Mastering Web3 Wallet Abstraction feat. Instadapp

This is the PoolTogether Community Podcast. PoolTogether is the world's number one no-loss prize savings account. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit. You're listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. I'm your host, Hot Mike, AKA Millie Yearley, AKA Tim, AKA— listen, I accidentally Lightly stepped on my cat Bella's tail, and I would like to publicly apologize to Bella. I know she's an avid podcast listener. So Bella, I'm sorry. And we are here with Seb from Instadapp. Seb, thank you so much for being here. I'm so pumped about— I've been looking forward to this episode for a long time, and then we're here now and we're enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me. I, I've also been eagerly excited to jump on this journey with you because I know we're going to talk about a lot of really interesting stuff.

Interesting, at least interesting to us, which is what matters, right? If we're not interested by it, then who's going to be interested by it?

Well, if we're not interested, it doesn't exist.

That's right. That's right. Because we won't talk about it. We only talk about what we care about. And, uh, Seb, what do you do at InstaApp? What's your role? What's your, what's your title?

Yeah. So I am, I do growth and business development. But as a small team, I also think of myself as a jack of all trades. So I also have done some UX. I've also, you see me all over support, governance. Yeah. And just building and bridging those connections with the other DeFi apps and communities.

And where, what is the thing that you most, what's eating your vegetables like for you? What is the thing that you're like, oh, really? Do I have to do that? And then what is like your flow state if you were to do this one thing? You could do it forever and it's the best.

Oh, okay. That's very interesting. I really like the wow moment that people have. I'm gonna start with the good first. So like when someone, like when I'm talking to someone and they're interested in crypto and I'm kind of explaining it and they're getting it and it's like clicking and clicking and clicking, I think that is fantastic. And for me, like my approach to crypto is all about like usability, actually using it less on the speculation, but the idea of having your own bank account and Yeah, it's just been amazing to see people click and particularly how people click with InstadApp when they kind of start to understand what, what we do. And then in terms of a pain point, I think sometimes people don't have patience. I, I always say this, I think people like, they want the gains of a decentralized cryptocurrency, but then they want the security of a bank. And that's this really challenging thing. It's like, oh yeah, I need to self-custody because that is amazing. That's where the gains are. That's where the autonomy, the, the liberty comes from, but then it's kind of hard. I don't want to do it, you know? And so that's this, this really weird pain point where we have to kind of bridge users into that. And that, you know, perfectly leads into like Avocado, but we'll get there.

Well, that's interesting because I went like in your job, like what your role is, but, and this might be part of your role, but you were talking about basically onboarding people, which is like the holy grail. That's, that's the Lord's work right there in crypto because it's so stinking difficult. I was at ETH Denver trying to do referral program for a pool together. And just like, I mean, I was trying to give people money and it was so hard that I couldn't even like Coinbase wallet. When you scan their wallet to send, their QR code doesn't work. It's compared to like, it only works within— I don't know. It's just so bad. So, but you're, so you went there, you like to onboard people, but you don't like the friction of like people being like, oh, why do I have to do that? That's so much work. And then you're like, go suck it up. What do you want? You know, that's what you're saying.

Yeah. But I also will balance that. There's also a big part from the developer side. Like I'm huge on anticipating needs. Like, and I think that's funny because I come from a very, very mixed background. We'll get there. But, you know, I have a customer service background and, uh, I'm always looking to make sure that people don't have to figure things out, that things aren't confusing. I'm constantly pushing the team to make just whatever little changes that will aid the user along. So for example, very simply, like putting a button where someone anticipates a button to be, like that sounds very silly and nuanced, but devs are crazy and they'll put buttons all over the place or they'll use like Versals that just puts buttons, but that's not how most people interact with applications. And so I'm always constantly trying to make sure that like, it should be pretty evident how things work. But again, you know, Instap is quite a complex beast, so it's not always so easy to do that.

Yeah. And customer service wins championships, believe you me. That's how you win, right? I mean, and it's very lacking generally, I think, on the web. If I have to fill out a form, I know it's going to a black hole and I'll never, like, why would I ever spend this energy? And when somebody does respond to me, like within a day, within an hour, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is the greatest product that's ever existed because they actually care about customer service enough to where You know, I, I get, I hear something. And then I also agree. I love that. So you're taking, Seb, you're taking your customer service experience, you're applying it to something that's very complex, which is crypto. You're working with devs who are, you know, trying to ship, right? So let's just ship it. And then, and you're like, why did you put that button there? Why are there so many buttons? You know, analysis paralysis. Let's, let's eliminate that, eliminate any, any sort of friction for the user. But also you actually need some sort of friction for security and for like, you know, they're, they're like, you know, if people are just signing and like quickly doing stuff, they could easily get scammed. So that's a, that's another aspect, but let's not go down any more roads other than I want to hear, how'd you get into crypto? I want to hear that, that customer service background.

