Starknet ecosystem growth and Braavos wallet security

0:01I'm ashon Addison from the cryptocoin show and today on blockchain interviews with Marty lvi CEO and co-founder of braavos mty welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time thank you great uh great to be here I'm excited to dive into braavos wallet uh the Stark net ecosystem which I've been very fond of in the past months I'm excited for the growth of that I'm interested in

0:23your insights into it being Deep In Stark net as well um and we can dive into all of that today but I would love to start off our ation together by first of all hearing a little bit about you uh your background in in blockchain and what led you to starting braavos and then we can dive into all the details uh sure I will be happy to I'm uh I'm actually what you can call a

0:45latecomer to crypto uh I'm spent most of uh uh the last decade in in a company I co-founded a classic webd company did everything from embedded software Cloud software a lot of AI before AI was as popular as it is today and only got into crypto um I think two and a half years ago I had a luxury of taking the time and uh and studying the space and and and you know it was clear

1:16at first of all I fell in love uh you know right at the beginning but uh it was clear it was clear that uh from you know the web two uh realm that that I got in uh there is a huge gap in of user experience there a lot of good things in crypto but the user experience was uh um needs needs a lots of a lot of improvement if we if we ever want to get to mass

1:42adoption and and maybe you know that's also the uh the founding story be Beyond braavos we saw a few things uh um you know coming together that uh can really allow us to to improve dramatically the user experience in crypto MH you know I completely completely agree and uh I feel like we're making huge strides in 2023 24 with people starting to explore

2:09new blockchains uh and get more deeper into web 3 as it seems like the user experience is getting a little bit easier uh more understandable safer uh that people can sort of venture into new things or things have been around long enough that they're like okay I can dip my toes into this um so I'm curious a little bit about bra wallet and uh sort of what inspired you to specifically go

2:34into this yeah so so uh as I mentioned I think that if you come from the from classic web to you can see a huge gap in what users are used to in their everyday application and what they are being offered in what we call real crypto uh self custodian and decentralized crypto as opposed to centralized crypto which is might be a good entry point but it's

3:02not uh you know it's not what crypto is all about and and and me and my co-founder we said wow this Gap has to be closed uh and luckily for us we we you know a few things came together at the right time uh that uh made us and still makes us believe that uh that we are able to close that and mainly that's uh a cheap computation and the notion of something

3:29that is called comp obstruction that uh maybe we can dive into a bit uh further in the conversation definitely would love to dive into that but I feel like before we get to that you know there are a lot of people that have used the Stark net ecosystem and the blockchain I've used it myself pretty thoroughly um but there are millions of people that are still

3:50using the centralized exchanges or maybe they're just holding Bitcoin and ethereum and they've yet to dive into these other ecosystems maybe they haven't bridged their ethereum to Star uh can you talk a little bit about the ecosystem you know behind braavos why you chose that and why should people experiment you know what makes it so good that you decided to build on the

4:11Stark net ecosystem yeah so I I told you that I had a luxury of taking the time and really uh studying uh the crypto space at large before uh diving in and starting building and and you know when I studied I I started with the different l1s uh and uh quickly came into the conclusion that ethereum did the right rof at least in my point of view between

4:36decentralization scalability and the security so sacrificing scalability in order to get de centralization and uh and security and then went and see okay so what do we do with the with scalability and back then there were H three uh you can say Solutions one is side Changs which was clear that it's not really a solution then there were rollups there were the optimistic

4:59rollups and uh the ZK or what you more accurately can call the validity rollups and and when I look at the optimistic rollup uh it was um somewhat obvious that that's at best intermediate solution because that also has a very strong limitation on how much it can scale and also the finality of optimistic rollups is is something of a problem which you know in Current

5:26Designs take uh take up to a week which is a very long time and and it was clear that validity rollups or ZK rollups are the future and in back then there were two main players there were there was ziky syn and stocket and stocket was Far Advanced with battle tested technology in terms of star proofs that already work in uh in a product called starx that were used

5:56by big protocols such as dydx and immutable X and sare and Rhino and so forth and stock took and build um took the the stock technology and built stocket which is a composable network and and it was a very good sign for us the main caveat was that stocket invented their own language which is optimized for validity proof unlike the

6:25entire let's say ethereum ecosystem or even more than the ethereum ecosystem that uses solidity and evm stock took a completely different approach and for us it was a concern we weren't sure if it uh if it can work or not so we did a little test project that became a very successful project and just to make sure that that it works and then we said oh

