Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
DevNTell - Building Secure Internet Money Infrastructure with @openfort_hq feat. co-founders @joalavedra and @jamalavedra | host: @narb_s
Recorded: March 13, 2026 Duration: 0:31:14Space Recording
Full Transcription
GM, GM, welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of Devontel.
So if you didn't know, Devontel is a 30-minute podcast held every week,
allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show
and showcase what they built.
And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Joan Alavrera, who is the co-founder of OpenFort.
So if you don't know, OpenFort is building a secure wallet infrastructure
to unlock better UX with internet money.
So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to meet Joan, learn about OpenFort and how you can get started using them today.
All right, let's get into it.
GMGM, welcome to the show, Joan. I'm so excited to have you on today, man. Hey, how are you doing, Arp? Thanks for stopping by and inviting me.
Of course. Likewise, thank you for stopping by on the show as well.
Yeah, man. I've been taking a look into OpenForge and it looks like you guys have built quite quite a suite of uh really useful
tools for developers who basically get up and running with wallets um but uh before we get
into all of that um would you like to give a introduction about yourself folks who aren't
familiar yeah yeah yeah for sure so uh yeah for everyone that never heard of open ford or ourselves
i'm i'm john one of the co-founders here.
Basically, OpenFord started a little more than three years ago within the gaming entertainment space in crypto
to later on realizing that there is more parts of the stack that could be improved in terms of private key management,
sending transactions on the blockchain, etc.
And so today we kind of like position ourselves as like an open source wallet operating system.
We can, you know, definitely better, like what does it mean and like what parts are, you know,
working together to accomplish that.
But yeah, very excited to be here.
Amazing.
And yeah, really excited to have you here as well.
I guess, just curious, how did you find yourself in the technology space in crypto and eventually becoming a co-founder?
It's a good question.
I started this venture with my brother and co-founder, Jamme.
And before starting OpenFort, we were actually doing other kind of like more traditional
uh businesses uh one of those uh back at the time when we had the gpt3 uh the process uh
predecessor of uh you know chat gpt and so we were building a lot uh in the kind of like in the hacker
community trying things out um and then yeah luckily we came across all the hackathons from
eth global and like other smaller ones and so we participated in some online others in person and
then from there you know you start having a kind of like an opinionated view of what a good solution
could be like uh what are the problems that the ecosystem face, et cetera? And that got us straight into OpenFord
and the whole wallet stack.
Yeah, yeah, that's amazing.
And I've heard some founders have a similar story,
but I don't think I've ever come across,
at least not one that comes to mind,
a company co-founded by a pair of brothers.
I think that's really, I think it's really awesome.
It's a big in its challenge, but it's actually pretty fun.
Yeah. I mean, it lets you both be like completely and openly honest with each other at all times.
It's a different dynamic than if you were with a non-family relative, eh? Yeah, you probably start from a trust place
that is completely different from someone that you just met,
6 to 12 months in, which is good.
Yeah, 100%.
And yeah, I guess you kind of almost alluded to it.
But I guess while you were kind of building through those hackathons and whatnot,
I'm sure you came across a slew of different problems in just the wallet usage domain and wallet infrastructure in itself.
I guess for the audience today who might not be familiar or might be new to the
space, what are some of the paramount problems top of mind for you relating to wallets and
wallet management?
Well, it's a very good question. And it's unfortunately a place that there's still a lot of room to improve
and to get kind of like a consensus agreement
of what the end state of a UX and what it should look like.
There's been a lot of progress there, right?
When we started, people were literally managing wallets
through Chrome extensions.
Now we completely changed paradigm to embedded wallets.
I think the next iteration
will be probably around
authentic wallets
and how we manage security in those.
But I think some of the problems
that we have,
we unfortunately already solved
is how we manage private keys,
how to a certain extent
we guarantee that who's the custodian of manage private keys um how to a certain extent we guarantee that is uh that who's
the custodian of those private keys um we also solve um you know the interactions that are
happening in the blockchain meaning how do we send erc20 to stable coins without having to pay gas or
how do we earn stable coins from yield in a smooth and fast way
so all those parts are like uh are hopefully like already solved within wallets i think um you know
parts that are still not solved and probably require a little bit more digging if you look
at the specific ecosystems for instance in ethereum now you have a huge um um you know let's say a huge uh conversation happening around okay what's the
next stage of account abstraction how does it look like it is do we implement a new standard
uh called frame transactions do we go for something more entrenched uh within within the
protocol etc like all this all this it's it's good because it basically means that there's good progress within the
ecosystem.