Oh, that's funny. So, okay. So my first introduction to crypto actually was Bitcoin. So I actually read the Bitcoin whitepaper, I think in like 2009, or I was in college, maybe 2010. And to me, I was like, oh my God, this is Ghost in the Shell. This is all the sci-fi that I've watched. This is how money works in a digital world. It made perfect sense to me. I didn't think about it as an investment. So I think I like printed a QR code, put it on my phone, and then bought whatever, like a tiny little bit of Bitcoin and never thought about it again. But after that, I did a bunch of customer service. I was working to be a sommelier. I used to work in Manhattan. And at that time, I was also helping a friend of mine who was a white hat hacker run a Discord group for like job boards. And so anyways, anyone's on the call and you are interested in pen testing, you can definitely send me a message. I can connect you to some people. So I used to do that and that group was slowly kind of getting into crypto. So crypto had kind of always been around. It was there and I didn't really get fully interested until MakerDAO. So when MakerDAO came, I was blown the F away. I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And then the page was like 17 transactions and it was terrifying. And then Instadapp showed up and I was like, oh, we can abstract all this away, which is the word we use now, or just make it simpler, right? We can just say, hey, I have 10 ETH, I want 500 DAI, which now obviously just feels very— obviously it's like that, but it wasn't like that in the beginning. It was like ETH to pool ETH to mint this other thing to then mint DAI. It was very very complicated. So I already saw from the very beginning, I was just so inspired by Instadapp right from the start at just taking something amazing, which is MakerDAO, and simplifying it and making it actually usable. Right?

Yeah. I love that, that sommelier plus white hat hacker origin story. And then I love, so was it like, it sounded like one of your first projects or something that you got into Was Instadapp. And then you're just like, yeah, I'm doing this now. Is that how it worked?

Kind of, yeah. So I was— so my Somalia journey ended and I shifted into legal. So I started working in the kind of legal— I was a paralegal. But the whole time I had been helping the Instadapp team, which at that point was just Gian Brothers. And I think maybe one other developer, two other developers. And I was just in the Telegram and people would complain and say stuff. And I'm like, what are you guys doing? That's wrong. No, it's like this. So I kind of just started helping like however I can. I still had my, my day job and on and off helping Instadapp until I think it was 2020 when I basically let go of my old job and switched to crypto full-time.

And then can you give me the Instadapp origin story as well? Do you know that? I mean, of course you do. You know everything.

Yeah, I'm like the timekeeper. So Instadapp started as a hackathon project at ETH India in 2018. And the project was simplifying the MakerDAO interface. So again, at the time MakerDAO, it took like 10 transactions. It was very complicated. And so the first iteration of InstadApp was just an interface. You connect, you say, I have this much ETH, give me this much DAI. And that's, if you look at kind of everything that InstadApp has done there to now, it seems like it's all the same thing, right? We're simplifying how to make a Maker loan. Then we simplified how to refinance between Maker and Compound. Then we simplified how to refinance between different networks. And it's kind of been evolving, evolving. And it seems natural that now we're at the kind of like wallet network level.

Okay. I went— I was at ETH Tokyo and it's a hackathon and I thought it was so cool that I was non-technical and being in a hackathon. And if you wanted to succeed, at ETH Tokyo, and I think generally any hackathon in the ETH global system, you need to use AI, you need to do something with public good, or you do something with account abstraction. And so that's the hot topic right now is like, how do we abstract away all of the difficulties in life and just make it super easy and people can do whatever they want and they don't have to worry about fees and all of that. And so Avocado, me stumbling upon Avocado one day just makes so much sense where it's like, of course you can. And let me stumble my way through an explanation of what I think Avocado is, and then you can correct me. But it's just this network, this RPC that you can select on your wallet, and then you can transact away. And then you're basically paying gas on that network that you're transacting on, whether it's mainnet, Optimism, what have you, but you're using USDC instead of whatever gas token that need to go swap for, and you run out of, and then you're stuck and you can't transact anymore. So Avocado just comes in and saves the day, just like it does to toast, right? You could have toast or you could have avocado toast. Saves the day.

