13 - DeFi's Mainstream Wallet | Itamar Lesuisse

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 https://www.jdoqocy.com/click-9261763-13920047 - tax shelter your crypto ($50 w/ "BANKLESS https://www.jdoqocy.com/click-9261763-13920047") Monolith https://monolith.xyz/ - holy grail of bankless Visa cards Aave https://aave.com/ - money lego for lending & borrowing DYDX https://trade.dydx.exchange/r/bankless - trade, margin, BTC perpetuals (10% off with this link https://trade.dydx.exchange/r/bankless) (trade.dydx.exchange/r/bankless) http://trade.dydx.exchange/r/bankless ----- Resources discussed: (Article) It's 2016 again https://bankless.substack.com/p/its-2016-again-market-monday-lite (Article) How to get your first DeFi Wallet (Argent) https://bankless.substack.com/p/how-to-get-your-first-defi-wallet (Podcast) Learn about the Dai Savings Rate in Ep #9 https://bankless.substack.com/p/9-going-bankless-w-maker-and-mariano ----- Episode Actions: Download the Argent wallet & try it! https://argent.link/bankless2020 Use a money protocol on Argent (how to https://bankless.substack.com/p/how-to-get-your-first-defi-wallet) Share the wallet with a crypto newbie! ----- Subscribe to podcast on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bankless/id1499409058 | Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/41TNnXSv5ExcQSzEGLlGhy | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless | RSS Feed http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ Leave a review on iTunes https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bankless/id1499409058 Share the episode with someone you know! ----- Don't stop at the podcast! Subscribe to the Bankless newsletter program http://bankless.substack.com/ Visit official Bankless website http://banklesshq.com/ for resources Follow Bankless on Twitter https://twitter.com/BanklessHQ | YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/bankless Follow Ryan on Twitter https://twitter.com/ryansadams Follow David on Twitter https://twitter.com/TrustlessState

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Ryan Sean Adams?

  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?

• 0:29David Hoffman?

  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? How do we make sure that Argent is aligned with the Ethereum ecosystem into

• 1:12David Hoffman?

  the future? So, a super valuable episode. Itamar definitely has the right vision for what Argent needs to be, and it was just an absolute treat getting him on the pod.

• 1:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. I think the entire Bankless community is cheering 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 are completely new to crypto can use this. It's really difficult to talk to somebody and talk to them about DAI and stable coins and sort of, you know, the DAI savings rate and talk about how great it is, and then try to explain how to use MetaMask and how to get their crypto off an 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

• 2:06Ryan Sean Adams?

  of those, including, I think, one of the biggest impediments, which is Private key management, right? That that sense that, oh my God, if 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 Edamar today about the concept of DeFi's Netscape 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.

• 2:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, protocols like TCP IP and SMTP and FTP, 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 Edamar 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

• 3:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 Rocket Dollar. This is primarily for our US 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 ripoff. 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,

• 4:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 rocketdollar.com. When you use the code BANKLESS, you'll get $50 off. Rocketdollar.com. Use the code BANKLESS.

• 4:33David Hoffman?

  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 DAI 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 this space. And the way that they do that is that they offer a complete suite of services that surround ETH and DAI and other assets on their exchange. So not only can you go to DYDX and spot trade between ETH and DAI, but you can also lend and borrow both ETH and DAI, as well as being able to take margin long positions or margin short positions. So getting 1X, 2X, 3X leverage in

• 5:18David Hoffman?

  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 DYDX and get 10% off of trading fees when you sign up with the bankless referral link,

• 6:03David Hoffman?

  trade.dydx exchange slash r slash bankless. It's in the show notes, so you can just go copy that and go straight to DYDX and get 10% off of all trading fees.

• 6:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Hey David, before we dig in with Edamar, we should talk big picture stuff. You know what I've been feeling like lately? It's felt like it's 2016 again.

• 6:24David Hoffman?

  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, in the space that really sets the foundation for, for a new wave. I, 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, it feels weird to be able to count on these things, but I wouldn't actually bet against it.

• 7:05David Hoffman?

  Um, and it does feel like we are on the cusp of a very long, slow, drawn out appreciation in ETH price. That will, you know, probably inevitably turn into another bubble, which will be fun to, uh, to go on the ride.

