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Unstoppable x Swing.xyz
Recorded: Nov. 27, 2024 Duration: 0:28:49Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you for joining us.
Okay, I'll probably give people a few minutes to filter in here since we didn't have our official start time.
Hopefully people didn't completely give up.
We've got a few people who persisted.
Thanks, 135 and Mario.
Hey there, AI.
We have to ask the question now, you know, which of these accounts are actually real people and which of these are AI bots? We don't know.
Well, I see most of these guys chatting on X, so I think these folks are real.
They're familiar faces.
Do you guys do a lot of spaces for swing?
We did a few months back.
We were doing them pretty regularly.
We are looking to start it up again pretty soon.
Yeah, we did.
And I mean, technical difficulties are all part of the game here for sure.
So I totally sympathize with you here.
That's right.
When it works, it's wonderful.
Yep.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I think we can probably go ahead and get started.
We've got a handful of folks in here and people can filter in or listen to the recording.
So I'll go ahead and introduce the topic here today.
We're going to be talking about unstoppable light wallet.
We're going to be talking about token swap and why that's fun and important for users.
We're going to learn what token swap is, what swing is, what unstoppable light wallet is.
So let's go ahead and get started.
This is Aaron Quirk from Unstoppable Domains, and I'm a principal engineer here.
I've been here for almost three years before coming to Unstoppable.
I worked at IBM for almost 16 years.
So I was there for a long time doing traditional Web2 development on enterprise level systems,
and I was ready for a change.
So blockchain seemed really interesting.
So I took the plunge, and I'm still here and really having the most fun career-wise that I've ever had.
So I'm excited to be doing it.
And we've got Vivek here from Swing, and I'll let you introduce yourself.
Awesome.
Yeah, definitely happy to hear another fellow tech person here as well.
Yeah, great to be here.
My name is Vivek, founder, CEO of Swing.
I've been working on this now for almost, we started the company back in 2020, 2021, and we've been kind of at it through the last little bear market as well.
Before Swing, I was actually at Apple in California for about eight years.
I worked on AirDrop and AirPlay software protocols, wireless protocols.
You know, I got into this because in 20, I want to say 2017, 2016, 2017, you know, when Bitcoin was kind of a topic that one of my friends had kind of bumped up to me,
I was asking some of our senior software engineers at Apple, the smartest guys I knew around, you know, what they thought about Bitcoin and crypto.
And they just, they were like, what is that?
You know, what is the blockchain?
And so everyone knew about Bitcoin and the Silk Road affiliation, and that was all they kind of knew back then.
And so, you know, for me, it was kind of two things.
Either I was drinking the Kool-Aid about crypto or there really is something impactful here.
And so I kind of went off and started this organization called the Silicon Valley Blockchain Consortium in 2017,
just to kind of bring together, like, folks in the space that were knowledgeable, that understood more about Bitcoin and crypto.
Ethereum was kind of like an evolving topic then as well, given that it was just kind of created two years prior.
And kind of the rest is history.
You know, we've been kind of working on, we brought together a lot of kind of professors from Stanford and Berkeley and local entrepreneurs in the Bay Area.
And we were just kind of really just a bunch of curious folks in terms of how we could leverage this technology in the various verticals and businesses and with various use cases.
And so that kind of led me to kind of start Swing, quit my job at Apple and went full-time into the startup.
And I've been here ever since.
And we're now a team of about 25 plus.
And we're just rocking and rolling.
And we're excited to be here today.
Awesome.
That's an exciting journey.
I was not around for Unstoppable's, you know, origin story, but it also had its root in San Francisco area.
So that's pretty neat.
I think a lot of projects have their roots out there.
Very cool.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, you know, we're going to be talking about swap and why it's important.
So kind of a key vision for Unstoppable Light Wallet and why Unstoppable Domains even has a wallet is because we see a missing piece in the market.
There's a lot of wallets out there, general purpose wallets, and they're really great.
But we didn't see a wallet that was specifically tailored to our customers, which is domainers.
And so, you know, Unstoppable Domains sells Web3 domains and now Web2 domains.
