Elevating the User Experience Feat. Matthew Wright of Argent — The DeFi Podcast Episode #4

Hey DeFi’ers,

This week’s episode of The DeFi Podcast features Matthew Wright from Argent. Argent is a user-controlled wallet that provides free transactions as well as a free address using the Ethereum Name Service (ENS).

In this episode, Kerman interviews Matthew on how digital wallets currently work, what a “smart contract wallet” is, and what Argent is doing to improve the user experience of digital wallets.

Kerman Kohli: 00:02

Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of The DeFi Podcast. Today we have Matthew from Argent, who leads growth and operations. Matthew, could you briefly explain what crypto wallets are and how they work?

Matthew Wright:00:16

Hi, and thank you very much for having me. At the most basic, a wallet is a place to hold assets and send assets and there’s a few varieties. The most traditional one is based on an externally, externally-owned account, (an EOA) and that’s kind of public-private key pair. You may know, like, writing down a seed phrase or password on a piece of paper helps you get access if you lose your wallet and that has some kind of basic functionality and then what we’ve seen after that was kind of the emergence of hardware wallets.

People wanted somewhere safer to store their assets because people were just getting hacked too much. It was too easy to lose money with the kind of traditional wallets. So you’ve had companies like Ledger and Trezor emerge and now in the last couple of years you’ve also had smart contract wallets, which Argent is one of them, but there’s also Gnosis Safe, Dapper, and a few others and that’s really trying to solve some of the problems with usability and security that we’ve seen in both EOAs and hardware wallets.

Kerman Kohli: 01:22

Sure. Thanks for that. Leading into the next question, how does Argent utilize smart contracts to help people keep their money safe?

Matthew Wright: 01:31

Cool. So I think what we’ve done with the smart contracts is essentially build the logic into them, which provides the ease of use and security that you would want from a kind of new banking app without having to have custody of the assets. So we’re non-custodial and I guess that’s also an important point for your earlier question on types of wallets.

Some are hosted wallets like Coinbase, some are non-custodial where you never hold the user’s assets. Argent is the latter type. We never touch users assets. And there at the smart contract we’ve got rid of the need for the seed phrase. We don’t think the future of crypto is writing a piece of a password on a piece of paper and then losing all your assets. If you lose everything you hear people having to like troll through landfill sites trying to get their passphrases back. It’s crazy. We needed to get rid of it.

So with us you can, and with other smart contract wallets, kind of recover without seed praises. But also other features like setting a daily withdrawal limit so you can only spend up to a certain amount to help someone help avoid the risks that anyone can drain your accounts or even being able to approve large transfers. Being able to avoid the need for long cryptic addresses you can have. Using something like integrating with the theory of names, service. You can have Matthew to arch and do X, Z. So there’s all these kinds of features just to make much easier I see. For experience for normal consumers.

Kerman Kohli: 03:03

Sure, sure, sure. At its crux, how would you describe the experience of using a traditional crypto wallet versus something like Argent; would have people typically said about the experience?

Matthew Wright: 03:19

Yeah, so I think if you were to compare it with…I guess the fairest comparison is comparing a traditional noncustodial wallet with a smart contract wallet with Argent. And I guess the first thing they notice when they sign up is this lack of a seed phrase. So instantly removing that barrier. It and then yeah, as I say, not having to deal with the long addresses.

With the old fashioned wallets, you also have to deal with transaction fees that Argent has been able to abstract away. And then a lot of it also comes down to the kind of, it just the UI. Like, I think if we’re talking about Argent specifically, a lot of the work we’ve done has been on the smart contract side, but there’s also just being, applying kind of the team’s backgrounds in consumer mobile to make it easier to understand what’s going on. A more familiar experience.

Kerman Kohli: 04:19

Sure. And while using smart contract wallets, there’s still obviously a bit more risk because you’ve actually got live code which is holding your assets. So how do you kind of mitigate some of the problems that might come up from trusting some extra bit of code to hold your funds?