• 7:19Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I, I, 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, uh, bubble and then the pop. Uh, after that, there were, there was an interim period, years until, uh, high-flying companies like Amazon fully recovered, right? It took something till like 2008, 2009, and the, the way it recovered, uh, was through utility. So Amazon actually delivered on some of its promises and started to, to recover. Uh, so some people think that that's what's going to happen in crypto. Basically it'll sort of seep into our everyday life.

• 7:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  And there'll be a slow growth slog, uh, as it seeps into our life and people realize, 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 exuberance and hockey stick growth, followed by, you know, a crash type period. Uh, followed by some sort of dead period, uh, and then the whole cycle repeats. I was reading a, 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,

• 8:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  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, the same sort of pattern. There's at the very beginning of the cycle, this, 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, 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

• 9:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 that 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, 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

• 10:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 building and infrastructure are being put down. And I feel like it's 2016, like we're just waiting for that spark.

• 10:21David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's, 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 testnet to

• 10:44David Hoffman?

  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 14,000 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 stablecoin payments. And then also citing how stablecoins are additive to a payment network, not competitive.

• 11:27David Hoffman?

  And so like, 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 the, these markets today because we're still, we still have, you know, trauma, we still have fear, we're still like 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, is part of the kindling that is being laid down. Bitcoin just went through a halving during a period where the Fed just printed a bunch of money. That is also huge kindling. The, the whole Paul Tudor Jones, who has 2% of his assets, which is an insane amount.

• 12:13David Hoffman?

  Like 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, when that match drops.

• 12:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  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. 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 the subreddits that they're releasing the community token on is a Fortnite subreddit.

• 13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 vaults 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 the these events aren't the spark, they're the fuel, right? This is the 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.

• 13:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  It could still take some time. I mean, there's still could be some some more tinder that is is laid before we see the spark. But it feels like that spark is just a matter of of time and and probability. Something's going to set this this forest floor off. And when it does, it's 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've 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 these scarcity games.

• 14:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 in an exciting time.

• 14:58David Hoffman?

  Yeah, in your article, you talked about fractals and you just said that, you know, just because this feels like 2016 doesn't mean that next year is 2017. Like, 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

• 15:42David Hoffman?

  know, these things are repetitive cycles that look like each other each 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.

• 15:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 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 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 was a data breach at BlockFi.

• 16:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And for those that don't know, maybe you can tell, tell listeners what BlockFi is and what happened here.

• 16:43David Hoffman?

  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 DeFi. Uh, and there's no really other way to get alpha on your Bitcoin. So that's really the, the business proposition of BlockFi. Uh, and why one would deposit your, their Bitcoin there. The problem is, uh, you know, when any website like this has user information.

• 17:26David Hoffman?

  And, uh, whenever a website centrally collects user information, there is an incentive to, uh, to snag that. Uh, and that's exactly what happened. Uh, and I think this is really good juxtaposition between why a similar product, which there are plenty of on, on Ethereum in, inside of DeFi, uh, kind of fixes this problem because, uh, public permissionless protocols don't care about your government issued ID and don't care about who you are. Uh, and don't require your email address or password or any other identifying information to use them. Uh, and so I, I think this, the whole block fight idea is a legacy business model that is being imprinted upon crypto,

• 18:11David Hoffman?

  using crypto assets, uh, to fuel them, but they don't actually make any, to anything new. Like the real innovation here is permissionless, uh, you know, identity free, uh, protocols. And, and the, this, this hack is just kind of illustrates why that is important.

• 18:30Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, BlockFi would be what we generally call a crypto bank. So they, um, you know, they specialize in, 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. Uh, and along with that comes some regulations, as you said, like AML KYC in, in the U.S. And that's, um, you know, money laundering essentially laws where BlockFi is a crypto bank. They're taking custody of assets. They have to get your identity. So they have to log your email, your, your name, your ID. Um, and that's what was breached, um, in this, in this, in this hack, in this, in this issue. It was email address.

• 19:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  Uh, it was physical address. It was. transaction history.

• 19:19David Hoffman?

  Which Bitcoiners care a lot about, by the way.

• 19:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's that's very private information because it can be dangerous, obviously, to 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 Voorhees 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?" You know, and that's that's one take, definitely. But I think another take is is going

• 20:03Ryan Sean Adams?

  along the lines of what you just said, which is DeFi 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 in something like the 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 just kind of works because you're not giving up your assets. So it feels like DeFi fixes this. Is that is that a take you share?

