Blockchain attracts interesting people, and Alexander Chopan is no exception. Before working on some of the most popular crypto products, the man known by his 🖖 emoji username was involved in clandestine military activities, worked at Bridgewater, and developed new products at DARPA. Now he's building product at Pimlico.
Crypto people tend to be very self-promotional, but you really try to stay out of the spotlight. Why is that?
There’s a bunch of reasons I guess. I’ve been a Zen Buddhist since I was 12. Been introspective and ran away from home at 15 because I was physically abused. Worked on clandestine military activities and covert action stuff for over a decade, which is all about the team, or not even about the team because the team and the operation wasn’t supposed to exist.
I didn’t have LinkedIn until I was 38 or something old, when I left the government. My existence is about my purpose. To me, that activity is identity. It’s about the cause, the mission, the values, the alignment. My face and my name are not relevant.
One of my pet peeves is when someone posts “had a great time at the McDonald’s conference,” or “so excited to be speaking at McDonald’s.” About what bitch? To who? Who are you helping? If you’re just trying to social brag, what good does that do? It’s counterproductive. Just lead and focus on the thing that matters, which is who you’re talking to and why you’re talking and how it may help them.
One of my pet peeves is when someone posts “had a great time at the McDonald’s conference,” or “so excited to be speaking at McDonald’s.” About what bitch? To who?
I really admire how you don’t come with a lot of BS, which quite a few web3-type people can have. It’s something I actively try to prevent myself from falling into. It can be really easy to fall into ego traps. For better or for worse I have really awful anxiety, which helps keep myself in check.
It might be overcorrecting though.
That’s true.
I’ve also struggled. I’m on my own cocktail mix of prescriptions to help me with that.
Yeah I’ve struggled with it since high school. I didn’t realize that it was actually a thing - I thought it was just who I was, and that my reactions were totally normal until I met my wife. She was like “no no no, you’ve got a problem, let’s go in and get it fixed.” So I’m on my own cocktail of Prozac, Wellbutrin, Trazodone and stuff.
I have my own versions of all of that stuff that manifests itself in different ways over time. I think it’s really good to have a partner that can give you that outside perspective. Throughout my life I’ve stopped taking medicine, then got back on it, then off, and on again. That’s probably not a good pattern. Each time when I decide to get back on, it’s because I hit this point where I realize it’s not fair to myself to feel this way. Logically I could have just won a billion dollars or be on the moon with Obama, but everything would be bad.
It’s a total physiological thing. No matter how much I meditate, reduce caffeine, or even quit Nicotine in 2019 it still persists. I’m sure those things helped in some way, but having that extra person is just so critical. I have a friend that I encouraged to go to a clinic, and finally she did, and it’s like being in a different world. You will still feel those emotions, but just a different dimension of them. Your feelings will still exist about a thing, but it won’t feel as extreme.
I really resonate with that because everything used to be a big deal. Now things are more proportional. I actually think I’m a little bit under-medicated, if anything. I still find myself occasionally falling into those traps. But the fact that it’s diagnosed, I have a partner to call me out, and even just having a name for it is already a big help.
I really appreciate how open and honest you are, and how you speak your mind all of the time. There are so many economic incentives in web3 that can warp people’s opinions very much one way or another.
Thank you. Being counterfactual has consequences, especially with people that have their own bias and interests in terms of the answers you’ll get back. Imagine me trying to deconflict MPC from account abstraction back in the day, or resolving different terms like wallet versus account. Teams all have different incentives and reasons why things are the way they are. It’s hard.
It’s hard when you have some ideas or intuition, and you’re trying to pull that thread, and you meet some of your heroes - those teams whose products you’ve used. I’m talking to one right and it’s a healthy struggle you have to have. The few you meet that are willing to think objectively are cool, because now you can dance with the issue and really beat it up regardless of the outcome. But when you’re doing that on newer ideas, especially when you’re new to the industry like we are, it’d be easy to get discouraged or misled.
Back in the day everyone was telling me account abstraction’s stupid, what can you do with it, just go use Argent wallet or whatever. And then account abstraction people telling me the same thing about MPC, then ZK people, all back and forth. If you’re a total neophyte that can’t put those threads together, you can easily be misled.