6:47that's great so stocket offers us abundant computation meaning we can do a lot of computation on the blockchain uh uh in a really cheap way and stocket had another um another Jam in it in which they took count obstruction maybe technical listeners can can refer to that as e 4337 and baked it into the protocol meaning we have on state C obstruction

7:15baked into the protocol and and both of these things like very cheap computation and abundant computation together with account abstractions allow us to bridge this uh this Gap that we saw in uh in uix and if you like I can dive into why exactly that is yeah I would love to learn a little bit more about account abstraction and why other blockchains are also starting to pick it up and I

7:39feel like it's going to be the norm moving forward yeah so I I completely agree so for for listeners that that you know that aren familiar with account obstruction account obstruction is is basically what's uh What uh sits in the base of smart contract wets and the difference between traditional wallets like metamask and smart contract wallets is that traditional wallets are

8:05application only meaning uh you have an application either as an extension on your browser or as an app on your phone uh the application uh reflects the status of your account on the blockchain and allows you to to sign transactions but basically everything happen on the client side on the application side and smart contract wallets actually have two

8:27sites you can think of that as the ation side like all traditional wallets and an account smart contract that sits on chain and all of your transaction goes through this account smart contract and this is extremely powerful now that we've divided uh the account into two uh into into two parts because it allows us to do uh two main things one is to employ Uh custom signature verification

8:53logic meaning we are no longer bound to the signature scheme that was set by the blockchain and the second it allows us to bring uh um an arbitrary execution logic meaning we can add any logic that we want to each transaction that uh uh that we issue from the account and you know that's a whole new design space that we can bake into that practically whatever we want

9:23and and the beauty here is that we are not sacrificing nor neither decentralization nor self- custody and and that's that's really nice and we can give a few example of what exactly we can do with that MH I appreciate that explanation and I think this is sort of the reason that the you know the part of the reason that braavos swallet exists and that you can't just connect snark

9:47net into metamask like you can with ZK sync and some other chains you know it's still using ethereum but you have to have a separate ecosystem where you're Bridging the ethereum over uh whereas you know ZK sync Linea you can just sort of switch the chain on metamask and it's easy to do but you're not going to have that functionality that granularity that

10:08you would in the starnet ecosystem is that right exactly exactly exactly Since U starnet baked the count obstruction into the protocol it means that every wallet on a c obstruction has to be a SM contact wallet and all that all the entire ecosystem works with smart contract wallets and uh and having that from the get-go is uh is very powerful because you don't have any compatibility

10:35issues like you might have in uh in in classic evm chains that uh uh that were reliant on what we call EA externally own accounts like uh like metamask and and you can see that the entire stocket ecosystem take advantage of that and I can give you know maybe one or two classical examples so people will understand if you take a a swap in amm uh if you go to Unis swap on on ethereum

11:05L1 you need to First approve uh the amm to to use the token and usually you approve for the maximum amount meaning the amm has uh has as the the privilege as the allowance to uh withdraw from your account whatever amount that that it wants and only after that in the second and third transaction you can actually do the swap uh on St net with the account obstruction smart contract

11:32wallet one of the basic features is multic call meaning you don't have to call uh in in a in one transaction you don't have to do a call to one contract but you can do a call and another call so you can combine this approve and swap in the same transaction and approve exactly the amount that you want to swap and then not give protocols the you know infinite allowance into your wallet so

11:55that's just a very small example of uh what can be what can be done done on spot and and deps are utilizing that constantly mhm no that's a great example mty and I think some people have fallen cursed to that original uh method of you know approving tokens and yeah say you want to trade $10 and and then it approves a million dollars that you had in your wallet which then you know if

12:20you happen to get fishing attack later or something that can be siphoned out uh which is a big big security issue so exactly yeah no it's a great explanation um I'm curious though with daps dex's di5 platforms like Unis swap for example it seems easy for them to be able to add other chains that are evm compatible uh say on kyber Swap they're adding ZK sync

12:46when they already had ethereum and Linea but it might be a little bit harder for them to integrate the Stark net because of the extra functionality as well is that a barrier to adoption for some of the tradition traditional dexes that are the main go-tos right now or how much harder is it for these main applications to integrate Stark net so I think it's a blessing in a

13:10curse because it is a higher bar to integrate why is that because take you know take Unis for example to to move from ethereum L1 to arbit or to optimism uh you know it's just a click of a button because it's evm uh it's the etherum virtual machine with the same solidity code and the same solidity code which is already working and audited and debugged etc etc H to

