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Redefining Onboarding w/ Aggregation!
Recorded: April 21, 2025 Duration: 1:02:21Space Recording
Short Summary
The discussion centered around the evolving landscape of crypto adoption, emphasizing the importance of simplifying onboarding processes, enhancing user experiences, and fostering growth through innovative projects and partnerships. Panelists highlighted trends in user engagement, institutional adoption, and the need for accessible technology to bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hey, what's going on, everyone? Happy Monday. Happy Easter Monday. Oh, my goodness. I can't
believe. Yeah, no. Holidays in web three. What is that?
Never heard of it. Never heard of it. But guys, thank you so much for being here early. Let us
go ahead and kick off that usual mic check. So if you can hear me right now from the audience,
please let us know with some thumbs ups, with some hearts, with some kind of indication that
the audio is in fact reaching you all right now. Thank you, Timmy. Thank you, Inception.
Thank you, Emmy. Thank you, Diana.iana web3mj always a pleasure to see
you my friend thank you so much for always turning up for these all right guys i think we're all good
to go here uh thank you evan all right guys we're all good to go here but please give us just a few
more minutes to get things set up on the back end but in the meantime please head to the bottom right
hand corner give us a like comment and retweet on today's basis and we will be starting the show
in just a few more minutes.
Let's go.
Let's go. I want you to breathe me, let me be your air, let me roam your body freely, no inhibition, no fear, how deep is your love? The ocean. What devotion. Are you.
How deep is your love.
The light. The water.
Hit me.
Again.
How deep is your.
How deep is your.
How deep is your.
Love.
The ocean.
Hold me close up Again
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
Open up my eyes and I How deep is your love? Is it like the ocean?
What devotion are you?
How deep is your love?
Is it like Nirvana?
Kick me harder again. How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love? How deep is your love?
It's like the ocean.
Hold me closer.
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love? How deep is your love? How deep is your love? How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love? How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love?
How deep is your love? Sous-titrage ST' 501 so tell me how deep is your local community how deep is your love so tell me how deep is your local community
so tell me how deep is your local community
yo how's it going everyone welcome back to egg layer
the cross-chain settlement layer that is aggregating all of web
three but in my opinion they're doing a bit more than just that but anyway my name is ice and i'll
be your host for today's show now ladies and gentlemen as someone who is actively trying to
get his parents into crypto i can confidently say okay that this is just about the only money
related thing that old as Asian people cannot grasp immediately.
It's confusing as hell for them.
I don't know why, but it just is.
But to be fair, it was pretty confusing for me too five years ago.
But the point is, is that it is less confusing now than it was before.
before. And I know that in the immediate future, making things even less confusing will be one of
the most important keys to bring more folks on board in Web3. And yes, that includes our parents,
by the way. So how might we do this? Let's talk about this. But first, let me check in with my
dear co-host from the Ag Layer team, starting off with our dear Diana. How are you doing today?
the Ag Layer team, starting off with our dear Diana. How are you doing today?
Hey, GMI is doing well. Happy Monday, everyone. It's a great day to be here in the industry. So
excited to chat more about onboarding, especially with aggregation.
We love to hear, Diana. Over the weekend, I was thinking, oh yeah, it's Easter Monday. I wonder
what Easter Monday is going to do for the charts.
Maybe we're going to get a blessing.
So lo and behold, we wake up this morning and say, huh, green around the board.
Oh, new announcements.
Oh, okay.
And whenever we see green on Mondays, it's always a little bit of a momentum push for us.
So there's that going for us, which is nice.
But Diana, glad to speak with you again.
I'm feeling good.
I'm hoping everybody else in the show is also feeling good about what they saw this morning.
But Diana, it's a pleasure.
Always happy to have the opportunity to speak with you.
And we're going to get back to you in just a moment.
But first off, let's go ahead and check in with our other co-host.
What's going on, Timmy?
How are you doing today, brother?
GM, I am good.
Crypto Twitter
is way more fun when the vibes are good and the vibes are good when it's a green Monday.
So it's a good day. It's a good day to be here indeed, man. Thank you so much for being
here, Timmy. And before we kick off today's discussion about why green days are good and
why might that facilitate onboarding in addition to layered aggregation, Let's go ahead and check in with some of our lovely panelists.
First off, let's go ahead and say hello to Benny checking in from XDC.
What's going on Benny?
Hey, GMGN.
So yeah, this is my second space.
Thanks for having me.
I'm in second space with AgLayer, so thanks for having me here.
Yeah, let's jump into the conversation.
Yeah, actually today I was talking about this to a friend,
so I would like to share it here as well.
The timing could not be better, Benny.
Thank you so much for joining us, man.
Let's go ahead and check in with the representative
behind the Inception House account.
What's going on, Inception?
GM, GM, GM, how are you guys?
Today the vibes are good. I'm Gonzalo, I'm the CMO on, Inception? GM, GM, GM. How are you guys? Today the vibes are good.
I'm Gonzalo. I'm the CMO here at Inception. Pleasure to be here. I think it's my first
space with Aglayer, but it's a pleasure, guys. Let's keep it rolling.
Let's keep it rolling indeed. Thank you so much for joining us, man. And that being said,
let's go ahead and say hello to Evan representing Billions. How are you doing, Evan?