And all of those domains, since they're tokenized, need to live on chain somewhere and they're managed through a wallet.
So we wanted to have a wallet that was like very easy to use for our users, that they could feel safe and that they can interact on the blockchain in a way that was comfortable to them.
And so we decided the best way to do that was to have our own wallet.
And so when someone gets a wallet, they manage their domains, but they can also hold crypto.
And so part of holding crypto is you want to be able to convert it to other types of currencies.
And so that's where swap comes in.
And so when you start up your new Unstoppable Light Wallet, you get five chains automatically.
You get Bitcoin, Ethereum, Base, Polygon, and Solana.
And if you wanted to change some of your Bitcoin into Ethereum, previously we didn't have a really great way to do that other than like, you know, sending it to, you know, exchange, converting it and sending it back.
It's nobody wants to do that.
And so with Swing, we found it was a very easy and straightforward way for our users to be able to write within the interface, swap, you know, one token to another, or even swap to stable coins like USDC.
So that's kind of the purpose of why we introduced token swap to the wallet.
So Vivek, why don't you tell us a little bit more about swap, how it works, and how it's important?
Yeah, for sure.
Happy to.
You know, I think when we initially were thinking about how to design an API to kind of help with the swap experience, there's certainly a couple kind of pillars that we kept in mind.
And really it was around, you know, how do we make sure that it's fast?
How do we make sure that's reliable and how do we make sure that these swaps are actually secure, right?
And so when we were in the early days of designing our API years ago, we were essentially looking to select the best DEX partners, the best bridge partners, the best aggregator partners as well.
And so I'll give you an example of kind of how the swap works under the hood.
Let's say you want to swap Polygon on the Matic Polygon blockchain to, let's say, Ethan Arbitrum, for example.
Typically what happens here is that we'll first utilize, we have aggregation contracts set up on all the blockchains that we support, which is 50 plus today.
But specifically today for the example of Polygon and Arbitrum, we've aggregated all the major DEXs on Polygon.
So we'll first find the best price to swap the token that you're starting with, in this case Polygon, into a stable coin, usually sometimes, if that's the best route.
And then we'll actually kick it off over a transfer using one of the bridge partners that will provide the best routes.
And then we'll then do a post swap into your destination token.
In this case, it might be ETH.
And there's also another reality here where we may just go from Polygon into ETH and then transfer that directly.
But the route that we decide to take, that the API decides to take, is really based on price and speed and kind of reliability of the actual partners that we're leveraging to make these swaps happen.
And so that's kind of how we've designed the API to kind of optimize for price and speed across the board, regardless of which chain, which token that you want to swap for through the Unstoppable Domains Lite wallet experience there.
I think another kind of big piece as well is we've also kind of, you know, security is a big focus on our end as well.
And so emphasizing frequent audit reports, I think we've done around five, six audits today.
Quirk just has recently shared a day ago about the cross-chain swap experience.
It definitely suggests everyone to kind of go take a look at that video that he put out and kind of how the swapping experience works.
I think that was between Polygon and Base.
But yeah, I mean, that's kind of, I'll just kind of keep it short, but that's kind of how we designed the API, really kind of just thinking through how we can create the best user experience for users like Unstoppable.
Yeah, we just pinned that demo to the top of the space from that tweet yesterday.
And if you get a chance to go watch it, if you haven't already, you can really see how easy the feature is to use.
You know, once you have your wallet open, you click on the swap button and you pick, you know, from the tokens you have in your wallet already.
In that case, I picked Polygon as my source token.
And then I said, I want to change it to USDC on base.
And then you say how much you want to swap.
And all the currencies in our wallet, we just denominate in dollars because we found our users have an easier time thinking about, you know, how much fiat is this, you know, particular coin worth right now.
And so we just like try to standardize everything on dollar amounts for ease of use.
And so the thing that I thought was really cool is one, how fast it works and two, how low the fees are.
And it depends on which chains you pick.
Obviously, Polygon and Base are two of the lower cost chains that you could be working with.
