Arcana Network’s Sendit app reaches 250,000 downloads

0:00I'm ashon Addison from blockwest capital for investment pitch media and today on the cryptocoin show we have Maya rear co-founder and CEO of arcanon network Mayer welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time no I'm glad to be here and you know thanks for having me here actually yeah likewise um I've seen Arcana around for many years and I'm excited to finally

0:22have you guys on the show I know the main Nets in full action and there's a lot of uh traction going on in the community so I'm excited to hear a little bit about uh what is the latest that you guys have been up to but I'd love to kick off our conversation with a high level overview for those who aren't familiar with Arana on what exactly is the network and then we'll dive into all

0:40the details yeah sure absolutely and Arana our goal is to kind of essentially uh significantly impact and improve uh user experiences in the web three space uh we've been uh I think all of us in one way or another have have have been victims of like really really bad ux in one one way or another however small or large uh the damage may have been and this is something that we care

1:10deeply about and it it goes back to our background of course but this is something that we like taken upon us to essentially fix and how we intend to do this is basically build the first blockchain that is focused purely on uh resolving and improving in fact uh user experiences yeah I completely agree there's some major hurdles to be jumped

1:37over in terms of the user experience and user interfaces um not just for people that aren't involved and they're non-technical and they're trying to figure out how to use something for the first time but also for advanced users um just trying to figure out how to do things safely and not accidentally you know not understanding what you're doing and and losing funds or clicking on the

1:58wrong thing I feel like that's been a major issue issue do you see progress being made since you know sort of what you would call the Wild West in in crypto in in the past few years since the last uh major hype cycle that there actually have been improvements in the industry overall yeah know significant improvements for sure uh we we've seen you know many people even call out all

2:23like a lot of activities that we in the crypto space have now given given the fact that we've many of us have been here like two one two three years and have gotten kind of used to how how things work here but we it it it it's it just shows our apathy towards like new users who come in and and they they have to kind of experience all of these intimidating interfaces and trying to

2:49figure out all of these things before they could even even do one single operation or any of these web three application so uh that is that is something that uh you know has has improved and people are definitely calling that out and people are now saying uh tradeoffs are okay and I think this is coming from the fact that you know we3 hasn't really seen the sort of

3:09adoption that we all hoped for uh and we know is truly possible and that needs to change so I think we although the there have been improvements I think we're still very early I think if we want people to kind of you know be able to experience and use applications that that they would find useful on a day-to-day basis I think we have some some ways to go there MH definitely and

3:36I feel like one of the most important aspects for the user experience is the wallet sort of comes down to the heart of it is you know that's where your funds are that's how you're going to interact with the web3 world um how much importance does Arana put on the wallet side well the wallet is front and center uh with what we do it's it's the way we we are a business to business sort of

4:01like platform uh our products are more developer facing than they are end user facing but the wallet is the one piece that developers get sorry end users of applications actually get to experience and this is the Arana wallet so just just to kind of dive a little bit deep into that is our Flagship product is actually our authentication SDK it's called Arana and what it does is it

4:25developers can integrate this app this SDK into their apps fairly simply and but once they do that their users can now sign into these apps with just their emails or social accounts whether it's Twitter twitch Discord you name it and what a kind the network does is gives these users a non-custodial wallet right within the app so now uh users don't have to go and install third party

4:53extensions figure out what seat phrases are figure out how to manage all of the you know that entire rabbit hole that you need to kind of go down if you don't know what a wallet is God forbid uh that is something that we eliminate and we think there are a whole host of use cases perhaps just outside of like the D5 world uh whether it's you know web3

5:13social nfts gaming all of those sorts of places where where we're seeing a lot of developers you know trying to reach outside of crypto natives uh to become their users and that's where Arana art fits in uh quite well so this is this is something that you know we we we've focused on for the past six to eight months and now we now slowly branching out into some of the other products that

5:36we're looking to kind of that's great to hear and I feel like web 3 social will be a big game Cher when it takes off and I feel like it's a balance between you know having you know people stuck in the sort of older current social media platforms and they want to onboard to web 3 I feel like the true web 3 natives want want to have you know the wallet and the web 3 ID as sort

6:03of the Native they don't want to stick to their old email addresses in web 2 but I don't know if that's really realistic I feel like it is a good on onboarding to be able to build a wallet but then sort of connect back so that you can slowly make the transition into more web 3 how do you feel about that yeah so for us it's very clear that self custody is is where it should be at

