Episode link:
https://www.citizencosmos.space/pedrogomes

Episode name:
Pedro Gomes, Wallets, DID's & Adoption.

In this episode, Citizen Cosmos has a conversation Pedro Gomez, co-founder of Wallet Connect about his journey starting in traditional FinTech and how regulators and a hackathon helped to being him to where he is now. As always, the devil's advocate has some great questions around, safety and privacy that always raises it's head in Web 3 conversations. Pedro has some wonderful insights into what he hopes the future will be. The conversation spans a wide range of topics, including physics, sociology, economics, motivation and Web 3. Pedro also gives a run down of what we can expect at WalletCon, you will not want to miss it.

Citizen Cosmos
Good space time, y'all. In this episode in the Citizen Cosmos podcast, I spoke to Pedro Gomez, the co-founder of Wallet Connect, a web wallet and a communication protocol. Along with Pedro, we discussed the dark side of fintech connections between physics sociology and Web 3 and what can be considered as a crypto wallet. We also spoke about account abstraction, developers, responsibility decentralization spectrum and adoption of Web3.

Citizen Cosmos
At the end of the day, this is communication tools, and if the communities will not communicate, there will be nothing. I think semantics does definitely play a huge role in understanding to everything.

Pedro
An address on the blockchain is a reference to a blockchain account, and a blockchain account itself is not even a wallet. When you have money in a bank account, you don't technically on it. You have a contract with the bank.

Citizen Cosmos
Hi everybody. Welcome to a new episode of Citizen Cosmos podcast. Today I have Pedro Gomez with me today, the founder of Wallet Connect. Pedro, Hi.

Pedro
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Hi. How are you doing?

Citizen Cosmos
I'm very good, man. I'm glad for having you because even though you know, not everybody knows yet about wallet connect, I think that it's been, in my opinion, very under the radar for some time. In my opinion, it should be. It's not everybody knows about it, but it should be. A lot more known And I think my goal here today is not that is to get to know you, of course.

Citizen Cosmos
But I think by getting to know you and the audience, getting to know you and the listeners and everybody else, we can get to know Wallet Connect more as well. So if my first thing to you, just introduce yourself. Tell us about everything you do. What are you working on? What are you interested in? Everything you want.

Pedro
Yeah. I mean, like, wallet connect and me are kind of one in the same, and it's been like that for quite a while. I mean, I started, like, programing into, like, online shops and e-commerce, that was kind of the first thing that got my hands into writing JavaScript. But then one of the things that interested me the most was actually payments, because once you actually complete the order, you have like this whole process with like Stripe credit cards and like PayPal.

Pedro
And that started getting me really interested. And at the time I was living in London, so I applied to like this very neobank at the time and there was like kind of targeting a youth audience. So when I joined them, it was really cool because you had this experience of what it was like to work in the finance industry or fintech, as they call it, but it also kind of like revealed a lot of the dark side of it.

Pedro
And I think that's really what brought me into crypto. I actually did a I had heard of Bitcoin, but I didn't really pay much attention. I got to just like, Oh, internet money cool by and I didn't pay attention for it for a long time. And then I joined FinTech and I was like, Damn, this could really use some change.

Pedro
And I was working on it and it was really annoying to kind of like build features in them that have the regulators essentially cool it down to like basically nothing. And all of the innovation was like dead There was like nothing you could do. So in 2016 and I heard about Ethereum and I was like, Oh, smart contracts, this is this completely different than Bitcoin?

Pedro
Like, this is actually something you could do, something you can build like savings accounts. You could build like people like sharing expenses and everything. You could create some interesting financial products. But for me, the personal banking was always the most important thing. That's why I started working in wallets. And in 2017, I went on full time into crypto and I was just trying to build the wallet.

Pedro
I actually joined the project back in the day. That was called Balance. It's no longer around, but Balance was trying to build both a portfolio manager and a wallet, and we ended up having this issue very early on of like, Hey, how do I connect my wallet? Then everything was Metamask Metamask here, Metamask there. And it was essentially saying, Oh, the normal user is just going to go into your desktop and download the Chrome extension into the Chrome browser, and this is Web3.

Pedro
And it was quite a disappointing because I didn't really see that taking off. If you think about the Internet, one of the most successful applications on earth is Instagram. And Instagram was a mobile only application from the very start. They didn't even have a browser app for a long time. So if you didn't make the experience mobile I thought Web 2 didn’t stand a chance.

Pedro
So I essentially designed Wallet connect as a protocol for that. I was lucky at the time, back in 2018 when I started working on Wallet connect to get a grant from the ... Foundation, and that's when I went solo to build a project. And yeah, the good thing about Web 3 is that there's a lot of support for open source, so I was able to focus on it for a long, long time.

Pedro
And then in 2021, that's when I took it to the next level and we raised our seed round, then turn it into a company. We went from 1 to 2 to 10 to 25 and now we're 25 people working on this. And it's such a huge project. And I kind of skipped one of the most important parts, which was was when I started getting into Cosmos, because I actually in 2019 was spending some time in Berlin.

Pedro
And in Berlin I had some tendermint people in the office because I was working at the full node and they told me about the Cosmos hackathon that was happening and I was like, Damn, this is interesting. Let's let's do something that not Ethereum Let's, let's go to the Cosmos hackathon and work on it. And I, I kid you not like I got lucky getting the team.

