The Wolf Of All Streets - Solving Crypto’s UX/UI Problem | Kosala Hemachandra, CEO of MyEtherWallet

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Crypto has a major User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) problem. Kosala Hemachandra, CEO of MyEtherWallet, shares how his company provides best-in-class UX/UI while remaining non-custodial, free, and open-source. MEW allows users to interact with the Ethereum Blockchain, smart contracts, and much more. He talks about how they got started, how they scaled from 0 to 3 million monthly active users, and where he thinks crypto is headed in the next 10 years. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR ►►This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens https://athleticgreens.com/melker This stuff is incredible, and I start every day with it. It’s just one scoop in a cup of water each morning, and you get 75 high-quality vitamins, whole-food sourced ingredients, probiotics, and adaptogens to help you start your day right. Right now, Athletic Greens will give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit https://athleticgreens.com/melker EPISODE LINKS Kosala’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/kvhnuke_ MyEtherWallet: https://www.myetherwallet.com/ Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c SHOW NOTES 00:15 A Note from Our Sponsor - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/MELKER 00:22 Kosala Hemachandra Intro 00:52 How MEW Got Started 03:20 The Problem with Custodial Wallets 05:13 Security and Education 12:36 A Note from Our Sponsor - Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/MELKER 13:39 Obstacles to Mass Adoption 16:02 What Makes MEW Different? 20:00 Product Roadmap 21:54 10 Years to Mass Adoption

This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. Please stay tuned for more information on this amazing company later in the episode. Crypto has a major problem with UX and UI. What does that mean? It means it's really hard for grandma to use and it's daunting and most people just don't get it. Well, I just sat down with Kosala, who is the creator of MyEtherWallet and was the first to create an Ethereum non-custodial wallet. Now, obviously, there are many of them, but they still continue to innovate. We talked about the vision of what these wallets would look like in five or 10 years when we finally reach mainstream adoption and scale to billions of people. You don't want to miss this conversation. I'm going to throw you the hardball question first. Oh boy, what's that? Okay. Yeah, go for it. I think that we have a major UX,

UI problem. That's what my wallet is for, to solve that problem. Yeah, yeah. So actually, that's a good question. I mean, this is, first of all, like I have to go a couple of years, not a couple of years, like seven years back, because it's been since 2015 August, that's when Ethereum first came out. And that's when kind of like the my e-toll story started, even though I was reading about Ethereum, Yellow Paper and Bitcoin before that. On Reddit, as soon as they launched the main net, on Reddit I realized the fact that so many people were having issues just opening their wallet and sending a transaction because it was just

command line. If you ask me, that's the worst user experience you can give to the Ethereum users, right? So that's when, since I knew how to interact with it in command line, I was trying to figure out, okay, the JavaScript libraries, which are necessary to create web pages, did not exist back then. So I kind of had to write all those JavaScript libraries and then put together a small website called myethawallet.com.

And then that's how MyEthawallet started. It was only able to unlock your wallet and then send a transaction and check your balance back then. That's the only thing that you were able to do. And that's exactly what people wanted. I mean, if you think about it, back then ERC-20s didn't exist. NFTs didn't exist. All you can do is basically like what Bitcoin can do, just send value from point A to point B. But it did also have the smart contract functionality,

but none of the actual contracts were developed yet. So people were just trying to send funds, unlock their wallet, and send some ETH to their friends, and then play around with it. That's all they wanted to do, and the only way to do it was command line. And once MyEtherWallet came out, and it was also open source so people who are actually capable of reading the code were able to go through the code and was like okay this is this looks like a legit site i'm not trying to steal anyone's keys or anything so um it just grew with it maybe 50 people back then 100 people started using it and they became thousand hundred thousand and then now we're here we are like three million unique users each month three million users of my ether yeah so yeah that's the

back story to my ether wallet and you had a great question ui ux sucks and that's like our main goal to solve that problem and then it's an ongoing process right like tomorrow i won't be able to i can't come here and say oh ui UX, we're going to solve it tomorrow. That's not going to happen because we still want to keep the non-custodial aspect of the whole process because we never want to be a custodian. Username, if you, again, if you go to any dApp that say, oh, we solved like the onboarding process,

you can log in with your username and password. I will guarantee you 100% that's not a non-custodial wallet. Someone else owns your wallet. Someone else has access to that wallet. That means if that person or that organization, if that company goes down, your funds goes down with it. And we never wanted to be that person, and that's why we want to keep that non-custodial aspect

of the whole process, which also brings in all these other user experience issues such as, oh, you had to onboard them using a mnemonic. Someone has to write down the 12 words. And yeah, it's a process that we keep improving. But hopefully, eventually, maybe in the next three to five years, there will be some kind of device that uses your biometrics, maybe like eyes, fingerprints, something like that, to unlock your wallet and then somehow attach that

