13 - DeFi's Mainstream Wallet | Itamar Lesuisse

welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance this is how to get started how to get better and how to front run the opportunity this is ryan sean adams i'm here with david hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless david how are you this week i'm doing great i'm really excited about this episode this is an episode where we dive into a very specific bankless tool and ask the questions that we think are really important both me and ryan are huge fans of the argent wallet and how they are

pushing the boundaries with the benefits of crypto while obfuscating and hiding away the friction points and the costs of crypto making a really good ux ui experience for users and then we also talk about really important questions such as you know if the argent wallet is as successful as they want it to be how do we maintain uh neutrality in in the in the wallet how do we make sure that argent is aligned with the ethereum ecosystem into the future so a super valuable episode itamar definitely has

the right vision for what argent needs to be and it was just an absolute treat getting him on the pod yeah absolutely i i think the entire bankless community is cheering for this wallet and excited about this wallet because it feels like the first wallet that's almost mainstream accessible uh this is pretty easy to use i mean my parents can easily use this people who aren't are completely new to crypto can use this it's it's really difficult to talk to somebody and you talk to them about die and stable coins and sort of you

know the die savings rate and talk about how great it is and then try to explain how to use metamask and how to get their crypto off an exchange easily and what gas fees are right those are all impediments to user adoption and argent has just found a way to remove all of those including i think one of the biggest impediments which is private key management right that that sense that oh my god if if my assets are outside of uh a wallet outside of an exchange like coinbase and

if i lose my private keys it all goes away right argent has found a clever way to navigate around this so yeah so we're going to talk to to edamar today about the concept of d5's netscape moment so what they're doing with argent is essentially they're creating a browser an overlay on top of all of these money protocols and allowing those to be easily accessible sort of what happened to the early internet so protocols like tcpip and smtp and ftp

those those protocols were kind of still in the the geek culture and not really useful for everyday people until netscape came around and gave you the ability to surf the web as they said back in the day this is the ability to surf the money protocols that really to me is what argent is doing here so we're going to talk with emr about three things first the ethos behind this so like why are they creating a bankless wallet secondly what it is what you can do with it some of the superpowers that are

available to you today with it and then the future how this thing gets to maybe a billion users someday at least defy does and what the wallets role is in that process so super exciting super uh interesting episode and we're glad you're tuned in before we get there let's talk about our sponsors today david so the first i want to tell you about is rocket dollar this is primarily for our u.s listeners if you have an ira or a 401k the problem with it is it's jailed inside of your

brokerage so it's stuck in your swap account it's stuck in fidelity if you want to buy crypto you have to buy it inside the brokerage at 5x the price don't do that it's a complete rip-off what you need to do instead is break your crypto retirement account out of jail use rocket dollar they can help you set up a self-directed ira a self-directed 401k i do this a ton of folks in the bankless community do this they will take care of the pain and help you break your retirement account out of jail help you buy crypto on the spot market to

start a self-directed ira or 401k go to rocketdollar.com when you use the code bank list you'll get 50 off rocketdollar.com use the code bankless dydx is an outstanding decentralized exchange in the crypto world for those that aren't familiar dydx is a place where you can go and swap ethan dye and access some of the deepest liquidity in the crypto space hats off to dydx for really gathering the liquidity they need to make a liquid dex something that is

really difficult in this base and the way that they do that is that they offer a complete suite of services that surround eth and die and other assets on their exchange so not only can you go to dydx and spot trade between eath and die but you can also lend and borrow both eath and die as well as being able to take margin long positions or margin short positions so getting 1x 2x 3x leverage in both directions on your ether and something that is brand new to the dui dx platform is the ability to

get exposure to bitcoin on their perpetual contract markets this is something that is brand new not only to dydx but the crypto space at large and so with bitcoin perpetual contract markets you can get price exposure to bitcoin on margin in an extremely liquid way this opened up just a few weeks ago and there's already over 14 million dollars worth of liquidity on the dydx protocol it comes from usdc and so when your contract is settled you get paid out in usdc it's a brand new money lego