Yes. And I think one of the other things that is important to note about Avocado. So Avocado, when you connect to this network, you're going to have a different wallet address. So this is a smart contract wallet. And what's unique about this compared to like our old one, which was our The DeFi smart account is this one is deterministic. So every EOA, every externally owned account already has an Avocado address. So as soon as you connect, it's there. So it's like ready to use, which is really awesome. So as soon as you have it, you don't have to execute anything to kind of get it started. That's just something that I particularly like. And then when it comes to the networks, the network aggregation just really simplifies whatever wallet you're using. One of the things I hate about MetaMask is if you have 2 tabs on 2 different networks, it decides to lose its freaking mind. It's like, which network do you want? Which one? Which one? So you skip all of that with Avocado. You just connect to Avocado and then, you know, just connect to whatever app and you're, you're good to go. And then another thing that I think is really important is as we add networks, I call it instant onboarding, right? So we added Aurora just not that long ago. You're onboarded, you have gas on Avocado. Now you can just use Aurora. You can mint NFTs on Aurora immediately. You don't have to wait for bridging. You don't have to figure out how to get to the network. You're already onboarded.

That's really— so rabbit trail, here we go. So any wallet has already a determined Avocado wallet. You already have like an address that's different than your current wallet address, but you have it. It's predetermined. It's deterministic, as you said. So you could also— could you not do that with email addresses? As well, like any string would already have a predetermined wallet for them.

In this case, we wouldn't, it's based on a private key. So you would, it would have to have some private key. Yeah. So it can't be like a smart contract.

Oh, okay. It's not based on your, it's not based on a public key. It's been, well, I don't know anyway. Okay. I'm dreaming dreams. So this, this actually leads me to my next question, which is I'm not technical and I'm doing biz dev in this space. I started out doing nonprofit marketing. Got laid off during COVID came over to crypto with my tail between my legs. Sorry, Bella, again for stepping on your tail. And then I tried to do marketing in crypto. I realized there was probably like a couple thousand people here tops. And then I was like, well, hey, business development and partnerships and growth is like the best marketing you could do, right? You announce a partnership with Starbucks, you don't even have to do anything with Starbucks. You just announce it and everybody's like, you're the best. So that's how I'm here. But then I'm realizing more and more and more and more, especially with the next version of PoolTogether that's going to be launched. hyperstructure, hyperstructure. There is this like in growth, the need for DevRel, the need for devs and to be able to talk to devs and befriend them and, and work with them in creating products and such. So Seb, you, I just assume you're technical. Are you technical? And if, if not, how do I get as technical as you? How do I fake it till I make it?

That's so fascinating. So I am. I'm a jack of all trades. I would, I'm, how do I even, I don't know how to, I don't, I don't know what advice to give you except to kind of just like dive in. Right. So I look at smart contracts. Do I fully understand smart contracts? No. I took a Solidity course. Did I finish that Solidity course? No. But, you know, having a little knowledge of everything, and I think it, you know, I'm a '90s kid who like grew up messing with Windows 95 and like messed with that computer to death, making, I don't know how many files and folders and changing the settings and all that. So I think just being a very inquisitive person helps. And I don't know, over time, I mean, working with like the white hat hackers and the different fields, it kind of lends to this ability to kind of understand different situations well. I don't know how to say it other than dive in, baby. You know, don't feel like you can't learn something. Like, yeah, Solidity is not my jam, but I can understand some of it. I've taken a few courses, even though it's not like,

yeah,

I'm not going to build a career in that. But it's, yeah.

Yeah. Well, no, I totally get that. And, you know, I'm a little older than you are and I've gone through probably more ADD cycles of where I— Wait, are you? I am. Yeah, I'm 41, BB.

Oh, okay. All right. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I know. I, you know, my maturity level is well below that, but I've done a lot of these cycles where I obsess over something or I get into something and I dabble. And then I get to this law of diminishing returns where I get to a point where I feel like I'm dangerous enough and then I stop. And then like it comes back into my life and I'm like, you know what? I want to get a little bit more dangerous. And I feel like I have a little bit more maturity and stick with stick-to-itiveness to get in there and learn some more. So I've done that with synthesizers. I've done that with, I'm doing that with chess right now. I like to play some chess. And also I've dabbled in code. And so maybe at some point in the near future, maybe even out of sheer necessity, I will, you know, code that AI crypto bot that will, you know, everyone will use to trade or something. I don't know. But you have your own pet project. Can you share it with us? And then this is like your teach yourself code kind of thing, right?

