Hey, folks, we are recording at stable Coins Summit NYC, co hosted by PayPal and borderle Us XYZ and joining me is Ellie Faresi, who is the lead software engineer at Dynamic. Ellie, great to have you, Hey, thanks for having me.
Good to be here.
Yeah, I'm excited to learn about Dynamic. Let's kick it off with your background. Tell us about where you're from. How'd you get into crypto and things like that.
Yeah, I'd love to, like you said, my name is Ellie. I've been in crypto since twenty seventeen. Twenty nineteen is when I started dabbling in it. Left my tech job at NBC full time to join a Web three startup in twenty twenty, so I've been a full stack Web three engineer for I don't know however many years that is now at this point. I love building products. I
love being in like a hackathon mindset. I then left that startup that I was working at to found my own company called Bellow, which was a data analytics product focusing on marketers and creators and Web three at the time to help them understand their audience anywhere a wallet touched. It was during that period that I actually met the
founders of Dynamic. We were a Dynamic customer as well during that time and loved the team immensely and I left below in October of twenty twenty three four twenty twenty four, sorry dates remembering, and joined Dynamic And it's been an incredible experience building out their embedded wallets team. I lead the engineering there for embedded wallets and it's been Yeah, it's been awesome.
So give us an overview Dynamic and all the services and infrastructure and solutions you offer.
Yeah. So Dynamics started probably similar to the time that my company had started, maybe theirs was a bit before, like twenty twenty one, really focusing on how do people access crypto and use crypto, and that was such a big problem in still as today. Frankly, at the time, the main key point we were trying to solve was around authentication, like how do you give people an ability to log in with their email and connect their wallet and really have the access come to this off layer.
So authentication was the core main focus. And as we started building, growing with more customers, more sophisticated customers especially, we realize that it's not just like how do you
connect these wallets that you have. It's how do you actually give a wallet to somebody who doesn't have a wallet, an application that doesn't have a wallet, And so instead of making you have to go like get a meta mask or a coinbase, a wallet account or any of these things, you can now just like build your app as you would, log in with an email, get a wallet and a secure wallet at that.
Wow. So is it kind of a dynamic wallet setup where it's generated uniquely.
Yeah, So it's all based on you authenticating as a user. So you log in, whether it's with your TikTok account or Instagram or email, phone number, whatever you choose. From your authentication, it's then giving you an embedded wallet into the application, so you now have a fully functioning EOA. It's it's a real wallet. It has a it can have a private key like you can get private key if you'd want to, but from the end user perspective,
that doesn't matter to them. They just want to be able to sign, transact all these things which may also be hidden behind the scenes.
So is it a self hosted wallet like you mentioned the private keys, where if I want, I can control the private keys, but also if I lose those private keys like any other.
So with with our offering, we leverage MPC and I will try not to go too technical because that's that's my background. But it's actually a non custodial wallet, so there is no like we as dynamic have your private keys any of that. The application developer also doesn't have your private keys. It all works with this model of share distribution where through the NPC libraries that we leverage, there actually is never at a single point of creation or signing a private key that exists. Oh wow, only
when you choose to go and leave the platform. Let's say you can then bring the shares together to export. So it's a very secure model because if a private key never exists, you can never get your private key stolen. If your share gets stolen, it still doesn't necessarily mean that you can bring all the other shares together because it needs a quorum to be introduced.
And what companies or brands are you working with to help them create these wallet services for their users.
Yeah, I think a really great use case for this embedded wallet product is Kraken. Crackin's been around for a very long time. They've had their centralized exchange and realize that there's so many more things that they can offer their customers as they move into the DeFi space. They need a wallet for all of their customers right to be able to do these lending, borrowing, all these different apps. They're doing a ton of stuff on chain right now,
and each of them need a wallet. Kracken doesn't need to be responsible for custoding or making their end users have to have like hold the private keys themselves. That wouldn't be a great devx or UX. So what they do is leverage Dynamics embedded wallets, where again their customers just log in with email, they get a wallet.