in the crypto world you can go to dydx and get 10 off of trading fees when you sign up with the bankless referral link y d trade.dydx dot exchange slash r slash bank list it's in the show notes so you can just go copy that and go straight to dydx and get 10 off of all trading fees hey david before we dig in with itamar we should talk big picture stuff you know what i've been feeling like lately uh it's felt like it's it's 2016 again i'm 100 with you yeah i've

and i even feel that every single morning when i wake up and for i'm just more optimistic about the future of crypto not only just from you know the price appreciation which i totally think is coming but also just the fundamentals in the space that really sets the foundation for for a new wave um i i've always been skeptical of the of the concept that you know there's a new bull market coming there's uh the idea is that uh there's always a new bull market on the horizon and that crypto runs in

cycles uh it feels weird to be able to count on these things but i wouldn't actually bet against it um and it does feel like we are on the cusp of a very long slow drawn out appreciation in eath price that will you know probably inevitably turn into another bubble which will be fun to uh to go on the ride yeah i i i think that's the debate in crypto whether there's going to be sort of a slow slog to adoption so if you look at like the dot-com uh bubble and then the pop after that

there were there was an interim period years until uh high-flying companies like amazon fully recovered right it took something until like 2008 2009 and the way it recovered uh was through utility so amazon actually delivered on some of its promises and started to to recover uh so some people think that that's what's going to happen in crypto basically it'll sort of seep into our everyday life and there'll be a slow growth slog as it seeps into our life and people

realize start realizing more and more utility but i've come to think that what really happens in crypto is we get these crazy boom bust cycles so we get like these periods of irrational exuberance and hockey stick growth followed by you know a crash type period uh followed by some sort of dead period and then the whole cycle repeats i was reading a an andreessen horowitz article so they're a you know crypto vc uh firm

and they they talked about the three previous cycles so the first cycle was 2009 to 2012 uh where you had this boom bust occurrence and then 2013 to 2016 was the second and then the third which we're kind of still in or it's just closing up is 2016 up until now and in all of these cycles you you get sort of the the same sort of um the same sort of pattern there's at the very beginning of the cycle this

this kind of tinder period where all of this infrastructure is getting built all of this fuel is getting laid down so only the hardcore true believers are really in that in that phase that's where we are now basically and then there's some kind of a spark whether that's a narrative or a use case or a combination of both in 2016 2017 that spark really was smart contracts and ethereum and the bitcoin as a store of value narrative and then you get this explosion that happened in all three of

the previous cycles it was almost like more explosive than everyone thought it would be so there's a growth phase and then that turned into like crazy growth and then it melted faces like with the the level of growth that you saw in each of those cycles uh followed by a crash and then after the crash you started to see articles like crypto is dead people started leaving the crypto space the bubbles pop the narratives are wrong that cycle has played out already three times and we are now in the fourth cycle

this is the the tinder phase where all of this fuel all of these layers of a building and infrastructure are being put down and i feel like it's 2016 like we're just waiting for that spark yeah there's there's as you said there is so much tinder being laid down there are things and developments happening that if they had happened in 2017 2018 would have just absolutely just pumped the market especially out of some developments in the last two weeks

reddit using ethereum an ethereum test net to experiment with community tokens uh is absolutely huge after just like three days there were five thousand different wallets just using one of the two tokens that they issued uh and i think that number's up to like 14 or 15 000 now uh and that's just the fact that the i think number four world's most popular website is using ethereum to host some sort of uh community engagement infrastructure

mechanism is is insanely bullish and then there's also visa explicitly uh citing ethereum as infrastructure for stable coin payments um and and then also citing how stable coins are additive to a payment network not um not competitive uh and so like if those things had happened in 2017 like the crypto markets would have pumped by like 25 alone uh and they didn't you didn't even see a blip in the these markets today because we're still we still have

you know trauma we still have fear uh we're still like very hesitant dipping our toes but uh the things like argent wallet which we're about to get into and the infrastructure that our argent represents to host a bankless revolution is is part of the kindling that is being laid down uh bitcoin just went through a happening during a period where the fed just printed a bunch of money that is also huge kindling the the whole paul tudor jones who has two percent of his assets which