Yeah. I shared with you a little kind of idea that I sketched out that I was like, okay, I want to build something. I want to build something fun. And my whole thing again with crypto is like getting people to actually use it. And that's why I've been such a big fan of PoolTogether, because I honestly think— I'm trying to think, is this the first app I introduced to everyone? I think so. It really is like my first dApp, which I really love because like I can't share them InstaDapp. That's too much. Like InstaDapp Pro is too insane. So I was trying to figure out a way, like how can I create something on top of PoolTogether that is almost like a game that would get you to just spend more time hanging out with the poolers? So I kind of created a sketch and if someone on the call wants to like work on this, please let me know because again, I may not have all the resources to do it. But yeah, it's called PlantTogether. And the basic premise is you deposit into PoolTogether, you get PoolTogether, you like USDC coins or something like that. And then you stake it and you earn a generative like NFT plant. And then the more time you spend on like staking your PoolTogether, You earn water, like these little water tokens that you water your plants. And whenever you do win, your plant blooms. And there's like little mechanics, you can trade them and stuff. So it's just this gamification on top of PoolTogether that kind of encourages people not only to stay the maximum amount of time, which I think is 60 days, but also to periodically look. That was another thing. Like, I don't have a strong reason to look at my earnings unless I get like a message. But if it was like a little plant thing that I had to water and then I had to take care of, I feel like it would just get me more engaging. And then with PoolTogether v4, there's this other interesting component where we can create maybe like different plants based on which tokens the user is staking. There are air quotes on staking.

Oh, I like that. So you have a plant shelf and you can have all these different plants, but I love that, that you're like, now that HypaStruxure is going to have all these like vaults, different vaults, different token yield source pairs, each of them can have their own plant family. And then you get like, so you can have bonsai, you can have little succulents. You can have like, you know, the big burly, you know, as you're, as you get more prizes, your plant develops and, you know, maybe forest creatures live in it and stuff. I love this. I

was actually thinking about creatures. It was amazing. I was thinking about like how to add creatures because you have to water the plants, but what if like you get a special creature in a plant every 1 in 100,000 and that little guy hangs out on your window shelf, you watch him walk around and he waters the plants for you.

Oh, little helper. Little helper. And then you can, then it turns into CODAs from the Bored Apes and then you can sell it for tons of money. And then we've, capitalism ruins everything. Has this brought you along to like coding? Are you, are you starting or it's, I mean, cause it's a beautiful vision, but at that point I'm just, I hear that vision. I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to code that. There's no, that's like years and layers of learning, but maybe you can do that with partnerships and like friends, you know? Hey, hey, code friend.

Yeah. Yeah. I was, I'm, I'm Thinking, I don't know, I've, I've been seeing a lot of people who you wouldn't anticipate in coding things, which is funny. You mentioned you went to like Eve Tokyo. I know someone who's like our governance person who like was like a salesman who like learned to code to do a project in a coding hackathon thing. So I'm like kind of challenging myself in my head somewhere that I'm gonna go to some hackathon and I'm gonna do this. But like, again, if there's massive initiative for this, I think this is great. And that's a whole other conversation we could have maybe. another time about just general gamification on top of Pull Together tokens. 'Cause there's something very, there's something there.

There is something there. And I would love to like, you know, go to a hackathon, you and me, Seb, on a team. And then we just go like descend upon some, some, you know, poor hackers and we just get them to do this idea. And then we like, you know, I do the pitch deck and you do, you make sure we get all the bounties from all of the people as well. Like that could, I don't know, we can have different roles. But what hackathon should we do? What are you going to ETHCC?

ETHCC in Paris? Not that one.

Yeah. Bali.

No, maybe something in, maybe something in the States or maybe India. You want to go kind of far?

Oh yeah. No, ETH India would be awesome. I would love to do that. Shivansh is one of our community members who just did a represented pool together on a Hindi podcast. There's a Graph developer who runs a podcast, like the biggest crypto podcast in the Hindi language. And so anyway, yeah, that'd be awesome. ETH India. And I heard that's a ball too. I heard it's banging. When is that?

That one is usually at the end of the year. So sometime in like December, November.

Okay. And it's in Bangalore?

Yes.

Okay. Because if it's in Delhi, it better not be in the summer because that would be oppressive. Oppressive. That's cool. Okay. So let's talk about the future, Seb. What's happening? We're in— are we still in a bear market? Is it going to go down even more so? What's the new technology? Do you agree with everything that Vitalik said in the last paper that— or the last article they published?

Would I be crucified if I said I didn't read it yet?

I didn't either. I skimmed it and I was like, okay, he's got this, he's got this, he's got this. Got it.

I was going to skim it and I was like, no, I need to read it. I try to like actually read, you know what?

That's true. You're better. You're better.

I do want to mention a couple of things on Avocado, but For the market, I will say I don't think the market's going anywhere. I think we're going to pretty much stay where we are. I thought we were going to have L2 summer. Like, I really thought 2020, you know, like I thought this was it, but I am not feeling like this is it. I think we need to kind of get through all the regulation nonsense. And I could surprisingly see like Coinbase winning a good victory at some point and that being the bull run, a very interesting bull run based on legal stuff. Which is, I don't think ever happened before.