13:38onboard stocket they will need to rewrite their entire code base from solidity to Cairo and adjusted to uh to the Kyo language and also to the stock powerful functionality but that's that's heavy lifting that's not like pushing a button that's a lot of men or many maybe years of uh uh of of engineering work is so the barrier is definitely harder but the the plus size is that it

14:06allows for uh new protocols and new approaches to to emerge on stocket without the need to fight incumbents and and take braavos for example that's a that could be a classic example a metamask has over 80% market share on interium M1 if you know a new startup like ders need to fight metamask that's an EXT extremely hard up uphill button on the contrary when when we can

14:36uh build a user base and show the advantage of smart contract wallets without the need to to do this upal battle H then that's that's a good starting point in order for the the entire ecosystem to to evolve not only not only stting because we can actually show what's possible we can actually show what what can be done with uh with account obstruction for example mhm

15:00that's a great explanation mty and maybe you can talk a little bit about the the growth of the Stark knet ecosystem and the partners or the connections that Bravos is making into new dexes that have decided hey we're not going to we know we're not Unis swap we not trying to rebuild everything they're just going to make a whole new Dex Al together because it looks like uh despite having

15:21a different language all of this extra functionality has actually pushed a lot of developers to make new dexes new defi platforms that are built within starn do you have any numbers or connections to the partners in in how fast the Stark net ecosystem is growing right now so in terms of developers I think it's the fastest growing uh ecosystem by far like

15:42by order of magnitude more and more developers are coming to learn Cairo more and more developers are experimenting with Cairo H trying to build a project in Cairo and that's you know that's really great uh because we kind of came to stocket at the very the very beginning uh there weren't a lot of teams like we knew everyone uh and now to see the the

16:06entire ecosystem growing and not only growing but accelerating that's uh uh you know that's really encouraging and and I think yes definitely there are there are uh um new amm that emerging I told you about our initial projects that just to to you know to to kick the tires and check if uh if we can walk on stock and that was actually a basic constant

16:31product amm back then uh which you know we build it just to see that uh that we can build something on stocket and it it became so popular that uh you know we we launched that on mainnet and then we upgrade that to a singl ton concentrated liquidity type of amm that takes advantage of the the the cheap computation that we have on stocket to to offer better quotes and better prices

16:57Etc and and there are a lot of such uh projects uh um um like um in defi Aven is a prominent one who is a price aggregator uh gives user the the best uh uh you know the best price uh which is available uh there is stet ID which is a great project on uh on stocket that also experimented with what you can do with uh with

17:27onchain name servers and profile pictures uh etc etc so the fact that you that there are no incumbents that's uh I think it's really it really opens the door for a lot of innovation I agree and I think some of the early adopters of the star ecosystem they were just personally interested in testing out this new functionality the account abstraction and the speed Cairo

17:55the new language um but there was also some people that are incentivized to do so so because of the potential airdrop of the Stark net coin which may or may not happen in the near future who knows what's going on with that as well and I know a lot of people have tried out uh braavos and the and the other main Stark net wallet and they maybe more as well

18:16uh when people go into Stark net for the first time how do you help sway their opinion and like hey you know we should be choosing braavos as the main primary wallet um do you guys also have incentivized ations or you know how do people decide what's that thought process and like which wallet do I start using on Stark net so I think we approached from from um uh

18:44from two from two uh from two different angles so one uh since uh start is new and all the project is new as we said there is no compound or a uniscope etc then when people come they don't know uh what they can experiment with uh so what we did we build uh the stock Journey which take users uh in a in a journey to all the deps it actually it monitors all

19:10your interaction with each and every dep uh it builds like a gamification of a professional score for you how proficient are you in on on stocket and and people really like that like they uh they said this should this should be on any channel on any network so you know we can really see what what we did what we didn't do uh new protocols that are coming that we can experiment Etc so

19:33that's one thing and the second thing is is the core elements of the product I think um you know we we brought uh a few Innovations uh uh to the space um which we are very proud of uh there are gazillion wallets out there but uh there are not gazillion smart contract wallets and uh in in the smart contract uh you know product category I think that uh ER

19:59we we constantly try to to explore Uncharted territories so we build we build and Brad things like um a true decentralized two- Factor authentication which you think about that you know it uh it doesn't exist in crypto it exists in every mediocre web to service even when I order food when I go into settings I need to have TOA but on crypto you you save millions and you