is an insane amount i give two percent maybe sounds like a a little bit but when you're a billionaire like paul tudor jones like i would have expected point two percent not two full percent like stuff like this the kindling is just found everywhere uh and it's gonna be a fun day when when that match drops yeah totally it you know that what's funny is everything you just named that happened like in the last week and a half to two weeks like we're not even talking about like cool stuff that's happened since the beginning of 2020. this is all in the

past week and a half two weeks that's like new layers of kindling this is a dry forest floor with like leaves and you know twigs and there hasn't been rain in months that's what we're talking about here and even the the reddit news alone so 430 million daily active users on reddit 64 of those are gen z right so and one of the the subreddits that they're releasing the community token on is a fortnight subreddit and they're even

more excited about the token and about using uh the ethereum wallet and this community point system than the crypto subreddit is they have already more vaults uh signed up there so like this is um a massive amount of uh kindling someone asked me the other day it's like well just the reddit news why didn't price go up and i i think the answer that question is the these events aren't the spark they're the fuel right this is the the kindling and the spark is yet to come uh feels

very much like 2016. that's not to say that next year is going to feel like 2017. um it could still take some time i mean there still could be some some more tinder that is is laid before we see the spark but it feels like that spark is just a matter of of time and and probability something's going to set this this forest floor off uh and when it does it's going to be quite explosive at least that's kind of what i think i don't think that crypto works because of

the scarcity games we've talked about those in previous episodes david i don't think crypto is just going to like slowly seep into our life and there's not ever going to be a speculative mania because the next 500 million people that enter this space are going to need to learn the same lessons as the first 50. it's the same human psychology that drives these these scarcity games i wouldn't bet against another speculative explosive growth phase that seems to be how this whole crypto thing grows in these cycles and after every cycle uh the good news is

10x the amount of builders and users and holders remain even after the crash so every cycle ends with a higher floor than the last one i think we're an exciting time yeah in your article you talked about fractals and you you just said that you know just because this feels like 2016 doesn't mean that next year is 2017. like and what a fractal is it's a pattern that looks the same at different scale and so what when we say that this feels like 2016 like all those

patterns are there but that doesn't necessarily mean that the next pattern is 2017 right so like obviously this is not financial advice 20 21 is not the year of 100x you know 100x growth in all crypto assets but it's what it feels like like with the foundations are being set uh so patterns do change like that nothing is guaranteed uh but i do like the the illustration that you know these things are are repetitive cycles that look like each other each each time but that

doesn't mean that this next cycle is going to be a you know a one-to-one repeat of the last one yeah exactly like one one fractal that we see in nature all the time is mountain ranges right and uh mountains sort of look the same if you look at sort of a mountain range but but some mountains are are higher than others and that's what we might see here some kind of a difference from the last fractal pattern but a similar pattern and i do think that pattern is one of um fast speculative growth don't know when

it'll happen uh but um i definitely put my money on that i don't think it's going to be something something slow and uh gradual not in crypto man it's too crazy for that david we should talk about uh something else that happened um recently and that's the block fi there's a data breach at blockfi and for those that that don't know maybe you can tell um tell listeners what blockfly is and what happened here yeah blockfi is a company that you can deposit your bitcoin with uh and then they also do

other assets like ether but i'm pretty sure it's mostly bitcoin customers uh centralized company you deposit your bitcoin there they lend it out and give you a bitcoin denominated return so it's a way to receive alpha on your bitcoin so they're offering somewhere between like three and four percent on your bitcoin and and your eth which is pretty good like you can't really get those rates inside of defy uh and there's no really other way to get alpha on your bitcoin so that's really the the business proposition of block fi uh and

why one would deposit your their bitcoin there the problem is uh you know when any website like this has user information and uh whenever a website centrally collects user information there is an incentive to to snag that and that's exactly what happened and i think this is really good juxtaposition between why a similar product which there are plenty of on on ethereum and inside of defy kind of fixes this problem because

public permissionless protocols don't care about your government-issued id and don't care about who you are and don't require your email address or password or any other identifying information to use them uh and so i i think this the whole block fight idea is a legacy business model that is being imprinted upon crypto using crypto assets uh to fuel them but they don't actually make any to anything new like the real innovation here is permissionless uh you know identity free

