Simplicity vs Power: Designing Wallets for the Next 100M Users

Recorded: Sept. 25, 2025 Duration: 0:42:12
Space Recording

Short Summary

In a recent discussion, industry leaders explored the evolving landscape of crypto wallets, the significance of on-chain banking alternatives like Ready, and the trends shaping user experience in the blockchain space. Key topics included the merging of traditional finance with DeFi, the importance of seamless on-ramps for crypto payments, and the future of identity management in decentralized applications.

Full Transcription

Music Thank you. The Thank you. The Thank you. The do
do Thank you. The Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Adam Simmons, the Chief Strategy Officer here at
Radex. And joining me today is Daniel from Ready, formerly Argent. Daniel, hopefully you are able
to hear me and can speak on the space. How are you doing today? I am able to hear you and I think everyone can also hear me speak.
I'm fantastic. I can hear you.
Yeah, good.
Very busy.
It's coming up to event season of stuff.
So we've got people going out to like Token 2049, Merge Madrid and a couple of other things.
So yeah, hectic.
What about yourself?
Yeah, I mean, it's always busy right i mean uh building we had uh we had ready we i mean as a remote company we have like this uh three times
a year we we meet spend some time together get excited and plan what's next we just came back
from that uh so everyone is kind of heads down building.
We're skipping token this time. But yeah, still busy as always.
Good, good. Well, I'm conscious that we don't have a huge amount of time today. But firstly,
thank you very much for coming on. Why don't we kick things off with a quick kind of elevator
pitch of Ready for those who maybe aren't familiar with it
or would like to learn more. Sure. So I think if I summarize it in one sentence,
Ready is trying to, or hopefully is to some degree already, your on-chain alternative to a bank.
We actually reprinted some of us. Some of you might know us as
Argent from earlier times. So we split into two different products.
One is what I just described and the other one is basically
a wallet more focused on DGENs and advanced users.
Awesome. I still remember
Argent. I downloaded Argent awesome i i still remember argent um i was i downloaded argent i pretty soon after you first
released um because some of the stuff you were doing was really really cool at that point with
social recovery and so i i had to go and give it a try out it's a really great experience and i know
it's only improved from there um so today we are going to go over the rough topic of kind of like
wallet ux and and some of the considerations that come in here, of course, from the Radix side.
We've obviously got Radix wallet and our kind of full stack approach for things.
Reddy, you're also with the kind of like the alternative to a bank plus your wallet solution have had years in market around trying to get a better UX experience within crypto. So the first question here, Daniel, is I'd love to
know your thoughts on this kind of trade-off you often see in wallets around the simplicity versus
the power of a wallet. And this is a trade-off that you see across the board. So even when you're
trying to go for a user-centric design, it's like, should you strip down what is available in the wallet to its simplest form to
make it really easy for mass adoption or should you add more features that potentially advanced
users want more upfront more accessible what are your views on that and what is the approach that
ready's taken on that um so i think yeah the the tldr is both but not both in the sense of like doing everything and try to cater to everyone.
More like in the sense of, I think we have different personas with different needs.
So I think even if you do a comparison to TreadFi, you have people buying stocks on something like Robinhood
and you have people whose job it is and they use maybe a Bloomberg terminal, right? So there's just very different personas that have different needs.
I think people who are in crypto for a very long time, they are used to these, especially the early
days where everything is super hacky and you just, you know, you have to nerd into everything.
Like we have a lot of these people. So there's, I think, a big
user base of advanced users that are, you know, they are maybe not doing that as a job, but they are advanced users. And then I think one user group that is becoming more and more important as
crypto kind of advances, matures, becomes more usable, is a user base that is more akin to the
becomes more usable is a user base that is more akin to the average consumer, right?
Who basically just wants stuff to work, wants it to solve a problem for it, but who maybe,
you know, is not interested in following prices every day, following the news.
And so I think it's really different personas.
And one user group is more of like, they, basically they don't even need to know about
crypto, they want an app
that solves their problem. That's in our case
the on-chain banking alternative
that I talked about earlier
and I think the advanced user
base is probably more looking for something that
is a wallet, right? So
what most people are used to, to use also
in their browser and stuff, which
will have more advanced features. Do you think those two are likely to merge or separate further? So my hypothesis on
this is that what you see, I see fintech as like a role in DeFi in crypto as really becoming a front end service.