6:28but that's so it's so hard today and it feels like you know we everyone of us who's a crypto native today has has gone on this journey and now we just expect everyone to kind of make that leap uh just on the basis of the fact that a bunch of us have and that's just simply not how it works because users will simply not care about your app or you know all the wonderful things that you

6:52may have behind your login screen if the first thing they have to do is connect wallet and they have no clue what that means uh or what that is and it would do us and serve us very well if we kind of you know actually took the evolutionary route instead of the Revolutionary route and actually handheld people through that journey and make them sort of go

7:14through almost everything that we did that a slightly faster PA but at the same time get them past that first screen and let them start interacting with your app and see all this wonderful stuff that you potentially have to offer mhm and building uh a wallet that is userfriendly is great but then connecting into sort of the current blockchain ecosystems that aren't very

7:37user friendly I feel like there might be some hurdles there from what I understand our Canon network has built out an entire you know web 3 infrastructure with you know the the network and the ability to build user-friendly applications and and the whole Spectrum can you can you talk about what exactly are all the functionalities and did you really have

7:58to rebuild you know everything in blockchain to make it all sort of work in synchronicity um we didn't have to like rebuild but we had to do a lot of work I mean it we took our Fair time and and many would uh say that we did it to our at our own detriment uh and they have Fair arguments to say that but these the kind of things that we were building are

8:23all so steeped in like things like applied cryptography and uh you know making the right set of abstractions having the right architectures and those sorts of things and these are things that you can't simply can't rush I mean we we could have but we would probably put out a substandard product uh so uh that's something that we've been very thoughtful about in general and trying

8:44to ensure that you know whatever we build has to be safe and secure to at least the degree that is acceptable for uh and the trade-offs are essentially acceptable and and and that Focus has led us to this point where we are now looking looking to not only uh you know put out one product but put out like a suite of products all of which can be used together uh independently so it's

9:10like a modular stack of tools and the idea is that if we improve the developer experience um then I think we can see a higher class of apps getting built in the space and if we see a higher class of apps then we could potentially start looking at Mass adoption cuz simply just you know putting out wallets and and throwing out incentives is not really going to be the way

9:40forward to kind of you know getting millions or perhaps billions of people uh using the this the things that we do on a daily basis it's a great Point Meer because if there's a wallet and everyone has a wallet but there's no applications to interact with or maybe there's only one di application then you're not really going to be able to have more mainstream adoption obviously having

10:04applications that are easy to build and easy to use in all the different Industries especially ones that aren't you wouldn't first think that they would Connect into web 3 you know the real mainstream use cases I think that's really what's going to drive adoption but for that to happen they need to be able to have developers come in and develop those applications easily I'm

10:24curious on the process that you and your team uh set out for the developers and how they can build apps uh with you know low barriers to entry and and not have to learn new languages and and such so that apps can be developed more abundantly so what we did essentially was we said we're not going to tie ourselves to one sort of block chain or one ecosystem we're going to build like

10:49our own sort of like app chain and what this allows us to be agnostic to any sort of builder in any sort of uh ecosystem with this despite their uh you know whatever like tribal uh influences that they may that they may be exposed to so we this is something that we decided early on and once we made that decision it obviously took us a little longer to kind of bootstrap everything

11:16and build everything from scratch we had to make choices with regards to you know what research papers we need to look at what sort of implementations that we need to kind of make and all of these sorts of things but this enables us to build the right sort of abstractions even for the developers not just the end users and now developers can come and

11:34simply build with with JavaScript with unity with uh you know whether it's Swift for iOS or whether it's cotland for uh the Android so you can be a developer in any of these places and you could pick up one of our sdks and and simply be up and running in in basically a matter of a few hours uh and this is this this is the critical part uh the abstraction away for developers is the

12:01one thing that I feel that we've not done well enough in web3 because we have these open protocols these are maintained by communities or even the teams in a lot of cases but many times what happens is these documentation for example gets uh uh ignored and when when you get stuck people just point you to a discard and I mean you know you you then are at the mercy of the mods there the

12:29people there to kind of come and help you out which is which is great but except when you are in an active project development environment and you need to kind of show results and move forward fast enough you can't be stuck in these sorts of ways so what we do is we interface heavily with all the apps that are kind of working with us it's very hard to scale this because it requires