uh protocols and and the this this hack just kind of illustrates why that is important yeah blockfly would be what we generally call a crypto bank so they um you know they specialize in in lending and borrowing but they do it through a custodial service so you actually have to give up your assets your private keys to block fi they secure it and along with that comes some regulations as you said like aml kyc in in the us and that's you know

money laundering essentially laws where block fi is a crypto bank they're taking custody of assets they have to get your identity so they have to log your email your your name your id and that's what was breached um in this in this in this hack in this in this issue it was email address uh it was physical address it was transaction history which bitcoiners care a lot about by the way oh yeah it's that's very private information because

uh it can be dangerous obviously to to leak that if that gets in the dark web which inevitably it will that list will be resold then somebody knows potentially uh all of your bitcoin addresses or the addresses that were linked to uh block fi they know uh how much you have they know where you live uh they have your email address i mean it's pretty sensitive information eric voorhees actually he tweeted this out he said the problem is with aml kyc it's like why

are we uh collecting this why do we have to collect it you know and that's that's one take definitely but i think another take is is going along the lines of what you just said which is d5 fixes this so if it's just a protocol if they don't take custody of your assets then aml kyc doesn't apply if you deposit your eth or your wrapped bitcoin on something like that the compound protocol you don't need to supply your street address you don't need to supply your passport

or your driver's license the protocol just just kind of works because you're not giving up your assets um so it feels like d5 fixes this is that is that a take you share abs absolutely and just to harp on kyc one more time the the reason why kyc is required is because the government and and the nation state wants as much insight as to who who owns all the money and where the money is because that having that access

to that information is power that is power and so what they're doing is is they are forcing everyone to say like okay i own this much amount of money and here it is and the fact that the nation state knows this is extremely beneficial for them they basically sit at the center of the most important information ever in the world which is where is all the money and who owns it and so you know eric voorhees a famous libertarian when he says the problem isn't block fi the problem for the

problem is aml kyc that's what he's talking about he's saying that the government has this undue incentive to understand where who owns what money and that's what defy does not care about uh they don't care who you are they just care that you have the money and that that's the end of the story uh and this kind of just goes into why agnostic protocols that are minimally extractive always win like we have always seen throughout history the transition from

subjective protocols with undue costs and influence be replaced by less subjective more objective protocols that just need the minimum amount of information to to operate and and that's really what defy is d5 is the next evolution of money and finance protocols that only require the minimum amount of information for their for them to function that's that's an an an alternative definition for d5 well it sounds a lot like the protocol sync thesis episode 12 right oh yeah so

i think you're right so guys if you've been tracking with us this is our 13th episode so hopefully nothing goes wrong david like unlucky number 13 but um the previous 12 episodes really lead up to this bankless the podcast is really best if listened to you sequentially so you know one episode builds on the last and now we're going to be talking about um the the first almost mainstream defy wallet that acts as kind of a an overlay

to all of the the protocols and all of the the money economics and scarcity economics that we've talked about in previous episodes so uh episode 13 fits right in there so before we get there with itamar david we should talk about our second round of sponsors the first is ave so ave is a d5 protocol you absolutely have to check out we mentioned it in today's episode you can actually now access ave by way of the argent wallet in just a few taps

so what does that mean it means you can put your die into it you can put your eath into it once you do it magically transforms those assets into interest-bearing assets so you're actually earning interest on the assets that you put into the protocol you can also borrow from it so these aren't just variable rate loans these are fixed rate loans which is something unique to the ave protocol i just saw earlier this week that ave had passed 70 million in assets locked inside of the

protocol so it's not the fourth largest d5 protocol now it's getting a lot of traction a lot of growth and i think that's because they've constructed a pretty interesting protocol if you're a developer you've got to check out their flashline protocol as well if you are a user and you want to access interest through ave you can go to ave.com that's aave.com or even just access it in the arjun app in order for ethereum to be stitched into the traditional world of money and