Back in the day everyone was telling me account abstraction’s stupid, what can you do with it, just go use Argent wallet or whatever. And then account abstraction people telling me the same thing about MPC, then ZK people, all back and forth.
There’s one founder of a team that gives me hard feedback, but ultimately I realized it wasn’t legitimate because logically it didn’t make sense. And if they did agree with me it would invalidate their model, which would mean they’d have to admit that it’s not sufficient.
Another founder of an MPC wallet that I really respect will. He’ll go toe-to-toe. Whereas others will nitpick every little thing to disagree. It’s so good when I can hear from someone like you that can recognize that.
You know what else is cool? We would never have this conversation in our past lives in traditional industries.
Yeah both of us were in traditional industries. You were at the Department of Defense and Bridgewater, and I was at a bunch of aerospace companies.
From a glance, your work with clandestine military operations is the polar opposite of an open source, decentralized web3. What is the common thread there for you?
A few things. Being a bad kid and introspective makes you look at more signals for things happening in your environment that you might not be aware of. The creative engineering of a system that can be doing things that you can’t prevent or is happening in front of you without your ability to directly impact it. I’m also into cool nerd stuff that can have an impact. But ultimately values, missions, why I’m here are one of those threads.
I’m Turkish and Russian third generation. My grandparents were relocated in Iran. My parents were born in Iran even though they’re not Iranian, and I was born here. So I’m not connected to the Turkish, Russian, or even Iranian cultures. And my parents aren’t connected to America.
So I have this question of “what is my culture?” And peer-to-peer, networks, and helping in ways that traditional systems don’t appeal to me. But ultimately I want to make the world better in some cool way. Money, I think, is the cause of so many problems.
Crypto is a cool technology for high level values with great impact on the world. Government is also doing that, whether you agree with it or not, and you build things for very specific purposes and goals. For example preventing Iranian weapons going across the border, and I’m really proud of that. And the technology you need to do that is more than just technology, it’s important and cool, and we get to help people. Crypto is also a way to help people.
Why crypto specifically, or what’s the thread? It’s all tied to identity to me in some way. That’s a vague answer. But basically: money sucks, traditional systems suck. We can’t ever really own anything so I don’t subscribe to any of that self-sovereign identity stuff. We need to make it as easy as possible for people to be in control of their digital life.
Crypto is a cool technology for high level values with great impact on the world. Government is also doing that, whether you agree with it or not, and you build things for very specific purposes and goals.
Internet access and privacy are universal basic rights. I believe in the individual and helping individuals. I came from a shitty upbringing. I got my GED in jail, I went through all kinds of trauma, and I believe in things that can help people.
If you’re born in India randomly, you’re not going to have the same opportunities as someone born in San Francisco. But with blockchain, with Ethereum, you have that opportunity. That’s so cool to me. It’s tied to money, and money is what fucks it all up. So if you can fix money, you can change people’s lives the most. I think that’s a gross thing that I’ve learned.
In government it was all about money; why a lot of products suck is because of VC interests or value capture or whatever. Money is an equalizer and a disequalizer. I want to help people make a difference in this world, and the internet is where that is going. Whether it’s a JSON web token or gas doesn’t matter to me. Crypto’s a way to do that.
If it wasn’t crypto, it’d be some other technology like AI or quantum or whatever. Crypto seemed the most practical.
It’s clear from your writing and other activities in this space that you have spent a lot of time thinking about identity. What is identity?
Identity is a goal. And internet identity is activity. Probably all identity is activity, but really I think identity is a goal.
Let’s start at first principles. Someone is born in the womb, comes out and feels an environment. So they are now feeling something outside of themselves, so they’re aware of themselves. But what is identity at first? You’re already in someone’s womb, and they already know about you, think about you, and talk about you right?
So it’s this constantly evolving sort of quantum-y state. It’s subjective and up to the person to define. You’re a physiological creature that wants to survive and thrive. And in order to do that, your local sense of self is not enough. You are forced to interact with the environment. You connect and engage with other things and this experience is what’s creating the identity.