12:51specific individuals from the team to actually go and start interfacing with each and every one of these people we consult with them we try and figure out what they trying to build how they're trying to build it what they're trying to achieve and we try try and help them almost in a Consulting capacity to kind of achieve those same goals but faster but in a way that is uh more agreeable

13:14to their users and this comes purely from like the experiences that we've had in web 2 and some of those engineering practices in general that have like really work very well there's no reason they shouldn't work here mhm H very interesting and what kind of applications uh are you seeing uh with the main net out that are actually starting to gain traction or early on on

13:39Arana so it's a all sorts of consumer apps that are looking for users uh outside of like the standard web3 crypto ecosystem uh this is the fact there's this uh thing that people say right there are more uh chains that than there are apps and there are more apps than there are users and it's almost like a meme today uh and it's not very far from the truth uh but at the same time I

14:07think you know this is what people realize and especially Gamers who are a big chunk of you know uh our current customer base uh they these are mostly people coming from Web Two gaming backgrounds you they work at Studios want to start up their own AAA Studio or their own AAA game and they are very clear they come and say the web two Gamers don't care about your blockchain

14:30about your nfts and any of those sorts of things they just want excellent like gamepl but if there is an incentive layer built on top of it all the more better and so they want to hide away as much as possible from from people they they go as far as saying that you know most we Gamers just hate blockchain because because we have that rep now that things are just so hard to use it's

14:54so hard to kind of get past and there have been so many of these sort of like SC scams and scammy projects and people showing excellent gameplay in video but the actual gameplay just sucks and so now these people are coming out and saying no we're just going to build great games we're going to build this incentive layer we're not going to call them nfts we're going to call them

15:13collectibl we're going to let people you know use things uh but in a way that gives them true ownership uh but all of this needs to be in the background and when we hear people speak like that at first it's like sacrilege how can you say these things you know the purist inside you is shouting and saying no world is decentralized and you know you have to click on that sign button

15:39otherwise you know uh a validator node on ethereum goes down or something like that so uh but now we've gotten so used to hearing all of this stuff that we like yeah absolutely you know these are the abstractions that we need today this is the evolutionary path that we need to take because if we don't take people along with us they're just going to ignore us they're going to go past us

16:02they're going to go around us and that is something that we simply cannot afford it's a great point and I feel like we're slowly in the blockchain industry breaking into web 3 gaming going through some hurdles real realizing that hey yeah it's not all about blockchain uh we don't want to have to look at the transaction and the gas fees and all of the stuff every time

16:25you want to do something but there is some value in there for sure it's just a matter of getting it in the way that I'm guessing Arana is really focusing on is the the user experience and the user interface and really just almost not even noticing that there is blockchain in the back end um looking at the web3 gaming industry specifically how how much of a stride do

16:50you think we've taken towards getting this kind of Technology integrated into AAA games ones that already have you know you know millions of players already playing them I I would honestly say we still have some ways to go uh and this is purely speaking from experience of having spoken to other Gamers and things like I think we saw a huge influx of them I think uh late 21 early 22 all of

17:19these people were raising insane amounts of money and a lot of them don't exist today and this is in part because uh some of them were just bad Founders but mostly it's because people just you know haven't found it to be easy to build the things that they imagined that they could be able to build right A lot of these people said we are building gaming

17:42protocols and you know everything is going to be on chain and then they come in and realize this that's not how it is and that simply won't work it w scale and and and that's when you know all of these people have just been you know are are left sort of disillusioned to a very large extent a lot of them have just left the space the ones that remain are now taking an extremely pragmatic

18:08Outlook and saying we're going to use all the good things about blockchains and really really cull all the bad things we just simply don't want it and if you have that to offer us then we will build stuff so now we are left to kind of almost prove out that we as an industry have the maturity to kind of listen to these users and say yes we understand where you're coming from

18:32there are ways in which we could make the right set of tradeoffs we're going to push the boundaries when it comes to say things like applied cryptography to help create the right sort of abstractions and and really deliver on this front and I think we've reached that point as as as an industry where people are now saying yeah it's okay not to have uh seed phrases in wallets or

18:55wallets without seed phrases and all the sorts of things um so those sorts of narratives almost nobody complains about today uh so I think uh we're at that point now where we listen and now is when we need to kind of build the tooling out and there lots of great people doing great stuff and I think it's it's going to be a matter of time where we going to see the