payments we need it to have roots into the outside world and that's exactly what monolith does monolith offers you your defy card which is a visa card that allows you to spend your die but at any store that accepts visa which is like basically the whole world so this is a really useful tool for people that would like to go bankless but not really compromise their ability to live their life in a normal way the way that everyone else lives their life and so the defy card from monolith

allows you to be a bankless individual while still being able to access traditional payment rails through the visa network so monolith is a smart contract wallet where you deposit your die into and when you swipe your visa card in any store it just spends that same amount of dye from your wallet through monolith you can focus on spending the things that make sense to spend like dye instead of your ether and this is just a great one-to-one replacement for hsbc or revolut you can download the app at monolith.xyz

and sign up and get your bankless visa card today without further ado let's get to our interview with itamar lasuis the co-founder of argent all right david and i are here with itamar la suisse itamar is the co-founder of the argent wallet and we're excited to talk to you today itamar it's been a crazy busy week for you guys can you give us some of the highlights

sure thing thanks ryan thanks david for having me uh in the big big week at argent uh results of after almost two years of hard work uh launching arjun v1 many people in the community knew the product but it's really the day where uh we are removing that waitlist and we really open arjun to to everyone uh anyone in the world with with a mobile phone so we are we are super excited on monday we announced it to the crypto community and then on tuesday we did our

launch on on product hunt made it to the top three uh so it's pretty good to put a a crypto d5 product at the very top there yeah so you know what i've been super excited about is the defy community the bankless community has really turned out for you guys for argent and i think it's because we've always wanted a mainstream bankless wallet i think that's why you're getting such a turnout from the ethereum community and such uh excitement what's your take on that why are why are folks so excited about this

i think i think you said it very well i think we started the day where it was you know our app our product let's let's vote for it and by the middle of the day people were not voting for arjun anymore they were just voting to put defy mainstream to push the fight to more people to show to the world that crypto d5 could be super simple uh safe uh and still decentralized on custodial so the i think the the language and the the intent really

changed uh as the hours pass during that day i think this is a really interesting uh telling example of how crypto works differently businesses and companies in this space have communities that you just don't find in the typical world and the other company on product time that you guys were in neck and neck neck and neck with with votes was this marketing agency who obviously had skills in garnering votes because that's

the whole point of their company but you guys as a as a you know a d5 wallet you're not a marketing company but you get marketing all the same from the evangelists of the crypto world because we all believe in arjun and we all want arjun to do well and so it's just it's just free marketing from the the support that comes around from the banquets community i think it's really powerful agree first time really i i see that in action i mean in this company at arjun i didn't get the same vibe in my previous

companies uh there's really something unique here yeah you know i think part of the reason why is because this is more than just an app uh this entire space and what you guys are doing are part of a larger movement and that's kind of where dave and i want to start with with the why so itamar why are you doing this why are you in the crypto space are you here for you know the the entrepreneurship the the money the fame the movement what really motivates you

so we you know it's it's not my first company um all the founders have had several companies so yes we've been entrepreneur for for a very long time and that's what we would like to do and i think everyone has a different story on how they uh they get in touch with crypto for the first time um for for me i so when i saw there was few elements i think i sold my previous company uh it was probably no more than three years ago uh when

when we sold it there was actually enough flag on the on the purchase so the dollars money is sent from a uk company to another uk company but it was in dollars so some bank in the u.s could freeze the transfer put an affair flag on it uh it was obviously a mistake but it was a month where you know everyone was super stressed we couldn't access the funds and we were like okay that's it's your money you decide to send it to me but actually you can't really send it to me you need to ask authorization of someone some bank in the u.s um so that was the first event

then i unrelated to that i discovered crypto um i bought my first east probably it was on kraken uh early 2017. if i'm correct in my years i send it to a hardware wallet and i would say that's where i could feel the technology for the first time gerald and julian my co-founders talked about blockchain for many years but for me that was my first user user experience with crypto and i could see that that ability to send money like you send an email and text

message it was really my moment and so i think what motivates us is this idea of a future where you have uh well money and the internet is just totally open fair you have that global platform that is totally permissionless where everyone uh can innovate and i think that can lead to uh basically everyone on the planet being connected to that same system everyone with a quality economic opportunity and this ability to exchange value literally instantly