Everything we do is trying to get what we want as humans. Identity is this, who you want to be. It’s sort of chosen on my LinkedIn profile, or if I’m at a bar with my ex-girlfriend it’s that version of me.
It’s a projection of who you want to be. It’s not a projection of who you are, because that’s always changing and you have too many identities. It’s too ambiguous of a thing to make as concrete as something like an account.
If someone steals your credit card and starts using it, the bank doesn’t call and ask “are you your identity,” they are going to ask “did your identity use your credit card.” Identity isn’t this fixed thing that you own, or credentials. It’s what you do.
Identity isn’t this fixed thing that you own, or credentials. It’s what you do.
On the internet, that’s clicking. It means accounts to do, and clicking to do. Whatever you click is a reflection of what you do. That’s what identity is. It’s what you do, not what you have.
Where do you think web3 gets identity right, and where do you think it gets it wrong?
I don’t think Web3 is uniquely different in that regard. I think it gets it wrong in the same place everyone gets it wrong.
We have this concept of ownership and wealth and accumulating and holding and protecting and hoarding. That leads to weird behaviors that you don’t realize. There’s a fixation on nailing down what identity is because you need a UUID or some way to authorize or authenticate, but this is redundant. Identity doesn’t belong on the internet as a concept almost in a way.
To me it’s just about accounts online. That’s the best you can do. Everyone else is in this paradigm of “I need to prove, I need to own, I need to make sure no one can take this thing away from me.” But because of that, they’re less focused on “how do I do things?” So what happens is your identity just becomes a credential.
One example is Disco. When I first got it, it gave me a whole Disco profile thing. But why? I’m not trying to be Mister Disco. I’m trying to be Mister Me, and I need whatever Disco has to do that, but Disco is making it all about that credential and account system. It has a fixed view that 100% defines the user by who they are in their app.
That prevents people from seeing identity as this complete thing. It’s hard for them to think in a different paradigm, I believe. They’re in a traditional account paradigm that’s trying to map every account hyper-specifically to some identity. And identity means different things to everyone, so it’s like all products are doing math with the same variable but different values. So it just clouds things - it’s superfluous and unnecessary.
We have this concept of ownership and wealth and accumulating and holding and protecting and hoarding. That leads to weird behaviors that you don’t realize.... Identity doesn’t belong on the internet as a concept almost in a way. To me it’s just about accounts online. That’s the best you can do.
The way we are looking at identity prevents us from really looking at the multi-account problem, which is the multi-identity problem.
I’m not Disco, or Octa. I don’t want them to tell me that I am. That’s gross. Just let me decide what to do. You all are just tools, but all of these products need to do it because there’s this perception of value capture.
Why do we have one WalletConnect, and when it migrates to v2 unstably people bitch? But there are 900 wallets and only one WalletConnect? It’s because people aren’t looking from that paradigm and really trying to solve those problems. I need to move across accounts and connect to different versions of me. But it’s not in any product’s incentive to do that, and the industry isn’t managed in a way that builds product that way.
Why are we making so many wallets? Build more WalletConnects. We’re building Bridges, what’s the different really? Help me connect.
What will it take to change the behavior of the industry from value capture to value creation?
We come up with awards today that don’t match the goals, and that doesn’t work. For example identity products with a coin. Can you imagine if 1Password said that if you store four passwords in the next three hours, you’ll get six 1Password coins? You’d ask “what the fuck are they trying to trick me into sharing with them?” Identity isn’t about earning some token.
Everyone right now is so fixated on ownership means that we are fixated on trying to sell products where people think they can earn, not from selling products that solve problems.
Earning is not unique to web3. Every app in the world has points, rewards, coupons, whatever. Rewards generally mean you’re already getting fucked anyways, because they can afford to give the reward.
Everyone right now is so fixated on ownership means that we are fixated on trying to sell products where people think they can earn, not from selling products that solve problems. Earning is not unique to web3.
Farcaster is interesting - now they’re trying to do payments. I pay for services I like. I’d hope to get some rewards over time for something, but I’m not on Farcaster to get Farcaster points or earn three bucks. Now if you want to give me three bucks, that’s neat, but that’s not how people are building today.