But even that being said, I think the total fees for that swap was like 21 cents or something like that for the $5.
And especially with like a low value swap like that, that's not very much fees.
You know, it's like two and a half percent or something like that.
You know, and as you swap higher values, you know, if I was doing 100 or $1,000 on that swap, the price, the percentage would be even better.
So I think it's just really cool how easy it is to swap even from chains like Bitcoin to Base or vice versa.
That's not possible in a lot of wallets.
So it's nice to be able to offer that functionality.
Absolutely.
Yeah, I mean, I think you'd be pretty surprised.
I mean, when we think about, and this has obviously been, you know, something that's been a work in progress over the last few years.
And I think we're at a pace now where we really can minimize fees and optimize and maximize speed as well, especially in these type of experiences.
But I think, yeah, I think the biggest, like, especially when you think about for users of the unstoppable wallet, I think you just said it exactly perfectly, Aaron, in the sense that they'll be surprised, kind of how pleasantly surprised, kind of how quickly these things happen.
And I think maybe some other pieces I want to maybe share is that the other piece that users may find interesting is that there's a lot of different networks as well that you can swap across.
You know, because Swing does support Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cosmos, Solana, you know, a bunch of EVMs and Layer 2 chains as well.
You might be pleasantly surprised to find how many different assets you can swap between.
I mean, the one thing that we've done very differently is the ability to swap between EVM and non-EVM networks kind of seamlessly as well.
And so, you know, we have support for MetaMask, Unstoppable Wallet, Phantom.
If you're trying to go into Solana, the kind of the array of networks are kind of almost limitless at this point.
But we're picking and choosing and adding, and I'll speak more to the kind of what else is kind of coming up for Swing later on.
Yeah, how do you, you know, at a high level, how do you go about finding such a low price?
You know, because you're aggregating all these different possible ways I can get from point A to point B and giving the user the best value, which I think is really the coolest thing about Swing.
Because if we try to do this ourselves, that means we've got to, you know, know how to work with all of those, you know, bridges and swap providers, you know, do all the analysis.
You know, so you guys take care of all of that.
Can you give us an idea of like how that really works?
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, I think initially, so a little bit of the origin story quickly is like when we got started with Swing, we were initially just trying to figure out bridging.
And this was back in like 2019, we were trying to figure out just bridging between Ethereum and Polkadot at that time.
I don't know, you guys may remember there was a big narrative around Polkadot back then, you know, being the Ethereum killer, you know, that that's kind of how it was initially set up.
That clearly didn't pan out what we're seeing today in a multi-chain world today.
But when it comes to kind of selecting chains, we initially started off with looking at, you know, where are the developers, where are the most users, you know, where is the most volume and kind of traffic and deciding that these are the ecosystems that we want to be kind of, you know, securely camped in.
From there, we then started looking at various routes and bridge partners and DEXs and aggregators that we could possibly work with and kind of understanding the disadvantages, advantages of working with one over the other.
You know, every bridge slightly kind of implements and handles transfers and swaps a little differently.
And so building a kind of a unified architecture in our end to be able to work, you know, our intention is to abstract away all those individual complexities of working with these bridges.
If you're trying to, you know, add them yourselves to build a plug and play solution yourself.
And so it was just a lot of kind of early day research and kind of trial and error to make sure that, you know, sometimes bridges advertise certain speeds or certain prices and what you actually get in the actual transfer might be a little different.
And so kind of bringing some level of source of truth to what actually is the price of that transfer, that swap was kind of really important to us.
And so we've spent a lot of time on, you know, deciphering all the ways that the different bridges handle fees and how they present fees in their UI and really what's going on on the back end.
Sometimes one route might look like it's a little cheaper, but really there's the gas fees to kick that off on the user end side may actually be a little higher.
And so trying to take into account all those kind of details to make sure that truly if this is the fastest route that we recommend, it actually is the fastest route.
And so it's definitely been years and years of kind of research working on this stuff.
I think nowadays especially, you know, there's a lot of Bitcoin L2s that have come out.