Pedro
I got the winning team. All I did was like, build the cosmos wallet and a front end interface for that Dapp you will not believe. The winning team was the one who designed CosmWasm which is now such a huge project, and that was like damn. I was in the same room with that hackathon project, so I'm really glad to have met all those folks who built that and they've done something so impressive with CosmWasm

Pedro
But what I liked about this hackathon is kind of like open my mind of what blockchain should be like. It's so different, though. The Ethereum ecosystem, and I have to say that, like, it inspired a lot of my work for the walletconnect version 2 today. Like bridging from Ethereum to Cosmos was probably what made Wallet Connect version one, go to version two.

Citizen Cosmos
So just for the record, I am a decentralization Maxi So the name is Citizen Cosmos. We have the podcast. Yeah, but we cover Ethereum ecosystem and our goal is to bridge the layer zero, the community and our, you know, I mean, we can go and build all the tools we want, but at the end of the day, this is communication tools.

Citizen Cosmos
And if the communities will not communicate, there will be nothing to do. So is this for the record? And by the way, what fascinates me, the reason I was smiling all this time was you would like telling your geography like London, Madeira Full Node. 2019. And I was like, Why don't we know each other? Like, what the fuck, man?

Pedro
Like, it was a huge coincidence.

Citizen Cosmos
I was there in full node in 2019 before we started to record this Lisbon and then. Now what's going on, man? It's this fascinating.

Pedro
I don't know. Like even the. The lead investor for Wallet connect was based in full node, and we didn't know each other when I was at full Node. Yes. And then we just, like, ended up they ended up investing in Wallet Connect in 2021 and there was like, Oh, you were in the office in 20 2019, so were we.

Pedro
And then that.

Citizen Cosmos
Laugh

Pedro
We didn’t even know each other

Citizen Cosmos
Hilarious hilarious man, Hilarious I recorded my our first episode in Full Node actually the first ever episode of Citizen Cosmos three years ago was recorded in full Node. There was nobody there. It was dead. But and the episode has really bad sound because we took one of the glass rooms with like, Yeah, it was this, this like not working.

Citizen Cosmos
A very well. Pedro Before I go into all my favorite stories, because you mentioned Cosmwasm as well, and Cosmwasm is like one of my favorite and let's not go there. So lets taks about you and wallets And before we get to wallets though, before we talk about wallets and what does it mean for you and what does it mean for the industry?

Citizen Cosmos
I have actually some personal questions, and one of them is physics. I know you studied physics, and physics for me is again, a very, very kind of topic. I'm all my life evolves a lot around that. And I'm curious is if you see connections between the world of physics and between the world that you were trying to build in Web3 I'm purposefully not put in any specific questions.

Citizen Cosmos
I want to ask you that very vaguely and see your opinion if it's possible.

Pedro
I haven't talked about physics in so long. It's quite the refreshing topic. Like I have to say, I forgot most of it, but one of the fields that I was like mostly interested was the electromagnetic fields and lights and optics, because I think that you could draw so many interesting parallels between like sociology and psychology with electromagnet fields because electromagnetic fields, essentially you could sense that like if you have a bunch of nodes in the same frequency, they will eventually create a higher intensity field, and that would influence a much bigger field.

Pedro
And you could essentially learn about this electromagnetic just in general and understand sociology in general. Like for me, I learned more about sociology through physics than reading about sociology. And I think sociology is one of the most important topics because we always talk about economics, And economics definitely drives a lot of the incentives for people. But as human beings, we're extremely social, and a lot of things that we do are not financially rational.

Pedro
So finance and sociology is what makes economics. But I would say that sociology makes more out of economics than even finance itself. Finance is just a number in economics.

Citizen Cosmos
Can you move back to Madera? So I have someone to go to coffee with and have a conversation with. Like it doesn't work like that man and like I need to. Yeah. Yeah. The listeners sorry, the audience. And so Pedro originally is from Madeira, where I live now, and Madeira is a very small place and definitely the I don't want to pull the quilt but just to, you know, to just say that out loud, that the unfortunately the players in the, in the web3 industry that Madeira has attracted haven't been the most was the right word.

Pedro
Not builders.

Citizen Cosmos
Not.

Pedro
Developers of buildings.

Citizen Cosmos
Yes not that yes I love I like it. I like we are on the same page.

Pedro
Yes. And same frequency.

Citizen Cosmos
Even better same frequency. I love it, Pedro. And so the thing is, was physics is fascinating. I mean, I have personally, I think, not just in my interviews, but over the course of the last like ten years working with blockchains, the amount of people who I met that come from the physics, the chemistry world, the biology world, go into blockchain and then see all those connections where, you know, there is a lot, there is really, really, really a lot of things.

Citizen Cosmos
And it's fascinating that you are seeing that as well. I really like that.

Pedro
Yeah. I would say like what's interesting about blockchain is because of its decentralized and permissionless nature, it's not just decentralized because to some extent Google is decentralized. Google is a massive organization that has data centers all over the world that keeps the Internet's running, but it's not a permissionless open system. So if you make it that decentralized, open and permissionless system, what you end up having is that you have a virtual or digital world that actually acts like a natural world.

Pedro
So you can actually immolate the rules of physics and biology and sociology in the actual digital world. And that's what makes this technology so impressive. Why I came to blockchain because of finance, because I was working fintech. But this has a much, much bigger impact than that. And I would say like one of the my biggest interests today is decentralized identity and how that's actually going to influence daos and organizations in the future.

Pedro
So I think that it's really natural that we see all of these different academia people getting attracted to what it would look like, not just simulate, but actually putting in practice all of these models and theories that they have been working on for so long.