GM, GM, everyone. It's a beautiful day on chain. Thank you so much to the Ag Layer squad for
inviting me to join the party. My name is Evan. I'm the co-founder of Billions Network, which is
the first universal human and AI network built with mobile first verification. What that means
is that you can prove who you are from the safety of your phone without revealing any of your personal data, unlocking a connected universe that is personalized to you based on who you are, what you can prove, and unlocking many abilities that you enjoy in Web2 in an on-chain environment no matter where you go. So really excited to talk about exactly what you were referencing earlier,
Ice, which is simple, friendly experiences in the real world that can benefit everybody
who's gathered here today and all of our friends and loved ones. So thank you so much again for
having me. Honestly, Evan, with that intro, all I can think of is where were you when we had this
discussion at the coffee table? I feel like you could have done a much better job than I could have at that coffee table with my parents.
Because, man, with the one to two bits that you presented just there, I feel like the onboarding process just got easier for my parents.
So I'm going to have to send them this recording of today's space so they can hear what they are missing out on.
Parents, if you guys hear this and later on, just know that i love you oh this is not a this is not a burn i just think
you guys gotta listen to this a little bit more but evan thank you so much for joining us and
before we kick off today's discussion let's go ahead and check in with my friend naruto from
avail what's going on naruto hey guys uh thanks for inviting me this This is Naruto. I work at Avil as the bro. And what Avil is,
is that basically it's a DA layer, but it's also a unification of Web3. So there's an interop,
there's a DA layer, and then there's a very big staking mechanism. So there are like multiple
things going on in the back. We'll love to talk more about it. But yeah, thanks for inviting me
here. Yeah, man.
Thank you for joining us, Naruto.
You know, it's going to be tough for me to say your name without thinking back on the sound effects of my introduction.
It's going to weigh upon my mind a little bit for today's show, but I promise I won't let that in.
That's what I noticed.
That's what I noticed, honestly.
I'm like, yeah, that's pretty cool.
We did it for you, man.
We did it for you.
Bernardo, thank you so much for joining us.
And that being said, ladies and gentlemen, let's go ahead and kick off today's discussion.
And I want to start, as per usual, we'll start at the top before we take a deep dive into what this iceberg is truly about.
So to kick off today's conversation, I want to ask you guys, our dear panelists, first of all, what brought you to Web3?
And how was that onboarding experience
like for you? So let's talk about this a little bit more and let's talk about how we can change,
refine, and make it better for the generations to come. So please take a moment, think about what
you want to say, and at any point you want to join in on the conversation, please use the bottom
right hand panel to raise your hands like so and of course if you have anything
to add in direct response to what the previous speaker just said keep those hands raised but
also hit me up with one of these waving hand emojis and i'll do my best to skip the line and
send you the mic asap and for everybody else in the audience listening in right now please go back
to that bottom right hand corner give us a like comment and retweet on today's spaces as i hand
the mic over to my man
timmy to kick things off what are your thoughts on this man yeah so i i came to crypto as i would say
probably the most cliche story of 2021 um where i got caught up in first the gamStop hype, and then downloaded Robinhood,
bought some GME, had some fun, and then decided to buy Dogecoin.
So I came with the meme coins, and it went salt, I would say, very quickly. After buying Doge, that went okay, and then you got caught up in the crypto Twitter,
got caught up in like the crypto Twitter,
I would say, shill fest.
I would say shill fest,
basically instantly got wrecked buying safe moon
because I didn't understand anything about it.
And then I realized I had to actually learn.
So I started doing a lot of research,
mostly on Reddit to actually read about projects
and then really fell in love with everything.
But it's because I became obsessed with the um
the back end like the ethos what crypto stood for the permissionless nature um but it was
yeah so i would say memes memes and dogecoin brought me here um but then hopefully i've
matured a little bit since then man i feel like all of us has that one onboarding story where we got wrecked by either meme coins or some kind of some kind of basically coin that somebody else is trying to dump on us.
And we thought like, oh, you know, if Bitcoin, the only thing that I know, went to the moon and is now worth a gajillion dollars, then chances are this token is going to have the exact same effect, but only for us to learn the hard way.
Right, Timmy?
But, you know, we kind of spoke about this in the past, but you're actually a moderator
at one of the most booming crypto forums on Reddit.
So before we pass it over to the next speaker, I just wanted to get your opinion on this.
What is the general consensus or how do people view crypto on Reddit?
I would say it's probably it's split. Some people love it. I mean, I typically
use crypto Reddit is what I would call it. So like the cryptocurrency subreddit, the polygon
subreddit, they have avatars. I like those. And then outside, I would say it's kind of a mixed
signal. I would say over time, people tend to be opening up more and more, I think, because they're
just seeing how it's impacting their life. I mean, one Reddit that I like to use is the investing
subreddit and kind of seeing how talking about Bitcoin from four years ago to now, I mean,
you even mentioned that Bitcoin's a viable investment four years ago you were going to get downvoted into oblivion and now there's what i would say technical
conversations about it like uh you see the pros and cons and it's not like well accepted the same
as like a invest in the s p 500 would be but um it's i would say generally people are warming up to it.
Gotcha. So we're still in the phase of letting people know more about not just investments,
but also the tech side behind things. That's actually a good indication there to me. When
people stop talking about money, but instead start talking about the way that the technology can
change people's lives, I think that is the key conversation that really shifts mindsets.
But I guess for the immediate moment, yeah, I guess TradFi investment talk is always going
to be momentarily superior than crypto investment talk.
But we're going to change that.
We're going to change that real soon.
But on that note, let's go ahead and pass the mic over to Evan on this one.
You had your hand up earlier.
What are your thoughts on this, Evan?
So, Ace, exactly as you were noting, noting you know many of us have similar journeys finding our way to
this technology through an interesting discovery a group of you know friends whether digital or in
real life and that's exactly the same as my experience um i had the good fortune to encounter
bitcoin in a more of an academic context through an amazing professor
and group of particularly interested friends. And this is, you know, around, let's see, I,
you know, got interested in it, you know, a couple of years into school, graduated around 2012.