Wow, that makes things so much easier because you know you mentioned earlier, if you want to get people on board on chain in Web three, you need to make it easy. The on ram has to be seamless. You highlighted the connection of web through platforms like TikTok right right. That would make it a lot easier for the average Joe and Jane, who you know, they may be scared of ce phrases like oh my god, I have to remember this and things like that.
Yeah, I think I think TikTok and that those kinds of places are a really great use case, both as the end user, but honestly more as the creator platform. Because what does TikTok do with creators? It pays them. And what do you need to get paid, either right now a bank account or if you're using stable coins, a wallet, And so if you could log in with your TikTok account and you just automatically get a wallet, and now as a creator, you can start getting paid
via this stable coin. You don't need to know it's a stable coin, it's to you, it's a US dollar. You really just start opening the opportunities of where crypto can actually start being the fundamental layer under all of these social apps, other financial apps, et cetera.
And I don't know how much you can reveal here, but I'm curious, are you using AI in anywhere? A plan to use AI to assist in the walla generation or assistance and things.
Yeah, So one of the big focuses as we launched this new embedded wallet with NPC was actually offering a
server version of it. So what that means is that if you're building agentic use cases, if you're saying, like I want a trading bot that's like built using some LM in the background that it can also be non custodial because previously to have a trading bot, again, where do you store those private keys if you're managing them, like maybe you literally just have it on your computer, but that's not the most cure way to do it.
So with with Dynamic, you can leverage our embedded wallet infrastructure to have a non custodial wallet where you don't have to worry about the private keys. And now you
can start doing agentic use cases. And you can combine this with the end user like login experience and a server wallet, and so this the way you can do this essentially with Dynamic is what we call delegation, where you can have a wallet, say on TikTok or any any financial app to like, you go to your banking app, sure you get a wallet as the as the end user, and you can delegate permissions to the application, so to TikTok or too wells Fargo or whatever your your application
may be. Where now you can say I'm going to allow them to perform actions on my behalf. So say every Monday at eight am, you want to set a payment to go to your UH or every month I have like a rent payment that goes because my rent is old Florial in New York, and I have to send a check, so I have to do a build pay that way, that kind of system can exist now through automation that they create in their back end that they don't need to have your private key to do it.
You can just get a share of the wallet that they can operate to some degree with limited permissions.
Got it? Are there any risk or vulnerabilities? And you guys probably thought of all these things, but with the connection of these social platforms being able to log in that way, or you maybe could talk a bit about the security layers.
And yes, I think about security all day, all night. I dream about these problems. So I love this question and that's really where I think what we do at Dynamic with MPCTSS architecture is the best solution because it is not saying that if you lose access to your TikTok account, let's say that you whoever the bad actor is,
automatically gets your wallet. It's saying that they could potentially get access to a share one single share, and one single share on its own does not give you permission to export a private key to sign a message, to transfer any of that kind of stuff. It has to be this combination so that on its core with TSS NPC gives you immediate level of security that doesn't exist with again traditional other providers that are working in the
embedded wallet space. On top of that, I think for us as the people building the product, then it's how do we take that a step further? Like the fundamental is there secure? How can we then say what are we detecting? When can we just detect that someone took your account? We should be why can't we know that?
Right?
And so can we block requests from even attempting to be happening? If someone do we see a suspicious activity, we're like, hey, this doesn't look like they're signing in from their account. Immediately block the ability to export a private key. And so there's all of this laundry list of items that we're thinking about and crossing off and saying, what can we do to ensure protection fully for this end user?
Oh? Absolutely, yeah, And I know it's a delicate balance, right of usability and security and all these things. You have to think about so many situations and scenario the fun problems though, Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, and it's such a critical component for you know, we talked about it earlier adoption. Yeah, on rap right, it has to be easy where mom and dad can say, oh, yeah, this is like using Facebook or whatever.
They don't even know. I think that the end goal is invisibility. Yeah, if you can just if there's zero knowledge that there's crypto, a wallet, any of the stuff that's existing. That's that's how you know we were able to reach MAT's adoption. Whether or that does it on its own, I think there's other things I think to get there, but it's that fundamental layer of invisibility that needs to exist to reach it.
