Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

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.

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

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 interoperable modules to augment the various 4337 implementations that choose to support it.

On this episode, Konrad and I discuss the different approaches to account abstraction contract architecture, including Safe and the ERC-2535 Diamond standard. We dive into the details of ERC-6900, and discuss the compelling Rhinestone video demo, which shows how a user might activate and disable smart account modules like Passkey validation, dollar cost averaging, and recurring payments. We also cover the grant that Rhinestone recently received from the Ethereum Foundation's 4337 team to develop a Module Registry, a public goods venue where security audit firms and others can attest to the safety of specific modules.

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(00:00:00) Intro

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 on Alchemy's Account Abstraction team.

In this episode, Will and Noam walk me through the ins-and-outs of Account Abstraction. We discuss the actors in the lifecycle of an AA transaction, how different signing schemes like Magic link and onchain r1 verification fit in, and how AA wallets will connect to dapps. We also dive into Alchemy's latet offering, AccountKit, which provides a suite of options for building smart contract accounts.

It was fantastic getting to talk to Will and Noam who are knowledgable builders making quality implementations at a crucial software frontier.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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, technology, culture, politics, and everything in between. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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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 treat talking to James and Peter about their experience building with Passkeys. I hope you enjoy the show.

While Forum is fundraising, as always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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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.

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 you to check out recent and upcoming episodes of Web3 Galaxy Brain where I get to talk to many of the people working with Passkeys, Account Abstraction smart wallets, and L2s.

If you get value from Web3 Galaxy Brain and would like to support the show, please send me a tweet length testimony explaining what makes it special to you. I'll post the best testimonies to the website to help others discover the show, too. Thank you.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

(00:01:13) The Consumer Crypto Stack

(00:01:35) The Problem

(00:04:05) The Consumer Crypto Stack's Values

(00:06:10) The 4 parts of the Consumer Crypto Stack

(00:06:45) PWAs & Apps

(00:07:50) Passkeys

(00:09:49) EU's Digital Markets Act

(00:10:44) Smart Contract Wallets & Account Abstraction

(00:16:15) L2s

(00:19:22) Gasless User Experience Design

(00:21:00) Case Study: Passkeys and largeBlob in Warpcast

(00:22:00) Summary

(00:22:20) Outro

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 Cosmos for EVM devs. In this conversation, Sam and I discuss the major components of Cosmos: CometBFT, Cosmos SDK, Inter-Blockchain Communication (IBC), VMs like CosmWasm, and client tooling like CosmJS. We also compare the design philosophy of Cosmos and Ethereum. Good starting points for interested builders are included at the end of the interview.

It was fun chatting with Sam about Cosmos, which is an ambitious project whose many flexible affordances can make it challenging to get a handle on. My thanks to Sam for sharing his knowledge. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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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 architecture from first principles, this episode is for you.

My thanks to FirstMate who provided the recording studio for today's episode. If you're creating NFTs and want to run your own branded secondary market that aggregates listings across all NFT marketplaces and enforces NFT secondary royalties, check out FirstMate at firstmate.xyz.

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Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

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 more.

If you're interested in the frontier of self custody smart wallet user experience, this episode is for you.

It was a pleasure talking to Jose who is knowledgable, humble, and generous. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro

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 America.

On this episode we discuss the team's path from building a traditional EOA software wallet to account abstraction smart wallets. We get into the tradeoffs of Shamir, MPC, and Passkeys, and the challenges building smart wallets in a massively multichain world. We also talk about fiat money platform incumbents, like M-Pesa, India's Unified Payments Interface, IBAN, and how crypto fits into the mix.

It was a pleasure chatting with Himanshu and Jebu who are moving quickly at the intersection of cutting edge smart wallet tech and global consumer applications. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

Links

Chapters

(00:00:00) Intro