So just in the same way as in the early internet,
you had kind of your AOL experience or your Yahoo
where everything was on that kind of homepage
and you did everything from there.
You didn't worry about the other bits.
You could also just go and drink straight from the fire hose.
And I think we're going to see a similar thing in crypto
where, as you say, this new, bigger audience that comes in
aren't necessarily going to want to be drinking from the crypto or DeFi firehose directly. They want
simpler solutions. They want things that they can just earn a reliable yield on or do their
payment systems or payment terminals, all these sort of things. Do you think those things are
going to coexist in singular products? Or do you think there's something that is going to merge and there'll
be this kind of combination between the two? I think it will be singular products. I mean,
that's kind of the strategy we are driving right now. Because I think it will be just very hard
to cater to this very specific needs. So a classic example is how much information,
how much transparency do you expose?
I mean, transparency is usually a good thing,
but one of these personas usually wants to know
how everything works down to the detail level,
while the other one just to some degree
wants someone else to make decisions for them, right?
So let's say to one person, you might, you know, you have a token, let's say,
US dollar stablecoin, to keep it simple.
One person wants to make sure they see it all.
You know, they want to pick where they invest that stablecoin for their best,
you know, basically the risk reward combination that they
are looking for. While the, you know, the less advanced, more consumer-ish user likely just
wants you to do the research for them and be like, hey, these are three options that we think are
good, like from a risk reward trade-off, you know, just pick your risk level. And it will be really hard to combine this.
I mean, of course you could build an application that has a pro mode and an easy mode or something
like this, but I personally think these people are served better with different applications.
And I think we will see a kind of merging, like what have with ready the on-chain bank i think that will
become more and more like a revolute for example or like the classic web2 fintech while they on
their part will become a bit more like crypto so these worlds will likely merge and they might be
just you know banking apps or financial apps that coexist next to each other. And while I believe on the more advanced side,
things will become more crypto to its core, right?
Because I think there's also,
I think what is interesting about crypto is also,
it's not only about that's where maybe my analogy in the beginning fails from
Treadfire with the Bloomberg terminal or Robinhood is there's also
an ideological part to it, you know, where people, where the idea of ownership resonates very strongly
with people, we will see how that develops. But yeah, I think in its core, I believe that will be
different apps, different applications, different services for different people, just because the needs on some levels are so different. I think I agree with that. And I think the needs are
going to get more extreme. So your Bloomberg example, I think is actually a really good one.
But if you look at TradFi, as it exists today, there's way more levels of debt than most people even realize. So you've got a huge group
of people, even in like financially developed areas where they just keep their money in the
bank, maybe having a savings account. That's their level of involvement in like the financial
infrastructure. Then there's a level up from that where maybe they're buying index funds or index
trackers for major stocks or certain like blue chip commodities and stuff
like that then there's people who are picking their their own stocks or maybe they even want
like a managed fund or something like that very very very few people outside of financial
institutions are sitting there running like a a hedged option strategy or trading exotic options for like timber yields or something like that or
oil futures or something like that and crypto is only really just starting to get into that so i
do agree with you that there's going to be these different levels that people engage and it's
really interesting what ready is doing with the ready card is like incorporating some of that and
i think from the fintech perspective as well, there's a really interesting point around regulation.
One of the few people who finds regulation
around crypto interesting.
But there's a question for a lot of these fintechs
that are increasingly going,
well, if we want to grow,
do we have to get your traditional banking licenses
and being involved in that side of things,
which is obviously hugely expensive, hugely complex. Whereas potentially going down the self-custody route is a way that they can
start offering similar services as DeFi matures without needing to go down that same route to
maintain a competitive edge. And I think crypto offers routes for both of those. But I think
that's where the space will go personally, is we'll see people competing more and more.
And where fintechs end and like crypto companies start is going to start blurring more and more over the coming years and decade.
Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense.
I think also, I mean, I don't want to go too deep in the regulatory topic to not bore people. But I think from what is interesting from that perspective, what you've seen, I mean,
traditionally there's banks, right?
Banks as an institution that takes your deposits and then on a simplified level makes money
by using these customer funds to do stuff with them.