Citizen Cosmos
Absolutely. And, you know, just again, for the record, for the audience there, and especially today, because we have a few people in the audience who are asking questions and I will ask them at the end. But we have another recording tomorrow with a very cool academic guy, and there is a lot there that could be like the dark side that academia sometimes would bring that.

Citizen Cosmos
But there is a lot there that we can, I think, explore and and then definitely put in and I will have some questions with you about DID’s But first, I have a question for you about wallets. And this is not going to be a question, but rather a comment on which I would love to hear your thoughts.

Citizen Cosmos
And so here is the thing. Long story short, I was talking was it two days ago to somebody about wallets and about blockchain? And this is a person not from this world. And I was trying to explain and yet again, like I've happened over the last seven, eight, ten years, you come to the point of a wallet and blockchain isn't really a wallet because, well, you don't really have a wallet.

Citizen Cosmos
You interacted with a database where you have 24 words and that's your access and it's what does a wallet mean for you? What is a wallet for you? A For a person who is definitely built today one of the two or three biggest like open source Web three related because not all of the Web three three big ones are Web three, in my opinion, if you first says so, what's your opinion on wallets?

Citizen Cosmos
What is it for the industry and what is a wallet essentially in the blockchain world for you?

Pedro
I love this question because there's always a lot of misunderstanding. I really does. Like when I see people online saying, Oh, this user has this wallet, and then they what I actually refers to some address on the blockchain. An address on the blockchain is a reference to a blockchain account, and a blockchain account itself is not even a wallet.

Pedro
The wallet is actually the software or even hardware that actually manages the keys that control different accounts. So at the end of the day, what wallets are are key managers. And then these key managers have logic associated that control accounts. So you could even go to the most basic scenario, which is the seed phrases, which is the most common, I would say is like 95 or even higher percent of what wallets are today is essentially the seed phrase is just a form of you recovering the wallet.

Pedro
And the wallet will be instantiated as a form of software that manages multiple keys. And for each corresponding key, you have an account. And then those accounts are referenced in a specific blockchain as an address. But then the same accounts could actually mean something different in another blockchain. Therefore it gets a different address. And this is a little bit more confusing when it comes to Etherum because Ethereum created this pattern where the same account does reference with the same address in all the blockchains, and we've done some standardization around this to kind of solve this problem.

Pedro
And it's very confusing because people kind of just assume, Oh, it's all the same, but it's not because if you have one key in one chain that gives you a different account than the the same key on a different chain. So essentially you have two accounts and one key. And then people kind of get confused with all of this semantics.

Pedro
And that's like, which one is the wallet? While the wallet is the control of the keys that give you access to accounts and all of these blockchains. And then the addresses are just way for people to Identify as public information of which account is yours.

Citizen Cosmos
I think semantics does definitely play a huge role in understanding to everything, and especially with wallets. We've seen that for sure, mix people up completely, right? Yeah. Okay. Back again to wallets though. What do you think about when you kind of really started to speak about it? And I'm still, though, like in a more open and detailed way.

Citizen Cosmos
What's your opinion today on I don't want to name specific projects, but there are a lot of projects out there posing as Web3, and a lot of those projects are wallets or some kind of infrastructure for Web3 which are under the hood unfortunately don't really well, they're shit. So there's just like, say, like that, Yeah. What's your opinion on all of that and how can we move the industry forwards?

Pedro
Well, I think the way that Wall connect tries to move the industry forward is to lower the barrier of entry for wallets by being a company that builds open source software. What we're doing is we're democratizing the access of developers to build better experiences because I think that given the open and permissionless nature of blockchain, it's inevitable there will be thousands of.

Pedro
Wallets. Like right now, on Wallet connect alone, there's 200 wallets that's supported. I expect this number to go ten times more in the next 3 to 5 years. And this is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, because everyone will have a very different experience of how they manage their keys. And at the end of the day, what makes a good wallet?

Pedro
It's how they manage their keys. So if there's a project out there claiming to be a wallet and you do not have control over your keys, then it's not a wallet like it does not fulfill the promise of a wallet. It's a bank account. And the analogies are very clear in the traditional financial world because in your wallet you have cash.

Pedro
Cash which you control as a bearer asset that it's yours because you own it. While when you have money in a bank account, you don't technically own it, you have a contract with the bank to potentially give you back. And now there's regulations that protect you so that banks can steal from you. So the definition of a wallet should be that those funds or those assets are in a 100% control of yours.

Pedro
So a wallet must fulfill this premise. So if you have something like custodial, like at Coinbase account a Binance account, a kraken account, or a Gemini account, these are not wallets because they control the keys. But if there's a wallet out there that gives you a seed phrase or even gives you control over a smart contract wallet, or they have some form of authentication where you control the shards of a multi-party computation, those are wallets because at the end of the day, the user has the control of what this key does that what a wallet definition should be.

Citizen Cosmos
I think for anyone out there who has ever came into contact with trying to launch crypto project, a blockchain project, especially an open source blockchain projects, and I'm not talking about infrastructure, I'm talking about like, you know, blockchains. I think it is quite not obvious, but it is a very big obstacle signers and wallets. It's a huge, huge obstacle.

Citizen Cosmos
If you want to keep open source, if you really want to keep Web 3, it's a pain in the ass, you know. What's your advice for startups out there that are trying to today to build Web3 open, verifiable blockchains and are looking for a good place to onboard users with signers and wallets and whatnot? Whatever. What's your advice to those teams?