It kind of like resembles to like a V1, V2, V3 of normal software products.
And so eventually it all means that, you know, you need to have less middleware to manage
like a very good UX.
You need to have less dependencies.
You can be less vendor dependent
so it's it's actually it's actually good good progress there and i think for the most part any
you know user product already has a good variation of ux uh solved um and i think like the next
challenge as i was saying is like the agent wallets and how do we manage those?
How does it look like for us to incorporate permissions,
automations, and all that type of stuff?
Yeah, and that's amazing to hear.
And I don't know if you caught it yesterday,
but it was all over my timeline.
Somebody apparently swapped with a mobile wallet 50
million dollars of usdt to that's all they and there there was like basically 90 or more of
slippage and they resulted getting i don't know like 40 000 or something like that some really
really low number uh yeah i guess uh like when stuff like that happens, as a founder trying to kind of better the wallet UX space as a whole, what's your reaction to that?
Yeah, I had confronting feelings.
I guess for one, I was like, okay, maybe he had a very strong setup with a bunch of, I don't know, past Q encrypted seed phrases with a multi-seed behind it, etc.
Like he felt very secure to do that with the phone.
We might be reaching to a point that, yes,
we actually can self-custody all that money.
But it also like it was very crazy to me,
like thinking that, you know,
you can have that much slippage on chain,
even though they said that they had the right cautionary banners
to say, look, this is going to be packed significantly,
the return of the transaction, et cetera.
I think it's like overall, I would say this was very responsible,
but it's good that this person was able to do that before getting hacked, I guess.
But yeah, it's kind of like an interesting event for sure.
Yeah, to say the least.
uh yeah i guess um kind of segue from that um i'm really keen to kind of hear your uh side of the
story of all things openfort so i guess um like as an introduction uh how would you describe open
fort uh to our audience who might not have heard of you guys before yeah open ford is uh what it
Yeah. OpenFord is a wallet. I like to say that OpenFord is a wallet operating system that helps developers plug the necessary abstractions for them to ship the right product at the right time.
you know, think about custody.
For others, it might be
they just want
a smooth, you know,
transaction orchestration.
And so OpenFord, like with this operating system
analogy, we try to meet the
developers and builders where they are.
And some, they are building like a, you know,
an airbank from the scratch. And then
they might use fully OpenFord plus
other parts with like other parts of
infrastructure we have with partners, like virtual accounts of infrastructure we have with partners like virtual accounts,
et cetera. Uh, and others are like, okay,
I already have like most of the stack defined and I just need, you know,
pay masters or I just need a great way to save the, the,
the private queue like a permission. And that's,
that's kind of like the modularity of, of this operating system.
Amazing. And, uh,
it's not just a one or two uh different uh tools you have
in the toolkit um there's multiple different things that you have available for for developers to get
up and running pretty quickly and easily i guess um from your perspective what are what are some
key highlights or uh product offerings um of open for you like developers to hear about today sure i mean
one of the one of the proudest parts of the product that we that we have uh and we've been
developing for the past six months was um the watch it the widget sdk um so so basically what
we did there we we took the great work that the team from family uh did
with connect kit and we fork it and give it like a you know a longer and util uh lifetime basically
by adding you know emails passkey social logins that before this wallet uh you know this wallet
kit was not able,
it was just like functioning as a wallet library.
And so that one is like one of the kind of like proudest
product that we have out there.
And it's pretty cool because it's packed, like, you know,
as a developer, you can literally just like do NPM,
create open forward, and you have like a fully working
version of like the whole authentication
wallet creation and sending a transaction with a paymaster.
And I feel like this is kind of a very interesting way to plug these different tools that OpenFord
offers in one uniform good UX.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's awesome, man. And I recall you have some on-screen demos
or on-screen content you want to showcase.
So did you want to get into that now?