• 20:41David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. And just to harp on KYC one more time, the the reason why KYC is required is because the government and and the nation state wants as much insight as to who who owns all the money and where the money is. Because that having that access to that information is power. That is power. And so what they're doing is 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 Voorhees, a

• 21:26David Hoffman?

  famous libertarian, when he said- 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 where, 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, 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

• 22:09David Hoffman?

  protocols that just need the minimum amount of information to, to operate. And, and that's really what DeFi is. DeFi 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, an alternative definition for DeFi.

• 22:29Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, it sounds a lot like the Protocol Sync thesis, episode 12, right?

• 22:33David Hoffman?

  I think you're right.

• 22:35Ryan Sean Adams?

  So, guys, if you've been tracking with us, this is our 13th 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 sequentially. So, you know, one episode builds on the last. And now we're going to be talking about the, the first almost mainstream DeFi wallet that acts as kind of a, an overlay to all of the, the protocols and all of the, 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 Edamar, David, we should talk about our second round of sponsors.

• 23:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  The first is AVE. So, AVE is a DeFi protocol you absolutely have to check out. We mentioned it in today's episode. You can actually now access AVE by way of the Argent Wallet in just a few taps. So what does that mean? It means you can put your dye into it. And 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 Aave protocol.

• 23:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  I just saw earlier this week that Aave had passed 70 million in assets locked inside of the protocol. So it's not the the fourth largest DeFi 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 Aave, you can go to ave.com. That's A A V E dot com, or even just access it in the Argent app.

• 24:33David Hoffman?

  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 DeFi card, which is a Visa card that allows you to spend your DAI 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 DeFi card from Monolith allows you to be a bankless individual while still being able to access traditional payment rails through the Visa network.

• 25:16David Hoffman?

  So Monolith, it's a smart contract wallet where you deposit your DAI into. And when you swipe your Visa card in any store, it just spends that same amount of DAI from your wallet. Through Monolith, you can focus on spending the things that make sense to spend, like DAI instead of your Ether. And this is just a great one-to-one replacement for HSBC or Revolut. You can download the app at monolith.xyz and sign up and get your bankless Visa card today.

• 25:45Ryan Sean Adams?

  Without further ado, let's get to our interview with Edamar Lasuiz, the co-founder of Argent.

• 25:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  All right, David and I are here with Edamar Lasuiz. Edamar is the co-founder of the Argent Wallet, and we're excited to talk to you today. Edamar, it's been a crazy, busy week for you guys. Can you give us some of the highlights?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Sure, thanks, Ryan, and thanks, David, for having me. Indeed, big, big week at Argent. Results of, after 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, 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.

• 26:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, so you know what I've been super excited about is the DeFi 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, why are folks so excited about this?

• 27:15Speaker 02

  I think, I think you said it very well. I think we started the day where it was, you know, our app, our product, let's, let's vote for it. And by the middle of the day, people were not voting for Argent anymore. They were just voting to put DeFi mainstream to, to push DeFi to more people, to show to the world that crypto, DeFi could be super simple, safe, and still decentralized, non-custodial. So the, I think the, the language and the intent really changed as the hours passed during that day.

• 27:51David Hoffman?

  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, neck and neck with, with the 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, as a, you know, a DeFi wallet, You'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.

• 28:32David Hoffman?

  And so it's just, it's just free marketing from the, the support that comes around from the bankless community. I think it's really powerful.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Agreed. First time really I, I see that in action. I mean, in this company at Argent, I didn't get the same vibe in my previous companies. Uh, there's really something unique here.

• 28:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, you know, I think a part of the reason why is because this is more than just an app. Uh, this entire space and what you guys are doing are part of a larger movement. Uh, and that's kind of where David and I want to start with, with the why. So, Yamar, why are you doing this? Why are you in the crypto space? Are you here for, you know, the, the entrepreneurship, the, the money, the fame, the movement? What really motivates you?

• 29:18Speaker 02

  So we, no, it's, it's not my first company. Um, all the founders have had several companies. So yes, we've been entrepreneur for, for a very long time and that's what we, we like to do. And I think everyone has a different story on how they, uh, they get in touch with crypto for the first time. Um, for, for me, I, so when I saw, there were a few elements, I think. I sold my previous company. Uh, it was probably now more than three years ago. Uh, when, when we sold it, there was actually an OFAC flag on the, on the purchase. So the dollars money sent from a, a UK company to another UK company, but it was in dollars. So some bank in the US could freeze the transfer, put an OFAC flag