So that was before there was a universe of Ethereum, smart contracts and self-executing
code. However, what Bitcoin presented that I thought was so inspiring and
exciting was a censorship-resistant communication network, one that was self-healing, that had the
ability to, you know, to connect and operate the same for any user from any location, any part of
the world, any corner of the internet. And so in, you know, later years had the opportunity to begin building in the Ethereum ecosystem
around 2017, but specifically focused on identity.
And that I think is, you know, what I'm really excited to discuss today with aggregation
is the ability for the personalized internet, whether, you know, for our experiences as
humans or for the experiences and capabilities of AI agents acting on our behalf, that that is only possible
with distributed immutable ledgers and the capabilities of key material that we get in
our crypto wallets. And so although my journey started as academic, became more focused on
business opportunities and scale. And today, my work with Billions Network is really focused on in real life applications, making it really easy for people like, you know, your parents.
Hi, Isis parents, if you're listening to this later, and our friends and neighbors, you know, bringing really friendly, simple, straightforward experiences to them, such as allowing them to do things like tap their passport to their phone to safely prove that they're over the age of 18.
tap their passport to their phone to safely prove that they're over the age of 18.
So with that experience and many more, you know, Billions Network is unlocking this kind of accessibility at scale.
And with aggregation, we can do that in any chain environment because people are not limited to a single protocol.
Oh, powerful. I love that, Evan.
And also parents pay their regards.
They say thank you.
And future parents say thank you. But, you know, let me let me ask you this, because you mentioned something that's that really. Oh, my goodness. Sorry. Give me one second here.
I know we're here talking about AgLayer and we're here talking about cryptocurrency.
But when we discuss online identities, I think this is something that is incredibly, incredibly heavy when it comes to anybody that uses the Internet.
Whether it's at surface level as our PFP or whether it is as deep as the personality of the perfect version of who we want to be online.
So just wanted to get your thoughts on this, Evan.
In terms of the human identity, what do you think the average internet user is looking for when they want tools or maybe
just other ways to become that perfect version of themselves? So I would say no one wakes up
in the morning with dreams of logging in. We are all trying just to get through our days to accomplish the tasks that
we need to and to spend more time with the activities and people who we enjoy in our lives.
And so to that end, we want to fill out fewer forms. We want to make it easier to discover
opportunities that are well-suited to our attention and our capital, and we want to do so in a way that sucks less
than the process and experiences that we have today.
So on a very human level, the personalized internet
that we can unlock online, on-chain, and in real life
using zero-knowledge technology,
using decentralized identity, is really about saving time,
saving effort, saving complexity, and giving
you more back in your calendar and more choice and freedom in the process. So what this really
looks like from a practical perspective is that right now, if the, let's say, you know, Diana and
I are trying to interact on chain. If the only thing I know about Diana is her public key,
then there are pretty limited games that we can play together on chain.
We can pool our capital and spend a treasury.
We can send tokens back and forth to one another.
Perhaps we can, you know, lend to one another in an over collateralized fashion.
But if we want to plan a Twitter space like we're having today, we want to build a product.
If we want to plan a Twitter space like we're having today, we want to build a product,
if we want to lend to one another in an under-collateralized fashion, or we want to create personalized
app experiences tailored to Diana's preferences in music or in language, then we have to know
more about one another.
We have to be able to prove cryptographically that we are, for example, over a certain age in a certain
location, not from a forbidden country. And that additional data, adding that layer of verifiable
trust to our existing keys and capabilities, that allows us to play all sorts of cool games together,
meaning that when I say games, I mean, you know, coordination capabilities.
And so these are capabilities that will allow trillions of dollars of institutional capital
that's not allowed to mix with funds from random folks off the street,
but has to be conducted in a safe and compliant way.
This is going to unlock both a ton of value for builders, for protocols,
but also for individuals like you and me,
just allowing us to interact with applications
that allow us to do the things we wanted to do today
without having to think too much
about the underlying protocols.
Just like we're having this awesome conversation right now
and no one discussed VOIP or TCPIP or HTTPS,
yet all those protocols are still supporting our discussion
right now.
And I have a feeling now that we mentioned it, Evan, the Pandora's box has been open,
so we're about to hear those real soon.
But I love how you explained your thoughts in that conversation without using any of
the high tech and the really like deep
entrenched lingo and terminology that we're really, we've been kind of throwing around
here on web three, but instead you focus on the quality of life improvements that the
average normie can enjoy with personalized internet and decentralized knowledge.
And I love this so much because I've been a firm believer and you guys that have been
to my spaces before, you guys already know, I probably say this way too often, but I really am a firm believer,
huge subscriber to the thought that when it comes down to anything that tech can do for us,
it's about making our quality of life and web2 better, right? And what that ultimately does
is that it gives us human beings more time, which we've mentioned time and time again,
time is our most precious
commodity. So the more we can get of that, the better this tech is going to be into the future.
But I do want to take the opportunity to actually segue the conversation because we mentioned
like this, these are all great ways for us to bridge this convo over to Normie. So
wanting to pass the mic over to Benny on this one, actually, and that is, what would
you think, Benny, are some of the ongoing challenges surrounding conversations to onboard
with Normies?
What would you say are the most difficult things that we need to overcome right now?
So, yeah, I completely agree with previous speakers here.
So, I would say not much technical challenges because we have a
lot of infrastructure account abstraction there are a lot of ZK
improvement there are a lot of good products in the market that they are
very confident to onboard users so I would say the challenge is distribution
and I mean aggregation helps to get more distribution in general.
