time. And I remember thinking, this is just incredible.

Like, I can't believe I just moved value from point A to point B. And there was no one in between. And just from a payment's utility perspective, I thought that was a fascinating concept. And probably the second time I felt that feeling was when I used MetaMask to log in and just see things that I owned in the wallet. And, you know, that sort of clicked to me that, hey, this could be like a universal login across a bunch of different websites in the future. That's kind of where my mind went.

That's exactly right. And beauty is it's universal login on shared rails in the sense that tomorrow a competitor comes along and there's no lock-in, right, in the sense that a customer, an end user has the benefit of being able to move from wallet A to wallet B, which creates this like fundamental different way of like if this is, you know, we think about it as had all. these standards existed, all these shared rails existed, would there be more competitors for like the login with Google, login with Facebook that kind of try to kind of improve on experience?

So to your point, it's this magical moment, you geek out over it, right? It's this like one thing that you're, I think the last time I was so excited was like Ajax in like 2004 where you're like, oh, this thing actually works and you can communicate back and forth. It feels the same way. Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's one of these things where you do it. you do these logins and the first thing I thought was this is just the way the world is going to work, right? Like objectively, this is just a better system versus having your identity tied up with a trusted

third party that owns all the data. And so why wouldn't you build it this way? That's right. And by the way, even if you don't believe in kind of doing this on crypto rails, I think everyone actually fundamentally agrees that you want to move away from passwords and move away to kind of private, public, key, based authentication. So even if you look at things like Apple's pass key, web often, right, they're all fundamentally saying the same thing, which is you want to move away from username password to private public key based authentication, which is significantly more secure and a better customer experience. The beauty of doing it on crypto is you can carry a backpack of a lot more things on this private key or on this public key essentially and kind of share

them across sites. Well, I definitely want to go a lot deeper on that in the why crypto rails question. Maybe before we do, why don't you guys just set the stage in terms of what dynamic is building, what type of customers you guys work with and how the product works? Yeah, absolutely. So the short version, the kind of the one sentence version is we're really building kind of an off zero for wild based. We think about the following way, which is wild based authentication is a completely different way of logging in. And two things in our opinion, happen for which dynamic is it's on. The first one we talked about, which is everyone moves to wallet-based authentication and not just Web3 companies, but Web 2 companies. But the second is there's

going to be for a while this chaos in terms of competition in the space of wallets, right? Different wallets, different chains and so on. So as a developer, and a large number of these really interesting identity protocols are coming up, right? The Lens Protocol and the Lit protocol and what the Spruce folks are building Kepler, which is a phenomenal group of folks. There's going to be this chaos and a lot of really interesting things. And so what we're trying to do is say, okay, look, how do we abstract that away for developers so that they can focus on their product? And the way to do it is kind of two things.

It's the set of SDKs that a developer can get, that they set up on their site and they can get multi-chain kind of multi-wallet login. But then as soon as they set up the dynamic SDK, they can go to the, their developer dashboard and they can start interacting with these different kind of protocols, right? So they can turn on an access list or NFT-based gating or they can kind of do information collection or one day a lens protocol or a cyberconnect or anything of that sort. So the idea of what dynamic is building is really saying, okay, look, there's so much going on in authentication and identity in Web 3. How do we abstract that away from the vast majority of developers by giving an extremely

simple SDK that they can use, and then kind of a bunch of toggles that they can add to leverage the more sophisticated things you can do with Web3 identity. So that's really what we're building. Again, the short version of it is off zero for wild-based authentication. The longer versions what I just attempted to describe. In addition to the old zero analogy is that we are developers shop. Everyone at our team is an engineer. And really our goal is to build tools to make not just the wallet integration and authentication easier, but also any type of future integrations. So we have a bunch of them.

They're all optional, but it's all about building the tools and the integration and making developers life easier and mass adoption of pretty cool things that exist on Web 3. If it's access control, NFT gating, and there's going to be some cool messaging tokens, protocols that may come in the future, how do we enable that,

basically making any type of integration easier for developers. That's our promise. and we really want it to be like a few minutes of integration, and that's it. And things will just work, like measure. So if you have the view that most services online will transition to some sort of a public, private key cryptography login standard or system, you know, at some point we're going to get there where just mass market things that we all use today in Web 2.0 are on things like this. But the way to get there is obviously the crypto-native projects that are using these things today.

