Keplr in 2023: Why appchains will fix wallet UX

Published in

Chainapsis

9 min readJan 4, 2023

Our 2022 Retrospective

This past year was a rollercoaster ride. Appchains finally got the attention they deserved. IBC is the norm, not the exciting ‘new technology’ it once was. Gravity had its way of renormalizing the hype of ‘to the moon(luna)’, bringing things back ‘to the earth(terra)’. Interchain accounts, once just a specification our co-founders proposed in 2020, are a fundamental building block for liquid staking for most of Cosmos.

As Mark Twain once said, history never repeats itself but it often rhymes. Keplr was built in the bear market, so this is all familiar territory. All that to say, the biggest lesson we’ve learned along the way was this: The path to resilience comes at a cost.

The ongoing bear market couldn’t hinder Keplr team from building.

Progress is not always linear, and we’re not going to sit back and warm the bench until the next boom arrives. And our main thesis has never changed despite the gloomy downcycle — no matter what, the key driving force that will onboard the next millions of users to the industry will be killer apps with simple, easily accessible, and user-friendly UI/UX, and Keplr aims to be at the leading edge of delivering such products with the highest quality.

So, regardless of what the market threw at us, Keplr team has achieved several meaningful milestones over this past year. Here’s a brief look back:

💫 Native Integration:

Axelar, Juno, Stargaze, Umee, Sommelier, Gravity Bridge, Tgrade, Stride, Injective, Quicksilver

🌐 Keplr Extension:

Self-configurable node endpoints
Gas simulation before sending Tx
Showing the number of unlocked tokens from their vesting schedule
Firefox support (beta)
Customizable fee token on Osmosis and Gravity Bridge
Partial EVM support
Ledger support for Evmos
Auto-detection of ERC20 tokens that are transferred via Gravity Bridge
Launched Community-Driven Integration, providing a public API to our users for creating and updating a set integration standard for each chain
ICNS support!

📌 Keplr Dashboard:

Dashboard 2.0 with NFT PFP, dark mode, and improved data visualization
Osmosis LPs at a glance
Send assets within the dashboard
Transaction history
Proposal notification for Cosmos and Osmosis governance
Deposit with QR code
Fiat on-ramp, in partnership with Moonpay, Transak, and Kado

📲 Keplr Mobile:

Edit chain list and their order
Agoric, Junoswap, Osmosis Frontier, Regen added to “Discover Apps” tab
Auto-gas adjustment
Ledger support for Evmos
Dark mode 🕶️

🙌 User Support:

Approve button gets deactivated when mnemonics are typed in the Memo field
Revamped Help Desk with richer visuals
Partnered with Cosmoshield to protect our users from baneful phishing attempts
Scam Alert enabled

🌊 Expanding the Horizon:

Partnered with Skiff to provide Keplr users easy access to their end-to-end encrypted email and workplace tools
Cosmoverse ticket purchase via Keplr wallet

And hopefully, these accomplishments will be our building blocks for this year. Finding itself in a unique position with a capacity to impact the way people interact with DApps, Keplr will continue to expand its purview as a gateway to the expanding interchain.

What’s ahead for 2023

Appchains 🤝 Interchain Wallets, Fixing Self-Custody UX

“I feel the need… the need for convenience! ” 🚀

The entire team saw the catastrophic fall of FTX as a lesson for us to build better. Without better UX for self-custody, it’s just a matter of when, not if, another centralized will blow up causing millions of funds lost.

“Not your keys, not your coins” is easier said than done. As a team building software for people to self-custody their assets, we fully acknowledge this.

The truth about security is that the best form of security is one that balances technical security and practical security. You can have the best technical security process, but you also need to account for human mistakes such as misplacing seed phrases and phishing attacks, where even the best form of technical security can fail.

Realizing the need to onboard new users entering Cosmos, Keplr launched with built-in Web3Auth (formerly Torus) support, enabling our users to register and sign in with their Google accounts.

While social logins provide convenience and some level of resistance against human mistakes, it still fails to be the all-encompassing solution that eradicates the root of the problem; as long as we maintain the current account and authentication design of blockchains, users are still exposed to the “single private key” problem.

As a user’s on-chain activity increases, users would eventually seek to strengthen the security of their accounts, but there’s no way at this moment to simply add or switch to a different login/authentication method (i.e. Web3Auth to mnemonic accounts to Ledger) while still maintaining the history and reputation of their crypto accounts.

In 2023, Keplr aims to work towards abstracting the idea of an “account” from a private key (a.k.a. account abstraction), and allow flexibility and diversity in signing and authorization UX. And this decoupling can beget a plethora of new use cases and blockchain/app designs such as:

Signing/authorizing mechanisms that take not only the validity of signatures into account, but also the contents of transactions, such as spending limits.
Adding your friends’ Twitter accounts to be your wallet’s recovery authorizer (and this can be further expanded with the growth of the on-chain identity layer such as ICNS).
Diversified multi-key accounts that can be flexibly set up to serve different purposes of different accounts.
Sign once to do multiple on-chain actions
Losing your private key would not necessarily result in losing the entire asset stored in the account

What should be kept in mind in taking this step is that regardless of how complicated the whole backend architecture would be, the goal is for user-facing UI to remain largely the same from the user’s perspective.