19:16turn very exciting uh and and another different type of application that I saw on uh Arana Network being featured is one that probably has even bigger than the ging industry is to do with email I feel like there's a transition of you know everyone's on email um but not a lot of people are integrating the blockchain or the functionality that it could possess with uh integrating money

19:42into it as well um I saw an application called send it on AR Canon Network can you talk about that and what exactly that's doing to revolutionize email yeah I mean uh this is this is Case in point if you if I may say so in all modesty or of building a useful app with incentives can really take you very very far and this is something that we've we've learned and so so I'll just

20:07tell you like the backstory for send it right so we are a B2B platform that aims to become a public good which is why we have a token we want everything to be as decentralized and permissionless but it that's that's a journey for us and that's how we looking at it and and and but because we're building developer tooling it's not exactly something that

20:28uh says someone who holds a token is going to fully understand and realize uh uh because they simply can't interact with it so what we told ourselves is we're going to give away for our community who's eventually going to hold our token to be able to interface with us and what we're going to do is we're going to build small low touch product on top of our infrastructure on top of

20:51our tooling on top of rdks and uh we're just going to run this as small experiments put them out there any apps that we can build and release in two weeks was the was was the limits that we set ourselves are what we're going to put out there and so we we decided to kind of we we chanced upon this idea of uh you know saying why don't we try and do PayPal for crypto right so PayPal

21:17back in the day was a way in which you could actually make payments or send monies uh to an email ID I said you know why can't we just do it for crypto and so that was the idea so one of our devs hacked together like a small PC in half a day because of the the the infrastructure and the tooling that we already had built it it made it easy to be able to do that then we spent the two

21:39more weeks to kind of put put in all the bells and whistles and make it all fancy and we said yeah perfect let's put it out there and we we set oursel a lofty goal of saying you know let's try and get 50,000 users um in two months and uh but to our surprise we got 50,000 users in 6 days we got 100,000 in 12 and we are currently 9 weeks in and we have uh

22:07close to 500,000 users who've done upwards of 1.8 million in 1.8 million transactions uh on send it and what send it is is very simple I just I just need to know your email and I can send you crypto across mult different kinds of cryptocurrencies across multiple chains and you don't even need to know what send it is or be a sended user yourself and so uh we did that and we we go

22:36smacked ourselves right so all of this happened and we saw the influx of users we were we would have sleepless nights because you know uh emailer Services would ban us because of the sheer volumes that we would do we were finding it very hard to keep up with payments uh we'd had to we maxed out every plan of ours uh that we had with any every service provider that we had maxed out

23:02credit cards you name it but the great thing was the our back end the the Akana Network itself actually stood up well and it never went down so that was something that you know we take a lot of pride in the fact that you know despite having like several thousand concurrent users at any point in time uh we were still kind of uh holding up very well so

23:26yeah so that now has has has puts us in like this awkward spot because we never really imagined that we'd have have to include send it in our road map but now we've seen all of this stuff happen how a very simple useful app built in with with the baked in with the right set of incentives can actually attract like a significant audience or at least help

23:48you bootstrap it right and then once you do that uh you know maybe like us we we not start starting to get very greedy and start saying okay now how do we go to and 5x thish right so so that's where we are right now with tend it wow that's incredible uh growth and it's great to hear that you're you're breaking the email servers uh on something that's

24:13that's going viral in web3 um and so now looking forward how do you 5x this or you know what potentially could you do to bring this to tens of millions of people yeah I think I the Bas premise of send it is simple it's payment right so it's payments you can make it's payments you can request it's payments you can receive these are all like different

24:38sorts of ways in which this can happen but we the like our goto Market from here is is is something that we feel like you know we need more help than uh than we can must internally I think this is something that we need to kind of build co-build with multiple players within the ecosystem and for that we need like one narrative for sended that everyone can get behind and so the

25:07narrative that we actually choosing to adopt right now instead of saying oh this is the cash app you know this is VM for crypto or something like that we could go down that direction but we feel you know this is something that can be greater than just a cash app and we currently feel like this can be a way in which we can actually start to onboard more more people to crypto because if

25:29you think about it one of the best ways to onboard a non- crypto native to crypto is if you send them some right so that's a great first step and typically when let's say you know Aston you you had a friend or a relative who really isn't very crypto Savvy and you wanted to kind of get them onto crypto You' You' probably send them some eat or some soul or whatever it is and but this you