Pedro
Yeah, so I think that is something that I always followed was there's so many new blockchain, like not just like blockchains as and they spin up like a new Ethereum chain or Solana or Cosmos, but like they actually build a brand new ecosystem from scratch because they're trying to innovate into something different. They don't want to build on the same building blocks as the existing blockchains.

Pedro
What they have always missed is the actual user experience, and we don't need to create a dedicated blockchain to change the user experience. But there are certain primitives that should kind of just become the default for new blockchains. And one of the things that has been taught for so many years, like Vitalik, has been talking about account abstraction as this concept.

Pedro
And now we have matured to a point where we understand what Account abstraction means. We actually have standards for it. We just have to implement it. But I'm surprised there isn't a blockchain out there that just started from the get go with the account abstraction built into the protocol, because if you had account abstraction built into the protocol, that would mean that like a lot of the wallet design would have completely change.

Pedro
You don't need to kind of like find all of these alternative solutions that go around to make the wallet experience easier because the protocol would support it. So having account abstraction support at the protocol level for a new blockchain would be my best advice I could give, because you would have what it takes to onboard the next million users which current blockchains don't have.

Pedro
And I think that's something that it's still unexplored. And I would like to see it like being more developed by now. So for me, the biggest ask for like new blockchains and I mean like completely new blockchain, that's not just another cosmos based blockchain or a like an Ethereum based blockchain is that they would build into the actual protocol some form of account abstraction.

Pedro
And as I said, the like, I was quite surprised to see that account abstraction has been talked about for like years. It's not something as a new concept, in fact it's been for long. So for that long that there are standards, there are implementations today about accountable traction, but having it built into the actual blockchain would completely change because a lot of the things that we see today are regarding NPC wallets, like kind of building shards of keys or even smart contract wallets, which has delegates, keys.

Pedro
This could all be like first class citizen into the actual blockchain because it shouldn't be something that we hack away around the blockchain. The blockchain itself should already come with this pre-built in there would completely change how wallets function and it doesn't even change how wall connect with function is just like makes key management significantly easier because it's only hard because the blockchain kind of just took a step aside and said, Oh, I don't care about key management.

Citizen Cosmos
Do you think that's a responsibility? Because key management is a lot about responsibility, right? And I understand what you're saying, which of course helps adoption and it helps onboarding and it helps solves a lot of problems. On the other hand, if we starting to take responsibility again, are we not getting back to the point where we came from, where we take too much responsibility and then the user is kind of left of hoping that, well, they will do the blockchain will do everything for me?

Pedro
Well, I think it's more about like creating enough primitives into the blockchain that makes like the wallet design much easier. At the end of the day, the purpose of wallet design is to make key management secure and easy and trying to balance those two together. But a lot of the things are kind of impossible or just limited by the actual blockchain design, like something as simple as delegates.

Pedro
Keys like delegate keys is something that should kind of just come out of the box. But what has been done today with smart contracts is that you essentially build an application and now you immolate the experience or what an account would look like directly from a key. But now you have the application, which is the smart contract owning your assets, and then you have like multiple keys that actually can control those assets.

Pedro
Why is this not just built into the actual protocol, like you would make so much more sense that you can have multiple keys controlling the account and you have some form of registered method where you can add new keys. This is like pretty standard like everywhere in the internet, but then blockchains kind of just oversee that and then really take care of it, I.

Citizen Cosmos
Believe Bitshares was well Grafanna right and and Steemit I believe had some solutions to that. And of course I remember like launching a fork of this in 16. And I remember you had we had four or five sets I think it was four sets of keys active key. Then the master key. And, and I think we're coming back to it now.

Citizen Cosmos
I've seen a lot of that and this is how I guess slowly moving to the DID topic, right? Yeah. Let's go with the question. I go with everybody who loves the DIDs and I love to hear opinions on this. And again, this is a bit of a devil's advocate question, but it's a question that, in my opinion, should be answered.

Citizen Cosmos
So I'm the kind of person and I think a lot of people are out there can see that sometimes over complications, create certain necessities. And, you know, the most simple example of the DID is a private and a public key, right? We have a private and a public key. Why on earth? And this is a question, do we need anything beyond that to identify anyone?

Pedro
Well, I guess the problem is how you actually associate data to that private key and public key. I think one of the things that kind of took DID in the wrong direction was they wanted to have as many entities and organizations involved into the project, and then everyone that was involved was kind of unwilling to coordinate like some standards and best practices.

Pedro
So what they created was an abstraction of saying like, Oh, whatever form of authentication you have in your system would be compatible in DID we just like prefix it add the new method, and now all of the sudden we created a whole new branch. So the problem is that the fragmentation became extremely overcomplicated and it's a little bit inevitable because everyone will have a slightly different use case, but it's, it's also kind of our job to create like working groups to find that common denominator between, yeah, those use cases.

Pedro
At the end of the day, what DID brings that a simple private public key doesn't bring is linked data is how can I take some form of data, sign it and then add some more data. And instead of trying to sign this new data, once again, I can create this web of trust which I can link back to the original data that I signed and essentially scale the trust from that first signature to far more data than the user needs to sign.

Pedro
It actually tries to reduce the amount of signatures the user needs to control by then delegating responsibility to a third party who can use and attestation from the first party to then go to another party. And it creates this web of trust, right? That's what DIDs try to eventually achieve, is creating these attestations that can link data across the whole Internet.

Pedro
And we can even use the blockchains as the roots of this trust. Actually, one project that does this very well is ceramic. So ceramic builds the roots of trust in a particular blockchain and then builds with DIDs. What they've done is they kind of standardized like the data models around DIDs and created this route of trust from one blockchain accounts.