So when you think about your customer base and the things that people are. actually using wallet authentication for. What does that look like today? And I'd be curious, what do you guys see that evolution looking like? Yeah, it's a really good question. I think to your point, we see several types of customers, right? So we see anywhere from the native Web 3 kind of crypto type DAP, so the more extreme, like the defy types of services, to a lot of folks that are starting to kind of tread Web 2.5,

essentially, which is analytics on top of NFTs or kind of the ability to kind of move things from kind of one marketplace to another or other examples would probably be around gaming, right? So all these kind of web, so we see the core interest that we're getting is from folks that only interact with wallets and are going multi-chain or are trying to add more wallets and the maintenance or implementation cost is just terrible for them. We do think that very quickly, though, or Dow tooling, by the way, is another one. But we do think that very quickly we're going to start seeing more Web 2 companies implement kind of Wall-based authentication.

So as a good example, right, Twitter has fundamentally implemented Wallet-based authentication, right? Because they did NFT verification on your profile. That's really Wallet-based authentication and connection. Or a second example, more in Web3 is Farcaster, right? they have done wallet-based, they're essentially building kind of decentralized social network and wallet-based authentication is a very good way for them to kind of authenticate NFTs or what you're up to, you know, blockchain. We do think, and sorry, I know I'm rambling here, but we see an interesting use case for like

the figmas of the world or the lineers of the world or Asana, etc., which is how do you start allowing Dow's, for instance, to collaborate on top of a, Figma, right? And for that, you really need wallet-based authentication and NFT-based gating, right? And so those are types of customers or potential customers. Sorry, they're not our customers today, but those are types of use cases that will be super interesting to start seeing kind of being implemented, which is how a CODA or how a linear or SANA or a notion start implementing wallet-based authentication. I think once they do it, you're going to start saying this acceleration web 2 of more and more companies wanting to support this.

And another belief that just to emphasize is that we think more and more people in the world are going to have wallets. Right now it's still a minority. You see browsers like Grave that basically has embedded wallet inside. Probably in the new future, every user, whether they use Chrome or other type of popular buzzer, we'll have a wallet at some point. And we want to be ready for that. So we know we're a little bit ahead of the game on the census.

Right now, we have a bunch of am adeptors, but the web too will catch up to that. And I think it will become, as some of the usability issues that exist today with wallet, will get solved and become easier. It will just a barrier for adoption. I think this is where tools like us will shine, basically, because it would be very easy for a site that already have authentication platform place to just add wallets as another layer of authentication. That makes sense.

I mean, one of the ways that this really goes mainstream fast, I think is on the back of NFTs and not necessarily NFTs that are used for speculation, but NFTs more in the sense of your example, eti, I around Twitter. So, you know, imagine a world where brands start doing living receipts that are based on NFTs and they start to engage with their customers based on a token that represents, hey, I bought a pair of sneakers six months ago. In that type of a dynamic, unintentional pun there, really wallet authentication becomes a core way that you just need to engage with your customers.

So curious if you guys see the NFTs is really the standard that starts to push brands and just front-end services to start to adopt wallet authentication. Yeah, absolutely. I'll start by giving an example for one customer that we had that exactly kind of treads the physical virtual and then expand to that first. So we had this, one of our early customers was pop art cats. And they wanted to do something super simple, which is they wanted to give anyone who was an NFT holder for a while, a shirt customized to their NFD.

Right. So you go in, it's a shirt that has a pocket of your specific NFT. It was pretty cool. For that, really, what do you need? You need wallet-based authentication. You need NFT-based gating, and you need to understand which specific NFD they have in their wallet, and then redirect them to their own Shopify checkout page. Right.

So that's a kind of a membership use case that they could easily implement with dynamic. Now, to your point, In our opinion, very quickly, a Nike or anything like that would need to start kind of spinning up membership-only websites, right? Or start kind of interacting with online offline type interaction where you can show the NFD that you have, which is your membership on. So yes, I think that to your point, and by the way, there's a second conversation here, which is what is a wallet, right? And does Nike have a wallet on their app, right, for their use case, right? And so on. And is there like a single wallet?

Like, do I have a single wallet or do I have five as a user, right, which is a separate conversation. But the short answer to your point is, yes, I very much agree. I think that the NFT and specifically NFTs and brands is an accelerant use case because it creates a new way for brands to interact with their customers. It's a fascinating concept when you just think about the way that customers will engage with some of these brands going forward. And one question that comes up a lot is just, you know, people are really bad at managing

keys. And so people lose stuff all the time. And so how do you guys think about the challenges from a user perspective in this wallet authentication world? And how do you think about securing passphrases? One of the biggest problem of adoption is really about how do people manage their pass key and the password. One of the approach we took right now is we know it's a complicated problem. Dynamic, not necessarily is going to be the one to solve it, but we have opportunity to solve it because we're acting as a user management platform, and that gives us the power to find solution and help customers at least migrate between wallets if they want to.