Yeah, we can showcase some cool stuff for sure.
Let me quickly share my screen here.
Okay, is it showing now?
Yes, sir.
Yep, very good.
Very cool.
So I think this all can be found in a demo that
opened for .io.
This is a work Arnav from the team did.
It's really really really cool we basically tried to you know build
demos that resemble the um the user life cycle uh or ux within crypto so we call it like stablecoin
transfers here on the left there's cfo approvals x42 payments etc so just to show you like a couple
of them that we think is really cool one One of it is called Stealth Addresses.
So this is basically the ability to create addresses,
send and receive money without actually being able
from external parties to track the address that receives the money.
And so something that we've created here,
and all those demos are like testnet,
but something that we've done here is kind
of like okay you know we resemble a cool kind of like mobile ui and show you hey this is how like
you would receive money this is how you would send money etc etc so this is like a pretty
you know cool demo we also made the you know a demo showcasing how you can actually pay
a demo showcasing how you can actually pay transactions
with any stable coin that you want.
So you can actually say, hey, I want to pay transactions with DAI,
I want to pay transactions with USDC, et cetera, et cetera.
And it all works seamlessly either if you use a delegated account
or if you use a smart account.
So if you use something like a safe, like a multisig,
or if you use an account that delegates to another one
in order to make the transaction seamlessly.
So this is kind of like the type of demos
that we look to offer and I think
that are interesting within OpenFord.
We created another one with X-Pro2,
where you have already
a very simple
demonstration of an article that you want
to read and with an X-FRO2
micropayment, you get the article on lock.
So this type of things are actually
like, you know,
we feel it demonstrates the power of
crypto beyond perhaps the
hyper-financialization of something
and it's actually more tangible to a role of a person within a company
or within their day-to-day consumption, if that makes sense.
It does. And yeah, this is pretty snazzy.
And yeah, I've shared the link in the comments below
if anybody is interested watching us live today to poke around with.
And it would also be shared in the podcast description,
so you can check it out after the fact as well.
I guess in terms of the competition landscape,
what would you say you guys do differently than some of the competition out there?
Yeah, I think wallet infrastructure is a very interesting space
because it's one that if you do really well,
you get to be in the middle of end users, companies,
interacting directly with their blockchains.
For us, the thing that we the thing that we
double down a lot
in the early beginnings is to
have an open core that
is open source.
We identify
the way that the private keys are
managed and the way that private keys are
created, etc.
By being one of these
strong trusting
assumptions that we do from a developer standpoint, saying,
yeah, I trust with this partner that they'll do the right thing.
And it's fine.
Maybe 95% of the time, nothing happens.
But then if something happens, it ends up
being a catalyst, a black swan thing.
And so we ended up deciding building something
we call OpenSign signer which is a self
hostable wallet key management solution um what it basically means with open signer it's basically
the idea that any project can self-host their own wallet infrastructure if they want and be
completely non-custodial towards their end users. So it's very easy to actually create wallets
and then be the custodian of the wallet,
of the private key by encrypting it, et cetera, et cetera.
But it comes with a lot of regulatory burden,
compliance, et cetera.
And so with OpenSigner, kind of solve this paradigm
by letting any developer actually make this part,
like this, internalize this part of the stack themselves
and as a result be able to create wallets without having these compliance burdens in a secure,
but also, you know, very importantly, easy way to recover the private keys if for whatever
reason something wrong happens with those, like something wrong happens to the users,
you know, managing those kids themselves wow that that's amazing to hear that um you guys are taking open
source so seriously i guess um was there any particular moment during the the company's
founding or or some event that kind of pushed you guys to say, oh, we want to do something, we want to do this differently, we want to make our stack open source?
I mean, it's a good question.
There's definitely like a part of it, you know,
that becomes part of like a business strategy
and kind of like counter positioning
to whatever solution we see in the market
and like we think makes sense that there is a, you know,
value proposition that
it's different for other types of like developers and companies um i think there's also an important
fact here uh where you know a lot of a lot of setups that we saw back at the time were claiming
that they were like non-custodial but it was actually not truly non-custodial
because you could recover the private key
via an auth token that you can get
from your authentication solution or vendor,
or you actually were back-channeling some parts
to your server, encrypted, et cetera, et cetera.