Pedro
And then it can link to much bigger data sets and you can actually search data much more easily.

Citizen Cosmos
I mean, it sounds all cool, but, you know, like how do we well, I guess we cannot avoid like things we cannot know in the future. But where is the guarantee that, again, that data, even though it's for Cryptographically encrypted, you know, but it's a cat and mouse game, right? Always between security and cryptography and whatever. Where is it

Citizen Cosmos
agian the proof. The guarantees sorry not the proof that in ten years time or 20 years time there will be no cool way to decrypt that data. And you know, we will not create another Web 2 on top of Web 3.

Pedro
Well, yeah, I guess that's a fight that we always have to fight, right? That's we want to be pragmatic and you want to build something that works today without actually compromising the values of what it would actually build a more decentralized future. You know, every company has this internal fight, you know, because you don't want to get left behind, but at the same time, you don't want to compromise the ethos of the ecosystem.

Pedro
So I think what we are going to eventually achieve is we're going to find a good balance between what goes on chain and what goes off chain and finding that balance that can scale every everyone to kind of work on use cases and applications that people care about and are adopted worldwide, but at the same time utilize blockchain as a way of forming trust, right?

Pedro
Because at the end of the day, a web of trust is nothing without the roots of that trust. And Blockchains are the best source for that, the roots of trust. So that's what Web3 means. Web3 is how can we have cryptographically ensured data that is trusted by proofs on chain? How much on chain do we need to put proofs on?

Pedro
And finding that balance is something that is still yet to be decided. I guess ten years from now we'll see whether we have succeeded or we have just created a new web too, with slightly less trusted parties. But you know, it's moving the needle forward.

Citizen Cosmos
Where is the border for you personally? As for a founder of not just a big but an important project, in my opinion, too, today's at least infrastructure, infrastructure for sure. Where is that border that the ethos? I mean, for example, I'll give you mine, I'll give you my border. And for example, right now, you know, we're talking about all these things, but we're using, you know, Riverside and you know, where we're kind of like, I'm going to go and use Twitter today and, you know, so my border doesn't obviously stop here because I understand that I cannot reach I am producing educational content.

Citizen Cosmos
I cannot reach the people. I'm trying to help to understand what this all that stuff means, you know, without going to those platforms. So I guess. But where is the border for a project that, of course, has a lot more meaning in terms of to the whole industry? I would say.

Pedro
So I guess like I would start with like what? What does it look like for engineering to evolve in a completely modular system? Like if you think about computers, like you had to get the hardware and the software from the same vendor and eventually hardware became commoditized and now we don't need to get the hardware and software from the same vendor.

Pedro
You can just get any hardware and get any software and then inside of that software, then they get even more modularized. And even in server architecture, like we've seen this explosion ten years ago of microservices, which meant instead of building a monolithic server that has all of the features and this is what the app looks like, then we started building mini servers that had very clear specific responsibilities that eventually kind of modularized and you could actually distribute the risk or even the trust across different services.

Pedro
They kind of optimized for different use cases. So that's what Web3 is going to do. We're going to slowly split out different parts of the Internet and bring more trust lessness into each one of them, and the most valuable ones are going to get first. That's why finance was the first one. Then we started seeing speculative assets like NFT and art.

Pedro
Eventually we'll see like actual organizations, which are probably the most valuable ones, like nonprofit organizations on for profit organizations actually get a decentralized and not actually living under some form of jurisdiction. And I think that kind of you always have to treat each case very different, like, let's say we're using this streaming service. What is the primitive behind this that would, if we decentralize it, would allow to have like multiple clients instead of this client would be the official client.

Pedro
There would be a lot of unofficial clients. That's a form of decentralization. If we you just break down the service into microservices and then one of the core microservices becomes decentralized, you have taken a step forward into the centralization in this case of streaming, it would be a Transco there. And there's already projects working on this. Like life Peer is essentially a decentralized transcoding service.

Pedro
So if we could make multiple clients for the Life peer transcoding service, then you essentially have decentralized what's it as a streaming service and at Wallet Connect we do the exact same. We basically broke down everything that makes what Wallet Connect is and we came down with like a publish and subscribe network that essentially routes messages between peers and the other components that are not so easy decentralized.

Pedro
We just allow people to self-hosted so you can self-hosted yourself or you can use our cloud hosted version. But at the end of the day, we all kind of bind together through the same decentralized relay network that routes messages between peers.

Citizen Cosmos
And what about I mean, you mentioned, you know, decentralization and you mentioned it several times and this is another one of those like, you know, not tricky, but a question that I think should decentralization be always everywhere or is it not very decentralized to say that everybody should be decentralized? They know what I mean. Like, is there room?

Citizen Cosmos
Like what I'm asking you, do you think that in a world from that we will see in ten years? Because what have been speaking about ten years, Let's go with ten years, Is everything going to be decentralized or is there room, in your opinion, for services and for companies that are not decentralized and might not even ever become decentralized?

Pedro
Oh, absolutely. Like it. It's important to note that, like decentralization will come to the most valuable services and assets and products that impact people's lives. But there's a lot of satellites, assets, services and products that will not decentralized because we can't justify the cost. For example, like if you go back a lot of time, like democracy, they got a little bit decentralized By creating three powers.

Pedro
You have the executive power, the legislative power and Judicial power. So by breaking it down, you decentralized what was a governance to some extent. And you kind of have to start with the most valuable parts. And I think right now we have decentralized currency, which was very core to a lot of social, economical causes. And how humans operate and eventually will decentralize other components.