And banks are regulated for good reason because, you know, they take,
they usually don't have all the money of all their customers ready because they make money by
lending it, investing it, and so on and so forth, right? So it makes a lot of sense to regulate
them to make sure that the average person on the street does just not constantly lose money by a
bank doing risky stuff.
And then what happened over time, especially I think that's interesting in emerging markets,
is they realized that strict regulation kills innovation. And they started creating fintech licenses that have a little bit less requirements adjusted to the modern world and you saw all these fintechs popping up and i think you can look at
kind of crypto wallets or crypto banks on chain banks so to say i'm probably not allowed to use
the word bank in that context um as another evolution of that right so now with self-custody
evolution of that, right? So now with self-custody, you take out one of that main risks that required
regulation, right? Because now the company offering the service of managing your money
cannot access your money anymore. That requires, of course, a different business model,
but it takes away one of the main reasons why regulation was so important. And that brings a
new level of competition to the incumbents, which I think is a very interesting evolution of how we deal with finances, how we manage with our finances and who we trust and don't trust with our money.
have had in terms of our wallet design is at least back when I first heard of Argent back at
the original launch, like the social recovery side of things is very similar to what Radix brought
on chain on like a network layer with our multi-factor recovery system of being like self
custody as a concept is a really easy sell to pretty much anyone. If you stop people on the street and be like, would you rather
someone else, no matter how much you trust them, looks after all your money and has it and decides
whether you have access to it or not, or what you can do with it. Most people are going to be like,
yeah, I don't really like that. They'd rather have their own money. However, when the risk of having their own money is like, you have one seed phrase.
If you lose it, if someone else accesses it, if you write it down wrong, if your house burns down
and you haven't backed it up on metal, that's fireproof, everything you own is gone. Suddenly,
99% of people who like the idea of self-custody get a bit scared about it, as they should, because that is terrifying.
And so this approach of like simplicity versus power is like, yeah, sure.
It's not that it's if you can find technology systems that allow people to have those benefits without adding huge friction or huge risk on top of what the status quo is.
Actually, I don't think ideologically it's a hard sell.
And it'd be good to know kind of your thoughts on that
and how you see that evolving further.
Yeah, I mean, seed praise are a very good example, right?
So the conceptually self-custody is a very good idea
and something that resonates from the idea with most people,
especially, I mean, the further you go away from the idea with with most people especially i mean the further
you go from away from the western world right so let's say the less reliable the other options the
banking system is the more it probably resonates with people or the more uh maybe cash driven
the society is as well um but the problem with the initial especially especially AOA wallets, that, you know, where everything rests on you keeping your key and your seed phrase safe and basically all the wallet is like, is basically tell you, hey, here's the seed phrase.
You might not understand this, but this is now your responsibility.
it just replaced one threat with another effectively, right?
It just replaced one thread with another effectively.
Because now, well, you maybe are not at risk
as that the bank you have your money with goes bankrupt and whatever,
but now you are fully responsible for it.
And that is, I think, something that, I mean, now, as you mentioned,
there's solutions to it.
I mean, a lot of different wallet, not only RedX and Argent have either social mechanisms, backup mechanisms.
But that was, I think, one of the big problems, especially in the early days,
is to assume that every user has the capabilities to keep a seed phrase safe and also wants to.
So it is kind of on us as a wallet or let's say financial application provider, if you
want to put it a bit wider, to make it as safe and easy as possible for users to keep
their money safe and that responsibility
also includes to not leave the user alone with the responsibility of keeping secrets
safe right it's like i mean would be crazy if you you know with your regular bank you
lose your password and suddenly you lose your money.
So, yeah, I think on that perspective, I fully agree.
Recovery is important. And there's also, even if you look in TradFi,
a lot of UX and especially around assets,
you unfortunately have to optimize for the highest risk users in many cases. So the one that always comes to mind
whenever we talk about wallet UX or security or self-custody or those sort of things is
the example of, it was about six months ago, it made the news in the UK in the newspapers.
it made the news in the UK, in the newspapers. There was a user of one of the kind of fintech
payment systems who was getting scammed. And they were sending money to the scammer.
They got stopped. They then rang up and even held up a sign where they had to say, like the bank got
them to hold up a sign saying, we're not releasing this fund unless you write down that I have been
told I am being scammed and I am going to lose this money. They still sent the transaction. where they had to say, like the bank got them to hold up a sign saying, we're not releasing this fund unless you write down that I have been told
I am being scammed and I am going to lose this money.