Matthew Wright: 04:35

Sure. All I would say, just to start, is that’s definitely true and the famous example is like the Parity hack, which is putting this front and center of a lot of people’s minds and it’s important to be aware of those risks, but also to not underestimate the risks, as I say, that come with, well, it’s with seed phrases where if you lose that you’re completely screwed. Or with hardware when it switched were a bit of a black box and have had some problems in the past, although they’ve performed a vital role.

So for smart contract wallets there’s a few things you can do. Audit of course, absolutely essential. And we worked with a company called Solidified that works with multiple auditor’s also things like bug bounties. Gnosis Safe has had formal verification in and that’s something that we’re looking at in the near future, but also then the very design of the smart contracts is really important.

So thanks to Nick Johnson of the Ethereum Foundation and Name Service. He worked with us on getting the architect architecture into like a very simple and modular form so that you could easily tell what part of the contracts meant to be doing what you can easily add features and kind of help the wallet evolve without having to redo everything from scratch. And that kind of simplicity I think is really important. Security too.

Kerman Kohli: 05:58

Sure. And I guess like what does someone need to do in order to start using a smart contract while it,

Matthew Wright: 06:04

Yeah, so I mean it’s kind of as simple as going to going to the app store, downloading, and then depending on the type of wallets you’ll either be faced with a seed phrase or not or and then with, you know, if they support Ethereum Name Service like us, you can just choose your user name and that’s it. You’re ready to go. The next step from that is getting crypto inshore wallet. And so some that you buy a crypto within the wallet going from fiat to others, you just transfer from an exchange like Coinbase.

Kerman Kohli: 06:38

Perfect. And I guess why did you or the founders or you personally choose to work on this problem in particular of all the other things in the crypto space?

Matthew Wright: 06:49

Sure. So yeah, as a non-founder, what really drew me to Argent was firstly I think wallets — although there are millions of them, I think there are millions of them for a reason because to be the consumer interface with crypto is a pretty vital part of the whole ecosystem and if we can’t make that kind of a fun experience for people to see if experience, I really don’t think that crypto will ever live up to its potential.

So kind of, yeah, helping consumers access it was really important. Like again, dApps we’ll have no users if there’s not an easy consumer interface. So I think that’s really important. And then for Argent specifically, I’d heard a lot about what it’s my, the CEO Gerald and his CTO had done before at Peak which was the world’s largest brain training app, present 50 million downloads and really showed kind of huge attention to detail on the consumer mobile side.

And then our third co-founder Julian — his background is in quantum information quantum cryptography, which I never really understand what that means when you call it deep cryptographic insecurity expertise. And so that combo I thought gave Argent a really great headstart.

Kerman Kohli: 08:12

Sure! No, that’s really cool. And I guess like kind of finishing off, is there anything else that you’d like to add about Argent yourself, which I haven’t asked and you’d like the audience to know about?

Matthew Wright: 08:25

Yeah, I think the kind of, the other really important element with smart contract wallets is the ability to orchestrate transactions. And so, for the user, this means, so to give a concrete example with Argent, you can open them a MakerDAO CDP. This used to be kind of a complex use case. It used to be seven transactions, but with Argent you don’t need to leave within the mobile app. You can tap once and then the smart contracts orchestrate rest drastically. Simplifying the process. So is literally a few seconds or so to access something like Compound. Again, you can orchestrate the transactions.

I think smart contract wallets have a really important benefit for how people who use dapps. And I think just that kind of simplicity is vitally important to kind of dapp adoption. And I think we’re already seeing that with the amount of money being locked up in compounds and they’re just kind of the explosion of DFI in recent months.

Kerman Kohli: 09:27

Of course. No, thank you for that answer. And I guess that’s about time for this episode. So thanks so much for jumping on and taking the time to ask you some questions about Argent and how smart contracts will it’s work.

Matthew Wright: 09:41

Cool. Well, thank you very much for having me.