Pedro
In the case of I, that's essentially what I was trying to give. The example is like we, we decentralize the most core component, but everything around it, it's still centralized because the cost does not justify the decentralization and trying to decentralize it would actually become inefficient and someone else would just like put out there a centralized version that people would use because it was cheaper to use.

Pedro
So we need to always find the cost to decentralized versus the value that it brings. So if technology hasn't met that mark, it will not become decentralized. So it's a matter of time that more things are decentralized, but it's inevitable that some things cannot be decentralized.

Citizen Cosmos
You mentioned that decentralized currency and my my nickname on Twitter, not the actual NIC, but a description of the NIC has been decentralized decentralization for about six years now, five, six years now. And, um, do you think with decentralized like currency, do you really, like ready to say that, hey, it is decentralized today? And do you think that people who use currency think that currency's decentralized?

Pedro
Well, I guess there's a lot of currency. So when I say we decentralized currency, as with the centralized cryptocurrencies, like the most basic functionality of currency for cryptocurrency has been fulfill. If you wanna send some funds from A to B between two parties who are pseudonymous across the Internet without any geographical limitations, we have achieved that. There's no trusted parties in the middle like we can do this.

Pedro
I think what we've done once we introduced smart contracts into the picture is that we have gotten way, way more ambitious. It's like, why stop at currency? Let's do way more, let's decentralize the whole Internet. And once you decentralize the Internet, you have essentially decentralized one of the most core components of society today. The next one would be the governments themselves.

Pedro
But that's even more ambitious.

Citizen Cosmos
I think we should start there. But the semantics, I think, is the last step. No semantics, decentralizing semantics and understanding that the mind the ego the yeah, I think we we can we can go as far as actually there are project working on that. It's crazy but there are already projects trying to work on that shit as well. And it's absolutely fascinating this industry.

Citizen Cosmos
I'm talking about the industry though, and I did say I'm not going to name projects and but I will name one and I will ask you your opinion about them because I think there have been actually a good light in my opinion. And I think for anybody who's listening, this is by no means any shilling. It's not an advice to use the wallet.

Citizen Cosmos
But I'm curious about your opinion on Frame and what do you think about frame in comparison to all the other wallets Web three wallets out there?

Pedro
Well, I think what Frame did really well was that they tackled the managing the wallet like or the keys at the operating system. I that's something that's like everyone tells me what would be like the ideal wallet. And I would always say, oh, the ideal wallet would be no wallet. And the operating systems would just support it because we don't currently manage like a wi fi app or a Bluetooth app.

Pedro
You don't go to your computer and be, Oh, I need to install the monitor app so I can actually use my monitor. Like it's not something that you do right? And eventually wallets will be the same thing. You will just come built into your operating system. So Frame tried to emulate that experience as much as possible by having a desktop app which lives at the closest as possible to the operating system, and then it would talk to multiple browsers.

Pedro
So it's not even secluded to, let's say, Firefox or Chrome or Safari. It would work anywhere within your operating system as a desktop application, but it still does not inherit the same security guarantees as if it was built into the operating system. It's close enough, but it's not perfect. But what I kind of preferred is that we could do this on the mobile level.

Pedro
As I said in the beginning, my focus is on the mobile experience frame is a desktop experience. So essentially, like you could say like frame is like the counterparty to Wallet Connect frame is to desktop. What Wallet Connect is to mobile? And they're trying to achieve what it's like to be the fork to wallet. The experience for desktop and wallet connect is the de facto experience for mobile.

Pedro
Having operating systems actually build wallets, SDK’s and, having it built into it. It's completely changing wallets and so Frame is good for the desktop user.

Citizen Cosmos
Have you are you familiar with orbit by any chance, a project called Orbit?

Pedro
I'm familiar with the brand, not familiar with the technical details.

Citizen Cosmos
It's an interest. I'm not going to go into that if you're not because there's no point. But it's an interesting thing because it's like an operational system and a wallet. I was curious about what you think about what they doing, but do check them out and then for everybody who is listening differently do check them out. Again, not shilling, but they're not really a crypto project as far process.

Citizen Cosmos
So anyways, what about Wallet Connect though? You mentioned that you guys have an upcoming event in Denver. What about non-market plans? But like plans in terms of development, of course you're focusing on mobile and I don't think it needs an explanation beyond what you already explained. What is the reason for that? What are the other grand plans that currently you have?

Pedro
So Oh, yes, we're hosting the first wallet focused conference March 1st in Denver, which is just the day before, Eth Denver which starts on the second. And we're creating essentially a platform for all the wallets to showcase and shill their best technology in terms of user experience, security, identity and communication. And obviously Wallet Connect as the hosts will also show there on stuff like we've been working on Wallet Connect V2 for a long time and we did the stable release back in November and then we announced also that we would sunset the version one in March.

Pedro
So Wallet Con will be like the pivotal moment where we move away from V1 into V2 and what I like the most about Wallet Connect V2 is that a modularized is the communications protocol because a lot of people misunderstood Wallet Connect as just a wallet provider or a form of aggregating multiple wallets. But the way it actually functions on the backend is a communication protocol that allows to peers send end to end encrypted messaging.

Pedro
And then with the adoption of Wallet Connect we're talking about 200 wallets connected to the same network sending end to end encrypted messaging. It's kind of an understatement to say that, like signing transactions is all you can do with end to end encrypted messaging. What we started doing is creating different APIs built into the same core network so that you can send different types of in the end to end encrypted messages.