Like a, like a legal stuff plus Base combo. 'Cause Base is pretty, I mean, that's, that's a pretty banging like layer, right? There's got, you know, there's going to be some sweet stuff in the Base, the Base ecosystem.

I think so. I'm a little nervous about how it all comes together. Um, yeah.

Oh yeah.

'Cause Base could become a KYC chain potentially. There's a lot of room for that. And you know, what does that mean for crypto? I don't know. But then just transacting on that. It's not the main network. It's on Ethereum. There are alternatives. So it might be a viable thing. Again, we were talking before about people wanting that, that simplicity, right? Well, I just want to pay on my Coinbase app and then use DeFi. That base chain might be, you know, that might be their way.

I also have this, and so do my friends, but this is, I think it's like probably a US-only thing, but I'm just like, if crypto is already in the Venmo app, like I get my credit card rewards from Venmo in ETH. Which is pretty sweet, but it's like one step away there. That's where I think like if oh if Venmo went like full on crypto and you could just start using your Venmo account anyway, that's what I'm thinking. But I get that with the K, but but any I think any what any mass adoption has to be KYC. That's what I'm thinking. Maybe I should leave that alone and maybe that's not very libertarian of me. That's okay.

I just think I just

think I'm not really with.

I just think I mean I don't know maybe this is me trying to. Get away from being so America-focused. I know there's a lot of American crypto users, but there's also a whole other world that's not American, like, that doesn't care about what we do, you know? And so, I mean, if you look at something like the Polygon chain, I mean, Polygon chain is used everywhere. It's super popular. And yes, it's building partnerships, but I don't think that, like, if America decides to be really strict on MATIC, MATIC is still going to grow. in other parts of the world.

No, you're right. I agree. I agree. A whole new world. I had to sing it. You said it. So I had to say there's a whole nother world out there. There's a world out there. Okay. You wanted to talk about Avocado. Let's go back to Avocado.

I do want to just bring up a couple of things that are coming up and just, you know, key points because, uh, yeah, there's a lot of, there's quite a lot of things happening. So first we just released cross-chain sends, and I think this is a great example of us Getting closer to abstracting more things away. So on Avocado, you can take your DAI, let's say from Polygon, and just pay someone else on mainnet, Optimism, Arbitrum, wherever you want to send that. And that's super awesome. And that completely skips the bridging and then the send. And I think what's really awesome is this is just sort of like the first example of something, you know, cross-chain, but then we could, you know, expand this to, let's say you want to deposit onto a new app that came out and it's awesome, but you have your funds on Polygon. You know, we might be able to build something where you deposit your Polygon USDC into an Avalanche USDC pool.

So, so why, why USDC?

Well, it doesn't have to be USDC. It could be any token.

Oh, okay. Okay. So say, say that again one more time. Just say it one more time.

Yeah. So

let me, let me, I want to get it. I want to get it in my head.

Yeah. Yeah. So right now, let's say if you have Avocado, you can go right now When you go to send, it'll say, let's say you're sending Ethereum on Optimism. So underneath you can put the address and it'll show the network. You can change the network. You can just say, hey, I'm sending this Optimism on ETH to an Arbitrum address instead. And then Avocado will bridge and transfer that to the destination. And we can expand that to other stuff. Let's say you wanted to deposit into Instadapp Lite. Mm-hmm. This is a cool example, but you have ETH on Arbitrum, so you could deposit your ETH on Arbitrum into Instaply on mainnet.

No, I love that. I love that you don't have to think about like, you just, you have a thing that you want to do and it's going to cost you stuff and there's gas there too. And then ideally, whatever you have in your wallet or whatever, whatever kind of, maybe there's one base token that is the thing that provides all the other things, which makes sense for it to be USDC. 'Cause Generally when I interact, I think in, I think in dollars as what, how much is this going to cost me? And then it pulls and bridges and does all this stuff from that center point, like that center thing that I need to keep topped up. Is that, is that right?

I think the trouble with the cross-chain stuff is like the steps that it takes, right? So if I want to deposit into like Instadapp Lite with my Arbitrum that's on ETH, with my ETH that's on Arbitrum, I have to first bridge, wait for that to finish, and then deposit on Lite. So you get to do this in one transaction, and then you just pay USDC gas. So that makes it, you know, that makes it simple. And then if you want to pay people as well, the number that you send is exact, which is awesome, 'cause that's super important. So you can just hold all your USDC in Polygon. Let's say that's maybe what I would do. And then if I need to pay someone on another network, I'll just pay them that way.

So that's awesome. And whenever I, whenever I experience something that is very convenient, I don't know. This has been ingrained in me with crypto. I know I'm getting ripped off. I feel like I'm like losing tons of money when something is super convenient. It's like, oh yeah, hey, we'll make that just one click. So how do we— what are the fees? Like, how do I know that I'm not getting ripped off? Are you ripping off people?