So in general, yeah, I would say distribution, more content creators, more influencers are
promoting or advising people to using these good products in the market.
So I would say from the technical perspective, from last two, three years, there is not much difficulties in terms of technicalities.
Now people can pay gas by stablecoins or
whatever type of things that exist on native account abstraction or ERC 4337.
Everything is there.
I would say the major challenge is distribution.
And yeah, I mean, Socialify applications are helping a lot.
So because to onboard, to getting that distribution,
we need to having right incentive mechanisms
that would be interesting for them to post on
on-chain Socialify rather than Twitter or YouTube, right?
So I would say, let's assume a YouTuber
with 10 million subscribers, right?
So trying to onboard those subscribers
onto the social file applications.
So you can see eventually the unique wallet address
is growing into the whole crypto,
I mean, depending on that ecosystem.
So it means more users uh and that would be easier for everybody to you to consume the yield products or whatever
web3 is offering as a product
thank you benny sir man i i'm losing my voice today. You know, when it comes down to distribution,
I feel like this is also something that we've discussed over and over again. And it's not just pertaining to the crypto adoption side of things.
I think I honestly, at the very beginning of this year,
I was very convinced that one of the main hardships for Web3 Gaming
was also on the distribution side.
But the more of these founder conversations
that I've engaged with,
the more I come to realize that
distribution is not an isolated struggle.
It is not something that is only faced
by Web3 Gaming companies.
As a matter of fact,
it's not only something that's being faced by Web3.
It's something that every industry struggles with.
Every single industry has this obstacle to conquer.
But there does come a time when the stars absolutely do align. that every industry struggles with. Every single industry has this obstacle to conquer,
but there does come a time when the stars absolutely do align
and it feels like distribution just becomes so streamlined
that kind of question,
why was this even an obstacle in the first place?
But I will say, Benny,
I think when it comes down to Web3,
there's a lot more friction
when it comes to distribution, right?
And I think most of that actually lays within education
and how that is being distributed. But on that note, I would actually love to pass the
mic over to you, Diana, regarding us. So first of all, do you agree with the distribution bit?
And secondly, what would you say are some of the more difficult ongoing challenges
that are surrounding onboarding conversations with Normies right now?
with normies right now. Yeah, thanks for the mic. And Evan, it's great to be honest with you,
dropping some massive knowledge bombs. And I would love to hear from you some more because
I'm like taking notes over here. But yeah, on the distribution side, I think like, you know,
everyone says this, but meeting users where they are.
Whenever I think of like onboarding normies, I think a lot of like my parents or like my friends.
And I actually recently just had a conversation with my dad.
He was just very curious.
He's like, how can I get exposure?
Like, how can I put a little bit of my investment into like Bitcoin or learn more about this. And like right now, there are just a lot of steps, to be honest. And a big a big piece of that is just like the knowledge part,
right? Like even just explaining the value prop of crypto and the use cases and and getting them
getting people to understand that, right? I think at least in the US,
like when I've tried to explain this to like family and friends,
they're like, well, we have Venmo
and we have PayPal and we have Zelle
and all these other things.
And it's not really until you kind of like
go into some of the deeper features
that they really start to like have that aha moment.
But I think, yeah, there's a lot of like ongoing challenges, I think, for onboarding other kind of folks into the space. I think a big
one is just, yeah, obviously, it's overwhelming complexity, too many steps, too many terms,
like not sure if it's worth it. Obviously, like there's kind of a mixed sentiment in the news.
Obviously, there's been like a lot of different, you know, FTX crash, like that kind of all my friends after the FTX crash were like, we're never going into crypto again because they all had money on FTX.
So like, I think there's like things like that, that kind of pushes to step back.
I think there's like things like that, that kind of pushes to step back.
There's also like this fear of loss that crypto could go to zero, that there's, you know, no real use case.
So I think a big part of this just all kind of comes back to like the knowledge gap and kind of like explaining the benefits, explaining how, you know, privacy and identity are going to make
a huge part of this industry. Like one thing that Evan said earlier, just like all I could
think about was like, you know, this generation of children that are growing up. Like I have a
one-year-old and I just watched this show Adolescence on Netflix. I don't know if anyone's
seen it. A phenomenal show.
But it makes you think of like, how am I going to protect my child and their privacy?
And that's like a huge piece.
When I was growing up, we didn't have cell phones or cyberbullying.
And we didn't have to protect their faces on the internet or anything like that.
So I think there's so many different use cases for
privacy and identity when it comes to blockchain. But anyways, that's kind of a roundabout,
I guess, answer to say that like, yeah, I think there's still like a little bit of ways to go
until we kind of get this like super clear onboarding, I think it's not going to be like immediate,
but until we can, I can just tell my dad to like go to an app and like download this.
And he doesn't even realize he's using crypto, like, which there are some apps I get like
Robinhood and all these other places where sure you can go and buy coins, but to actually
use the benefits of blockchain, I think every sort of application
needs to be simplified on a smartphone device, essentially.
So, yeah.
Very interesting.
So it comes down to simplifying the onboarding processes, as we've been discussing.
But also, what I really love about what you said diane is uh is about protecting the future generations right because i have this feeling that when it comes
down to like ourselves we kind of we kind of give ourselves too much credit it's like oh
crypto security uh ledgers like you know we kind of like that can never happen to me um but when
we start talking about other people especially our like our children or something like that
i think that's when human instinct really starts to kick in and that gets turned up to 11 right away, right? But before we
actually pass the mic over to Inception, you mentioned something that I have to dig just a
little bit deeper, Diana, and that is you said meeting the users where they are. And I absolutely
love that. And you mentioned, so somebody like your father, Diana, is looking to get more exposure
onto PTC. So a little bit out of the box question, but I want to hear your thoughts on this.