Solana has been a pretty big mover in this market as well.
And we have some other kind of networks that are launches that are coming up as well.
But it's really just kind of keeping our ear to the ground and making sure and kind of keeping in tune with what our community wants and what our partners like yourselves are looking for as well and making sure we're ready to support those type of experiences.
That's great.
Yeah, and one thing I wanted to call out in our own interface, when you first get a quote for a swap, we always show you the cheapest option first.
Now, the cheapest option might not be the fastest option.
There's like a tradeoff between speed and how much you're willing to pay to get the swap done.
And so if there's multiple quotes and there's a faster option that might cost more, you'll see a button up here that says, try a faster option.
And you click that and it'll kind of change the quote for you.
And it's going to be something that likely is going to cost you a little bit more in gas, but the funds are going to arrive quicker.
So we try to, you know, as Swing gives us multiple quotes, we try to, you know, boil it down, give you the cheapest option and the fastest option.
And you can choose between those two things is a ease of use and, you know, deciding what's most important to you, cost or speed.
For me personally, it's usually the cheapest option and I'll be willing to wait, you know, a couple extra minutes for the funds to arrive if it's significantly cheaper.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I guess a question for you, Aaron, there would be, you know, how do you think about these features, the various features you guys are building and how does that tie into Unstoppable Domains' long-term vision for crypto accessibility?
Yeah. So as we are developing a marketplace for domains that are on-chain, like I said before, it's really important for users to have an easy place to manage those domains.
Now, some users don't even want to custody their own domains at all and they're happy with a, you know, a custody wallet solution, you know, where they just use the website and, you know, things are on-chain, but it just feels pretty web too.
And that's a great experience for some folks. Some people would like to take custody of their domains and that's why we have this wallet. So you take custody of your wallet, you get an Unstoppable Light wallet, all of your domains are in it, and now you can interact, you know, a little more hands-on on the blockchain.
And so as you're making sales on the marketplace, as you're placing offers on the marketplace, you can be using that wallet. So you've got, you know, some Polygon or some Ethereum or some USDC in your wallet, and you're using those to make offers and to be paid for your domains.
And so being able to swap between those currencies that you might have at a given time on your wallet is going to be important as you interact with the marketplace. You know, you might want to place an offer in USDC or, you know, place that offer in Polygon, and that might not be exactly what's in your wallet at the given time.
So we want, you know, a very easy way to switch back and forth. And then also just to be able to adjust for market conditions, right? So if you've got all of your current assets in, you know, Bitcoin right now, and the market's doing really hot, and it's going up, you know, that might be great.
But there might come a point where you're like, okay, I want to take some risk off and be able to, you know, swap some of that to a stable coin like USDC. There should be an easy way to do that. And then you can kind of lock in some gains or some profit, you know, directly within your wallet without having to send things to Coinbase or to Binance and, you know, do things on a centralized exchange, which is an option.
And it's just not the best option if you want to maintain custody of your assets. And so having everything easy to use right there within your wallet, that's our vision for, you know, the long term.
Very cool. Very cool.
What about for Swing? What are you guys looking at here going forward?
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely, you know, crypto is one of those places where it's a high signal to noise ratio. And so, or noise to signal. But I think one thing we are considering is there's a lot of things going on. I think the most notable thing is we do actually have our token generation event coming up for Swing in the coming weeks. And so that's something that's kind of exciting that the team's been kind of heads down working on.
But I think in terms of infrastructure support, I mean, along with supporting major EVMs, Layer 2s, Base Solana, you know, Bitcoin L2s, we are looking to add some new networks like BearChain that's up and coming, Morph Network, Eclipse, which is a Solana Layer 2 that's coming up as well.
We're looking at Fuel Network, Monad Network as well. I think we're just, again, it really comes down to what is our community and partners asking for and what's important to them.
And this is kind of what the kind of the echoes of the chamber have been so far.
I think there's a lot of work even on when you think about chain abstraction and kind of even making these quotes even better or, you know, chain abstraction is really around this idea about allowing users to, you know, they may have USDC on multiple different chains.