20:25don't have tofa everything is eventually in this 12 24 word possible then that's you know that's uh as we said earlier that that's can scale even if you think about how the wallets and how wallets like Ledger Etc they they eventually they boil down to these 24 words that you need to save somewhere and hope for the best and uh and tofa this is something that uh this is one of the

20:49first account obstruction feature that we brought then we top it up with the three Factor authentication recently we launched uh uh um a pass key that that user can use from from the browser and all all sorts of these innovation in in around security this is uh uh this is I think one cool thing that we did H another cool thing that we are very

21:17proud of is that uh we I call it we democratize the ability to stake itat and why is that if you think about that when you go on L1 today and you want to take it if you if you use like staking aggregator like Lio or rocket pool Etc it cost you depending on the gas price but it can cost you 10 20 $30 to deposit and the same amount approximately to withdraw H it makes the the investment

21:45non-economically viable if you don't invest thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars because the entire yield Will Go On on the gas F and uh what we did we utilized the fact that on stocket computation is really cheap and uh we uh brought the concept of defi pooling meaning we pull users funds together on stocket and we ship them down as one transaction to ethereum L1

22:11let's say stake the eat in Lio get the red State e toen Bridge it back to stocket distribute it to uh all the users such that they will have it liquid in their wallet and the main benefit is that instead of paying the $20 transaction fee like you pay one you pay you know two ERS of magnitude less like you pay 20 cents 30 cents and that's uh makes Investments of the

22:37hundreds of dollars suddenly economically viable so all all such things that that bring real value to users uh I think uh they are uh they are you know they are appealing of and one of the main reason that uh that users choose to to try out and stick with brows mhm I I completely agree and that's great to be lowering those barriers to entry for staking eth uh or for trading

23:06you know no longer should people have to pay more than a dollar it should be cents uh to to be able to do that so that's great um now we don't have a lot of time left money but I'm curious if you can share any of uh your guys' plan for 2024 I feel like it's going to be a big year it already is for for Bitcoin and that's trickling down down into all over web three uh but how is the braavos

23:30team going to continue to grow uh and hopefully the Stark net will be you know one of the most popular ex it already is the the fastest growing um but how are you guys going to keep up to the pace of the ecosystem growth for this year so uh we uh you know we see that we have a lot of walk ahead of us if you remember we want to close the gap between the web two and web three we

23:56call it bring a web two experience uh but with web three values meaning without compromising decentralization and self- custody and for that we still have a lot to do uh we want to get rid of the seed phrase completely ER and which I think it will be a major milestone in the industry uh so again not sacrificing decentralization not sacrificing self-

24:20custody but no seat phras and having toofa so you know it's uh we move to another level and I think that that what will enable um many users that will hopefully join this cycle will rejoin to I call it to graduate from centralized exchange Solutions like uh coinbase and Kraken if they are lucky or Celsius and FDX if they are less lucky into real uh uh

24:52self- custodial crypto because the the fact that they opt into the centralized Solutions uh you know it's it's the problem of the industry because the decentralized self- custodial Solutions are extremely complex they are they are extremely unfriendly and as I said our goal is to to close this Gap and to enable the this new wave of users uh to to to opt in to to real crypto and not

25:18not stay on the centralized size and what is the best way for people to join that braavos Journey or follow along with these updates as you guys can continue to grow this year so uh uh you can you can follow us on Twitter we are constantly posting a lot of uh interesting stuff uh just last week we did a nice uh Capture the Flag uh initiative uh in which we put a

25:46wallet with 150,000 usdc and gave the seat phrase uh to the entire Twitter Community to to see if they can uh they can hack that so of course uh you you know numerous people have recovered download the BRS recover the wallet saw the high balance in in you know on their app or on the computer but couldn't do anything because they didn't have the TFA and that was for for many people

26:11that was quite mindboggling uh so so Twitter is a great place we also constantly post things on our website and and new blogs which are both Technical and and more light so you know whatever fits uh each audience you can find it there and of course I think the main the main thing is just uh download Bravos and try it for yourself on on any platform that that you want sounds great

26:41Monty thank you so much for the time I'll leave the links in the show notes for the braavos wallet the Twitter and the other docs uh for those that are interested in learning more appreciate your insights into the Stark ecosystem all the best with uh braavos moving forward into 2024 and let's follow up in the near future excellent thank you Ashton was a

27:10pleasure