25:57sending them anything is always prefaced by probably an hourong conversation around wallets and which wallet and getting them to install it and telling them you know how this this seed phrase is more important than their life itself and you know that they need to go very ditch 10 ft deep and you know hide this piece of paper there and Mark it out and

26:21tell their you know proen in the future that this is where it is and things like that right so with send it we eliminate all of that you just loog with their email you have a wallet right and uh so now we've solved the first part of onboarding someone to crypto which is you know they come in they get a wallet I I I can send you some crypto and now you have crypto

26:41sitting in a wallet that you own and control uh so now the next part of this is getting this person who's received this crypto to do something with that yeah and that I think completes like the loop that that's when you can say okay this person is on boarded so what we looking to do here on is to work with existing protocols projects to be able to say Hey you know uh hey Ashton I've

27:07sent you like uh5 e uh and you come to this page where you where you kind of discover these different things where you can now decide to do maybe your first swap on un swap maybe your first lending on to a you buy your first nft or you buy your first ID or you try your first web 3 app or you just offramp it to cash and say you know I just want my

27:35700 $800 $900 and um these are the things that we want to kind of work with multiple people to kind of enable and if you do that I think this can be a great way for people to kind of get on boarded you can start making these payments to friends and family then potentially to your your neighborhood Cafe stores Etc and then perhaps you know beyond that as well so

28:00yeah that's that's how we we're looking to kind of grow this from here and hopefully that'll get us the 5way that's incredible and it really saves a lot of steps compared to having to set up the wallet um but you're right about sort of the step after that in okay I have some crypto but like what do I do with it you know to actually stay in the ecosystem I

28:22I do have friends and family that have gotten you know a few dollars and then they have it in their wallet but then they're like well I guess I'll just wait for it to go up I don't really know how to interact or get an nft um but I feel like having a good user interface and user experience through Arcana could break those barriers to actually get uh

28:41new entrance into the industry to actually become active and then start interacting yeah no absolutely I fully Concur and I think uh I mean again in all modesty I think we can make it possible but there's only so far we can go I think we need like uh it's like the proverbial like child in the village and you require the whole village to raise the child and I think

29:05that's the approach that we want to take we want to take the more composable approach I think the web web3 is the whole ecosystem works very well when when more people come together and this is something that we want to be able to do with multiple people and potentially make it bigger than it can be MH and what's the best way for people to learn about send it and also to

29:25explore in the Arcana ecosystem yeah I mean you could do multiple things one is just go to our website we have uh like we just have links for you to be able to kind of set up calls with our business development teams if you want to talk to the tech team you can just mention it in the your comments we get the tech team involved if you want to talk to the business team business team

29:48will get involed product team whoever you want to talk to no problem you can DM any one of us so we are ar. network and everything and flow from there you'll find our links to our Discord where which is more developer focused you'll find links to our telegram which is more Community focused um there of course our Twitter DMS are open for the actual uh Twitter handle or any of the

30:12uh anyone on the team literally and it yeah that's that's the best way you can actually kind of reach out to us and nobody should feel shy about trying to talk to us about anything it could be you with just your idea that you want to kind of try and figure out or see through uh we'll give you very positive constructive criticism uh if necessary or just tell you that your apps

30:37fantastic you should go ahead we help you kind of figure out those things also so it really does not matter uh anything you need MH except for any any advice around trading because we don't trade we we we absolutely suck at trading we have no clue where markets are going to go up go down none of that definitely and yeah you never know when uh you know half day

31:00proof of concept is going to turn into an application with millions of users yeah incredible Meer well thank you so much for your insights into our Canon Network the gaming industry send it uh I will leave the links to the website the platform and the Social Links that you mentioned as well in the notes below uh all the best with everything moving forward with all the

31:23applications and everything in the Arcana ecosystem and let's definitely follow up in the near future sir yeah no absolutely I really want to thank you for giving us this opportunity to be here on your uh on your channel and speak about Arana it's been a true labor of love for us to kind of you know build this it's been like almost like a threeyear journey now uh but it's all

31:43coming to fruition and uh I wouldn't say logical conclusion because we still have a long ways to go from here but at least things are shaping of fantastically well and you know thank you again for giving us this opportunity and hopefully we get to uh work again together very soon