But I do think it's a challenge for wallets. And more and more wallets are going to solve it, and innovation will come from there. We don't have our favorite wallet, and I think they're going to be a favorite wallet at some point. And I think the wallet that will win is the wallet that will provide the simplest usability. So however the seed phrase is being managed,

whether it's with MPC or some, or whether it's social looking, it's going to be, or whatever it is, or biometric or all then, it's going to be something that will reduce the barrier that anyone would be able to use it. And hopefully, we're going to the basics here that by using Dynamic as a website developer, you don't need to worry about what's going on in the wallet space.

You just integrate with us and we will just keep integrating with all the wallets and whatever comes to the market and what's going to lead it, you're going to have it, basically. So it's really, I'm going back to the basic of what our promise is. We allow developers to focus on the core product and the innovation that they want to bring and not worry about how they manage their interaction and the communication with the different wallets and our user manage them. Yeah, to your only point, I think there's some fascinating wallets out there, like Zengo,

for instance, right, that is taking kind of an MPC approach, right? Short answer is it's a problem, but it's a problem that exists for every early stage industry. It's a self-problem. They're fascinating, right? There's Argent approach of guardians. There's Zengos approach of MPC. The market will sort itself out. I think personally, I think MPC is a very promising kind of way to solve it.

I think Guardians is also fascinating. Yeah, you're not going to need to, I think, by the way, one more example is Coinbase's kind of part MPC, which allows them to recover it for you through customer support in the regular app. Right. So short answer is the market's going to solve it. I'm actually not very concerned about it. I think it's a matter of time.

The way to think about wallets, in my opinion, is a bunch of startups trying to kind of compete in this market. And by definition, that's probably one of the biggest feedback points they get. And so I bet there are a bunch of extremely incentivized folks who spend every day and are much smarter than us on that, trying to solve this fundamental problem, which is log in and recovery. So I'm actually not that concerned about it. I think it's an artifact of early stage technology. It's going to get solved very, very quickly. I think you're right that just the immense competition is going to lead to this getting solved very quickly at the wallet stage.

It's a lot different to be fair from where we were back in 2014 with Bitcoin wallets and just the lack of user empathy that you would see in the industry, basically just because there's no product people in the industry yet at that point, just a bunch of engineers expecting that people would write down seed phrases and keep them safe. And that's how they would engage with their Bitcoin wallets. But I think it's just an unrealistic expectation, frankly. Yeah. And by the way, it comes back to your point about, you know, I'm biased obviously as a product person, but to your point and we're usually wrong. I don't know if I speak for all of product people here. But the one thing I would say is that you're going to start seeing, in my opinion,

not just wallets on their own, right, but wallets is part of application. Again, Coinbase as a phenomenal example of this, Coinbase's main app kind of turning into a wallet, right? Or maybe one day a Robin Hood turning into a wallet. And then you're just going to see it as a tab within an application and kind of maybe a roll-up into the existing login authentication system there. So you're going to, I think you're going to start seeing a lot of these companies that want to own the consumer relationship for the wallet, compete on easier kind of authentication methods, It's kind of abstracting away parts of the components of wallets so that you can get kind of the benefit without that complexity.

So it's a matter of time. That makes sense. I want to get into standards and decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials. And how do you guys think about the market structure right now as it relates to standards versus things that are actually being built in front of customers? Yeah. It's a great question. I think one of the reasons we got into this space is the fact that,

there's this promise of shared rails, right? It's the promise that over time, if you're unhappy with website or with wallet A, you can move to wallet B. If you're unhappy with chain A, you can move to chain B or unhappy with dynamic, you can move to a competitor, right? And we're trying to very much optimize for that. So we think about kind of two-sadynamic kind of looks at two sides, right? It looks at what we provide developers and our customers and how we interact with kind of standards internally. And the way we think about dynamic is kind of a buffer or a dampener on top of kind of a bunch of noise that the market has in terms of which standards win and how do they involve.

Right. So short answer is we are trying dynamic over time. You'll see us try to push for more and more standardization and push for phenomenal things like verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers that we think kind of accelerate how things are built while on the developer side providing kind of ease of integration so that if a wallet uses a standard, great. If a wallet doesn't use a standard also great, a developer actually should not care about it. Or if a wallet is on Solana or a wallet is on Ethereum, we should care about it as dynamic and we should strive for standardization and

kind of push wallets to kind of use the same rails. But the developer should just be able to wake up in the morning and say, hey, I just want to support everything and I don't really care. And as dynamic, our promise is you shouldn't just implement our thing. And then we will handle all the kind of noise and complexity there. I don't know if I'm making any sense. The short version of saying it is, we very, very. very much care about standards and pushing for standardization.