Do you think ETFs are doing this onboarding endeavor justice right now?
I think they're a great product for someone like my dad.
That's actually what I recommended to him.
I think it's a little bit of like, would I say my dad is on chain if he bought into a BTC ETF? Probably not, but he has
exposure to the asset. So yeah, I think it's kind of like a middle ground perhaps, but yeah,
I still think it's like a positive thing. Gotcha. So it's kind of like a foot through
the door technique, if you will, Diana. And so if ETFs were the foot through the door, what role would AgLayer
play in order to facilitate the full welcoming of blowing that door open, kicking down the front
door and actually welcoming your father into the world of Web3? Yeah. So, and that just goes back
to meeting the users where they are, right? So back in the early days of the internet,
you know, certain protocols couldn't talk to each other, right? Like, there was an ocean separating, you know, different research labs and universities that they couldn't send emails to
each other and things like that. Like, obviously, we're not like, we're still fragmented. There are
tools right now that we can use to bridge those to bridge those gaps, but like, it still
takes time and effort and thought to like bridge assets across chain.
So until we get to a point where you're not even like chains are just going to be like
plumbing features, um, and you're not even going to know what chain you're transacting
on, I think.
And that's really what the goal of Agler is, is just to like, help that kind of infrastructure like disappear to the user,
and more so be like the plumbing behind it. I think that that's going to be like the real
foot through the door. But yeah, for someone like my dad, it would have to be like,
a phenomenal app that you just like don't even know is on chain, but like has a lot of direct user benefit.
I think it's going to it's really going to be app driven for for someone like him or other other people.
Yeah, I honestly think so, too.
I think the presentation of the educational material is important and that kind of deals with the methodology behind that right but when we combine efficient methodology on with what uh with what
benny said earlier effective distribution and let's be real here most people have phones these
days most people know what apps are most people download apps before they even like read any of
the fine print you know who you are um but the point is if we combine these two power fronts
i think we're really hitting the shortcomings that we've been struggling with in the years of past, Diana.
So thank you so much for sharing that with us.
And Inception, you had your hand up earlier.
I do want to take the opportunity and pass the mic over to you.
What's on your mind, man?
Talk to us.
Can you hear me?
Yes, sir.
Loud and clear.
Nice, nice, nice.
So I guess sometimes it's bad to be the last one.
In this case, it's kind of amazing because this amazing panel already covered everything. So I'm just putting a quick nutshell. But I think everyone already raised the problems. Distribution, utility and complexity. Like the whole blockchain, and this is how me, Gonçalo, as a member of Inception sees it. But I know there are some, basically the whole team of Inception also has this look onto it.
but I know there are some basically the whole team of inception also has this look onto it
but yeah basically blockchain started as a financial I mean bitcoin was a financial solution
for the 28th crisis so yeah like when we started to enter in the financial realm
we kind of closed the doors already so only financial people were looking into blockchain
and that's cool because especially because we were on a phase where we were still growing.
Everything was still getting to the place where they are today, which is very far away from the users that what we want to be.
But that's where, and I think was Evan was mentioning this.
Now we start seeing some applications focused on the users.
And the users don't care if we are on HTTPS a py blah blah blah whatever or on a cip they don't care
about this they care about turning on their phone and doing what they want to do and that's where
i see a blockchain uh depths such as the the one from evin um or even uh the one from diana with
an aggregation layer that simplifies the distribution
among chains. I keep repeating this over chains. We are in a moment where we have too many chains
and it's very complicated for anyone to navigate. So yeah, basically right now distribution is a
problem because we don't know how to sell what we are doing here, but that's like the tip of the iceberg, the way I see it.
Utility is the first part.
So if we want to bring financial products and financial instruments to the market, all good, all fine.
Okay, there we have a distribution problem because people just think that it is too complex because they don't have a NADDAC to look into and understand which stocks are being traded.
No, they have 150 chains, which are at the moment, each chain with their own token.
There are some tokens that do these some magical thing that are present on several chains.
So people just get lost and decide to quit.
Most of my friends decided to quit when they started asking.
They wanted to buy meme coins just as the the team over here
uh and they just wanted so i want to buy these meme coin but i don't have money yeah man you
are an ethereum meme coin is on solana good luck bridging it around so it's always this problem
too complex uh there's no too much utility people only enter for quick gambles and quick investments. I do think that the info
we are building now will be adjacent to most of the apps we'll have in the future, which is good.
It's how I think we should evolve. And if we want to go on the financial level, we need to
simplify. Apps such as EggLayer are huge in this element. Let's cool down the bridges
and make everything a simple way for the user.
Like simplify the user journey
in the end of the day is everything.
And then of course, tip it with distribution
or top it with distribution
because distribution will help in fact us grow.
But it means that we will grow
for more than financial products,
which is what we are at the moment.
Well said Inception.
Combining simplification with financial solutions and, of course, bolstering distribution, all things that we are constantly at the forefront of our thoughts here.
And I think when it comes down to it, it really does go back to what you said there.
And that is giving people the ability to do what they need to do already, but while also mitigating changes
to the workflow as much as possible, right? Because let's be here, let's be real, human
beings, we're resilient, but we're also very against, we're also very against the idea of
change. And before some of you guys in the crowd say, oh, no, that's not me, I'm totally welcome
to change. Maybe you are, but the vast majority of other human beings, typically speaking, change
is an uphill battle.
Change is always going to be stressful to our brains,
no matter if it is positive or negative, right?