The whole industry is geared towards this pay-to-earn model. So that means products won’t work together by default because you’re trying to get value capture within your product, and the users you attract aren’t going to be real users.
We’re always like “what’s the next use case?” Anything on the internet is the use case! It’s already here. We trick people when we say that if you use our web3 social network you will earn money, because all we’re really giving them is another payment channel. We can’t guarantee that they’ll earn.
What would change the industry is when we start seeing products that people are really interested in paying for.
Your Twitter is this fascinating stream of consciousness without a lot of context and recurring characters that have never been introduced. What are you trying to do?
Share. Share without shame: (1) send out signal for the people that will come back, and (2) show others in the space who don’t feel comfortable in whatever way that there is this ancient old person sending out embarrassing stuff so they can start sharing or asking themselves.
I’m also hyper-iterative, hyper-online, and hyper-active. So I just make it an algorithm: share by default. And I got tired of trying to be validated by people’s opinions, so I often share stuff without context. Here, I circled a thing, up to you if you think it’s good or bad. I also quote tweet to repeat the signal that was already there.
You can interpret the signal whatever way you want, but I want you to see these signals.
You spent almost a year at ConsenSys, which of course developed MetaMask. Do you think MetaMask is headed in the right direction?
One of my weaknesses is being honest. So, let’s talk about what working there on user experience is like. I’ve had ups and downs of emotion with MetaMask.
The product, the team, the philosophy - it takes a while to sort of understand who they are and what they’re about. Which may be separate from how managing may be happening inside ConsenSys.
I used to be so frustrated with the UX of MetaMask. I left in some sense because I felt like a poser. I was trying to put in discovery in the entire company, but the MetaMask side that wasn’t with my team was hard.
But after I left I thought about it a lot. Their vision is so much about extensibility and choice that it impacts everything they do in a probably perverse way. Even if it improves the product you can’t remove legacy choices.
MetaMask core is now evolving toward snaps and flask way of extensibility. I think MetaMask is going in a good direction and an okay direction. However, I think they squandered opportunities to do more or do more differently.
I used to be so frustrated with the UX of MetaMask. I left in some sense because I felt like a poser. I was trying to put in discovery in the entire company, but the MetaMask side that wasn’t with my team was hard... I think MetaMask is going in a good direction and an okay direction. However, I think they squandered opportunities to do more or do more differently.
Does that mean I’m right? Should they have squandered those or not? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s the leading consumer app but not the leading consumer user experience. And we raised a shitload of money, so you have the opportunity to do that, and it’s almost rude in a way that you don’t.
Coinbase should have the best web3 app in the world, right? They have jillions of dollars. Or OpenSea - that app sucks, the UX side of it.
MetaMask is going in the right way, I think, for the community. Snaps is going to be a boon. Is it going to be the end-all-be-all? Who cares, it’s just one more thing that is doing this stuff that we’ve been talking about. It gives users control. What Snaps really does is it lets me improve my own UX. It lets me define my own experience. It’s letting me be my identity online in the way that I want.
And I respect the fuck out of MetaMask for that, begrudgingly, because I wish as a product it was sort of more consumer. Working on the strategy with them and sort of orchestrating it across the company influenced me. They were calling it distributed-digital-key-something at the time, but like the essence of it is all of this stuff that we’ve talked about. The irony is that I am very value aligned with MetaMask, just not the UX side.
Have you seen Rivet Wallet? It’s a developer wallet for testing, and it’s so niche but solves a real problem. MetaMask should have done that. What a missed opportunity. I wish the industry was sort of forced to do that a bit more. Rivet is such an interesting case to me, because the criticism of MetaMask is that it is that developer wallet but it doesn’t work the way Rivet does.
What are you doing at Pimlico and what are some of your goals there?
I’m doing product. I’m employee number three-and-a-half so responsibilities blur, but I’d say I’m doing the same thing at Pimlico that I do everywhere else, which is making us user-focused and systematizing that user focus so that we can rapidly develop product to solve user problems.