The beauty of the appchain design shines here. Much of crypto UX problems arise from having to support legacy standards, which most wallet developers have little to no involvement in. Appchains allow wallet developers to work with chain developers to envision and implement a blockchain that puts usability at its core–we expect Keplr to participate in this process alongside relevant stakeholders.

Wallets as the Human Interoperability Layer to the Interchain

“Life is like a box of pseudonyms, you never know what you’re going to stick with” 🍫

The nuances of building a cross-chain reputation in the interchain of appchains are much different than one of single-chain smart contract chains with dapps as smart contracts.

On the good side, from a technical level, a lot of the fragmentation around reputation and on-chain history can be abstracted at the interface layer as long as coin type 118 is used as the user’s public key is shared.

The emergence of NFTs was a real game changer in the on-chain identity sphere. Whereas crypto accounts felt more like a bank account in the past, NFTs paved the way for accounts to feel more like a social network profile, allowing you to build a pseudonymous identity, reputation, and vibes based on what you did, when you did it, and what you own. As wallets are the most tangible software for crypto users, it felt like a no-brainer for Keplr to keep our eyes on this transition.

Just as IBC brought interchain data portability across heterogeneous appchains, we expect Keplr to bring interchain identity and reputation portability across heterogeneous appchains.

The beauty of the crypto identity layer is that reputation and credibility can be accrued without necessarily revealing one’s IRL personal data. Pseudonymity and anonymity are two similar sounding, but different concepts. Crypto allows pseudonymous identities to have proof-of-reputation based on on-chain actions, without the necessity of linking these reputations and actions to one’s real-life identity.

For more various forms of social consensus systems to emerge, we need to design the layer from an individual level, to extract meanings from individual on-chain activities and capture the nuanced social information in transactions. Proof-of-stake thrives where stakeholders can share ideas, provide feedback, and discuss decisions within the stakeholders.

With the recently announced interchain naming protocol, ICNS (Interchain Nameservice), Cosmos will be equipped with a basic yet powerful tool for experimenting with different configurations of self-identity and social networks. And as a major vehicle that can carry and translate one’s identity data, Keplr wishes to be at the forefront of this movement. As a starting point, we’ve fully integrated ICNS into all of our products upon its launch. Several features are in our development queue, including sending/receiving tokens with one’s username.

Our next initiative will take off by releasing Keplr Validator Dashboard in Q1, which aims to facilitate and streamline the governance and communication process for the validators and delegators, and foster delegator-specific communities to emerge. This will allow the token-based governance to evolve from its simplest form that actually flattens out the different interests in the Cosmos ecosystem, making each vote more accountable, credible, and well interest-aligned. And we, the Keplr team, are ready to get our hands dirty with experimenting with its multiple variations.

Interchain expanding beyond Cosmos

Partial EVM support was implemented on Keplr products this year, but full support has been put off until 2023. However, we believe that now is the time to put the expansion of Keplr beyond Cosmos-SDK based chains on the front burner, in tandem with the expansion of the interchain.

Developed nations tend to rely on high value-added, tech-specialized industries that can sharpen their competitive edge in the global market and countervail their relatively high price levels. Emerging countries, on the other hand, tend to leverage their lower manufacturing costs and price levels. With concerted efforts, developed and emerging countries fragmentize their supply/value chains to maximize their net profits. It is inevitable for both sides to eventually open up and break down their barriers to scale up and grow in the international political and trade dynamics.

However, increased interdependence implies that risks and moats are harder to be isolated. And without a solid domestic market, infrastructure, and identity, competitive pressures will cause domestic industries to wane, and the threat is usually unequal, particularly skewed towards developing economies. And likewise, we’ve seen many chains that end up being just another L2 for Ethereum after connecting to the ecosystem.

Then why EVM support, at this point? Because we believe that the Cosmos ecosystem already has matured enough to open up and build multilateral ties with other allies.

With more EVM L2s gaining traction, we expect the definition of the ‘interchain’ to broaden.

That being said, Cosmos now has a vibrant developer community that never ceases to deliver and innovate. We also have a unique, distinct identity defined by our strong belief in the sovereignty of individual app chains and their interoperability. We have gained growing interest from investors, and built healthy financial exchanges to facilitate capital allocation.

As a leading interchain infra builder, Keplr team reckons that Cosmos is poised to fully fledge its wings in the multichain era, and we will proudly support its expansion in 2023. 🚀

In Conclusion

Keplr team’s fundamental and overarching mission has always been, and will always be, improving user experience in the crypto industry. There is no meaning in painting a big picture that has no relevance to a small picture, which is our daily lives and daily interactions with blockchain. And the best way of reducing the gap is by shipping the most user-friendly tools and applications to connect humans to the technologies.

We are not going to round up this roadmap with an overly optimistic, “lived happily ever after” vibe. We are pretty likely going to have a bumpy ride this year, but still, we hope you’re excited to be on this journey of finding missing pieces in the interchain world with us. Fasten your seatbelt, and get ready for our next phase to scale!

And for those who have read through the end of this article, thank you, and…