But also, Inception, the fact that your friends left the space
due to the wanting to shop for Mean Coins on ERC,
you know, that's...
It's unfortunate, man.
It's an unfortunate loss.
They were in the right mindset,
but in the wrong shopping district.
That's kind of what I feel like.
They were on the right mindset. They left the wrong shopping district. They were on the right mindset.
They left before everything crashed.
So they were like...
They were the ultimate winners at the end of this crazy turn of events.
But, you know, Naruto, I do want to take the opportunity and swing the mic over to you, get you looped in on the conversation, man. So we talked about a lot about what normies are struggling with when it comes down to pulling the trigger to really
joining us but in your mind naruto what kind of what kind of quality of life change do you think
normal do you think normies would need in order to move forward with crypto and adopting blockchain
technology to the to their daily lives?
That's probably one of the best questions that I've heard in a while.
So let me break it down to you because I recently kind of onboarded my brother.
He, you know, he's in college right now.
He's a sophomore and he's always texting me like, oh, you know, crypto. Tell me about it.
But his idea is like you just want to make quick money, know you want to make money and then get out um so i told him that crypto is not just
making money you need to like you know learn about blockchain you need to learn about wallets and
everything so how i onboarded him was i got him in a coinbase account we made a coinbase account for
him we i sent him you know 0.1, and then he can distribute it anywhere he likes,
do whatever he wants. Um, I showed him about bridges. I showed him a Metamask wallet. He has
a wallet. Um, he has a Revy wallet now. So he's trying to use both. I sent him some money on his
Coinbase account as well so that he can like, you know, buy other coins, um, looking into things.
well so that he can like you know buy other coins um looking into things i didn't introduce him to
anything else like ct or something but i did tell him about bridges i told him about different l2s
polygon base arbitrum all different places um and then the problem here he comes to me and he's like
what's the point if i have money on ethereum but I cannot buy on base or, you know, like I need to bridge out the money.
And that's the problem that we are currently facing is that because we have so many rollups and then we have to like, you know, send our assets from one place to another.
It becomes an issue for a normal user to not understand because there's like, you actually need a lot of education.
You need to first know about self custody wallet.
You need to know about different bridges.
You need to check about phishing links or scams.
You need to be learning about, you know, different L2s, why, which one is better, that kind of all, all different situations.
Right.
So I think for me, the habits that i told him like
you know you should be doing these is that read about one or two crypto things every day and then
these can be like just the apps these can be roll-ups these can be bridges and then try to
use them as well a lot of people on crypto twitter or like in general they keep on you know talking
about different projects or how they're bullish about it,
but their on-chain activity is zero. They have not really used something.
They don't know which bridge is best.
They don't know what's the difference between a lending and borrowing protocol
and then another DEX, which doesn't have lending and borrow, right.
Or other things.
So the point is like people on CT,
they don't use all of these things.
And then they kind of like, you know, support that.
So it's not just the normies,
it's CT people as well who are like struggling with this.
So that's what like education is really important.
Some of these habits is literally like choose one app, use it for a week and then move on to the next one or like try to like, you know, come back to it every once in a while.
I used to use, you know, Farcaster a lot in the in the beginning.
Didn't sit right with me.
So I stopped using it because it was like kind of like an echo chamber.
Right now I'm looking more into ethos and then other stuff as well so
my point is like just use it uh try to play with it have um have a burner wallet which you know you
don't mind losing your funds from because you're citing too many things one of my burner wallets
is like connected to 10 different sites i don't even care about it so point is like try to experiment stuff that's the easiest way for any Norway to like to learn stuff gotcha staying
curious staying hungry don't be not being afraid to learn but uh on the on
the subject of actually like bridging being one of the biggest layers of
friction it seems and the moment we actually mentioned that problem Timmy
Timmy immediately stepped up from his chair and started waving and had his
hand up so I'm gonna take the opportunity and pass the mic over to him what's going on in your mind
timmy talk to us yeah i i think part of it too is we have i know diana touched on it earlier and like
you said it earlier a little bit too i said like there's a few things so one is crypto is really hard to conceptualize. It's tough to understand, especially for people who don't really understand.
If you say digital assets, most people won't know what that means.
And then you have to meet users where they're at for what Diana said.
So I really think it comes down to making sure that people don't have extra work, making it easy and intuitive to use so that they solve problems.
They don't have to spend time learning about bridges or all this other stuff.
But I also think we're going to get a tremendous amount of onboarding, probably more than anyone's expecting, from institutions.
from institutions.
And it's institutions that not only are using crypto integrations
for their users and customers, but institutions that are using crypto
to make the institution's life easier.
And then people working for those institutions will become comfortable
using crypto.
using crypto. So like I can give a completely different example from Web2. Before I started
So I can give a completely different example from Web2.
working for Polygon, I never used Notion like for organizing things. I didn't really know how to use
it. And then once I started using it for the company that I worked for, it became intuitive
intuitive to use. I'm like, okay, this is good. This is better. And now I want to use it in my
to use. I've like, okay, this is good. This is better. And now I want to use it in my daily life.
daily life. And you can have all of this products that roll out to these companies that they're
going to then roll out to their employees and integrating web three into that. They'll see
the benefit and then people will just start using web three as a part of their job. And then it'll
really hit people. But the biggest thing of like, don't make it harder than it needs to be.
Make it super intuitive for people.
So like what we're trying to do with AgLayer is really like, hey, you just can log in and
connect your wallet the same way you connect a Gmail account to a website and you don't
have to worry about where your assets are to interact.
So I really think it's just like make it as simple as possible so there's no extra learning.
