Introducing Rainbow Wallet Browser Extension With Mike Demarais

Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And today on Bankless, we're exploring a wallet. Rainbow Wallet. Rainbow Wallet has been a wallet, uh, usually a focus on mobile wallet, one of the first mobile wallets that has been around since 2019. And recently, Rainbow has released their browser extension. Uh, I threw Mike my podcast recording link sometime in like 2022, and I said, hey, like, so whenever you want to do an episode on Rainbow, click this link, and uh on October of 2023, uh, we get that done. I have Rainbow Wallet downloaded on my phone, but I haven't really opened it up too much, I'll be honest. But I know a lot of members of the bankless community are big fans of it, and as well as just the other people I engage with in this space. So uh instead of actually exploring it myself, I just got the founder on to walk me through all the bells and whistles that they've got over at Rainbow. Rainbow's kind of got this cult following in the world of NFTs. They were very early to NFTs and uh just a collaboration with Zora, not a collaboration, but just like shared vibes with Zora and art. And so it certainly got its corner of crypto definitely carved out for it. So if you're interested in hearing about all the features that Rainbow Wallet has, what differentiates it from other wallets, then this episode is for you. We also take a moment to talk about design in Web3 and kind of why that has a bubbling meta going on, increasing in focus. This episode might feel like sponsored content to you. It's not. We don't do sponsored content on bankless, but sometimes uh people that have been around in the space for a long time, like Mike, uh, have shown conviction and contributions to the space. We just want to help elevate. And so this is an episode to do that. I hope you enjoy this exploration into Rainbow Wallet with Mike and Demoray. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Bankless Nation, I am here with Mike Demoray of Rainbow Wallet. Everyone knows Rainbow, it's the uh the cute rainbow themed uh uh mobile wallet uh for iOS and Android. And today, Mike's got a little announcement uh out of the Rainbow ecosystem. Mike, welcome to Bankless.

What's up, Bankless? Hey David, it's been a long time coming. Thanks for having me.

It has been a long time. It has. Uh how you doing my man?

I'm doing good, man. Uh, you know, happy Monday. Good morning, Wagme.

Happy Monday together.

All all the all the GMs.

Yeah.

Uh c okay, quick question for you. Why did you make Rainbow?

Ooh, great question. Um, well, we started Rainbow back in 2019. And

I think, you know, we, you know, Christian, Jin, and I, my co founders,

we just had so much fun uh playing on chain, right? Like we were quite inspired by a lot of the interesting projects happening, right? There was like MakerDAO, you know, we were using radar relay all the time. Um, and we realized really quickly that.

Uh, in order for this world to sort of take off and h and and flourish the way that we think it can,

you know,

consumers need to have an amazing wallet, right? Like wallets are the prerequisite to interacting with all of the different DAPs and cool experiments happening in this space. And

We looked at the market and we saw a huge opportunity to build a you know a fun, approachable wallet that allows you to, you know, actually interact on chain like every day, right? Just really we wanted to build a product for ourselves primarily. And quickly we realized that,

yeah, lots of other people like this. And uh they also sort of view

uh

you know Ethereum and DAPS as as

as fun, right? And they want to have fun on chain just like we do. Um so yeah, I mean we started Rainbow to

you know build a better wallet.

And what what m did a better wallet mean back then in twenty nineteen? And and kinda what does it mean today? What what's the niche specifically that Rainbow wallet is trying to fill in the market?

Yeah, it's a good question. Well, so back then um there were a lot of really low stakes actually, right? So Rainbow was the first wallet in the market that treated NFTs really as first-class citizens.

And back in 2019, that was not normal. Like few people were even saying the word as NFT.

Very few people were saying the words NFTs. Um in fact, you know, when we were going out there and trying to raise our seed round, a lot of investors were telling us that we were quite stupid for

putting any uh importance whatsoever into NFTs. They were like, yo, like, because at the time, right? I mean, Crypto Kitties were really the only NFT that they were like.

extremely few uh NFTs that anybody knew about.

Um but to us, we always had this thesis that,

you know, ERC standards are

like

are the developer platform and that as a wallet, all you have to do to make your wallet as like

you know, interoperable as possible is actually just give those ERC standards basically to make them work really well in your wallet, right? So in 2019 we um you know yeah we had NFTs in our wallet. Uh that was quite novel. Nobody else was treating NFTs as something that users would really care about. But it was quite quite clear to us that users would care about these someday. So back then, you know that certainly was you know a niche. This time around though with the browser extension product really we think that we've built a product that

uh that that's going to resonate with people who who interact with wallets all the time. Right. I think that uh the product itself is gonna be quite like is quite approachable to everybody but we really did build it for people who

Like use their wallet all the time, right? And then are taking, you know, dozens of actions every single day on chain. Um, so really, yeah, we we built the product, uh, the browser extension, um, really for power users and what we like to call pre power users.

