[REDACTED] 2024 | How Infinex Is Using Chain Signatures to Fix Crypto UX

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1. 0:00

   hey everyone thank you very much uh for having us we're very excited to to be here um I am here to tell you that however excited you are about chain signatures you are not bullish enough um what we are going to be implementing um inside infinex with chain signatures is going to absolutely change crypto um we we have an issue um at the moment and we've had an issue for a long time uh

2. 0:31

   we are we're building this amazing technology we built amazing technology starting from Bitcoin and yet very rapidly from the moment Bitcoin was launched we've been taken over by databases and this started like super early on um the the first database that uh was able to kind of take over Bitcoin and and control a lot of the onchain transactions was actually not even built an exchange it was built to trade Magic the Gathering cards that's how dark it

3. 1:02

   is it's pretty Grim um we we've had this uh this play out throughout the history of crypto from Mount GAA all the way through to coinbase binance and then eventually uh FTX where um you know no matter how good our technology got um from a decentralization standpoint um databases were always ahead of us centralized platforms were always ahead of us they've been better um you know to the point where like defi summer uh we

4. 1:32

   had Unis swap Unis swap is amazing and we were all doing Victory laps because Unis swap on one day was able to compete with the spot volume of coinbase one day right um and this is you know just really problematic as an industry we need to be able to build platforms that use the technology to do the the things that we want to do um and if all of the transaction volume that's happening inside crypto is happening in people's databases then something's gone wrong right um and so we need to fix this but

5. 2:04

   we haven't been able to fix it for a number of reasons so I built synthetics um I was building in defi um early on and what I learned is that we needed to build for enthusiasts we didn't have end users so we had to build things almost from an ideological standpoint right if what you were building was not ideologically pure uh it would get a little bit of fun um and if you want to uh validate that go and check out some of the Reddit threads about uh the early Haven days um so we

6. 2:37

   we have this problem where um you know we were building things for a group of people that kind of had different uh incentives to what the average user has right they actually wanted things to be hard in some ways um they wanted things to be weird they wanted to have to do these deep dives into the technology um and they they wanted it to be uh both censorship resistant and decentralized

7. 3:03

   and the challenge when you need to satisfy both of those two things is that it's very hard to build good ux right um and we haven't been able to until I mean it's basically in the last three months right that we've had the technology to be able to do this with chain signatures we can actually compete with these centralized exchanges finally right there's a whole bunch of other things that that have come about um but it's really critical that we um we have chain

8. 3:29

   signal because the problem that we had building defi is that we tried to get people to do things the way that we wanted them to do it um so if someone would turn up to Defi and say Hey you know I'm really excited about what you guys are building um how do I use my xrp we would say get out of here right like we don't want xrp we don't want we don't want your bad token um and you know cardano Litecoin Bitcoin cash all of these things right any of the assets that you can think of

9. 3:59

   um we we couldn't support them but we also didn't want to support them um and that's that's really not going to work when you look at the top 20 assets by market cap most of them are these assets that are not smart contract chains um and they have large market caps because they have large adoption and if we exclude these users we're not going to be able to bring on the average user that's on binance or buybid or coinbase

10. 4:22

    um and so we we've had to basically figure out a way to support all these different assets and the way that we've been able to to do this now is through chain signatures we have the ability to use chain signatures to um enable uh people to deposit Litecoin um but we have to do it in a way that is um both uh non-custodial um and has good ux um and so this is where um my friend Jed comes in um Jed and I have known each other

11. 4:55

    for a long time um he's been building in web 2 um and he's got some thoughts about the whole web 2 web 3 uh dichotomy as well um which I'm sure you can uh talk to him about afterwards but um I I realized when we were building infinex that we we were off like we're getting something wrong the way that we were approaching it was not quite working um and I was like we actually need to bring

12. 5:19

    some web people in so that we can figure out how to actually build something that will have good ux and the way that we sort of landed on this was that we needed to build an application which sounds wild um but I'll hand over to Jed and this is how we actually build an application in crypto so let me introduce infinex quickly like it's an app infinex is on chain but infinex is

13. 5:43

    also I think one of the better apps you would find on the internet anywhere um and we've done that not just by building an app in the way that it normally happens in crypto we've got a platform behind it we've got a vertically integrated stack that goes all the way from the UI that you interact with the signing experience the database the distributed compute platform underneath that and eventually um the blockchain

14. 6:07

    that all of the operations actually end up happening on and so when Kane sort of pitched me on infinex a year ago um he was saying we've got the technology I think to finally solve this problem but what we need to do is point it at ux instead of just building the functionality that we think people want to come on chain because we've tried that we've got it all and it hasn't really worked we just don't have the users so we realized that we had to actually

15. 6:31

    combine both of these strategies and there's a lot of prior art in Kane's head about what being onchain means we spent quite a bit of time sort of working this out and Distilling it down to really the core principles that we built infinex on top of and there are three of them there is we want users to be self- custodial we need to be non-custodial for this to work otherwise we haven't moved the needle far enough with self- custody comes the

16. 6:57

    problems of funds recovery what happens when some loses access or control to their private Keys how do we solve that so that was number two and number three is everything has to be onchain right we we have onchain transparency under everything you do and I think that's the biggest one that sets infinex apart from what the other applications most people are using to interact with crypto like