• 30:02Speaker 02

  on it. Uh, it was obviously a mistake, but it was a month where, you know, everyone was super stressed. We couldn't access the funds and we were like, okay, that's, 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, uh, authorization of someone, some bank in the US. Um, so that was the first event. Then I, unrelated to that, I discovered crypto. Um, I bought my first ETH, probably it was on Kraken, uh, early 2017, if I'm correct in my

• 30:33Speaker 02

  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, uh, user experience with crypto. And I could see that 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, uh, where money and the internet is just totally open, fair. You have that global platform that is totally permissionless, where everyone, uh, can innovate. And I think that can lead to, uh, basically everyone on the planet being connected to that same system.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Everyone with a quality of 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, that's really, so it started in some way from the tech. And this, we felt, wow, that, that tech can just be, can, can really have such an impact. And it's probably the biggest thing, uh, thing we have lived. And we're, we will see in our lives since the invention of the internet was probably the first. And then I think for us, blockchain and crypto is probably the, the next wave.

• 31:50David Hoffman?

  So, so is that it, Edamar? Is like, is that the point of crypto? You mentioned openness, sort of this, this open finance, open money layer. Is that why we're doing this? Is that the entire point here?

• 32:01Speaker 02

  We, at Argent, this vision of web three with decentralized internet is something we, we feel strongly about. But we, we think it's really connected to this layer of value. So yes, blockchain is about adding a new layer to the current internet, uh, with native value transfer. When we started, when the web started, a value transfer was not part of it. It was complex. And that's why, uh, I think we ended up with massive businesses that many ties attention, uh, rather than using transfer of value. Uh, so I do think this can have a massive impact to the, the internet as we see it. And you need that value transfer to enable also a more decentralized internet,

• 32:42Speaker 02

  where we all have full ownership of our, of our money, but also of our data.

• 32:48David Hoffman?

  So that leads into the next question I want to ask. What are the main core goals of Argent? Like, what are the metrics that you guys look towards to measure if you guys are being successful or not?

• 33:01Speaker 02

  So the way we define internally at least our mission or purpose at Argent is really to empower everyone to control and prosper from their digital assets and identity. That's something I mention 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 targets 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.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  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 their of these assets and their identity. And then prosper, 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.

• 34:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 can take control of the assets. So a crypto bank, an exchange, they would take control of the assets, they would have custody over it. But with the Argent wallet... You know, 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?

• 35:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  In what other ways is it, you know, self-sovereign money control, would you say?

• 35:11Speaker 02

  So when you look at self-sovereignty, I think there are several, um, I think several characteristics. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking about what you just said. And so there, there is obviously the first step. They don't give away control to us. We are non-custodial. And it's not just, uh, that's not just that 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, custodial exchanges are.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  There are big banks and it's very hard to innovate. For us, once we had really secured and battle tested the smart contracts, we could move then much more, 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, um, someone tries to steal your funds, the same way that the banks protects you. But it's really the, at the smart contract level that it happens.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  And you, you have method of recovery that are simple, uh, you know, on the, out, out of the box as soon as you install Argent. I would say the censorship resistance is another element of, um, 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, uh, which have the same feature. It's also, uh, we cannot prevent you from accessing your money.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  The typical. custodial wallet would work that way. Some are in between. They can, they might not take your, not be able to take your money, but they could prevent you from accessing your money. And that's why we built specific features so that their emergency kit, et cetera, to answer the question of what if Argent disappears? And what if Argent disappears, a big part of, I think, being bankless is you can still manage your money and access your money without that entity.

• 37:29David Hoffman?

  So, Itamar, I think a lot of people's first wallets 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, 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

• 38:09David Hoffman?

  specific apps on Ethereum like Pool Together or Compound and integrated that into your wallet. Now, with your guys, you guys have stated that you want to onboard like the next 1 billion people into DeFi. But I was hoping to get your opinion on Argent's neutrality. So when you guys choose to integrate a, an app onto your wallet, it becomes a political choice of sorts, especially when you have 1 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, or political neutrality of Argent Wallet

• 38:49David Hoffman?

  and how you guys plan to, you know, add future applications and then what your criteria is for adding some or perhaps denying others.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  That's a very good, very good question. So Argen 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 Argen 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.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  That would have been the very easy way, for example, to skip the EFC20 approved. It's 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 DeFi Hub, we chose specific integration. I think the first thing to know is that through wallet connect, any DAP can be connected to Argen. So through wallet connect, any DAP can be implemented. It's very quick. You have this web three provider and suddenly you can have a user using Argen, interacting with that DAP. And we are doing a lot more work on that front.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  So making the Argen experience better when interacting with a DAP 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 Argen to authorize this transfer or to secure their assets. So Argen being open is definitely where we are heading. Within the app, we have to be a bit more careful. It's a mix of UX, security and also user have certain expectation. So we are looking at, there are some criteria, but I think...