They still sent the transaction.
And at some point there is a philosophical
or maybe ethical argument
of how much should a company or a project
or a wallet or a bank
actually have to protect people from this.
But also going to the other extreme of
being like you're on your own good luck doesn't make sense i mean i think that kind of oh god
yeah i think i mean one thing that is very different between thread fire and crypto just
from a maturity perspective is right thread fire has a lot of, but it exists for such a long time that there is such a big framework of, you know, legal rules, insurances around it that kind of plucks a lot of these holes.
Right. So if someone gets frauded, there's probably an insurance paying for it.
That insurance has enough predictability because of regulation and the rules around it that they can make a business case that makes sense.
A lot of that that let's say
soft infrastructure does not really exist in crypto um yep and since we are trying i mean we are ultimately trying to replace that soft legal infrastructure with code right
and replacing that with code is not always possible because you still have the human factor
in that at least until ai agents overrun everything um where we've still got that human
factor of hey you're going to do that and i mean we we see that on on radix as well so
thanks to rvm solution and the way the radix wallet works like every transaction on radix
is completely human readable. It shows you a
review of exactly what is going in and out of your wallet on every transaction in force of the
protocol level. There is absolutely no way for that to happen in a way different to what it's
shown. However, that doesn't mean that you could go and connect to a malicious application that
proposes a transaction to your wallet that withdraws all of your funds.
And now in the Radix wallet, that will say, you are about to sign a transaction that will
withdraw all of your funds and nothing will be deposited in return.
It is 100% human readable, but someone could still sign that.
There's no way we can stop them signing that.
And there are times when potentially you do want to do that.
Like maybe you're sending all your funds to another wallet you control.
So you don't want to block it completely, but you're still going to have that
issue of people are going to do what people do. And I think it's that balance, which is
kind of taking me on nicely to the next question or the next point to kind of talk about, which is
there's been great strides made in crypto UX. So things Reddy's doing, things Radix's doing,
things many others are doing to
deal with seed phrases, access to funds, the transparency around crypto transactions,
how that's work, all the different layers are being tweaked to make it better.
What do you think is currently the biggest blocker between today's crypto UX and getting
your average person walking down the
street on chain as their primary
financial home?
Oh, that's a
good question. I think there's a lot of
You can only pick
one. If I have to pick
I think it is still on ramping um so basically the or on and off
ramping there is a lot of solutions for it um also there also lots of improvements since a couple of
years but the problem is still most of the people especially those that are not
using crypto yet in any form they live in a dreadfi dominated world right so they have a job
that pays them fiat into a fiat account and um until we have not bridged that gap of me simply being able to receive my salary on chain
i think that is that remains a big blocker because also so i i helped build dreadfy neobanks before
We've nailed Dreadfy Neobanks before, and one of the core KPIs usually a Neobank tries
to achieve is being top of wallet for the card and being a salary account.
That has reasons, right?
Because that is in the user's head, the account that is most important to them. them and we are making strides towards that um but it is by far not a standard for a wallet to
easily get paid in it i think that's a a definitely big pain point i was musing my
answer to this and i'm really torn between two.
I think they're kind of the same.
It is, oh, I can merge them by getting a bit technical and cheating slightly,
which is the financial instruments not existing on chain that people want.
And if you think similar to your paycheck example,
getting paid into your account is going well i
need to pay my mortgage you can't have on-chain mortgages or uncollateralized loans easily or
a s&p 500 index tracker doesn't really exist on chain or these sort of things are coming and
stable coins are the first wave of that but it's like having things on chain that your average person wants to interact with day to day at the moment
it's still kind of this proof of concept of and especially like defy summer was massively proof
of concept of like random food coin yields and stuff like that your average person doesn't want
to do that it's like penny penny stock trading essentially like sure there's a market but most
most people aren't interested in that they're like i want to get paid i want to pay my mortgage
want to pay for my car i want to buy a coffee can i do that i mean i i would argue it depends on
how your mortgage is being paid you could do that today with ready using the card at least
i mean i know it's not exactly
what you mean um but what i'm trying to say is we are you could pay for the mortgage but you couldn't
unless unless i miss something you can't issue a mortgage yeah that's true
which i i think these are the sort of things which are being hit like the stable coins are
one example where payments payments are coming on chain.
