My guests today are Nick Hollins and Ivano Salonia , co-founders of UFO . UFO is an onchain radio network and a spiritual offspring of indie radio. In this episode, Nick, Ivano, and I discuss the work of creating podcasts that grow onchain brands and build community. We consider how Web3 communities make use of Web2, how NFT drops create momentum, and how media consumption habits have changed in the last few years. It was great getting to know Nick and Ivano who are exploring what's possible at ...
Dec 26, 2023β’1 hr 28 min
My guests today are Bryce Ferguson and Jack Kearney , CEO and CTO of Turnkey . Turnkey is a private key as a service provider designed to let app devs and enterprise customers create, manage, and use private keys with a simple API. Turnkey leverages Amazon Nitro, a Trusted Execution Environment as a service, to give customers of all sizes a Secure Enclave in the cloud. This is particularly useful for companies that need to programmatically manage a large volume of private keys. On this episode, ...
Dec 19, 2023β’1 hr 18 min
My guest today is Bunny, aka @ConejoCapital , CEO of Dora . Dora is a user friendly block explorer and blockchain search engine. On this episode, Bunny and I discuss multichain block explorers, unified blockchain interaction interfaces, and the challenges of blockchain indexing. We discuss Dora's search product and it's data product, and it's adventures beyond the EVM. It was fun getting to know Bunny and learn about Dora's journey making blockchain transaction auditing easier for consumers. I h...
Dec 12, 2023β’1 hr 46 min
My guest today is Derek Chiang, CEO of ZeroDev. ZeroDev is a smart account provider whose SDK makes it easy for app devs to integrate social authentication, Passkey signers, paymaster gas sponsorships, transaction bundling, and third party plugins. In this conversation, Derek and I discuss 4337 in depth from the perspective of the app dev. We talk about the difference between wallet signer providers and smart contract account providers, how to choose between the many smart account implementation...
Dec 07, 2023β’1 hr 25 min
Subscribe at web3galaxybrain.com Today's episode is a roundtable discussion about EIP-3074: AUTH and AUTHCALL and EIP-4337: Account Abstraction Using Alt Mempool , two very different approaches to enabling smart contract accounts. To discuss the past, present, and future of 3074 and 4337, I'm joined by Matt Garnett, aka lightclients, developer contributor working on Go Ethereum, Gregory Markou, aka @gregthegreek, CTO at ChainSafe, and Joseph Delong, CTO at Astaria and former CTO at Sushi. It was...
Dec 03, 2023β’1 hr 23 min
My guest today is Biconomy co-founder and CEO Ahmed Al-Balaghi . Since 2019, Biconomy has executed over 40 million metatransactions to help devs make crypto UX easier for their users. Today, Biconomy is one of the top Account Abstraction service providers, boasting significant markeshare across popular EVM chains. In this episode, Ahmed and I sit down to discuss Biconomy's ERC-4337 smart accounts, Paymasters, and Bundlers as a service. We cover session keys, Passkey signers, EIP-7212, multichain...
Nov 29, 2023β’1 hr 21 min
Web3 Galaxy Brain on Gitcoin My guests today are Jacob Frantz and Zak Salmon , founders of FirstMate . FirstMate lets Creators build and host their own secondary NFT marketplaces. Creator-owned marketplaces can display all of an artist or team's collections across minting platforms, enforce royalties, and source liquidity from the most popular marketplaces thanks to Reservoir. In its initial version, FirstMate is served as an app within the Manifold app store, and it will become its own website ...
Nov 24, 2023β’2 hr
My guest today is Nitya Subramanian , founder of Capsule . Capsule is an embedded wallet SDK that leverages Passkeys, MPC, and AA Smart Accounts to simplify the user experience around wallet creation and transaction signing. Apps that integrate Capsule's embedded wallet SDK authenticate users by their email address. Capsule creates a Passkey for each user, which is configured as a signer on a 2/2 Multi-Party Computation. This MPC, in turn, is the signer on a 4337 smart account. Users that have c...
Nov 21, 2023β’58 min
My guest today is Furqan Rydhan , co-founder of Thirdweb . Thirdweb is a popular web3 toolkit for app developers. Thirdweb is used by big brands and indie developers to drop NFTs, enable log-in, and power decentralized games. By the numbers, in September 2023, Thirdweb had 50,000 active developers and 5 million active end-users interacting with products built atop its tools. In this conversation, Furqan and I discuss Thirdweb's focus on app developers, and how that differentiates it from its pee...
Nov 15, 2023β’1 hr 31 min
My guests today are DC Posch and Nalin Bhardwaj, co-founders of Daimo. Daimo is a stablecoin focused iOS wallet built with Passkeys and AA Smart Accounts. On this episode, DC, Nalin, and I discuss their new p256Verifier contract, which is an audited Solidity implementation of p256r1 verification. We discuss the ins-and-outs of gas optimized onchain p256 verification, compare their contract to the FreshCryptoLib implementation, and consider the limitations of precomputation. We cover EIP-7212, wh...