• 41:10Speaker 02

  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, etc., on their contract. But in this really first launch, we looked more at the user experience that would be simple enough across protocols. So the interacting with a protocol in the DeFi Hub is in fact just buying or maintaining a token. The same way that in a stock trading app, you can invest in mobile apps, in washing machine, in a nut company, or in a real estate

• 41:49Speaker 02

  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 trading, or actually a liquidity provider token. And it's really the same flow. Every DAP in DeFi Hub follows the same flow, very simple. You take a E's, or you take a hundred D I, 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 DeFi Hub. We had to start somewhere. We wanted to look at each integration one

• 42:31Speaker 02

  by one to make it to make it at the right level of quality. And there's a lot of improvement coming there.

• 42:38Ryan Sean Adams?

  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, you know, 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

• 43:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  Is you've taken a Venmo-like experience, so people in the US will probably be familiar with Venmo, or Revolut-like experience, and you have incorporated all of the bankless DeFi 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 1 billion people in this space. Is that all part of the design here?

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Totally. So when we started, I mentioned me sending money from Kraken 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 few exchange holding everyone's money, and therefore we are back to square one, and there is no point in what we are doing, or we have to fix that problem. That's really the starting point, and that has driven a lot of our design from UX, but also technical design choices in what became now Argent.

• 44:31Ryan Sean Adams?

  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, Edamar, 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

• 45:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  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?

• 45:39Speaker 02

  You can do, I mean, you could store, save, send, borrow, earn interest, invest. I think with this launch of DeFi Hub, we are reaching, I believe, every of the money verb as you mentioned. I think, I like that expression. So you know, you hold your ETH 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 Argent. 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. You have daily limits, you can freeze and freeze your account,

• 46:21Speaker 02

  you can recover it with guardians, the same way, the same mental model than you would have today with a good bank like Revolut, for example. All these great features are part of it. You can transfer, obviously, not only we do gas abstraction, so right now it's just free to come to transfer, but you could imagine also paying fees in ETH or in tokens. But transfer is not just that, it's the fact that you don't need to type a massive zero X address. You can just send money to Ryan the Argent at X Y Z U Z E N S. So that was part of fixing transfer also. So savings or lending.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  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 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 work with Skybird 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 $10 or whether they trade $100,000.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Investment, token set, I think is really a very good use case, that we launched it really on Monday.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  The idea of robot trading is actually quite common in the traditional financial world. 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?

• 48:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 DeFi protocols inside of an app that feels very much like a Venmo, like a 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 DeFi hub. And what I could do is, you know, you mentioned token sets, but I could click on token sets. And what this is, is it's basically like a, folks are familiar with traditional finance.

• 49:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  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. You've 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, Yamar, 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?

• 49:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  And like, what impediments are still sort of left for us? What have we got to sort through? Is it education? Is it something else?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Now, I have a quite opinionated view on the fact that crypto didn't yet crack product market fit, to be honest. I think, yes, UX was one of the blocker. UX and security make it very secure while keep it simple. Scalability, of course, is coming, is becoming a bottleneck. Gas fees are high, but I think we are very, very close to, to pretty good solutions there. I think we, we need, we still need more work on cracking use case that are mass market enough. Most of the current use case we see are still high-risk investments and speculation.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  There's a pool of users, there's a lot of money in that market, although in traditional world, which is, you know, it's fine to start there. But I think we still have to, to do some work to really, really cut it. As you said, my mom, my dad, they can use Argent. It's much easier than their current bank. They don't use Monzo or Revolut, they don't use Venmo. They have some old school bank. Argent is easier, that's done. It's easier for them to send money with Argent 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,

• 51:23Speaker 02

  the rates would, they are quite low 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 Argent was really deal with security and user experience. And DApps can just ignore that and focus on, on building this use case. And doesn't mean it's one use case that brings a million, not 10 million people. It might be an accumulation of smaller niches. And where, where this, this use case appear and where we solve a real problem.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  I might be a bit harsh saying no product market fit. I think the entire region of the world where just holding die rather than the local currency is an amazing use case and and literally something they are they are fighting for and it's it's not just a nice to have. It's critical to their to their life. But it's not yet a completely global use case that everyone can would benefit tomorrow, I think.