That's funny. Yeah. So there is a fee. So the only fee that we charge is a 20% upcharge on the gas, and that's for any network that you use. And what the goal of that is that that ensures that the relayer confirms your transaction right away. Right. And that's another thing. When you sign transactions, you're not picking your gas settings, you're just signing. It's just going to give you a price range. And so, so that's the only charge. So if you're charged anything like on a bridge, that's from the third-party provider. That's not us.

Okay. Interesting. Gas-based pricing. That's okay. So then, then there's no— right now there's no swapping that's happening, right? It's just like you have— you're— this is gas abstraction with Avocado. But ideally, like we're talking about a whole world of everything abstracted, correct? Is that the future?

Yeah. I think the future is you hold balances in whatever way you want. And let's say we could even do something as, you know, as far-reaching as abstracting all the networks away. So we could just show you one USDC balance and it wouldn't really matter what network it's on. Right. I think that would be like the kind of endgame. All right. But yes, I also wanted to mention something else I have on my list before I forget that we are also launching an Avocado multisig, and that is Quite a game changer because you're going to have all the features that we currently have with Avocado, but it's a multisig. So I'm like super excited about this because the current multisigs, which is like the notes to save, it has a couple of issues. One being that your address is different on every network. So for us as a team, it's pretty cumbersome. And then when you execute transactions, everyone— well, whoever the final executioner is, the killer of the transaction, they have to pay. So we can't— the

sucker.

The sucker. Yeah. Right. So with Avocado multisig, you'll get the gas abstraction. So one person can just top up the gas tank and then everyone can pay. And, you know, things like— I love that. Things like the Wintermute incident, things like that wouldn't happen because you would own that address. And even if someone, let's say like as a team, we don't have to deploy another wallet for Linea. We don't have to deploy another wallet for this other network or any other future network. It's just supported. So, it's just much easier for multisig teams that use multisigs to have this kind of solution. And we built it because we want to use it, of course.

That's so awesome. How can I get in that? How can I get on that?

So, the multisig is about, I would say like 2 to 3 weeks away. So, it's coming. So, you're not missing anything. It's in production. Well, it's done and we're just kind of finishing our security audits. So yeah, so hang tight, it's coming.

I'm so excited about that. Growth, Seb, how do you grow Instadapp? How do you grow Avocado? How do you onboard the next billion users? Cliché that everyone says. What do you, what are you doing? How can we help as a pulled-together community? How can we help you fight the good fight with all your might?

Good fight. I love the good fight. Yeah. So I do think, I do really think that all of us in crypto are kind of fighting the good fight. We're all really working towards a common goal of making this accessible and usable? I hope so, right? I mean, I really do hope what we build is meaningful. So I think one of the funny things right now, and I called it years ago, I called it years ago, I'm going to take some credit. It's mobile apps. Mobile apps actually are very important to the ecosystem. I think Uniswap has launched one. We're going to launch an Avocado mobile app. And I think that's going to be really, really great for users who don't even want to deal with the EOA. Like, we'll basically abstract that away. So the mobile wallet will just work directly with your Avocado address. And, you know, we'll have 2FA, we'll have backup, we'll have all these sort of ease and security features. So I think that's big, mobile apps. And then also I think building like a common framework. I know this is a little bit more abstract, but it's something I've thought about before. Sometimes the crypto communities are too Like disparate, like, so for example, like stETH and, and staking ETH derivatives, like I almost feel like we should kind of create more standards around that, but that's maybe more or less philosophical conversation. And then for dApps like PoolTogether, we are building an Avocado login, so that will just help users connect directly into your apps. And that will basically have, you know, get them to skip the UI, if the web UI, if they're using a, like a computer. And then for the mobile app, it's kind of similar, but the mobile app's already like a streamlined, slightly better experience.

So then do we need the big brands? Do we need the banking systems? Do we need the, you know, the, the masses, the media conglomerates to also be on board? Or you're thinking that maybe if we do the whole app thing and we let the people come to us that way, that's the way that they'll do it. I feel like we need Starbucks though. You know, I feel like it has to, and I don't like that. I don't want it to be that way. I'm doing Starbucks's NFT thing and I missed the timeline and I'm like out of it. And so I'm frustrated with them.

Yeah.

But do we need Starbucks or can we, you know?

Do we need Starbucks or maybe like Domino's for pizza?

Or Disney? Disney, the happiest place on earth. Make crypto the happiest place on earth.