So all these things,
and not having enough transparency
on how the system was designed precipitated the idea of,
OK, we actually need to build something here that OpenFord
can cloud host for the clients.
But also, anyone should be able to quickly run the Docker
themselves and get it up to speed.
Yeah, that sounds very amazing to me.
And yeah, I guess, are there any opportunities for people
to get involved and contribute to the source code?
Are there open issues?
Or how can developers get involved if they want to help out?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, we have, yeah, I mean, obviously, the repo's open.
I think we have a community on Telegram
of some developers coming in and asking questions there.
Like, OK, what's the right setup that I should use
or that I should create to offer this type of guarantees uh how
do i plug uh you know another authentication vendor like better out firebase etc and so like
people are asking these questions on on on the communicate on community channels uh we've we've
got some you know prs from people that uh you know we're improving parts of like the documentation we're improving parts of um the way
that you would uh instantiate and run the the the repo as well so yeah i mean uh contributions are
always uh like we're always open for contributions uh if anyone sees anything as well obviously
opens a issue and we try to be as timely as possible to to reply back there. Awesome. And yeah, we will have the GitHub repo as well
in the product description.
So if anybody watching today is keen to contribute,
definitely you'll have the opportunity to do so.
And I guess in terms of the long-term vision of OpenFort,
you kind of alluded to it early on where you're keen on exploring
agentic payments and similar avenues. I guess from your standpoint, what's the long term
vision of Openfort and is there any alpha you can perhaps share about what you guys
are working on this year yeah i mean for sure like uh so i think the like the core um the core assumption that open
ford works on is the idea that we want to make it super easy for any developer to access uh
financial products and anxious and access like financial primitives without having to ask permission to do so.
Right.
We should be able to, as a community, as a group of builders, we should be able to access
to these primitives and build products that we think would benefit the society and we
think would benefit our countries. Right. And so having, I think like having this middle word
that simplifies how you build your specialized
neobank in Paraguay, or you build your specific
wealth manager in Uganda, et cetera.
It's all very powerful because before all these primitives
were very, very locked by regulation, by big players, and all that mode around it.
And so for us, being able to offer this access, regardless of the geography or ethnicity, etc.,
is a very powerful mission.
In terms of where are we going with the roadmap,
where are we seeing more traction, more excitement
from community, et cetera.
I mean, obviously, the current thing
is all around AI agents and how you simplify.
I mean, there's two points here in AI agents that
are interesting. like one is
how you simplify as much as possible for these agents to have access to financial rails so either
through credit cards through you know crypto wallets etc etc but then the other important
part is okay now that we have these agents these agents with these endpoints, with these capabilities, what services do they consume?
Do they go to a normal e-commerce and they buy us a pair of Converse sneakers?
Or we give them something that they couldn't access before, such as endpoints that before were extremely gated under a very high price SaaS
offering.
And so if you start thinking towards the places where you couldn't develop the product because
it was very hard to do or it wasn't existing due to the system constraints, I think you get into a place where um you either expand a lot towards paper usage micro transactions
um or you you know eventually also expand a lot towards okay um do i you know do i need to for
instance if i want to make money i'm just like a builder i have no idea you know you know, what, uh, uh, you know,
what I need to do to register a company,
what I need to do to earn money on internet, et cetera, et cetera.
How do I make it easy for these people to actually earn money without having to
ask permission to, you know,
a bank or without having to ask permission to a government to do that. Right. Um,
and I think that is like also something that is now very possible and has been
unlocked because of, uh, AI agents agents and all this AI building toolkit.
And so this is kind of like the things that we are thinking a lot.
As a matter of fact, today, later on, we're also launching something very cool, which is OpenFort CLI.
which is a open fort cli uh so basically it's a very cool um you know building block for any agent
and human to interact with like all the infrastructure of open fort and you know get it up to
speed in just a couple of minutes and do things like uh sending access transactions on ethereum
like making uh investment on solana etc etc so it's it's all very very very cool yeah indeed very
cool and and yeah we've seen this this rise in popularity of clis again uh yes because a lot of
a lot of people are a lot of people are finding out oh the the mcp side of the of the story um
is actually eating up a lot of context in your ai agents. Yeah, you've seen that as well on your timeline.