• 52:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 a poor financial system, this is maybe something that's that's revolutionary, right? You know, and maybe there's 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 DeFi space and even Argent and everything that that you've done so far in crypto with its, you know, 10 years of 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.

• 53:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  But there's still not enough reason for somebody who is happy with their Wells Fargo account to to make the switch, you know, self-sovereign, 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? Where do you think the next big growth area might come in DeFi? Where is the superpower going to come? Is it in interest rates? Is it something new that we haven't seen yet?

• 53:55Speaker 02

  I wouldn't be able to answer what what's next if not, 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 requirements to be connected to this system,

• 54:40Speaker 02

  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 is 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 in Europe, so I've never used it. It looks great. Robinhood 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

• 55:23Speaker 02

  with a bit better UX, a bit better flows. It's still the same. And here we are talking about reinventing from scratch a system that that thing will evolve at an order of magnitude faster.

• 55:35David Hoffman?

  So are there any countries where downloading and accessing an Argent wallet is restricted? Or have you guys had any frictions with making Argent as globally available as most of the apps that you would find on an app store?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  So right now, it's simple. We put Argent 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 is just, you know, it's, it's, we all think, it is no Western world, Android, we think Google, we put it on the Play Store. But that, I believe, there means some markets where it's not available.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  And for example, in China, I believe you would need other, other app store for other play, other Android store. Or Apple is in China with app stores, 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.

• 57:00David Hoffman?

  So what, what pockets of the world have you, have you guys seen success with? Like what, what countries have really adopted Argent more than others?

• 57:09Speaker 02

  So we, when we started, we, you know, we, we never targeted a specific group. We really put the app out there, didn't do much marketing, just being there on Twitter. The, but the natural countries would be really UK and the US first, because we were an English speaking app.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Working with protocols that were popular in these markets. Then we, it started growing a little bit more in Europe. Maybe because that's where we are, a lot of our, all our team members are in Europe, so word of mouth, etc. But then we see some time, interesting behavior. So for the last thirty days, our second biggest market is Argentina.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  We, we don't really know why. We didn't, the app is not available in, in Spanish. And suddenly Argentina started to pick up. Maybe through our maker, our friends, I know there are a few team members there that might be sharing Argent around. But so, yeah, I think we, we really like to, to understand this behavior, to understand where can we, where can we solve problems, basically.

• 58:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  Wow, Argentina. So we just had Mariano Conte on, I think, a few episodes. It might have been episode nine. And he talked about 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, Edamar, of what you were 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,

• 58:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  you know, Western, US, European-based financial infrastructure. So this is already far better, because it can't be confiscated by their local governments.

• 59:06Speaker 02

  Totally. And in those markets, we're often also holding stablecoin like DAI is a very interesting use case. We are probably the dream stablecoin wallet. You can have an Argent wallet with only DAI, nothing else. You don't need ETH to pay for your gas fees. You can put DAI and then and start doing payments. You can put DAI and start savings in Compound or in the DSR. So we are really, I would say that we have the dream experience for stablecoin-only wallets. So I think that's definitely something attractive in some of these markets.

• 59:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  And if people are looking to get an understanding of DAI and the DAI savings rate, that's the DSR acronym that Edamar mentioned, which is basically a savings account where you can deposit your DAI, your stablecoin, and start earning interest instantly. Check out the episode nine with Mariano. It's got all that detail.

• 1:00:02David Hoffman?

  So, Edamar, 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? Able everyone to transfer value into the Argent Wallet. Because while the Argent Wallet UX is great and it integrates with all the DeFi 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?

• 1:00:43Speaker 02

  So it's a good question because when I think Ryan asked earlier about frictions, what prevents us from having a million or billion people? I didn't mention on ramp of RAM that actually is still, I think, a strong point of friction. So we took the decision to really focus on partnership there.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  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 in more project. 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 Argent that we fully control, that we 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.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  So our choice is we will keep innovating when it comes to DeFi, DApps, Web3. And let third parties work on the more traditional finance part, which is the on-ramp and the off-ramp. And so we partner. So part of the work we'll 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 in part of the flow, I think you know the usual suspects, but there are some great products, whether it's Wire, Moonpay, 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.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  It's not easy. I think their challenge is significant. But it's our strategy will be to work with with those partners.