How do we think about bringing that together and allowing them to use that balance on multiple chains to do a performance swap into a token that they don't have?
And so I think those type of experiences are very exciting as well.
There's still some kind of battle testing that's going on for that.
So not promising that this is coming soon, but we are working with some close partners to kind of enable some of these chain abstraction experiences for now.
But yeah, that's kind of like the major kind of updates that we have that we're sharing now.
I think a lot of for 2025, I think we have a really jam-packed year of updates coming.
And so definitely looking forward to sharing more updates.
That's awesome.
Yeah, and as far as our wallet, what's coming soon is you can expect more tokens to be supported.
Right now, we're just supporting the native currencies and USDC just to keep things simple out of the gate.
But, you know, obviously, meme coins and just tokens in general are very popular right now.
So expect to see, you know, the user interface to be populated with more options for you to swap to.
And then also a little piece of alpha is we are totally rebuilding the mobile app right now for the wallet.
And it's going to be a unified code base for both the Android and iOS platform.
And so, you know, historically, you know, we've had an iOS update and an Android update, and they might not necessarily be exactly in sync with which features are available in which.
And so with this new rework that we're doing, you know, those will go out together.
So that'll be really nice for users to be able to have feature parity between those two platforms.
So we're pretty excited about that.
And that'll be coming in the early part of next year, sometime in the first quarter.
Amazing. That's exciting. That's exciting.
Yep. And so right now, the swap feature is only on the browser extension.
But as we come up with that new mobile app, that's where you'll start to see swap with the mobile app.
So that'll be early next year.
Very cool. I'm curious.
Is your community taking a liking to one type of chain or two or a pair of chains over another?
I mean, I know it's early days.
I'm curious about what kind of analytics you guys might be coming across.
Yeah, absolutely.
So historically, Polygon has been our, you'll call it our most popular chain, because that's where we mint most of our domains originally.
And so, you know, we have millions of domains that are minted on Polygon.
And because of that, a lot of our users end up on Polygon, because that's where the domains are.
But as, you know, in the second part of last year, we started to say, okay, you know, Polygon's great, no problems with it.
But there's users on a lot of other chains that they'd like to have a domain minted natively to where they live on, you know, their day-to-day lives.
And so we've started minting things on base, which has been really popular.
And then in the first part of next year, we're going to be starting to mint things on Solana as well.
And so I think, you know, people to have domains, you know, directly on the chain, where they are interacting, is something that makes them feel like they can really identify with those domains.
So that's where we're at now.
Amazing. Amazing. Amazing.
All right. Well, any closing thoughts, you think?
Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, I think generally, I'm not sure if folks have been in the crypto space for a long time or they recently joined, but I would definitely stay optimistic.
I think with all the things that are happening, you know, we're about to see some crypto deregulation happening, especially in the States as well, which will ricochet across, you know, all governments across the world.
And so I think products like Unstoppable, a light wallet is going to be a kind of a key kind of gateway to help users onboard into the crypto space and kind of get familiar with kind of all the different things you can do in the space.
And so I would say, yeah, keep your head up to the sky and understand that, you know, things are just, I know this is a cliche term, but we're just getting started.
I think absolutely. I say this as someone that's been in the space for almost 10 years.
We're just, we're just getting started still. And so I think we're definitely, we have a kind of a second chance here at kind of making crypto mainstream and, you know, with Trump elect and Elon Musk in the government in the States, I think they're definitely going to be pushing, you know, pro crypto type of policies into the space.
And so I think it's to be working closely with the Unstoppable team and supporting you guys on all the things coming up.
Awesome. Yeah, we're excited to have you as a partner and looking forward to, you know, continued work and making this a really great experience for the users.
So, yeah, thanks a lot for joining and for sharing your perspectives.
And, you know, we should do another one of these once we release some more tokens and be able to have another checkpoint here in the future.
Would love to. Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on board, guys.
Awesome. All right. We'll talk to everybody later. Thanks for joining.
Bye, guys.
Bye, guys.
Bye, guys.