to an actual private key behind the scene. Until we get to that point, don't think that's like a quick and easy way to say oh we don't need mnemonics anymore right that makes perfect sense yeah just we talk about mainstream adoption and we all know that it always comes back to grandma right but we all know that grandma is not doing this unless you're in the philippines and you're playing axi infinity in which case you figured it out because you could actually make money doing it. But I think in general, it's just not something that people are comfortable. It's very scary being your own bank. It is. It is. I mean, it comes with its own risk, right? Like we trust our banks because, I mean, banks came out to say, okay, the recent

banks, it's like, oh, we'll keep your funds funds safe like it's a good place to keep your funds and i mean it might work for like if you have okay maybe five thousand dollars ten thousand dollars even up to like ninety nine thousand dollars you like i would say a bank is actually good and safe place because you're insured up to that amount and that is applicable to 90 of the population even maybe more 95 of the population um even maybe more, 95% of the population. But if you have, let's say, a million dollars, bank might not be the best place to have it, but still a good place to have it. But let's say if you have $10 billion in liquid cash, I'm only talking about 0.001% of the population,

but that person might have to make a fortress to guard that liquid cash. So the security aspect is not the same for each and every individual. It changes with what you're trying to secure. Jameson Lopp once told me when I was asking him why would people need multi-sig, obviously with Casa.

He was like, well, I like to tell people to basically scale to 10x what they have. If you have $100,000 right now, whatever security solution you come up with at this moment, what would you be thinking if you had a million? Or if you have a million,

what would you be thinking if it was 10 million? Yeah, no, that's actually great. I mean, that's what blockchain is trying to solve, right? Because like blockchain already like that's where your funds are. So that's where it's already mathematically proven that it's your funds are actually secure. Okay, the other two security vulnerabilities that you might have to

face is how do you access it? That where like uh interface like my the wallet.com comes in and the other one is actually you the owner actually i would any point in time argue that the person who owns the fund is the weakest link in this whole process of course yeah you're you are the single point yeah failure like it could be if you might be you might have a fortress to like one bump on the head. Yeah, and then you're like, okay, all my money is here. This is my pin code, you know? Yeah, so, yeah, that's why, like, not just, like, UI, UX,

it's just very important, but, like, education plays another major role in this whole process of onboarding users. If you just, like, even if you just, like, give them $100 each, just, oh yeah, just come play with the $300. If you don't educate them enough, they might just lose it. And then they're never going to deposit. Exactly. And then they'll have such a bad experience with the whole process. They'll be like, oh, blockchain is not good. It's not secure. I just lost funds. They actually just tell you it's a scam.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. If you lose tell you it's a scam. Yeah. Everything. Oh, yeah. If you lose money, it was a scam. Exactly. Exactly. And then it's also human mentality, right? It's kind of like, oh, you're never at fault. It's always someone else's fault.

So it's like, yeah, these things only can be solved by educating the user, educating the people, getting them onboarded. So that's why my EtherWallet plays. We also want to make sure that the people who get into the space are not just getting in to make a quick buck. Most of the users are. But at the same time, they are educated enough to at least secure their funds. To survive.

To survive, yeah. Survive in the space. So yeah, some of the ways that we do this by obviously messaging, like Medium and newtopia.com, our articles. And at the same time, since we have a huge user base, we do have a lot of customer support tickets. So everyone's welcome to just like if if they like hit a problem or issue or something like that, they can just like send us a quick email.

They're like, hey, I do not know how to like continue or go through this process. Help me out. And we will do our best to help us out. And that's a very critical part of this process as well. Since like, for example, if we did not, if you don't do that it's it's like it's possible that they'll go and read some other material which is not true or not correct and then

send the funds to somewhere else things like that can happen so definitely education plays a huge role i mean you talked about the early days and losing your funds and private keys. And we have a new phishing attack every day. Every day. I mean, if you own a Bored Ape, you might as well just assume that it's going to get lost and you're going to do something stupid. Yeah. I mean, that's a great, like Bored Ape is, I mean, they just got hacked like two days ago at Discord. Yeah. Discord was hacked.

Right. And someone sent out a phishing link from the admin. Exactly. Right. You'd feel like you've been doing this for a very long time. Yeah. Wouldn't you have expected at this point that you would have learned? Or is it just like, I mean, listen, this is not native to crypto. I hate that narrative, right?