What you're doing with like ReadyCard
is like an easy way to pay using the crypto
that you've got at payment terminals
or point of sales without needing to
have an on-off ramp immediately there.
I think the other one,
or kind of the next point to that as well
is like, what else do people want to do? So neobanks and fintechs have had a lot of success by incorporating features that aren't necessarily traditional finance features into their apps, or combining many things, which is really the next thing that I'm thinking about with where wallets are heading is I see a battleground coming
between this is my wallet similar to what I have in my pocket that holds my money it holds maybe
my ID as well but I put things in and out of there but it's a it's a container the other route things
are going and this is something that you especially see in like um developing countries and especially like in in china and stuff with things like wechat of the super app the app where
it's your social network it's your payment profiles it's your bank it's your e-commerce store
everything's built into the wallet and ideologically i think that's a really interesting thing to see
how things go is this going to become where everything is run from as a super app,
or is it going to stay separate? And we've had this debate many times publicly with Radix of
being like, is a wallet like your browser, or is it like an app, a traditional kind of app and
experience? And I think those are different things because the internet, would you really want every single website
to have its own browser?
Of course not.
But equally, there's convenience of having super apps.
So I'd love to know your thoughts on that, Daniel.
Yeah, the super apps,
I think it's a recurring discussion
that also, I think, emerges.
So what is interesting about super apps,
first and foremost,
is there is not necessarily a superpower app everywhere in the world, right? emerges so what is interesting about superpower apps first and foremost is
there is not necessarily a superpower app everywhere in the world right so i think in in asia super apps are pretty prevalent in latin america okay if you want to you could maybe
count uber as one to some degree but it's very everything they do is fairly delivery focused so
Everything they do is fairly delivery focused.
So it's hard to say where the world develops.
There is definitely, you know, there's a lot of things where crypto seemingly makes sense.
Like, I mean, social is a good example, right?
We're talking about this for ages.
How much fairer a social network would be if it was
running on the blockchain. People would actually own their data and so on and so forth.
But first of all, one thing, especially for things
with network effects, is that not necessarily always the best technology wins.
So I agree ideologically that
a lot of social things should be on chain, but I'm not sure if they will be, just from a competitive dynamics perspective.
I hope that at least identity will really become a blockchain thing, because here it really makes sense, in my opinion.
because here it really makes sense in my opinion.
I think for the foreseeable future,
blockchain will be very financial use case oriented.
That is my current thinking.
I hope we will get in the super app area,
but I'm torn between the two, I have to say.
Simply because, you know, we discussed most of this space
about what still needs to happen for us even to nail the financial use case, right?
There's still so many barriers, so many things happened.
My feeling is a little bit, let's get that right first,
like crush the banks, be the better banking system,
bring the financial world on chain.
And then we can see whether we incorporate
the rest of the stuff, right?
I mean, of course I'm not saying it's like, I mean,
it's great that people work on this stuff,
but I believe there's still so much work to do in the financial domain
that I feel like it's still a bit in the future.
I mostly agree.
The caveat that I would add on top of that
is I'd move it from financial to transactions of value which is mostly going to be financial but i class things like id
in there so i could see not necessarily bringing using social as the example um not necessarily
bringing everything on chain of that social network that's very expensive a lot of stuff
comes into that and it's very very, very complex. And obviously,
all the network effects of incumbents. Being able to log into your social app with a self-custodied
identity that is a provable version of you that is persistent across different social networks
for things like verified accounts to stop impersonations and other things like that.
I could see that being useful and being incorporated to existing things.
Gaming is similar.
I don't think necessarily every action
that happens in a game benefits
by going fully on-chain.
However, certain high-value assets
issued as NFTs could be great.
Even things like online multiplayer matchmaking
being tied to an identity could be great because
if you're like a fantastically high ranked player in say call of duty and then a new first person
shooter game comes out and you can log in with that same identity that is provable yours and
means you don't have to go straight away into like the like finding how good you are at the
game and you just go straight in at a
higher rank because they know you're a good player. That's a,
that's an immediate user benefit. And I think this is where it may not be a
super app that everything all exists in one app,
but I think apps that are able to bring things of value and interact with
things necessarily not all on chain could be a really interesting use case
Yeah. I mean, of course.