Yeah, I thought, well, I've had 2 kinds of theories. One is about, is the, my Pokémon theory. That no NFT game or anything has ever made, has ever been good. And the first one will be Pokémon. That will be the one. Someone will make a Pokémon NFT game and that will be fire. And those NFTs will live like 10 years. You can like actually bring your Pokémon. It won't be like the Pokémon Bank. It'll be like this thing. But that requires Pokémon to crash. So I don't know, maybe 2 more games in 3D of like hot garbage. And then maybe they'll be like, you know what? Let's make NFTs in, in an old school 2D. Octopath Traveler style. Like, I can see that happening. So that's one. Tickets again, which is funny because these are NFT things. But then I think banking might be one. I do think that. And again, because we're so American, we don't realize like in other places in the world, like how useful crypto really is, you know, like it's people really use it and it's meaningful to them. Where in America everyone has a bank account, so we just don't really think about it. So I could either see something in America happening where people get really nervous and they really want to just start self-custodying. Or just the other places in the world start adapting it. And we could see, you know, like a Visa or someone big making an integration that starts to kind of bridge this, the gaps. So we'll see. But I just don't trust the guys to, you know, I don't trust Chase. I don't trust that you'll be able to buy Chase, buy Bitcoin on Chase Bank, and that that Bitcoin you'll be able to withdraw to your own wallet. That I don't think will happen.

Yeah. And I think that that's like oil and water with the industry. Like the industry won't let the— well, I think the industry won't let it happen, but then I roll up to Permissionless last year and there's like the massive Visa booth and I'm like, oh, okay, well, I guess you need Visa, but, and you know, they're not a bank, but you know, I don't, I, yeah. So there needs to be like some, the industry right now, maybe, maybe that's what the bear market does though, is like, it lets you, it lowers the industry, lowers its standards. Crypto lowers its standards to lower the The price goes to where it's like, okay, we'll take Pokémon Go NFTs, or okay, we'll do this now. We'll KYC now. Fine. Fine.

I think so. I also was going to say, I really like bear markets because I just feel like everyone is just head down getting stuff done. And every time we're in a bear market, that's when like all the innovative stuff happens. So I'm like, okay, go bear market. In a bear market, we've launched Avocado. We launched the second version of Instant Up Lite. We're doing like everything.

Yeah, it's, it's awesome. It's hard to sell in a bear market, I think, like B2B sales is kind of tough, but yes, if you're building, it's great. And you know, I'm excited that somebody told me that, Tim, you're going through your first like real bear. 'Cause I, I dabbled in 2019 and 2020, but then I got in full-time into crypto in November 2021, which is, you know, all-time highs. And so, and I also think that's what you need though. You're not going to get mass adoption in a bear. You need the price to kind of drive, like to incentivize all of the friction that you're going to have to go through. And then that price doesn't need to go as high if there's less friction and there's more value. So like, yes, PoolTogether is a great killer app to let people know about who have never heard of crypto. Like, oh wait, I could save and then win. That's cool. That's really great. And then I feel like Avocado is like the, you know, for people who are just jaded with crypto and the bridging and all this stuff, they're just like, oh yeah, Avocado makes It's such sense, you know?

Anyway, well, it's, it's funny cuz like, I, cousin was like kind of into crypto, but like she took a, she took a step back and so she like started using Avocado, but she was also asking me about like, this is before we had Phantom. She was asking about like the Phantom Bridge and how to get like all this stuff. And she was like completely confused and she's like, oh, I have to relearn all of this. And it's like, she wasn't gone for that long. You know what I mean? It was like half a year. And then all the apps that she knows are maybe different or they look different or they change their name or they don't exist. And so like, it is a little bit like cumbersome to do all of that and especially bridging. So when she was like, yeah, I'm just putting everything on Avocado. I'm just using that. I'm like, yeah, great. That's the whole point. She's like, yeah, I don't know what bridges are. I don't know. I don't, I don't want to figure it out. I'm like, yeah, it's fine. You don't have to.

Yeah. I love that. I, I have friends who I've introduced into crypto during that November, you know, all-time high. And then they're all mad and they don't, they hate crypto and they'll never come back. But when they do come back, the returners, right? Avocado is great. I'm just like, hey, remember all that stuff I told you about? You don't need to worry about it. Just use the Avocado Smart Wallet. Just use the app. Just use the multisig. It's great.

And that's it. And you're good to go. And then, you know, you can just top off with USDC, which is like pretty easy. And then potentially we might be able to like use that as payments as well, which is kind of cool. So you can just, just like, you really just top up your gas balance and then just use that. A bunch of stuff like that would be very, very cool as well.

I love it. I love it. Well, Seb, I know that you had a list of things to talk about, and I want to make sure we got through your list. Did we get through your list today?