Yeah, 100%.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I mean, it's cool.
It's basically, in my opinion, it's all going to be APIs and CLIs from here on out.
any website that doesn't have a API will eventually have one
Any website that doesn't have an API will eventually have one
just because this is the way agents will be consuming data
until somebody else comes up with another protocol to do so, right?
And absolutely...
The whole IPification of software is super interesting.
And if you start thinking on...
You know, like a very simple API would be, hey, give me like this premium data and then I return you the premium data.
And like how you actually are able to abstract very complex systems under like one single API and then maybe price this API or give it for free under some conditions, etc.
Like this is obviously like super, super exciting.
And then the question becomes, how do you
find the right APIs, and how do you
vet that those are the right ones?
Maybe someone ends up building a Google algorithm for this.
Who knows?
Yeah, discovery will be huge, and verification
of these APIs as well.
I mean, we saw with OpenClaw recently, like a lot of these skills, like the people didn't know
any better and then they were consuming some skills or APIs that were malicious and
getting hacked. So definitely solving for that is a business in itself. So anybody watching today,
free startup idea for that. Solving for that is a business in itself. So anybody watching today, free startup idea for you.
Free startup idea.
Go build that.
Are you using a lot of open flow and stuff like this?
You said your own open flow and things like that as well, Nar?
I went down the rabbit hole to explore it.
I didn't get too far past the initial setup
because I was kind of put off by how open it was.
So I was like, maybe I'll let the technology mature a little bit before I step back in.
But yeah, it seems like everybody is digging in there.
And Mac Mini's for whatever reason.
Exactly. Definitely put it on all devices.
Don't put it in your current device, that's for sure.
Yeah, 100%.
But yeah, 100% is a very interesting space.
And yeah, it's really exciting to see it kind of grow out.
And I guess as we're coming to time here, I mentioned it.
There might be some aspiring founders watching the show today
who might want to start building their own project.
I guess, as a co-founder yourself, is there any advice that maybe you'd want to give to founders watching today?
Or maybe it's some advice you'd want to give to your younger self before starting OpenFOR.
some advice you'd want to give to your younger self before starting open for
i think i mean for sure uh i think yeah yeah if i had to give me myself like a good advice
would be to just you know build things with people that you're having fun with for the most part, at least initially.
I feel like I was talking actually to a bunch of friends that they were approaching company building
and starting their own ventures in a very rigorous
and methodical way, which makes sense.
There's no right or wrong.
But I always know the passion and
like the kind of like intensity of trying to do something and surround yourself with people with
the same level of intensity to be uh the kind of uh you know the the part that replenished me the
most and so that would be like the advice kind of like find people that like you know
And so that would be the advice.
Kind of like find people that fills you with energy
and have a common passion for a problem
and then doing it, right?
Going all in on that.
Well said.
And yeah, I agree.
Strouding yourself with the right type of people
really does make a difference.
It's very subtle, but yeah.
Great advice.
And yeah, I guess as we conclude, what's the best way
for people to keep up to tabs, keep up to date, sorry,
with all things open for it?
Yeah, I mean, like follow, I think,
like on Twitter, like X, sorry, you can follow us there.
We try to be as active as we can with the different things that we ship.
And if you want to try parts of the product, just go into the docs and you will see a chat widget there.
If you talk there, it's me answering back.
So I'll be the one answering back any questions that you might have, any ideas, et cetera.
So feel free feel
free to ping me there as well amazing yeah and we'll have that we'll have that contact info
down in the description below so if you're interested in open fort asking questions or
how you can get involved definitely reach out to Joan and with that thank you so much Joan for
for taking the time out of your busy day
to come chat with us today. It was really
amazing learning about OpenFort and
getting to learn a little bit more about you.
Oh, good. It was a pleasure being here.
Thanks for inviting us.
Of course, of course. My pleasure.
And with that, I just want to wish
everybody a very happy Friday,
happy weekend, wherever you may be, and
we will catch you here next week for another great episode of Devontel.
Until then, have a good one, folks.
Cheers.