• 1:02:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  So for anybody who's ever used a crypto wallet in the past, they may be sort of burnt out on how clunky the experience is 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 in my circle who can act as recovery addresses and, you know, get get me access to the wallet. I've got things like a daily 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

• 1:03:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  spent 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 could talk a little bit about some of the technologies that went into this, particularly the the smart contract wallet. Without getting too geeky, Edamar, just give us give us sort of the summary of of how this sort of functionality is now possible and previously wasn't.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  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 to store that private key in some way. That's the seed phrase that people make you write on a piece of paper with Argent. And you can compare that to having a wallet in your pocket with cash. If you lose that wallet, it's lost forever.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  If someone takes takes your wallet, they have your cash, it's lost forever. Argent, when you don't 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's yours, only you control it. Arjan 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 has an owner, and that's the key that is 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,

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  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 thirty-six 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 thirty-six hours, that's the security period. Thirty-six 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't find it, you could put a five-days lock on your wallet.

• 1:06:09Speaker 02

  The same way that you can freeze your card to 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.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  Or they can trust third-party services, so Arjan has a guardian service. You do two-factor authentication with us and we'll trigger that transaction. But the beauty of the model, this is just some framework, it's any Ethereum address. Anyone can create a guardian service. And so maybe, 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, it could be really anything, anyone, any, any system can act as a guardian and you as a user, you decide to trust them or that device to, to, to do that, that recovery process.

• 1:07:32David Hoffman?

  So speaking of recovery, what happens if Argent just disappears? What happens if the company folds or goes away? Like, how does that meaningfully impact the people that use Argent to store their funds?

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  So Argent is built to be non-custodial. That doesn't mean that everything stays exactly the same. The Argent, 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, etc. 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 built is quite simple, is what we call the Emergency Kit, which is, has been live on iOS for a while, only more recently for Android. You, you have funds in your, in your wallet, you, you open, you unlock the Argent app, all that is, is on the, on the client, on your phone.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  The, 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 conservative relay infrastructure, meaning you sign a transaction, we'll relay it to the blockchain, and that's how we abstract the gas. We, 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 a, in any type of wallet, it can, Metamask, you need to enable. To add data, could be my wallet, my crypto. You paste that piece of data, you send a transaction.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  So you will need some ease to pay for the gas. You send the transaction, the transaction now is routed 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 Argen 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.

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  And the only grail would be that they keep life as usual just by picking other services for these different building blocks. And I think we can get there. But right now, everyone can remove their funds. It's safe, it's under their control.

• 1:10:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  So if Argent goes away, everyone still has access to their funds as long as Ethereum is still in existence, as long as Ethereum is still running.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:10:22David Hoffman?

  So you mentioned something there. You say, guys, you're a centralized company and so 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?

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  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, 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 wallets 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 is a recovery, if anything happens on your wallet, you are, or anything security related, you are alerted through these channels.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  Second thing, and three, these are used for the urgent guard service. That, uh, at the beginning, it was not by default, not everyone, anyone who download the app by default has the urgent guard service. They can fully recover their wallet, then they can customize that. So, the, the civil resistance is something where, it's fair to say there, there were other solutions and one of the solution we, we, we worked on was implementing what we call create two, 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 transaction.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Therefore, uh, it, it would cost them a lot. So I would say we're starting to be at the point where we have, uh, we have some decent protection there. Yes, you can create three, four wallets, but probably not, uh, a lot, and you, you could limit rate limit uh, through different ways. So we, we are getting there. Where we are very opinionated, um, i- it's still on the email. So the phone now, we are the place where you can skip it. It's not obvious. We are debating that regularly. We don't want to encourage people, uh, to not use it because it would make by default things a bit less secure. So, uh, for us, privacy is about consent. You need to have control, uh, of what data you give to who and what is done with your data.

• 1:12:51Speaker 02

  We are very transparent. Uh, I'm sure we can improve, but we don't use your phone, your email for, uh, marketing, selling it to third parties. There is no such thing as data harvesting to profile you. Uh, but we have accepted that phone is quite different than email. Uh, after mostly talking to users in very different countries where, um, the Nike where really they, 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, is strongly tied to an identity. Uh, I can't have two numbers on my phone. Uh, and they were genuinely worried and they wouldn't want that.