I mean, I've been getting phone calls about the IRS coming to arrest me and Nigerian princes. All the time. But it's still a daily occurrence that we see wormhole or some sort of bridge exploit or something, or just on the retail level, these constant, you click a link and it's gone. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I swear, I'm pretty sure there's a group of people. Their full-time job is to create phishing sites for MyEtherWallet,

but we do have another company that's constantly monitoring every single registration that the link or the name is similar to MyEtherWallet or not. And if it is, they put it into a monitoring list. If a website goes live on that domain, they'll immediately like, okay, something's wrong, and then they'll take it down even before it actually hits the market. But it is happening. And like you said, it's not new to crypto. This has happened to banks. This is happening all the time. IRS calls.

Everyone knows about the Nigerian Prince. Oh, Nigerian Prince. Best friend. And then gift cards. Everyone's like, oh, yeah, I'm IRS. But you have to buy me a Google Play gift card for $500. Why would IRS need a Google Play? But people do get tricked by this.

They're not getting tricked on purpose. You only need to get one in 100 people. Exactly. The ROI is high, and then people do this constantly. And sometimes they don't even have to think about, they don't have to dig into smart contract vulnerabilities. It's like I said, humans are the weakest link. So that's what they're exploiting.

And at some point in time, we will definitely reach somewhere that will make it easy or at least let people know before like some action happens in that account but like since it's difficult right now because everything is there's no centralized authority to send out these notifications right everything is happening in the blockchain and the moment if you like link a phone or something, now it becomes centralized. So yeah, there are these problems. Challenges. Definitely challenges. But we are way more secure than seven years ago, I would say.

Sure. And you talk about the fact that you went from 50 people. Yeah. And now you're 3 million. Yeah. I want to tell you guys about an amazing product that I literally use every single day. Athletic Green sent me some AG1 to test out and I absolutely am hooked. I started taking it every single morning. And if you're like me and you need energy to, I don't know, write a newsletter,

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to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Is there a wall, like a certain number, where this just doesn't work anymore? Because we love to talk about mainstream adoption but what does a billion people in crypto look like yeah that's i mean our blockchains can't seemingly stay up when they launch an nft project yeah the blockchain goes on that's the first thing i was thinking about i was like oh boy gas prices right i mean

but like um i know a lot of other chains are working on this problem as well. But like, for example, I know Ethereum is moving to proof of stake soon. Like it's coming up end of the year. The testnet just went proof of stake yesterday or day before yesterday. So like, yes, we are in the process of solving like, for example, like, okay, how does 10,000 transactions per second sound like? Like, at this today, it'll cost you, like, probably at that rate, if the network is super congested, maybe like $1,000 per transaction.

That's not going to work. But we all were paying that. We do. Just to trade on Uniswap. I know. This is happening, and it's just, I mean, at some point, I'm like, do users even know

they're spending $600 to buy $10 worth of like some token? Or is it like a UI issue that they don't even realize they're paying this and then eventually they're like,

oh my gosh, how did my wallet balance it? I've seen you guys and now the wallets have been a much more glaring and obvious thing. Are you sure that you want to do this?

Yeah, and then we now have, like, if the gas prices are super high, we have it in red. Gas prices seems to be high. Are you sure you want to continue this? Wait an hour or a week. Four months. Never. Maybe wait till the merge.

Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, there are definitely, like, at least from Ethereum perspective there's a flow or some kind of timeline to solve some of these issues

but like onboarding or universal identity or like some kind of secure method to access your wallet is

still in the process it might happen in like next five years, but not as of now. That said, it's not complicated. Like if you have two hours to learn about it, you'll know how to secure yourself at like the very minimum level. So that's-

People aren't willing to take the two hours to go to the label. Exactly. Even with their money. So you were first, right? Kind of as you talked about. And then, of course, I mean, inevitably, a lot of competitors spring up. Oh, yeah. Right.

So how do you differentiate yourself when there's so many non-custodial wallets that are popular for various reasons? Is it a matter of adding new features? Do you have the first mover advantage? Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to deny that we do have the first mover advantage. But at the same time, like our way of approaching like a feature or like integrating a dApp is, okay, how complicated the current process is and how can we simplify it to three steps. So this is also something like, for example, this is something that we did with ETH staking. Like when ETH staking first came out, like, for example, the complicated process is you have to either like open up an AWS account or like some kind of infrastructure provider, run your own node, create like a validator key, another like account private key, and then deposit 32 ETH. There's a whole process.

Yeah, not easy. You're like, no one's going to do this. Or like some people will do if they're technical enough. And then that's why we are like, oh, stake.us is one of our partners. They can run the validators for you. And then users can simply deposit the 32 ETH. And then we will generate the private key

for the actual account. So we brought it down to 32 steps. So currently, in my wallet, the process is if you have 32-8, which is a lot, but if you do, your processes, you just go to my wallet, open the Dapp section, stake, and then send the 32-8, and you're done. No, you're staking.