And until everything moves to standardization, which historically takes the market time, and there are a lot of competing options, until then we will kind of try to dampen the noise of the market and just build something that works. There are the development on the protocol and development, especially I want to call it, like Verita, for example, that I think the promise is very great about how the identity it would be managed and now it's going to be verified across different applications or sites that act as the verifiers. But I think it's very early. And I think across the space, if you look at the the deed, the spec is relatively new. Like there is, they're starting to be adoption and we are

definitely reading the papers on the spec and we are very much familiar with it. Things that we're going to introduce over time. I think also we're talking to most of the customer we're talking to them, like we see interest, but it's not, it's not the top priority. I think we're still solving a lot of basic things that are, and this is where we are focusing right now. Where we focus right now is where the pain point is, and then we can build on top of it. What are the biggest barriers to standardization? Is it just that there are new layer ones that are popping up and people want to build on them?

Is it just consolidating a lot of disparate opinions? How do we get to standards faster as an industry? I think standardization has tradeoffs, right? Like by definition, when you create a standard, it means that if you are opinionated about a specific U.X or U.I decision, you can't necessarily. necessarily implemented, right? And so, again, the cool thing and the bad thing about the current space is there's so many smart folks trying to build in this space, right? And so you're getting a lot of extremely opinioned people that are trying to kind of accelerate things and move them

forward. But by definition, that means every day someone has a new idea for how to do something better and it's very hard for a standard to keep up. I think, again, a shout out to the spruce team, for instance, from being able to cobble and bring people together around something like with Ethereum, right, which is a non-trivial activity to do. So short answer is like, as long as there's a bunch of interest in the space and a bunch of folks trying to run very quickly towards implementing their own wallet or launching their own kind of, or you have more chains like that are successful like Salana or things of that sort, you're going to see more and more differences of opinion for the right way to implement them.

Do you guys imagine that this will be the type of market where new L-Wans are just popping up onto the scene periodically and you'll need to support them? How do you think about what you guys will support as a company versus what's being used in the industry? It's all about prioritization at the end of the day. I mean, just go back to how protocols become adopted. The good protocols win at the end of the day. And like there's adoption. once the application built on top of them and the usage increase, these are the ones that sticks in. So I think with L1s, the popular ones,

the one that the application we built will cause demand on integration, and then this is how we're going to decide and prioritize on our end. Right now, we started with three chains. We're going to add more. We're starting with Ethereum, which is obvious, Solana, which we have big fans and flow, and we're probably going to add more. But at the end of the day, the market will decide.

We're not the one who said, like, oh, we are like, We believe that this L1 is great and we're going to push it to all our customers. I think it's going to come down the way. We see that there's adoption and there's a need for customers for integration and we'll introduce it. The interesting thing about our space is that there are multiple layers of competition, right? There's the authentication standardization. But now there's the messaging protocol standardization, right? There are multiple companies competing on messaging.

And there's multiple companies competing on standards for KYC and KYC passports. You only mentioned Verity ID, right? That's an attempt and standardization of those. There's the XMTPs of the world, and I think Wallet Connect is doing some interesting things on messaging, right? There are a lot of really phenomenal folks trying to build a bunch of standards and a bunch of protocols. And so that's the main challenge.

The main challenge is not just standardization, but the main challenge is you get a bunch of folks trying to kind of think about the right way to build it. And it comes back to the market, we'll decide winners and losers. it'll take time. But until then, and developers should know that when they wake up in the morning, they can support Verity ID

and they can support KYC provider A and KYC provider B, and it should be a toggle for them. And they should be able to support notification protocol A and notification protocol B, and it should be a toggle for them. And that's how we think about it.

So while we try to push for standardization, we want to abstract that from developers so that regardless of whether on Solana, there's a notification and messaging protocol A, and on EVM chains, there's notification protocol B, and they're, you know, this better than us, there are multiple competitors there. Developers shouldn't care. It should just work for them. And hopefully it makes it easier, by the way, for these protocols to gain adoption, right? The idea is that if you're a protocol, you shouldn't need to convince someone to just implement only your thing. You can convince them

to just toggle your thing on in dynamic and have and support it. Yeah, you could see how that would just dramatically accelerate the number of people that would be able to use a protocol like that for sure. I want to go back to something you said earlier just around, you know, we have this just large rollout of PKI-based systems for login and why would you want to do one on a public blockchain versus just using cryptography in general. And so what do you see as the major benefits here of building these things on public blockchands.