And building things in a way where the conceptualization for people, you can make analogies to like a your wallet account is just like signing in with your Gmail account and people go, oh, I get that. Versus like, I think the way that we're trying to educate people now is not,
does not lend itself to mass onboarding.
Agree with you there, man.
There really is no finite playbook on how the onboarding should go right now.
I feel like this is something that we're still trying to iron out.
After all, we can draw a lot of inspiration by the questions like with people
that are like our parents are asking.
Hence why one of the inspirations
for today's space, right?
But you know, I really do think
you're onto something here, Timmy.
And it is that major institutions,
Web2 institutions are going to be
one of the major catalysts
and bring out a lot more users.
And to that, I kind of wanted to ask you,
do you think it's going to start off by kind of refining the payment aspect of things with crypto?
Or do you see institutions actually finding more utility behind streamlining the decision-making process with their companies?
I think probably my bet, and I don't know, because that's one of those the future will decide, but I really think payments and then also RWAs are going to be the two biggest ways where institutions and users in general get onboarded.
So like if you think about, I saw it earlier today, Squirrel, and I forget who even posted it, but they were talking about credit card companies taking a 3% fee.
But they were talking about credit card companies taking a 3% fee.
And once we introduce crypto payments, I mean, if you can do it on any layer too, but I'll talk about Polygon.
It's less than a cent to make a payment transaction.
And it's almost like once we start doing that, then every single business out there will prefer to take payments in stable coins and every single user
or patron of whatever business it is. If the business builds that into like, Hey, you pay
with crypto, you get save this 3% fee. People are just going to start using stable coins in their
wallet because nobody likes to pay more than they need to. Um, and then I also think RWAs will be big because it will give a lot of
companies and savvier investors ways to turn unproductive assets into productive assets.
I think that's a huge unlock and really creating a lot of value for people. So I think those are
probably the two biggest areas where we're going to get mass onboarding.
But I do think there is something to be said for Web2 institutions will also want to use crypto just to make themselves more efficient.
That is amazing, Timmy.
Payments and real world assets.
The tokenization of real world assets.
And I feel like this really, your example there about the royalties or about the commissions and the splits,
royalties, if you want to call them,
it really harkens back to the Blur days, right?
When Blur introduced zero royalty fees
in the NFT scene,
like saving on that 2.5% royalty,
it made all the change.
I mean, I can't really say
if that was a good or bad thing for projects
in the immediate moment.
I think a lot of people
wouldn't agree with me on this one.
But over the longer period of time, I do feel that the focus has shifted from royalty
fees and trading to more of what makes this product desirable and what solutions does it
actually bring to my daily life? Which at the end of the day, this really is what technology
should be about, right? We've talked about this time and time again. It should be about how this tech is improving our Web2 lives.
But guys, coming down to the final section of today's space, I do want to pass the mic
to all of our panelists once again for kind of a speed round here.
And the question I want to ask you guys is that if you could re-experience your onboarding
journey or perhaps curate the perfect onboarding experience for a
loved one? What would you want that experience to look like? And for the first person, I would love
to hear your thoughts on this, Evan. Sorry, Ice, just as you were handing things over,
my audio cut out. Could you repeat your just last sentence one more time for me, please?
Absolutely. If you could re-experience your personal onboarding journey or perhaps curate
a different one for someone, maybe your children or maybe a loved one,
what would that perfect experience look like to you?
So I actually think that part of the wonder and joy of learning about crypto is actually
understanding the technology underneath. Now, there is the
preferable everyday interaction with protocols that is second nature. But if I had my choice
and if everyone were as excited as I am about understanding how the technology enabling our
everyday experiences work, then I think starting with the basics,
reading the Bitcoin paper and actually learning about,
you know, the origin of this technology
is a great place to start.
However, if you want to speed run
your first on-chain interaction,
I think today most of our experiences
start with a wallet or with an application.
Actually, I think it was Inception who was noting earlier
and Diana as well about
the mobile first nature of onboarding these days.
Actually, I want to back that up with a little bit of data.
About 90 percent of users prefer to download
a native application versus a browser extension.
Actually, only about 15 percent of browser users in general ever download a browser extension versus over 90% of mobile application or of mobile users.
So smartphone users end up downloading an application of some form during the duration of the use of their device.
And so just in terms of, you know, meeting folks where they are, what that means is like a very literal form factor.
We need to show up on people's phones.
We need to build mobile friendly experiences
that are suited for all sorts of internet connections,
not just the strongest ones on the very latest devices.
And this also gets into some of the awesome expectations
that we have from our everyday apps.
That means quick response times, applications where you can click buttons and things happen right away.
That was definitely not the case when I first started interacting with Unchain applications.
In fact, when I think about even the work that my team at Billions Network does today,
our technology relies on a stack that includes something called zero knowledge proofs.
Now this method of extracting or proving data about information that is otherwise encrypted,
when I first started working on these capabilities, it took about 30 minutes of sitting in front of
a desktop computer to generate a zero knowledge proof of the type that today we can create in
less than two seconds on your phone.
And so these types of improvements,
where we think about speed, where we think about,
you know, the responsiveness relative
to everyday experiences we already enjoy in Web2
and just making those even better,
those are some big call-outs of how I would want
to improve my first experience
and perhaps improve the first experiences of others.
But again, if you're a super nerd
and you're really excited about this tech stack,
I think the Bitcoin paper is always a great place to start.
Man, we got tons of reading to do ahead of us,
but wow, mobile-friendly applications.
I did not know about that statistic at all.
That's kind of crazy how, I mean, both of these things,
extensions versus mobile apps,
kind of the same thing in a nutshell,
but it really goes to show how much more time
and how much more reliance people have
on their mobile devices compared to laptops and PCs.