And then we realized, OK, we're introducing a new problem now, because not everyone has 32-8. And we are like, OK, we're introducing a new problem now because not everyone has 32E. And we were like, okay, let's take a step back. How are we going to solve this? And we were actually in the process of creating our own solution, but then partners like Stakewise, Lido, they actually created the process. We were like, okay, we don't have to recreate the wheel. Let's integrate them and give our users access to liquid staking. So now you can simply go to my either world and

stake. Even if you have 0.1 or 0.001, it doesn't matter. You can just stake it and get rewards and interest on the amount that you stake. So it's like looking at the problem, current existing problem, and not creating a process just to make it happen. It's like taking a step back, looking at it from a user perspective. And another approach that we take is hiring UI designers who are actually not familiar with crypto, but really experienced in web design and UI design use experience. And then getting their perspective. They're like, okay, I don't know. I'm so stuck in here.

I don't know how to continue to the next step. Like, what are you guys talking about? That's good for us because we know, okay, this is what a new user will go through. And then we'll simplify that process. And we also like a feedback loop. And then once we release it, we'll get support, like customer support tickets. And then once we release it, we'll get support or like customer support tickets.

And then if you're like, OK, someone's having an issue around this step. And then we go back, fix it, and then see like how it goes. So it's like an ongoing process. And this is definitely different from most of the non-custodial wallets out there. Because we do have most of the access methods. Like no matter what kind of wallet you have, if it supports Ethereum, we support that. Like hardware wallets, software wallets, even like other non-custodial wallets

like Wallet Connect and all that. And the other approach is like our user experience process and then customer support team. Not many non-custodial wallets has those options. So just, you know, being on top of it. You wouldn't think so if you were on Twitter and you get like a thousand bots telling you to contact for support.

Well, that's another struggle. Yeah, that's another struggle that we face. So let's say if you had your dream 10 years from now and the world has gone to a, well, we won't even say a Bitcoin standard, but let's say that the majority, you know, a billion, two billion people are crypto native using it.

What does your product look like? Our product will look like, we still want to be like the non-custodial wallet interface. Our product will look like, it'll be simple as scan your fingerprint, you'll have a new wallet and no matter what kind of fiat you

come from it's simple as just depositing funds just from any like bank account credit card doesn't matter but and then at the same time uh it's like one product where all the blockchains are supported it's like it should be blockchain agnostic, and at the same time, users shouldn't be aware of, oh, which blockchain I'm interacting with. Because at that point, I know we are in multiple layers now, but at that point, it'll probably be layer five or something where all the other blockchains sits underneath it, and then layer five is where everything,

every wallet, like every one wallet is connected to all the blockchains. Right. So maximum interoperability, but with the caveat that you don't know that. Yeah, you don't know that. You don't have to know. You're not finding some way to bridge.

Yeah. I mean, that's how it is with like other websites, right? We don't know where the servers are hosted. We don't know. I mean, that's how it is with other websites, right? We don't know where the servers are hosted. We don't know. I mean, interact with our bank. We don't know where our actual data is, where the servers are. It's not up to the user to know that. They don't have to know.

But they know there's money in it. And then they know how to transfer it. And that's all that matters. And what kind of things will we be interacting with from that wallet? What are we going to be doing with our ETH or ERC-20 tokens or our Solana tokens or whatever? Five years from now. Good question. Maybe 10.

I want 10. Wow. 10 years from now. I think it'll be, I don't want to say everything. I think at that point, you'll be able to go to the supermarket and buy anything with crypto. And even maybe USD might live. I think at that point, you'll be able to go to the supermarket and buy anything with crypto. Even maybe USD might live, I know there are stablecoins, but USD might live on top of one of the blockchains and then it's like, it's actually USD is not.

There's entropy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you should be able to just like, it's like, I mean, it's already happening. Like El Salvador is like, Bitcoin is accepted as a legal tender. So like we see it's happening. And then eventually it'll switch to everywhere.

Hopefully governments will be okay with it. I mean, they won't be able to stop it if like if the store starts accepting it. So it's like, you know, that's the future that I want to be in. It's been, I mean, you've been doing this for seven or eight years yeah i feel like 50 oh yeah every dog years every day learning something new something new is happening and it's like it's so hard to keep track of everything that's going on that's

why yesterday i was talking uh to some of my colleagues like i feel like i had blind like i was just just focused so much on Ethereum, like the horse having blinders on the side, that I was not aware of some of these other, what some of these other blockchains are doing. So yeah, like you said, so many things. Dog ears, it's going by so fast. Well, then I can't imagine what it will look like in seven years,

but we'll have to do this again. Yeah, I'd love to do it. Thank you, man. I really appreciate you taking the time. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you haven't already left a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, please do that now. Spotify just added ratings, so please go ahead and click that five star.

I'll see you guys next time.