Pedro
For example, we created a dedicated one for sign in with Ethereum, so if people want to log in into websites instead of using sign in with Google, you could sign in with Ethereum, so we created the dedicated API for that would focus on that experience rather than connect your wallet to sign a transaction. All of that. Then we created the chat API that allows essentially 2 wallet connect wallets to message each other.

Pedro
So users that have, let's say, a trust wallet, the name token the these are to wallet can take wallets they're both connect to the wallet connect network. Why can't these users message each other. So chat API enables that experience and it would essentially build what web two has been trying to build for a long time, which is like a shared messaging protocol.

Pedro
If you had the ability to have WhatsApp Telegram and Signal messaging each other, that would be the perfect scenario. We can do that with the Wall connect. Network because these walls are already doing that form of communication, we just needed to create an API that focus on that scenario. And finally we have the PUSH API, which would allow Dapps to kind of reengage with the users that have visited their application.

Pedro
So right now when you connect the wallet to a dapp, you kind of just do some transactions and you leave it there. But there's a lot of a synchronous activity happening on the blockchain that it's relevant to the users. So with the push API you would be able to send a notification to kind of bring them back to relevant events.

Pedro
And I think my favorite scenario is when you have like DAO proposals and then people vote on it, they want to keep up to date with the status and receiving an email or a telegram notification doesn't seem right. You voted with your wallet, so the notification should go straight to your wallet. So yeah, we've been building a lot of open source software, but what we really care about is building the communication tools for a better wallet experience, and we're going to showcase that a lot.

Pedro
And if they ever at the Wallet Con conference as well, and we've been doing it a lot and we have some new products coming in Nice.

Citizen Cosmos
Do we need to decentralize APIs?

Pedro
I mean, it depends, depends what you mean by decentralizing API. So one of the APIs that we have is the relay API, which is where you can publish and subscribe these messages to get. Rather that one is getting decentralized, but some of the APIs are not decentralized.

Citizen Cosmos
I guess I'm not really. I'm more referring to stuff like Infora, I guess at the moment, and I'm not really talking about APIs, but I think the whole thing about when did Infora announced that they will be able to track the user and the IP .... and then you kind of like, Oh shit, you know, like we did actually get here, we did get here way before ten years.

Citizen Cosmos
You know, we, we, we came to this point and I guess Wallet Connect kind of protects you from the doesn't it, in a sense, because you go through the network of wallet connect right. Or it doesn't our on my mistake in here.

Pedro
I mean it depends right because at the end of the day what Wallet Connect enables you to interface with adapt from your wallet but then the actual choice of a node provider, it's always split between the dapp and the wallet like we've tried in the past to kind of enforce a more user controlled node selection. But it wasn't actually a very successful because as we talked before, like people want to be pragmatic, they don't want to be left behind and there would be a wallet out there that allows you to select the exactly the node that you want.

Pedro
But there's a wallet that shows NFT’s people chose the wallet that shows NFT’s over the one that allows you to show the select the node. So the ideal scenario is that the user can control the node, that it connects to the blockchain from their wallet, and then the dapp would follow and use the same node provider.

Pedro
But then that wasn't the scenario because we still need to find the use cases that people care about. And something like NFT’s kind of took off and brought a lot of people, even if you didn't have node selection. So it's something that I know that people are building some EIP’s so Ethereum improvement proposals for it. So maybe we could see some improvements there.

Pedro
But I wouldn't be so confident like service providers, like infora are still here to stay for sure.

Citizen Cosmos
One, I guess like last question before the blitz is I mean, considering you mentioned mobiles so often and you know, definitely I think a lot of people, you know, building today, I had recently released an episode. The guest was actually quite a while ago maybe you, but Boris Mann is a guy who yeah, maybe you know, the guy they work close with IPFS and they're also building a lot of open source software.

Citizen Cosmos
They're not blockchain builders. The built in tools and libraries and, you know, we had this conversation with him about mobiles, and I fully agree with the opinion of you and him. The thing is, what do we do in terms of and this is more of a devil's advocate question, but still, what do we do in terms of, you know, all that population whose phones are ten, 15 years old?

Citizen Cosmos
And we have to be realistic. There is the most of the world's population today. Are they still going to be able to use all the products that we are creating or do we need to somehow update those two or 3 billion people with with their old phones? And how do we get them on? How do we build them into the blockchain?

Citizen Cosmos
That's the kind of question with old equipment they have.

Pedro
That's a that's a hard question, right? Because to what threshold do you accept to be compatable? right, we actually had this question internally and then at Wallet Connect what we've decided is that we would follow what the operating system vendor would decide. So for example, if iOS, they say like up to this version number of iOS, we have long term maintenance, then that would be the same level of maintenance that Wallet Connect, would fulfill.

Pedro
And the same thing happens for Android with Google. So whatever Google says, like this is the oldest Android version you can use with long term maintenance, that's what we're going to use. So I think that it's inevitable that other project will follow that because you can only do as much as your operating system can do. And we can't give guarantees to someone who's using, let's say, an Android version three, which is no longer supported by Google.

Pedro
Therefore, we don't know if it works like it may work like technologies that we use that Wallet Connect our pretty standard for like the last 20 years. But we have no guarantees whether it's going to work. And that you could say like, Oh, what about people don't even have smartphones. That is a completely different conversation because if you don't have a smartphone, then you don't have a way of generally computing into your device.

Pedro
So I can't even sign a message like there's no form of decentralization if I can't get the most basic functionality, which is like signing a message. As long been someone has up to date smartphone with whatever is the minimum requirement by the operating system and it can sign a message. We can give decentralization to them now.