I mean, especially the, I mean, it can have different flavors, right?
So the gaming ID you mentioned,
I think identity management in some form,
that has, I see a lot of value in it, right?
And it can have different forms.
It might be your gaming ID.
gaming id it might be your real citizenship id um and there's obviously a lot of value in in
It might be your real citizenship ID.
having that like in one place uh but stored in a decentralized way the problem i just see with a
lot of these things is you know more like the competitive dynamics like i think for real id
management you probably in some form need to have governments on board,
which might happen. I hope it happens, but it might not.
For things like gaming, right, you have different ecosystems, competing companies that own them
and kind of profit from controlling them in some way.
So it's just very hard to break up these dynamics.
I mean, you could argue in the financial use case, we had similar problems.
The problem is always if you don't necessarily have the incumbents getting on board with it, right?
Because it feels like giving up a competitive edge they have.
You need to have strong enough value for creating a grassroots movements.
With the financial use case, we have that, right? Because we have large parts of the world's population that cannot
properly participate in the world, maybe don't get a bank account, maybe
we're looking at crypto as like their first real
shot of building wealth, right? So you had these
massive grassroots incentives of trying
something new, engaging with it. And I'm not really sure if these dynamics exist in a lot
of other places. I think social is a good example, right? No one likes Facebook or few or view people like Facebook. But a lot of social apps that are blockchain-based
so far, I think, failed to provide a strong enough incentive
for someone to say, hey, my friends are on Facebook,
but I'm going to use this.
And I will convince all my friends to come with me.
That often, you know, that is the difference between something making sense from a technological perspective
or from an ideological perspective in the sense of like, I feel like this should exist or this should work this way.
But then the translation into sufficient user value that is I think sometimes very tricky
with the let's say more niche blockchain use cases.
And that seems to be very similar
to what you're doing with like Ready
and what we're doing with Radix as well
is that one of the guiding stars
is you can't just up and replace the thing
and introduce different problems. Like if you want to, if you want to take market share from an incumbent,
even if it's a very different solution, but you want to bring people over, you have to do
everything that they were doing there as well as the incumbent and a few, at least a few things a
lot better. And I think this is where onboarding people, especially on kind of like the wallet
side of things comes down to, again, like, yeah, you're offering a benefit of self-custody.
But if that self-custody is tied to blind signing transactions and a single seed phrase and nothing else, people are going to go, oh, yeah, I like that idea.
But you've made every other part of interacting with this more inconvenient, more stressful, more anxiety inducing than just using my bank. So I'm not
going to do that right now. Or for example, with like the ready cards, like I want to pay for
stuff in the shop. So I'm cool with this, but I still need to pay for stuff in the shop.
And none of the shops support crypto payments at the moment. And so you've got to kind of
at least meet that bar of everything people are doing already. You need to do as least as well,
of everything people are doing already,
you need to do at least as well
while doing some things exceptionally better.
And I think that's where the future is going to be
and we're getting there.
I agree, yeah.
Awesome, we're nearly up to time, Daniel.
It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you
and talking around this.
I'd love to give you like a few minutes
to talk about kind of where people can learn
more about Ready, where people can learn
more about Reddy, why people in Radek should go and give it a go and what they can see
And also any questions you may have.
I mean, you can find us on ready.co.
We are available on all the app stores where you might expect us, iOS, Android, the Ready Wallet, so the
more advanced product is available for all the common browsers.
Give Ready a try, download the app, get our card.
It's a very nice looking card, gives you cashback.
So far we get really great feedback about it
for everyone who is interested in, you know,
living more of an on-chain financial life.
I think that's a very good starting point
and also making your potential crypto gains
that you already have usable in the real world.
And yeah, and Adam, thanks for having me here.
I think it was a really, really great conversation.
Well, if anyone has any questions after the space,
please feel free to reply to this.
Make sure you tag Daniel or tag Reddy.
They're in there.
Drop them a follow.
And we will be back on Friday for the Radix recap.
Andy's going to be joining me
and we've got a whole bunch of stuff to talk about,
including the news we dropped today.
So thank you very much, everyone, for tuning in
and speak to you all very soon.
Thank you. Thank you.