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  Uh, so now we started to make that optional, but you still need to tap on the privacy icon and then uh, they read the text and skip it. Uh, but we didn't make it the default because also it makes uh, Argent Guard less um, uh, less, less secure. Giving us this two factor of email and phone is still a much better experience, especially because Argent is not subject to SIM swap attack. That's not how our model works. The email, I would say we are much more opinionated. Um, are, are, an email is there, you, you are, you are creating a relationship with Argent. You want a certain service. Uh, and for that, we need a communication channel.

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  Saying push notification is not the same, not everyone enables them, it's not as reliable. You, we, in a part of our model is being able to warn you if there are problems. Uh, if a large transfer is initiated on your account, if a recovery is initiated on your account. And that's why users come to Argent. We have, I would say, security, uh, 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 Argent. We, we, we will not compromise on that. And email is easy, it's, it's so easy to create another email. I think it's also, again, important, and we want people to push on privacy.

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  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. Uh, but we are not storing, uh, for example, an email and a password and some ID data. It's a communication channel and this communication channel is important, brings security. And there, it's so easy to create uh, uh, an email with Proton Mail uh, or others. So we do not want a less, uh, unsecure product because we can't communicate with our users.

• 1:15:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 Arge. 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

• 1:16:09Ryan Sean Adams?

  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?

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  I don't, so, no, I don't think it will make any difference, to be honest. I think that element is not the blocker. The, I think, I think it's very, I appreciate the quizzes 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 opsec, 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 our, of my hand, the number of

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  complaint there. I don't think that's what will make Bitcoin suddenly, suddenly explode, I mean, or Bitcoin users suddenly jump on Argen. I think the, the, most Bitcoin users are savvy enough to know that they can create a pseudo anonymous email. So I think that's fine, and we, 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 projects coming soon, hopefully. But right now, we have wrapped Bitcoin that is still custodial, and I don't think that might be more of a philosophical issue or genuine security concern for Bitcoin, the Bitcoin community.

• 1:17:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  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?

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  So right now, we do very little on that front. We get affiliate fees on Kyber trades. So you get when you send trades to Kyber, you get KNC token back. And that's, you know, a small, I mean, it can grow. We are 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 Argent. And monetization is not something we'll be working on this year, to be very honest. We see ourselves disrupting tens of trillion dollar size markets. I mean, the entire

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  financial industry, there will be room for monetization. The only criteria for us is transparent monetization, meaning you don't, we don't like, for example, advertising or take something that is free and suddenly make it pay 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, and there is direct consumer subscription. So, you know, Revolut, Robinhood, etc., they have premium features where users pay a monthly for subscription. So I think

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:20:15David Hoffman?

  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?

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  Timeframe 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. It's 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 Argent wallet to any website. I would say these are core, core elements.

• 1:21:10Speaker 02

  You will also have the ability to have Argent anywhere, meaning any DApp developer, any third party should be able to create an Argent wallet disconnected from our app. A game console should be able to create an Argent wallet or a point of sale device that a merchant should be able to create an Argent 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 Argent app. So I think five years is starting to be an interesting timeframe, but I think that's the kind of timeframe we need to think of for entire communities to use crypto. I don't think it matters if it's Argent. Everything should be fully interoperable, but entire community using crypto for their day-to-day needs,

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  payment, investment, and there's no more question of on-ramp timeframe. This is, this is money.

• 1:22:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, there's, and there's really, it seems like a symbiotic relationship with everything that the Ethereum economy is producing, all of these DeFi protocols. Because what I see Argent doing is essentially acting as a user interface on top of that in 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 DeFi and Ethereum and community, crypto community cook up?

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Totally, we are totally dependent on the ecosystem. We are a bit like the browser, we are Netscape. You know, we make it accessible and safe to interact with these products. At the end, everyone needs to contribute and our job is to make it possible for DApps 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 of people have the right to innovate on a platform, you tend to have amazing outcome.

• 1:23:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. So, Itamar, 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. You know, and Netscape came about in the early internet in, you know, 1993, 1994, and just sort of shook everything up because it layered on top of these, 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?

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  So I think specifically for the bankless community, that tends to be, I think, 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 DeFi 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.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  The last 48 hours have been amazing. The bankless community has been really awesome.

• 1:24:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  You've heard of Bankless community. Itamar 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. Itamar, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining David and I today on Bankless.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  David Ryan, thanks so much and keep doing the amazing work you do.

• 1:25:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  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 DAI funds to the DAI 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.

• 1:25:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  They could download the app and you could send some DAI 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. ETH is risky. Crypto is risky. DeFi 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.