Okay, so power users, pre power users, people that are using their wallet, signing with their wallet quite frequently. What what kind of just like market signals were you guys being presented with to tell you that this is what needed to be built? Was this just from like dog fooding it yourself as Ethereum users, or like how did you go about doing market research? Like, where where did you get uh the signal that you needed to go in this direction?

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, well, yeah, I mean, first and foremost, everyone at Rainbow is basically a power user of Ethereum. And um, that makes

building products a lot easier, right? Because we really get we get to build them for ourselves first and foremost.

But yeah, we did also uh do a lot of user research. So we spent a lot of time out there talking to power users, talking to whales, um, and really uh yeah, they came back with a couple of

uh real pain points that we wanted to address in the product. Um, for example,

something that we heard from nearly every like whale that we spoke to, right? Was

they're really feeling a lot of pain around wallet management.

Right. So uh what is wallet? Like wallet management essentially just means, you know, hey, like I've got 50 plus wallets. Uh how do I how do I actually use those 50 plus wallets on a regular basis? Right. Everything from actually finding the wallet in, you know, like sorting your your your wallet list um to actually like you know jumping back and forth between them as quickly as possible. Uh so yeah, we we took a lot of that

feedback into account when designing Rainbow.

Oh, interesting. Okay. So this is a problem that I kind of definitely have. I have

Yeah?

um a like a lanyard thing and it's got three different ledgers on it. And I've actually like, you know, the metal sheath around a ledger? Yeah. With my drill, I've actually drilled holes through them so I could identify which one's which. I'm sure there's a better way to do that, but that's how I did it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so like one's got one dot, two's got two dots, and and the third doesn't have any. Uh and that's how I manage my ledgers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, okay, like go go into like how you solve some of the uh the wallet management uh problem.

Yes. Well, so a lot of the people we spoke to, right, um, they'll have really sort of

like, you know, special naming conventions for their wallets, even, right? So certain people, uh lots of whales out there, they'll like segment their wallet usage across like 50 plus wallets, right? So they'll have a wallet and it'll just be called like Milades, right? Or they'll have another wallet that's just like, you know, compound finance one and then compound finance two, right?

And so in the product itself, we have a couple of things that solve their their their pain. So one is sounds quite simple, but it it's really not, right? It's like we let the users drag to reorder their wallets. Um so no more sort of just like this this like long uh list in MetaMask, right? You can actually just drag them around.

Second is we allow you to search for wallets by name. So if you do happen to have a specific naming convention, right? It's like it's a lot easier to sort your 50 wallets just by typing something in than it is to actually like scroll and find it. As far as like switching between them, yeah, we built like the magic menu uh UI. So say you're on like any one of your wallets, you can actually just really quickly uh search all of your wallets and just immediately switch to them and then again immediately connect to whatever DAP you're on from your new wallet. Um so yeah, it's like a very like keyboard driven workflow, uh, which we think

you know it's it's one of those things that you really have to try it. And once you try it, we think that uh there's no going back.

Right.

Yeah, certainly. So but there's no so there there's no way of me just like porting over my wallets from my ledger to to rainbow because I have multiple different seed phrases, right? So that I would just have to actually spin up a rainbow wallet kind of with a new version set of seed phrase and then use that as wallet management. Is that correct?

Um, well, so we just let you connect your ledgers, right? So uh uh so you can just connect your ledgers to Rainbow. Yep, and you don't need to uh import your seed phrases or anything like that, right? Because really you're not when you have hardware wallets, it's it's not really good practice to be to import seed phrases, you know, to put those seed phrases in anything else. So yeah, Rainbow, you can just connect your ledger and get going. It's it's actually really awesome. Um we have like that was another major pain point that that power users in Wales would talk about is just kind of the fragility uh that they often had you interacting with with like MetaMask, for example, with their hardware wallets. It was they always complained about a very like fragile experience. Um with Rainbow, it just works.

Interesting. Okay. And this was this is a property of the new browser extension, not the mobile wallet, obviously, right? Correct. Collecting a little hardware wallet to a mobile wall doesn't make any sense.

Oh no, you actually can. Yeah, so with Rainbow Mobile. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With Rainbow Mobile, uh we we actually have

uh truly I I really think it's like the best uh in class support for Ledger hardware wallets. Specifically though, it's the Ledger Nano X, which is the one that has uh Bluetooth. Um the

Yes, correct. And that works on iOS and Android. Um we get like lots of praise from users who you know strongly prefer y using ledger with Rainbow uh more than using Ledger with like the actual ledger app.

Interesting. Okay. Um w really quickly, what security concerns are there using a ledger with Bluetooth? Anything that