Nov 02, 2023β’1 hr 7 min
My guest today is Pedro Gomes , better known as @pedrouid on twitter. Pedro is the founder of WalletConnect , the most important software for connecting wallets to dapps. On this episode, Pedro joins the show to discuss WalletConnect's origins and the architectural changes introduced in WalletConnect v2. We also go in-depth on the recently finalized EIP-6963: Multi Injected Provider Discovery, which brings together the most popular browser wallets to solve the instability caused when more than o...
Nov 01, 2023β’1 hr 7 min
My guest today is Konrad Kopp , co-founder of Rhinestone. Rhinestone is an exciting project that's researching and developing smart account modules atop the ERC-4337 Account Abstraction standard. AA modules promise to allow smart contract account owners to safely add new functionality and permissions to their accounts, without having to upgrade to new smart contracts. The module pattern described in the draft ERC-6900: Modular Smart Contract Accounts and Plugins aims to create an ecosystem of in...
Oct 25, 2023β’1 hr 20 min
Smart contract wallets are gaining traction amongst devs, because they offer several advantages over traditional EOA accounts. ERC-4337, the Account Abstraction EIP, proposes a standard for creating smart contract accounts that can have interchangeable signers and authentication schemes, allow for gas to be paid by third parties, and create a new mempool of transactions that can be bundled and put onchain by motivated third parties. My guests today are Will Hennessy and Noam Hurwitz , who work o...
Oct 19, 2023β’1 hr 17 min
My guest today is artist, Rhea Myers . Rhea is a programmer, essayist, researcher, thinker, and art practitioner who has been working in the medium of blockchains for over a decade. In this conversation, Rhea takes us through some of the works and writing in her 2011-2021 retrospective, Proof of Work , which is a gorgeous book in the print edition. I've been wanting to interview Rhea for some time. It was exciting to sit down with her for this sprawling and deep conversation about art, technolog...
Oct 12, 2023β’1 hr 58 min
My guests today are James McComish and Peter Ferguson , co-founders of Forum . Forum is an iPhone app where every groupDM has its own shared wallet. James and Peter are among the most knowledgeable builders working with WebAuthn and Passkeys that I've encountered. On this episode, we discuss the ins-and-outs of WebAuthn in production, including largeBlob, cross origin domains, session keys, and the three versions of the spec to date. We also delve into the team's journey building Forum. It was a...
Oct 10, 2023β’1 hr 35 min
The Consumer Crypto Stack lets devs make crypto apps regular people can enjoy. In this talk, I explain the 100x UX improvement enabled by Passkeys, Smart Contract Wallets, L2s, and Gasless interaction design. X.com Video YouTube Zora NFT PDF Slides Today's special episode is the audio version of a research tech talk that I published on October 5, 2023, entitled The Consumer Crypto Stack: The 100x unlock in consumer crypto applications. If you enjoy this talk and want to go deeper, I encourage yo...
Oct 06, 2023β’23 min
My guest today is Sam Hart . Sam is a developer, artist, and biochemist. He is Head of Product & Strategy at Skip Protocol and co-founder at Timewave Labs . He has contributed to the Cosmos ecosystem for years, and is also co-founder of Folia , a blockchain art collective. On September 1, 2023, Sam wrote a long and detailed post to the MakerDAO forums pitching Cosmos as an interesting option for the appchain aspect of Maker's endgame. Inspired by that post, this episode is an introduction to...
Oct 04, 2023β’1 hr 16 min
My guest today is Scott Sunarto . Scott is the founder of Argus Labs , a decentralized gaming company. He was contributor to Dark Forest. On this episode, Scott joins me to discuss his Cookie Clicker Rollup, a toy L2 he built to better understand and demonstrate the architecture of optimistic rollups. We discuss optimistic and zk rollups, censorship resistance, offchain execution, sovereignty, the spectrum of EVM equivalence, and much more. If you're interested in learning more about L2 architec...
Oct 02, 2023β’1 hr 51 min
My guest today is Jose Aguinaga . Jose is Head of Digital Custody Services at SEBA Bank in Switzerland. He was previously Head of Engineering at HOPR. Jose is also the creator of passkeys.is and mpc.is, two valuable educational resources that describe and demonstrate passkeys and multi-party computation, respectively. On this episode, Jose and I go deep on elliptic curve cryptography, ECDSA, passkeys, homomorphic encryption, distributed key generation, account abstraction smart wallets and much ...
Sep 22, 2023β’2 hr 9 min
My guests today are Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen , two of three co-founders of Obvious . Obvious is a smart wallet company with three products. The Obvious Wallet is a multi-chain 4337 account abstraction smart wallet that was among the earliest full featured AA consumer products on the market. Obvious Embed is an AA wallet that third-party devs can integrate into their own dapps. Obvious Money is a stablecoin focused smart wallet app aimed at emerging markets in Africa and South Americ...