17. 7:18

    binance or or all of the other ones are are right something like f FTX doesn't happen if you have onchain transparency so we tried to combine the best of these two uh approaches together but it leads to more problems right because the next thing you need to do if you're focusing on ux is solve uh how do we do genuine across chain ux right and that introduces a hard problem which is the multiple sources of Truth problem um we spent quite a bit of

18. 7:51

    time this year working around that as well and uh some of the stuff that we've shipped already like the patron sale is really cool cross chain user experience you can Farm access to the sale on base using some assets that you deposit on arbitrum you can then use some soul to buy an nft on ethereum and you don't actually see the chains that you're using really mentioned anywhere in this experience right and as we're working

19. 8:15

    through this we realize this is actually the secret to what the centralized exchanges have done to make it easy as well they don't mention chains they just talk about tokens they talk about what you want to do not how you need to do it and definitely not where you need to go in order to do it right so this kind of really I think is just the tip of the iceberg of what people are going to want to be able to do on chain without knowing how and this has brought us to

20. 8:38

    cross-chain signatures because even in that example we've only solved a part of the problem right I'm talking about all the defi tokens and as Kane mentioned we actually need to solve for more than that we need Bitcoin and so what we've said is that once you can custody Bitcoin on infinex it will be real Bitcoin and as cross chain signatures it will allow us to do that um if we have a look at what custody means like I

21. 9:02

    said it's only half the story you need recovery right we can't like we can translate a past key which is a big part of our ux into an onchain signature but what happens if someone loses it we need a smart chain underneath the hood that we can actually program with a contract or a program to sort of deal with what happens next and so near chain signatures actually lets us build the

22. 9:24

    smart contracts and the logic that we need to whilst also controlling these ass ass sets um on chains that don't have native support for the functionality that we need so yeah this is a huge unlock and we see chain signatures as the way to get to our vision of what people want to do on chain in a way where they don't really realize it um so where do we go from here so we have the technology now to beat binance like if you think about what the last 15 years has been it's been this era of

23. 9:58

    crypto happens inside someone's database and we've done Defi and we've kind of made some inroads but we haven't really been able to crack it we haven't been able to beat binance beat coinbase we can't even beat kucoin honestly which is uh you know we we can do better than this right so um what chain signatures uh allows us to do is to build an experience that is fully on chain and

24. 10:22

    support any asset every asset not just a selection of assets that we want to support not just SPL tokens not just ERC 20s but all of the assets um and this is going to usher in a new era like we will we're will be finally doing all of our crypto transactions on chain we won't be doing them in someone's database we won't be giving up custody we'll be doing it the right way um and it's it's pretty amazing when you think about um the fact that like it's taken us this

25. 10:52

    long to get there but once we do it's a huge unlock because at the moment if you are in binance you have a access to some functionality right you can do staking um you can do margin trading you can do per uh but there's a whole bunch of applications that you can't access unless you go on chain and right now the barriers to entry to getting on chain are just too high right um and so the question that we've been asking is um

26. 11:18

    how do we improve the onboarding experience what can we do um to get more people on chain and one of the things that I think many people in this room would uh agree with is that it used to be that we would onboard people right on- ramping and onboarding are actually different things right like fat on-ramps are one thing how do you get how do you get feat into crypto but the on boarding of someone into crypto how do you get

27. 11:42

    someone access to crypto is challenging right and it used to be that we would go around and we would on board people one by one manually right we would go and set someone up with a Bitcoin wallet or set someone up with an ether wallet um and we got to a point where we stopped doing it because if if you do that long enough eventually you get a phone call 3 years later where they say those words I wasn't really

28. 12:06

    supposed to write them down right and you're like you people will get wrecked right um and so what we've uh what we've figured out is that there is a way for us to onboard people um using uh using a platform that is a rich application where you can essentially give someone a link they can follow that link you can have already sent crypto to them them so that when they open the link and they

29. 12:31

    set up an account they have AOS key that can sign messages for them can sign transactions and they now have crypto in their account and you've onboarded them without having to go through kyc Fiat on ramping Etc um and now they can start to actually do things inside crypto um they can do onchain transactions the problem is that infinex as it stands is still a wall Garden it's a little bit

30. 12:55

    unsatisfying right like we've replaced binance with another kind of uh you know wrapped thing right so how do we break out of that how do we allow people to uh access the long tail of exciting stuff that's on chain um the way that we do that is we let them take their infinex account and sign in to adapt and when you let them sign in to adapt what you can do is take all of the chain

31. 13:18

    abstraction that we built inside of infinex and actually extend it to the rest of the long taale of crypto applications which is amazing like as an unlock for um D5 and for onchain uh platforms it's going to make that barrier that right now is too high for the average user to get off of binance disappear and then people can just go and use every application it doesn't matter what it is doesn't matter if it's a prediction Market or if it's lending or if it's some social application or a game they can get access to anything so

32. 13:50

    one of the things we've spent a lot of time talking about is actually the education problem that exists around crypto right um the things that you need to learn in order to use it and our goal is to remove the need for that education if you sign up for binance it's just like signing up for online banking and the more familiar we can make the patterns involved in crypto while still being genuinely non-custodial on chain behind the scenes I think the better off

33. 14:15

    we're all going to be so we've got some plans in that area but we're also out of time so we'll leave it there but thank you for listening and enjoy the rest of the conference