Absolutely, And is it you know, at this point in time it has to feel a little bit like Web two but have Web three function and al in the background. But still we're so used to the web to interface. That's the way to go at this point in time.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's this I always think about, like the idea that you expect that we expect as crypto developers or native users. I should say that most people are gonna ever write down a seed phrase or like know how to to wear Like we all are operating in Web three with just like this crazy security hat that we don't even know that we're wearing, right, because the rest of the world doesn't do that, and they it's not that the like they they don't do it,
like they will never do that. And I think that they that it's this expectation of like emulating meeting the user where they already are in terms of security. And I always look at personally at like some of the features that Apple has launched as a north star for security, because I think they're one of the people at the forefront of security and user experience for small things like being really the biometric scanners. Introducing face I D Pass
keys huge win for people out all the everywhere. It's a now this MFA that's built into your phone where you just scan your face and it doesn't really impact your your day to day. It's also not like you're not losing any security because you're not giving the developer access to your face. Yes, right, So they're they're digging doing the hard problem of thinking of how can we make this easy because millions of people all over the
world are going to use this, Right. There's a laundry list of examples from that to UH to hide my email. Those types of behaviors that like they're they're doing the job of making the most secure best UX. And I think that's what a dynamic we really try to emulate is how can we make sure that the security is number one? Like it is, there's nothing else that's more important than protecting users and their funds and providing that UX on.
Top of it, and what they're doing compliments you know what you're trying to build because in parallel the A the hardware is being built with the software exactly use your behavior.
Yeah, I would say part of what we've been working on a lot is like how can we leverage pass keys in MFA because that's that's always going to protect you more. Yes, whether everybody does it today has MFA on their phone, like you all should encourage everyone to and so incorporating features like that where you're just you're immediately going to get more security the second that. So you want to go sign a message that or sign
a transfer that's over one hundred dollars. Let's say you enforce MFA and you say you have to now you have to do face ID to actually be able to transact. That's going to be way better for the end user to provide that.
So on that note, hard question for you. It's twenty thirty five. What does a crypto wallet look like? Is it integrating all the things you're saying where advance the users, the customers are educated about the technology, the phones are up to par, and it's that and more.
I think so. I mean, I think it's back to that simple word of invisibilit like it doesn't exist to the end user. It is just an account that you're logging into. And I think that these devices will get better. I personally think biometrics will we'll get to a new place as well. But it's really just how can you ensure And I think it will become increasingly more important with the rise of agents via AI to have these biometric capabilities because you want to make sure you are
who you are who you say you are. And so I think that's the key thing that we'll hopefully see twenty thirty five. I can't say I know for sure, but.
Oh absolutely, what's on your roadmap? What can you share that's on it for the year.
I think some of the areas like we've kind of spoken about that we're really excited about is back to this protecting of the user in terms of policies, in terms of access controls. This is something that exists to some degree in different financial apps and Web two. And we've already done a lot to launch policy engines preventing like certain addresses you can send to in those types of things. There's gonna be a lot more in the
policy world that we're very excited about. And I'd say, there's there's a bunch of things around, uh, providing more access to more places. I should say, sure, but we'll leave it.
We'll leave it at that for Yeah. I mean, eventually I would hope to see the biggest brands integrate crypto functionality Walletfacehan Theater.
I'd say in the last Yeah, in the last year or so, we've had conversations with some of the biggest
financial institution's, biggest just applications. People building in this outside of crypto like traditional Web two, uh, and everybody is curious how how to build in it, build in it securely, and it really brings out some really fascinating use cases that I don't think traditionally in crypto we've we've thought about or maybe if i'd act to all we've all had a pipe dream of it, but now it's becoming a reality.
Yeah, it's exciting and I'm really really excited to see the future utbates around dynamic and you know which brands integrate these things, because they're going to be big on rams to bring people on chain. One hundred percent awesome, Ellie, thank you so much.
Yeah, this has been fun. Thank you so much for having me.
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