It’s about literally bring smart accounts to the web, but ultimately improving this user experience. So if I can shape the way we are doing development, that means we are going to be developing in a way that is improving user experience.
This philosophy of sort of multi-account and the account problems is very value-aligned with Kristof [Gazso]. That’s how we first started talking a year ago. So together with the rest of the team, we’re trying to figure out what we do to improve multi-account. It’s not about bundlers and paymasters - that’s just the current day and the tools needed to do it. Systematically we want to have this scaffolding to force us to not build another wallet if we actually need another WalletConnect, let’s say.
[W]e’re trying to figure out what we do to improve multi-account. It’s not about bundlers and paymasters - that’s just the current day and the tools needed to do it. Systematically we want to have this scaffolding to force us to not build another wallet if we actually need another WalletConnect, let’s say.
So we talk to users and hear their problems, and put them into our framework so we can objectively evaluate them. Does this help reliability? Scalability? The first thing that I saw was time. I really indexed on time. All of these developers were talking about permissions and permissionlessness. As I listened to them I thought it would be ideological, and it may be a little, but ultimately they have money and they’re trying to do value capture. What they really want is to not wait on somebody or have somebody’s account system imposed on them. They call that permissions, but it’s really time that they care about.
So how do we solve that from where we are now? These are the problems we’re moving towards and so the top problems we heard from developers are time and then, subservient to that, we call smooth. Smooth is basically clear and simple: is it easy to understand and is it easy to do?
For years all we’d hear from devs is that the hardest thing is lack of content, they don’t understand, the shit doesn’t work together, and so on. What does that mean for devs? Docs. Docs suck. I have a great quote from Jose, the passkey wizard guy, and he was like “man, your stuff told a story. It walked me through the steps of building something, a user op, and bundling and putting it together. Whereas this other example is just a catalog of their stuff. Where do I start? I ain't got time for that, show me the hello world then I’ll take it from there.”
So we want to make it faster for people who want to use us. Faster to get the information that they want, to understand it, to be able to use it, to be able to switch providers in and out. It’s speed ultimately.
That leads us to three personas that we see: account abstraction natives, friendlies, and hackers. For each one of these personas we are working on that persona’s version of these problems.
Let’s take the base level for natives - people need ways to work with user ops, so we’re building permissionless.js. Then we’ll address different levels of abstraction with the ability to switch out different parts including our own stuff.
Then there’s the two other layers. Let’s say the hacker layer. The hacker persona is “I don’t have knowledge.” They don’t know how this stuff fits in, and doesn’t have time to test it all. They don’t even know what product or user experience is, they’re just trying to build some random code. For them we want to solve this knowledge problem. And which you [John] are one of the key solutions, for being the best, I think, content producer for AA in the space.
So it’s this smart products platform that is open source. Instead of here’s our repo that’s open for engineering, here’s our repo that’s open for product. That’s not just a resource, I want to have groups that are standardizing how we collect user feedback and working with partners, including competitors.
Another thing for me is there’s no IP in that feedback that you’re going to get. It’s really the choice. You’re not going to learn about some unique implementation from a user feedback session. You’re going to learn about problems, which lead you to want to solve them in a certain way.
I want to build it into a prototype platform for this hacker. And one of the problems I see is that there are a lot of demos, but they never build on each other. We’re not thinking about really improving and solving these things and breaking down these knowledge gaps.
So for the hacker, that’s why we wanted to build this resource that can turn into a community that starts prototyping on its own. But initially we’ll launch it and beg for people to start working with us.
Another thing for me is there’s no IP in that feedback that you’re going to get. It’s really the choice. You’re not going to learn about some unique implementation from a user feedback session. You’re going to learn about problems, which lead you to want to solve them in a certain way.
A cooler persona, at least for me, is the 4337 friendlies, like Rainbow. This track is called Smart Profiles Discovery. Friendlies have EOAs and other kinds of weird accounts that aren’t yet account abstraction, so it’s all about bridging these two different tracks.
