Hey there everyone, welcome back to another episode of Odisea! On today’s show we have Ivo Georgiev, the Co-Founder and CEO of Ambire Wallet. Throughout this conversation, Ivo and I explore his journey building a product-led wallet, how he got into crypto, the opportunities he’s seen in the space, and what he’s excited for in the future of wallets and the wider crypto ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCgqUCXHzKE
Also available on: Spotify | Apple | Google | Simple Cast
By now, you’re probably already familiar with how bullish I am on the role of wallets in driving mass adoption. For many of us, we see the wallet as the key to providing existing and incoming users to the ecosystem a home for their digital, onchain lives. Within our wallets we trade, we collect art, we ascribe identity to ourselves, and we are able to tap into the power of the entire crypto ecosystem.
Despite the central role that wallets play, we seem to perpetually deal with the challenge between striking the perfect balance between self-sovereignty and ease-of-use. One the one hand, there are those who build their own hardware off-line to generate their private-keys in truly airgapped fashion; whilst on the other hand many will rely on using centralised services that put users at risk of being rugged by malicious third parties.
One of the things that particularly stood out in this conversation with Ivo was how they have taken an analytical approach to how they identify the problems they currently see in the space and have built a super holistic product that addresses a number of those challenges. Namely, those friction points are:
Having to store your private keys, which could provide a single-point of failure for storing your assets
Needing the native network token to pay for gas fees
Having to sign multiple transactions to conduct basic operations (eg swapping)
Hard to read transactions which may lead to signing malicious transactions
To address some of these challenges, Ambire has built a product whereby folks can recover their private keys through a number of channels, including email recovery. They batch transactions which reduces the confusion some have with regards to why they have to sign multiple transactions to execute simple operations onchain. They parse the transaction and provide a readable and accessible way of understanding the transactions you are signing. In aggregate, these all give everyday users a seamless experience when navigating their digital lives.
It’s this kind of holistic approach to address user experience challenges that are key to driving mass-adoption. In order for us to go mainstream, we’ve got to continue to push the envelope on integrating the latest technological developments in the space (AA, MPC) alongside slick UX.
Aside from exploring Ivo’s founder journey and his product-mindset, we discuss the other spaces he’s excited for in the space. As a power-user of Aave, he shared why he’s bullish particularly on lending protocols with regards to capital utilisation and other efficiencies. Ivo also shares his thoughts on where he sees NFTs playing a central role in unlocking more utility for DeFi, particularly in the real world and of course, the opportunities that crypto gaming brings with it!
Remember, you’ve still got time to mint your Odisea Community Collectible below. The collectible is available on the Optimism network, which we have intentionally chosen thanks to their commitment to support public goods, largely through their Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RetroPGF) mechanism, which allocates the fees paid by users of the network and then distributes them retroactively to public goods in the ecosystem. Mint yours below and support public goods :)
If you’d like to connect to discuss the episode and explore ways we can collaborate to build a better future leveraging crypto, let’s chat on Twitter or you can join the Telegram community as well!
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Odisea is produced with the support of Safe and Ambire Wallet.
Safe (previously Gnosis Safe) is a decentralized custody protocol, securing ~$60 Billion in assets today. It is establishing a universal standard for secure custody of digital assets, data, and identity.
Ambire Wallet is an account abstraction-based, self-custodial gateway to Web3 that introduces a range of impressive features like transaction batching, a pre-payment mechanism, and the ability to pay gas fees in stablecoins. By being accessible on both mobile and desktop devices, with a browser extension version on the horizon, Ambire Wallet aims at streamlining the user experience and ensure convenience across different platforms.