Citizen Cosmos
Because I know there is a lot of guides now all around the internet, which is really cool. I love those guides that show you how to turn any old mobile phone into a signer, you know, to strip away all the all the crap and just and I've actually been trying I'm not going to, I will say, because it's not like a big secret there is somebody gave me an iPod, the very first iPod, and I've have a mission to make that shit into a sign.

Citizen Cosmos
All right. I want to know if I'm going to succeed or not. But let's see, I still didn't to get to that Pedro. A Blitz, it doesn't mean the answers have to be quick. Call it the blitz, because it's kind of like three questions, one after another. But feel free to answer them in the way you want to answer them.

Citizen Cosmos
So give me and you kind of already named ceramic, but give me three projects outside of the top, like 20 projects that you are very curious in. What they doing? You think that what they're doing is essential for the Web three industry and might actually change something for the best? Not yourself, of course. Please.

Pedro
Yeah, of course. It's hard. It's hard to name projects like I think that.

Citizen Cosmos
Could be one.

Pedro
Yeah, like one project. Well, I recently I've been looking into how can we improve like Wallet experience beyond just like the key management and one of the things that always comes up is how do you actually protect users from malicious activity? And I've learned about this project called Blowfish that protecting users from phishing and malicious activity on chain by having the transactions analyzed before you sign

Pedro
So that's one project that I think it's going to be really powerful because we really need this kind of form of technology because wallet's kind of put a lot of pressure on the user. A user has to make an informed decision whether or not to make a transaction without actually having the information. So making the information available is quite important.

Citizen Cosmos
We must be on the same frequency because tomorrow I'm interviewing the person who is going for sure to talk to me with formal verifications and formal verifications for smart contracts. It's a guy from the main research of informal systems, and for sure we're going to be talking about how to check code before it. So yeah, it's it's the frequencies there.

Citizen Cosmos
And give me two things in your daily life that keep you motivated to build wallet, connect, and to keep you motivated to do build open source software.

Pedro
I guess like the number one thing that keeps Wallet Connect for me interesting is that I don't think I ever seen something so organically grow as much as Wallet Connect like the ability of building an open protocol is that it's essentially sells itself. Like sometimes people would come to me and over like, Oh, it's so great. You partner with this Wallet, your partner with this stuff.

Pedro
And all I did was write some docs and put out there an SDK that anyone can use. So that's really interesting. And the other part about being open source is not only that anyone can use it, but also anyone can contribute it. Like the amount of times I had like something in my mind that I wanted to do, but I didn't have the bandwidth or time to do it.

Pedro
And then someone just kind of showed up and gave me a PR or showed me some open source repository on GitHub and said, Oh, here's this project I did over the weekend because I was bored and it was exactly what I wanted. It's something that you cannot achieve with like a project that's closed source for sure.

Citizen Cosmos
For sure. And one last one, one person to follow dead or alive. And I know it's hard to follow a dead person, but, you know, for the sake of semantics let's leave it like that, that you think whoever that person is, whether it's a writer or a GitHub account or a Twitter account or a medium account a book will could help people to succeed in life.

Citizen Cosmos
And whatever it is they're doing and whatever it is they're building out there to inspire them, let's say them.

Pedro
What's an inspirational figure, either dead or alive for me.

Citizen Cosmos
Huh? Apart from the dog. Because I know you have a dog. So apart from the dog.

Pedro
Yeah, Yeah, the dog is very inspirational. That's a really hard question to pinpoint. The single person, I don't know, like, can I get another one?

Citizen Cosmos
I know it's good. You don't have to. It doesn't have to be. There is no more questions. Yeah, but you don't have to be an answer, you know? I mean, the answer doesn't have to exist. It's not.

Pedro
Like it. I think everyone. Everyone kind of brings a little bit of light there now. Like, everyone has their, like, own, like moment where they bring something so unique and innovative to the world. And it's always great when they put it even in form of like arts or technology or even just an opinion in an article and they inspire the next person.

Pedro
So I think the most inspirational person is all of us who kind build like this, like hive mind that like build the best world that we could do. Because it's I, I can't say like, who's my biggest inspiration? Like, I kind of met so many inspirational people and they all contributed to the person that I am today.

Pedro
So I'm grateful for all of them.

Citizen Cosmos
I love it. I love it, I love it. That was a very fucking cool answer. Thank you for that. Um, Pedro, if there's anything I didn't ask you and I know we had, like, technical crap in the middle, so I apologize for that, but is anything I didn't ask you? Please feel free to share other. And that's been very, very, very thankful for your time and for your answers.

Citizen Cosmos
But if there is anything I didn't. I didn't ask you that you want to share, please do.

Pedro
Well, all I want to share is that I can't wait to. See Wallet Connect everywhere. Because Wallet Connect already exists in so many places. But there will be this pinpoint moment where. We will see Wallet Connect become the next Bluetooth and people will just like, forget about it. Like when we forget about Wallet Connect think I've succeeded to do my job because we just assume that the web 3 experience includes some form of Wallet Connect technology on the back.

Pedro
And yeah, that should be the success on any decentralized technology. It's to become boring, but that exists everywhere.

Citizen Cosmos
I like that. Pedro, thank you very much for your time. Again, everybody out there who's been taking the time to listen to us. Thank you very, very much for listening to us and see all next time. Thank you.

Pedro
Thank you for having.

If you would like to support our mission in creating educational content and aligning the goals of different communities, please stake with us here:

Join our community, to build a future where communication is decentralized. May the code be with you!