Yeah, I think it comes back to two points, which is the concept of backpacks and the concept of the user choice, right? The concept of backpacks inherently means that it's not just about authentication. Authentication is a part of this, right? But what matters is the fact that you can tie additional things through your public key, and you can share or not share them across sites. So we gave an example of KYC, right, and KYC pass scores. right the fact that you can tie the result in kind of a zero knowledge proof type way of the result

of a KYC to your wallet and prove it from website A, prove it to website B. That's a really interesting concept. That's a concept that can only exist where you can tie more things to your public address, which is what, in our opinion, like, you know, decentralization is all around, right? It's the fact that company A can tie it, company B can tie it, right? the fact that I can tie my social network through, again, a lens or a farcaster or anything of that sort to my public key and share that across sites, that makes kind of crypto-based public, private key much more interesting to me because it's not just about authentication,

it's all the things around. It's about onboarding, authorization, right? What's in your wallet that matters. The second thing is kind of user choice, right? It's the fact that you can wake up in the morning and say, I don't like quality. I've had enough. And you can take your key and you can put it and we can talk again, we talked about keys and whether it's MPC or anything like that.

But fundamentally, you can take your key and move it to Wallet B and you're now a customer of Wallet B. That's a magical thing because it creates the analogy here would be that Twitter's, you know, infrastructure is a shared infrastructure. And if you don't like the Twitter UI, you can switch to a different UI by a competitor, makes the market more competitive, which makes it better for end consumers. So the fact that we have shared rails and they're decentralized and everyone can wake up in the morning and write their own UI on top of it and add things and contribute

will make for a long term kind of better consumer experience. I think that's spot on. I think the interoperability is just a total game changer here when you think about it that way. And Yoni, do you think about it the same way? And I'd be curious, your view on just NFTs as a primitive that also makes this exciting. Yes. So when we were looking, we were exploring ideas in the crypto space, one of the things we started with is we just helped a friend of us do like a mean drop on Solana,

NFT main drop on Solana. And one of the things we realized that we went deeper with the NFTs, just the concept of the uniqueness and how unique it is. It's kind of obvious what I'm saying right now, but the aha moment for us was that with NFTs, you can actually solve any concept of fraud because it's so unique. Like if you care about the moment you attach

your physical good to NFT and any future transaction with this physical good will require the transfer of the NFT, in theory, if everyone is doing it, you kind of solve the fraud problem, especially that you can tell who minted it and when it was created and you can expose specific information inside the NFT,

like the serial number that is attached the product, et cetera. And at that moment, like, we were thinking, okay, what can we do with it? So, like, for us, as a software people, to start working with every manufacturer in the world, like the wallexers, the products, convinced them that they should work with us and start tying NFT to physical goods. It's not something going to win. But what we thought of is that identity, actually, there's no, the standards are still being

involved right now, and we're probably going to touch them later. But if we can attach something as an NFT or a token, it's a non-fifference. To an identity, there's a lot of room for us to innovate and play with it. And that's how we got to this today today. We start by authentication. And if the wallet, which is kind of magical, can also have a token that reflects who you are as your identity, your credentials. It's open a gate for us for tons of features and integration that we can introduce

over time. That makes a ton of sense. Well, it's really exciting what you guys are building. Where can we send people to learn more about dynamic and to start using the product? Yeah. So folks can go to a dynamic. to check it out. You can start looking at our docs.

There's a demo environment you could play around with. We're still in closed beta. So folks can sign up to our wait list. We're building a pretty critical piece of infrastructure, which is like authentication. It has to work. And it can't work 99% of the time. It has to work 100% of time.

And so we're taking a little bit of time to onboard folks and can run through our beta to make sure things work proper. And so for anyone listening and applying, bear with us for a little bit as you apply to our beta, we're trying to build something magical. And we're taking a little bit of our time to make sure we get everything right. So yes, go to dynamic.xyz. Please apply. Join our Slack community or our Discord community.

Email us. You know, we're available. Yeah. And we're looking for feedback and any type of criticism. So any thoughts that the community have, we hear it all. We take it to heart and we'll try to improve and make the best product of it. Well, I appreciate you guys coming on the podcast, your first joint crypto podcast, first of many, I'm sure. So really excited about what you guys are building.

And thanks again for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. Visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink dash podcast.com or just click on the tab and our website. Thanks for listening.