One is on session keys in general, and hey they can fit in. Last problem I want to solve is bringing privacy and security with alternative signers and data networks to complement blockchain. I think things like XMTP that uses double ratchet and one-time session keys is smart. I think the Ethereum world is starting to realize this with UTXO patterns with registries as layers of separation, drop boxes, and whatever. We need better ways to connect different things that don’t connect, and there’s no reason we can’t use XMTP or any of these other networks as data networks.
So that for me is Smart Profiles Discovery, but I need to refine the specific use case and start prototyping this quarter. What does that help Pimlico? I mean sure if we have an integration that’s good, but really it helps XMTP or Lit or Capsule if they do it and it becomes a new use case. But that’s good for everyone.
So Permissionless.js for the natives, Smart Profile Discovery for the friendlies, and Smart Products as a resource for the dev/hacker community.
I think Pimlico is excellent as a competitor to Stackup and in many ways a breath of fresh air - it’s encouraging to have a competitor that is not just good at what they do but also believes in creating value for everyone overall.
There are a handful of ERC-4337 infrastructure teams now, but I find that many of them are holding things close to their chest. The whole reason ERC-4337 is valuable, in my mind, is not because of any particular technical innovation but because it is an open ecosystem.
Stackup actually started out as a wallet over two years ago because Hazim Jumali and I were banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out why user experience in web3 sucked. It didn’t take us long to find that it had to do with the way accounts work. Smart contract wallets, or some form of programmable wallet, was the clear solution but previous attempts at versions of smart accounts like Argent and Gnosis Safe became closed ecosystems over time despite the best intentions of those teams.
People don’t even realize that they’ve created a negative feedback loop. The reason why we created yet another wallet was that we realized ERC-4337 could create an open ecosystem instead of just another closed one.
I think there are a lot of projects that are in the right place with the open versus closed mentality, but I do feel that Pimlico is one of the first ones besides Stackup that not just lives and breathes it, but is also actually executing on it well.
I’d like to unpack this competitor or competing versus not competing thing. I’ve learned that if you do the thing with the most altruism, or least entropy, you’re going to get all of the things you would have expended energy for anyways.
You can “compete” without competing - of course we need money to survive, but if you look at everything as a competitor you’re not connecting this web. Sure I wouldn’t want to give Stackup some IP or have them be in a partner call while I’m trying to land some deal, but we’re not shit talking or doing nasty shenanigans like some other teams in the space.
You can “compete” without competing - of course we need money to survive, but if you look at everything as a competitor you’re not connecting this web.
How do you see the other market players?
So, let’s take your first principles approach. Today there isn’t a big enough pie, so the existential threat to all account abstraction projects is whether people choose ERC-4337 or not, not whether they choose Pimlico or Stackup. That is going to stay the existential threat for a while. We only decrease the chance of people choosing ERC-4337 over not if we don’t work together. We need to focus on creating more value rather than capturing what little value is there right now.
Also our companies are too young to really know what is unique about us and where we fit within the huge room we are creating. So there’s both the big picture part of playing a positive sum game with everyone, as well as not knowing where each of us is going to fall as this matures.
Yes, our identity is evolving. I want to pull another thread. Another interesting thing to embrace is diversification. Nobody’s going to have just one custody provider. And we’re starting to see it in our market too. I wouldn’t call our services a commodity yet, but it’s going to commodify right? Just like validators and delegating to staking, bundlers and paymasters are sort of like that.
And because of that, I think we’re seeing more frequent switching out of providers. Let’s say we’ve fucked up and had some downtime, someone’s probably going to rip us out and go use another one. Or what we see is they’ll use more than one provider, which is an opportunity we don’t want to leave on the table together.
What happened with CyberConnect is a great example of that kind of openness and interoperability being critical.
When CyberConnect opened up their V3 protocol, Stackup was initially the sole provider for it. We, both Stackup and CyberConnect, grossly underestimated the amount of traffic there would be and it broke all of our systems. So Stackup went down for CyberConnect during that launch, which was absolutely awful. As we were running around adding more capacity, CyberConnect was able to work with Pimlico to quickly spin up an alternative so that they could continue their launch. And it ended up working.
