The origins of Wallby
The journey from meta-wallet to superapp
All interesting products start with a problem to solve, a heterogeneous group of people and years of build-up.
This is also true for Wallby: we would love to “sell” you a fabulous origin story of young geniuses, garages in suburban California and serendipitous “eureka” moments coming out of nowhere on lazy Sunday afternoons, but that wouldn’t be the truth at all.
It is also not going to be a story of clamorous ICOs, Stanford-teaching parents, fake effective altruism or overblown seed rounds.
It is going to be a story of trial and error, perseverance and alpine valleys.
A little bit of geography, society & history
The story starts in Rovereto, the main town in Vallagarina, in southern Trentino and close to Lake Garda, in the wild Nort-East of Italy.
Trentino, together with its northern neighbor South-Tyrol, has always been a crossroads of people, trade and ideas, being the entrance to the Italian peninsula for those coming from central Europe.
Once a rural region of the Austro-Ungarian Empire first and Kingdom of Italy after, following World War 2 Trentino has steadily developed a world-class ecosystem of innovation, technology and research, also thanks to its status as autonomous province of Italy.
One of the innovations which found fertile ground in Trentino, and especially in Rovereto, is Bitcoin: Vallagarina has been known as the “Bitcoin Valley” for almost ten years now, being the longest-running local Bitcoin community in the world, albeit not as well-known as other local Bitcoin communities (trentini, the people of Trentino, are known as “bears” in Italy, not particularly sociable at first like all mountain people, and definitely not naturally inclined to marketing and self-promotion).
The core of the Bitcoin Valley are inbitcoin and Comproeuro, the first two startups of what now is the biggest Bitcoin business ecosystem in Italy, which spawned companies such as Bcademy, co-founded by industry veterans including Giacomo Zucco and Marco Amadori, and 100% self-funded.
Wallby was in turn first incubated within Bcademy, and it carries in its DNA all the history and experiences that preceded it.
The Bitcoin Academy, tokenization and many chains
Bcademy was first intended to be, as the name suggests, the education & training branch of the ecosystem; after an initial expansion though, it quickly became clear how it made little sense to have too many companies each with its too narrow focus, and Bcademy quickly started incorporating also consultancy and B2B custom software development services, getting in touch with clients for training first, and then helping them integrating tailor-made Bitcoin-based solutions into their processes and products.
In recent years, the most requested service has been tokenization with all its collateral consequences, such as need for decentralized finance services, fundraising and marketplaces.
For example, the typical client would want their tokens to be minted first on Liquid Network for its reliability and “proximity” to Bitcoin, and then also have a “wrapped” version of the token on Rootstock or other EVMs to take advantage of DeFi applications, with a proprietary bridging protocol for users to move their tokens between chains.
There was a missing piece though: after minting tokens on different networks for different use-cases, there was no all-in-one Bitcoin wallet we could recommend to clients for their users.
From Bmeta to Wallby
As had already happened before, the easiest solution was to take the matter into our own hands and come up with our own answer: Bmeta.
We started brainstorming about Bmeta, which should have been a Bitcoin meta-wallet, almost three years ago, fantasizing about a tool we could customize and provide to our clients, letting their users manage bitcoin and tokens on different networks in a single and convenient environment, while also being able to natively access selected services and products.
Something unexpected happened though: the more we pitched the idea to our partners, the more we started getting enthusiastic feedback and realizing we could go to market directly with our own product, and then have our clients recommend that to their users, in order to unify userbases and to better support it.
Thus Bmeta naturally became Wallby: an all-in-one self-custodial wallet and superapp with its own identity and brand, which would help users conveniently access Bitcoin and its layer 2s/sidechains, plus an ever-growing ecosystem of fully-optional products and services, based on decentralized protocols or offered by centralized providers, for a truly personal experience.
Into the Unknown
This has been Wallby’s story so far. We don’t know yet what the future holds, but we are excited to unravel it with the amazing support we’ve been receiving from the Bitcoin community.
What we do know is how the next chapter begins: as anticipated in our previous FAQ article, Wallby will soon be its own entity outside of Bcademy, in order for it to grow and evolve in the best possible way.
We will have updates soon, so stay tuned for future articles and news!
Download Wallby on Android here.
Download Wallby on iOS here.
Watch Wallby’s presentation at Bitcoin Amsterdam here.
Watch Marco Amadori’s presentation of the Bitcoin Valley at Plan B Forum here.