I just want to mention a couple of things about Instadapp Pro. These are more— this is, this is more of a— this is bulletin style. This is just kind of updates. So the old Instadapp app, which it's not old, it's the same, which is defi.instadapp.io, is being rebranded to Instadapp Pro. So, and one of the things we're going to do is we're going to add better support for Avocado. So Avocado is essentially like our V3 DeFi Smart Account. So DeFi Smart Accounts, we're not going to make any more of those. Obviously, you can still use both on the website, but over time we'll make Avocado sort of like the preferred wallet for InstaPro. And one of the things I also think is important is with the DSA, you were limited to our interface. With Avocado, you're not. So If we ever have an issue or if Aave has an issue or whatever, you can kind of jump back and forth, which is kind of, I think, very helpful. And even myself, like, I, I think that that's useful to have just alternative entrances. So yeah. So if you haven't, if you haven't imported from your DSA to Avocado, you should. We're giving you gas credits. If, and again, the integration will be stronger, better over time as we make a couple more upgrades in StepN Pro. And we will be adding Spark Protocol.

Spark protocol,

kind of like an, like an Aave Market version of MakerDAO.

Got it. I think this would be helpful for just listeners and, you know, people on YouTube now, on the people stuck in Web2, you know, that are, that are watching this, listening to this on their TVs, their smart TVs. Can you just— I think we didn't talk about this. How does one interact with Avocado? Like, how do you get in? Like, what do you do? Can you just walk us through the user flow real quick?

Very, very easy. You just go to avocado.instap.io. You need a wallet that has custom networks. If you use MetaMask. So when you sign in, it's gonna ask you to add a network. This is the Avocado Network aggregator, and that's it. You just add that to your wallet and then top up with USDC. So send any USDC from the supported networks that'll allow you to top up, and then you're good to go. It is a separate address, so you have to import your funds in there. There's an onboarding page if you wanna like dump your assets, but honestly, just send it. It's an address. You can just send funds into it. And that's it. And then that's it. You can start using it. And there's a Wallet Connect button to connect to external dApps.

So then let me know what is importing. Like, I understand the USDC and I can— I understand like sending USDC to your Avocado wallet and that helps you do all the things. And I even see like connected dApps. I'm connected to PoolTogether right now, but there's this import thing and I'm like, wait, what is this doing?

Yeah. So I'm not sure if import is the right word, but basically because Avocado is a different address. So when you connect Avocado, it's only going to see the assets that are in the Avocado It's not going to see your MetaMask or your EOA wallet. So the, the import is just a page that we created to make it easier for you to deposit funds. So you don't even have to use that. You can just send funds directly into your wallet. But if you want an interface that's pretty and that shows you everything, you can use the import and the DeFi positions. If you want to import, this is a real import, the loan positions from your DeFi smart accounts, you can then migrate them from that page as well.

Oh, that's very helpful to me, the noob user, the non-technical user. So like when I see import, I feel like there's some fancy fancy schmancy stuff going on, but it's not. I, I can just send my tokens on whatever network is supported, all supported EVM networks listed right here. So if I have tokens on mainnet Polygon, Arbitrum Optimism, BSC, Avalanche, Gnosis, Polygon zkEVM, Aurora, and Fantom, I can send them to this address and they are now in my Avocado wallet. And that's all I need to worry about.

Correct.

Great. I love that. I love that.

I will mention something else that's a very edge case.

Please do.

But just in case, very edge case, but I know, I know your listeners will love it. If you happen to send funds from a network that we do not support, do not fret. They may not be lost forever. If we support that network in the future, we would have access to that address and you would be able to access those funds. So just so you know, FYI.

So if somebody really wanted a network supported, they could just send millions of dollars of tokens on, on that, and then you would feel obliged to help them out.

Please don't do that. That will give me a heart attack. I mean, if you're okay with it being, you know, locked away for some time, possibly forever.

In purgatory.

Yes. Then you can do that.

Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that something's not like fully, fully, fully, fully permanent. It just might be permanent, but there's, there's some chance. You're saying there's a chance. Seb, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for giving us your time, for instructing us, for fighting the good fight. Of abstraction and making things more elegant and user, user-friendly for the masses. And you know, I'm looking forward to us doing a hackathon together and making the Pool Together plant game ASAP.

Yeah, this is a great chat. Thank you for having me. And yes, we also gotta talk about synthesizers. So we'll, we'll hack and make plant together and then we'll also jam on some synthesizers. That's it. It's done.

We'll do some sound tracking.

There you go.

Yep. Love it.

All right, man.

All right.

Take care. Thank you.

Take care. Bye. Thanks for listening to the PoolTogether Community Podcast. You can visit pooltogether.com to deposit, and we'd love to hear what you thought about today's episode. So visit the PoolTogether Discord and let us know.