I think that’s a fantastic example of the value of interoperability. Not just to the end user, but also to us, because we fucked up bad and if CyberConnect didn’t have an alternative and couldn’t continue, that’s the kind of thing that ruins the reputation of ERC-4337 overall, and leads people to choose not to use smart accounts instead of embracing it.
Just to make sure I give y’all credit on this, in the same way, if CyberConnect had just said fuck Stackup and totally ripped it out and replaced it solely with Pimlico, we probably wouldn’t have been able to handle that load either.
Let me ask you this - what do y’all do when you have downtime? For us, I don’t ever want a user to find out first by asking us, because that means we weren’t proactively forthcoming or just not on top of our shit. And it sucks when you have downtime, for every reason. You really feel for them, which is going to hurt me.
A hundred percent. Also because as an infrastructure provider, people are putting their businesses in our hands in a way. They’re trusting us with their business, and that is a huge responsibility. I’ve been in that position too where I’ve had to trust a startup, and it’s scary to just hope they know what they’re doing because we are making a big bet on them.
For the longest time I told people to have multiple providers and test with both so that you know you can switch them out, and we designed our systems so that you can do that because we believe it is really important.
That’s the first time I’ve heard someone say that. Even if it’s intuitive, I just want to register that it’s best practice to have more than one provider. Nobody’s saying that right now. You don’t have one bank. For so many reasons that is more mature. Shit’s not audited, it’s not regulated, it’s changing so fast. It’s just irresponsible to not be telling people to do that.
And in that compete-without-competing thing you win that way - you mitigate your vulnerabilities by not being good enough to be the only provider because technically you can’t, and give that other person the best information to make the best decision for them.
I think people recognize that and it’s how they are choosing which providers to trust with their business. But even beyond that a lot of our focus lately has been on increasing our reliability so that people worry about it less. We’re doing a ton of working on making things more robust and making it easier to spin up resources so that people don’t need to manually switch providers unless it’s absolutely necessary, and otherwise fail more gracefully.
It’s interesting to hear you say that, as it seems like a different focus and vector than where we are going. Obviously reliability is super important and we’re trying to optimize that too but the hyper focus for us seems to be on the actual switching in and out interoperability piece. These are all related but it’s not the same, the fact that you led with reliability and we led with interoperability is interesting.
Yeah and when I say we’re focusing on reliability, I really mean that this is the specific focus right now. After the CyberConnect launch we realized that our systems weren’t well instrumented and didn’t fail gracefully enough, and there is a ton of work required to get there. Reliable ERC-4337 services is a necessary condition for the proliferation of ERC-4337, and certainly so is better dev tools.
My cofounder Hazim whipped out userop.js over a week or two a while ago, and it’s decent in the sense that it is a much more intuitive way of building user operations than the only thing that existed at the time which was the account-abstraction/sdk created by the Ethereum Foundation team. But it’s certainly not the end-all-be-all in its current form. Just curious, why didn’t you fork userop.js when creating permissionless.js?
I’m not totally sure, since that was Kristof’s decision, but we are making a bet on viem. I think it’s a slight risk because switching is hard. Is that the total full answer? I don’t know.
I actually think viem's a pretty good bet. A lot of people have to completely redesign their stuff already to support smart accounts, and switching to viem is a lot smaller of a disruption than switching to smart accounts anyway. We’ve actually talked about creating a userop.js that uses viem natively as well.
I think regardless there needs to be a way for people to build user operations with ethers, viem, web3.js, Alchemy’s SDK, whatever they prefer. That’s why userop.js is MIT licensed, and I imagine a large part of why permissionless.js is MIT licensed as well. If someone wants to copy-paste code and use it in production, fantastic.
Are there any cool projects you want to shout out?
Versa Wallet. I think it’s neat because it’s really leading into modules. It’s not doing anything that complicated, but the way it’s doing it is cool.
Troop Labs. They are still figuring things out and I haven’t even seen their latest product, but the way they described it to me and the parts I’ve seen let you create your own modules but as a consumer thing.
Rivet, which I mentioned.
Umbra, which is stealth accounts.
X-rays, which is on scroll.
I don’t know any of those teams, but they’re interesting and pushing the direction of what I think is possible.