This is very good information, Evan.
Thank you so much for sharing that with us.
And guys, I know I said I did want to pass the mic
to everybody, but because we are running down on the final minutes, just want to say if you guys have if you guys want to contribute to
this final question about re-experiencing the onboarding um please raise your hand for this
we can probably get one to two more takes before we pass the mic um back to diana and timmy for
some closing thoughts so um while we don't have oh there you go naruto naruto your hands up let's
toss it over to you go for it. I'll just give it a shot.
I think one biggest thing that is needed currently
in the whole ecosystem is the idea of like,
you know, you have mobile friendly applications
and everything,
but you want to make the UI, UX for the wallets easier.
When someone comes in,
it gets really hard on how these wallets perform.
Privy is doing a really good job there, but it still becomes an issue because a lot of time people forget their secret phrases.
They don't know what private keys are.
It's really hard to have them onboarded.
And at the same time, the biggest another problem is the multiple L2s.
We cannot do much about it anymore because Ethereum chose this roadmap.
So companies like, you know, like Agler is working on that.
Avail is working on the, you know, the unification side of it where you don't have to like do too much, too many transactions.
too many transactions. So another thing is like just the L2s having different assets,
different places that becomes a big fragmentation issue. And that contributes to like
harder onboarding experiences. So I think like these are the two major things. If I
want to onboard someone today, I want to see that these things do not exist in the long run.
I want to see that these things do not exist in the long run.
That, man, you know, when I think back on what Aglayer is trying to build, Naruto,
it really does drive back her point.
You know, the fragment tissue issue in our space is probably one of the biggest reasons
why there's so much, first of all, so much difficulty in understanding
and the education becomes very, very fragmented as well, right?
Like one onboarding video about how something works.
It has to be kind of enhanced and refined a little bit for every single chain out there.
But at the end of the day, the process kind of feels the same.
So I do think so, man.
Aggregation is going to solve that front.
But to your point, improved UI and UX.
Definitely we can see improvements.
Even for apps out there that are already top leaderboard and having the best user experience as possible, even those guys have room to improve.
So I definitely see this coming down to the pipelines in the near future, Nara.
So thanks so much for sharing that with us.
And Inception, you also had your hand up.
Let's go ahead and toss it over to you.
Basically, what I would like to see would be the usability of, that I experienced on a centralized exchange.
And my first onboarding platform was Binance,
but I was using Binance Lite.
So like as a new user coming to the space,
the Lite version really helps out.
And that's like for the onboarding,
more than the white paper that Evan was referring to.
It's pretty good.
It will be pretty insightful,
but technically-wise, it won't bring any value for the user
because 99% of the readers won't understand it.
So yeah, I would like to see simplistic apps
on the mobile phone app store.
First thing I checked when Evan was saying that
was if Google Chrome was on the app store of iPhone because I was not sure of it.
But yeah, overall, it will be simplistic apps that can in two, three steps drive you exactly to what you want to be doing.
And yeah, that's it.
I can't remember which.
I think it was an article
or maybe a video that said this, right?
It's like reducing the number of clicks
for someone to get to your website
and to getting to checkout.
It might be an Amazon thing
now that I think about it.
But if we take that concept
and really...
It's present everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If we take that concept
and really apply the Web3 angle behind that,
I think that has immense, immense power to really streamline this onboarding process.
So thank you for sharing that with us, Inception.
And for the final take for tonight's show, I do want to pass the mic back to our dear Diana.
So first of all, Diana, share with us some closing thoughts on curating the perfect onboarding experience.
And secondly, what are some of the latest updates going on with AgLayer that we should be paying more attention to? Yeah. So one thing I always
like to do when I think about how fast slash how slow we think things are moving, I always think
back to span out, look at your life,, you know, realize that 10 years ago we didn't have Uber and, you know, five years ago we didn't have, you know, XYZ technology.
You know, how many people had smartphones in their pockets in the last 10 years or 15 years or whatever. It's like technology moves so fast.
And also it just takes time though too, like fast and slow. So I think like the whole idea
of aggregation is like, this is the next step in blockchain technology, right? Like we've
found that there's, you know, fit for blockchains in people's lives.
And now it's really just optimizing for it.
So I think Agler has some big updates on the next big updates happening in mid-May.
So keep your eyes peeled for that.
But it's really about creating this whole aggregated future where we can interact with applications and use the technology for all the
best use cases without kind of all these hurdles and hiccups. So very excited for that.
I love that, Diana. And just to build on to what you were saying before, I do feel like
blockchain technology, everything that's happening in Web3, while it seems like we are absolutely
leaders in the world right now when it comes to innovation,
our use cases right now, we're still kind of traveling on a discovery by discovery basis, right?
So I do feel once we get more, like Timmy said, more industrial contributors coming into our space with crypto and with blockchain technology,
we are going to be able to take what has been discovered in the past, truly understand the power of it going into the future.
And I do believe, Diana, once that happens, we're going to see this technology be applied and figure out more novel use cases.
It's going to get better. It's going to become more streamlined.
And the onboarding experience will absolutely become easier as the months and years go on.
But that being said, ladies and gentlemen, this is going to mark the end of our space for
today. So once again, thank you so much to all of our awesome panelists for joining and sharing
your thoughts and expertise with today's conversation. And of course, thank you guys
in the audience for giving all of those likes, comments, and retweets. We really do appreciate
each and every single one of you. And one last time, make sure you guys are following the Ag
Layer House account and remember to turn on those notifications so you guys don't miss out on any of the latest updates.
But until then, this is going to be Ice signing off.
And we'll see you guys in the next one.
Peace! Thank you.