Sep 20, 2023β’1 hr 22 min
Today, I'm joined by Vivian Phung. Viv is the 23 year old solo founder of Snowball, a Web3 dev tools provider focused on mobile apps and webapps. Snowball's first product, Igloo, will give developers a simple solution for SSO authentication, AA smart wallet, and onramping in one SDK. Igloo is currently in private alpha on testnet. Prior to starting Snowball, Viv was co-founder of Dora, a multichain block explorer search engine, and she was an engineer on the Instagram feed team before that. In t...
Sep 14, 2023β’1 hr 1 min
Today, I'm joined by Gami. Gami is a crypto creator and the founder of GnarsDAO, the skateboarding-centric nounish community. Gami is one of a small number of practitioners in an emerging discipline that I call "crypto production." Gami led the creation of several onchain happenings, including GnarsDAO, a DAO dedicated to onboarding skaters to Web3, Forgeries, a nounish open edition and onchain Noun raffle, as well as an arts patronage dao, an onchain tontine, and much more. In this episode, Gam...
Sep 08, 2023β’1 hr 55 min
Today's episode is all about EIP-7212 . To understand EIP-7212, first we need to talk about Passkeys. Passkeys are a new authentication standard designed to replace passwords. With passkeys, when you sign into an app or website, a passkey is generated on your device, and saved either locally, to a passkey manager, or to a hardware device like a Yubikey. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla are adopting passkeys because they are more secure than the traditional username and password scheme. Pass...
Sep 06, 2023β’1 hr 23 min
My guest today is Henri Stern , CEO of Privy . Privy is an authentication and embedded wallet SDK. With Privy, dapp developers can allow their users to sign in with their existing wallet, or generate an embedded wallet associated with an email, SMS, or SSO provider such as AppleID or Gmail. Privy's embedded wallet powers friend.tech, the breakout social dapp launched in August 2023. With Privy, friend.tech generates a new embedded wallet for each user that signs in, allowing the PWA dapp to sign...
Aug 29, 2023β’1 hr 30 min
My guests today are John C. Palmer , Steve Klebanoff , and Danny Aranda , founding members of PartyDAO , creators of the Party Protocol . Party is a dapp for onchain group coordination. With Party, a small group of friends or a large group of strangers can come together to raise funds and buy an NFT, trade tokens, or complete any other onchain activity together. Party is a group wallet with onchain governance, designed to allow parties of people to move quickly and get things done onchain. On th...
Aug 23, 2023β’1 hr 42 min
My guest today is Paul Razvan Berg . Paul is a longtime Solidity developer whose open source tools , including prb-math and prb-proxy, are integrated into many Ethereum contracts and protocols. Paul is also the co-founder and lead developer of Sablier, the token streaming protocol which launchced its v2 in July 2023. On this episode, Paul and I go in-depth on three topics. First, we discuss a handful of his influential open source repos. Second, we talk about testing in Foundry and recap the Bra...
Aug 17, 2023β’1 hr 51 min
My guest today is Tom S. Lehman, who goes by Middlemarch on Twitter. Tom is the creator of Ethscriptions, an NFT standard for inscribing base64 encoded URIs in the data field of EVM transactions. Prior to Ethscriptions, Tom was co-founder and CEO of popular lyrics site and content company Genius. Ethscriptions are inspired both by Bitcion Inscriptions and the Ethereum practice of appending hex encoded UTF-8 strings to the data field of regular transactions, a gesture that has been used by hacker...
Aug 01, 2023β’1 hr 49 min
My guest today is Decent co-founder and CTO Will Kantaros. Decent is an NFT service provider that has helped over a thousand creators deploy NFT projects to Polygon and other EVMs. According to Will, hundreds of thousands of collectors have minted over six million NFTs on Decent's contracts. Their new product The Box is a web checkout SDK that lets users pay for Mints and other transactions on one chain, with assets held on another. On this episode, Will and I discuss Decent's evolution from a N...
Jul 25, 2023β’49 min
My guest today is Christian Montoya , Senior Project Manager of Metamask Snaps . Metamask Snaps is a major upgrade to Metamask slated for September 2023. Snaps transforms Metamask into a programmable platform, roughly akin to an App Store. Snaps is an execution environment where third party developeres can, if granted permission by the user, run sandboxed Secure ECMAScript as a user prepares to make a transaction, or periodically in the background. Snaps will debut in the browser extension, but ...
Jul 18, 2023β’1 hr 22 min
My guest today is Reservoir founder Peter Watts . Reservoir is an NFT API provider that makes it easy to build cross-chain NFT interactivity into any app. On this episode, Peter shares how he got his start building music and streaming apps and how music NFTs led him to starting Reservoir with a co-founder he had never met in person. We discuss Reservoir's demand driven approach to development prioritization, how they deal with tech debt, and why it is that no one else is making a unified read/wr...
Jul 11, 2023β’1 hr 26 min
