Chris Maddern and Christine Hall present Rally, a mobile wallet that makes transactions gas-free on Solana and turns discovery into a group activity. Built by the Venmo and Robinhood founders, Rally lets you sponsor friends' transactions and earn rewards through a social referral program called Give a Meme, Get a Meme.
Chapters
Hello, Breakpoint. What an incredible few days. I'm Chris.
I'm Christine.
And we're the co founders of Rally. You might have known Rally as Floor until just a few days ago, but the transformations in the product that we're going to tell you about today led us to it was time for a new name.
And we've been sitting in the audience.
Amazing builders, announced some of their really great launches. And one thing that we've heard over and over is mobile 2024 is the year of mobile on Solana, which is exciting for us because we've been building a mobile first product since 2021. But even before that, Chris and I have focused our careers on introducing users to revolutionary financial products on their phones. So, Chris first at Venmo and me recently at Robinhood.
So why does mobile matter? Mobile matters because attention matters. And attention is the biggest market that we've ever seen. And it lives on mobile. It lives on the devices that we have with us for 12, 14 hours a day and that we literally spend four to six hours of the day on. It's where we connect, it's where we communicate, it's increasingly where we transact. And the way that that attention is shaped is through influence.
And now influencing has been around for centuries. It's nothing new. But in the era of the Internet, influences really mirror the underlying compute structure that's evolved. It's nothing new. This is a diagram from a paper published six decades ago. Might seem familiar of how something can go from centralized to distributed. If you think about influence, that has happened as well recently, with influencers having their own audiences and being able to work with platforms or brands to monetize that influence that they have.
But fundamentally today the system is extremely broken because we lack the tools in order to be able to recognize, to track and to ultimately reward that influence. And with crypto and blockchain, we have this incredible tool set for the very first time to take the most powerful force that there is, attention and influence, and to platform it in web3.
But the thing that we all use is stuck in single player mode. We're doing it alone.
You start your journey in web 3 in non custodial crypto with these 12 words, probably in a dark room, so no one else sees them and you can hide them. And it really doesn't get any better. As you go, you're sat at your computer, in your desktop browser, in your extension and you're signing messages. And fundamentally, while our clients are stuck in single player mode, we don't think it's going to be possible to realize this vision of a multiplayer influence recognizing system that's equitable for everyone. And so we've been focused for the last year on how you put your wallet into multiplayer mode. And today we're sharing four updates to Floor that transformed it into Rally and we think really puts your client to Web3 into multimedia mode for the first time. First and kind of most directly is bringing your friends with you at every single step of the way. So whether that's how you discover tokens or coins or NFTs, whether that's social context at the point of transaction, or whether it's for new users being able to see the world of Web3 through the eyes of the person who brought them before they're even ready to get into it themselves.
The second thing that we're excited to announce is meeting people where they are with native payments at every single step. Native to us might be on the blockchain paying gas, but for our users it's using a credit card, it's funding with a debit card, it's purchasing with in app payments and face id.
Speaking of native, probably the least native thing to anyone who isn't in a room like this is gas like why on earth do you have to pay to click a button? And with Solana, with localized fee markets and with the cost structure of Solana for the first time, it's really feasible to be able to completely sponsor Gas and make that problem go away. So starting today, every single Solana network transaction in Rally is completely sponsored, completely gas, free to the end user.
And last but not least, the thing that I'm most excited about, it brings the social element of Venmo's feed with the dynamic that Robinhood used to grow virally and that is a social referral program. Give a meme, get a meme.
We're really excited about this. We're working with some of our personal favorite memes in order to make sure that when you bring your friend to web3, they get a little bit of web3 in their wallet from the very get go. We think this is important for two reasons. One, for new users, it proves to them that Web3 is for them and they can do it because they already have a token, they've already done it when they start. And for memes and communities, it's a way to welcome net new users at the very front door and have it be the first community that folks join. And we're really excited to bring it some of these meme communities to more people.
If you ask someone how they got started in stocks and they onboarded through Robinhood's referral program, they probably know the actual share that they got. We want to replicate that in Web3 and shifting something that really feels PvP sometimes today to something that you can do together. Explore, trade, win, maybe even lose with your friends.
So everything we just talked about here is now live in Rally in the App Store. And we think that these four things, bringing your friends into the context of the wallet everywhere, using going to where users are, and using native payment methods for mobile, getting rid of gas entirely and welcoming new friends with memes puts your wallet into multiplayer mode and hopefully can be the place that you can bring your next curious friend into Web three. So we challenge you to give that a go. Try welcoming your next friend to Web three through Rally. They'll get their first token. You'll get a token as a thank you for bringing them. And finally, I want to say thank you for having us and thank you to everyone in this room who isn't building at the consumer layer, because so much of what we've been able to accomplish here is because other teams have been building much further down the stack in order to make things possible that weren't possible two years ago that weren't possible before Solana. And so we really are building consumer experiences on the back of many of the giants in this room. So thank you very much and have a great break point.
