Ambire wallet, Fixing Wallet UX, Privacy, AI Agents in Crypto & the Future of Wallets

Kris Let's go Yeah, anyway.

Cinesius I Ambire Nice.

Kris Hey man, welcome. Good good to have you.

Cinesius I Ambire Thanks for having me Cap. Been some time.

Kris Good to have you, man. really nice to have you. Last time we synced up was in East Belgrade and I wasn't feeling too well. so I had to bounce now and I wish I had more time to talk to you. And that's the reason why I started this podcast. Now you know the reason. Everyone. How are you man? What you been up to lately?

Cinesius I Ambire Doing good, can't complain much. is going slowly to the end. I'm more of a summer guy, to be honest.

Kris wait you live in Slovenia, how are you summer guy? Slovenia is like cold. sorry I sorry if I doxxed you.

Cinesius I Ambire No problem. It can get super hot in summer, but it's also a great place to be in winter. If you love skiing and stuff, Italian resorts in Austria are super near. So you get a bit of everything, but since a very young age, I've been more of a sea guy. But yeah.

Kris Yeah, do you plan do have any plans on plans on moving? I'm exploring

Cinesius I Ambire No.

Kris myself. Not yet.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, sorry Michael. Yes,

Kris Do you like leaving Huh?

Cinesius I Ambire I have no intentions of moving out of Slovenia. Been to some places, I love going around, but somehow being home makes the most sense for me.

Kris Dude, for me too, even though I'm not super obsessed with Serbia these days, especially ahead of the elections and everything we have going on. Dude, I just I don't know, I couldn't I couldn't bear living in another country. I could do it for a while. I was in the US for a while, but dude, I I missed com just coming back so much. I don't know why. I don't know why. I think that's something like with us people in the Balkan region, for for whatever reason, like completely

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris unknown. an ungrounded reason we are absolutely tied to our roots.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, I think that we are far less likely to move than people, let's say, in US. I think that most people stay most of their time in places where they were born. But especially, let's say, in Slovenia, everyone goes to do study and college in Ljubljana. And then now I'm around 30 and I see a clear trend of people

Kris Okay.

Cinesius I Ambire moving back to the villages. to the outskirts. Yeah, a lot.

Kris Really? I have a thesis, dude. I'm I'm I'm arguing with everyone around here in Serbia because in Serbia the apartments prices are skyrocketing, like the real estate, like everything is booming just into fucking like it doesn't even make sense. So I'm arguing with everyone, like I'm saying I'm seeing trends of young people, not even young, but like young people, people with families, blah blah whoever, moving back to the villages and everyone's like, you go back to the villages, you know And I'm and I'm saying I I don't mean these people go back to the village to, work off of an agriculture and fucking milking cows. I'm saying they just move there to live there. They can work online, they have a starling, they have this, they have that. They can just like chill and live in a very, very nice environment and like ten, fifteen, twenty minutes drive to the city. but yeah, I'm I'm so glad you say that. because I'm seeing it

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah,

Kris here as well.

Cinesius I Ambire I think that offline is the new online. People will prefer spending time in the nature way more. So yeah.

Kris Are you are you saying we should we should invest in real estate, should buy plots of land instead of buying apartments in big cities?

Cinesius I Ambire No, it really comes down to preference But yeah here in our part. They see a clear trend of people moving outside out of the cities and more to the to the outskirts. The biggest problem is that not everyone can work online and finding a job or a

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire real estate in some of the places which are a bit out of the city can be quite difficult, but

Kris Yeah. That's why there you miss out on a on a lot of good stuff if you're not in the city. Like events

Cinesius I Ambire percent.

Kris and meeting people and mingling and, food in the tree in three A three but there's a lot of benefits with just like moving away and being in nature. Yeah. I forever I forever like wanted to like build myself something that I call the cybershed. And it will be like a dedicated

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah

Kris little like a place where I just go to work and maybe work out. And when I leave that, I have nothing. I'm completely unplugged, no phones, no nothing. But when I go to my cybershed, it's just high speed internet, all the text and gadgets and everything. So that's my long term dream. We'll see it if it ever comes to fruition. But yeah, the good reason why like w being in crypto, I guess, you c you work online so you can live everywhere.

Cinesius I Ambire Yep.

Kris And speaking of crypto, what should we talk about crypto maybe? Should we maybe talk about Embire? How are you guys? What you guys what you been up to, guys? Like I've been seeing you fucking everywhere. Everyone is giving you praises, including myself, as you know. I'm very vocal online on Twitter about you guys. You're so awesome. but lately it seems like the trend has absolutely shifted in your direction in terms of what the quality wallet should be. In terms of like I'm talking about now, like a wallet extension. I've never had any problems with Empire. Or on

Cinesius I Ambire Nice.

Kris mobile on on the extension, which is really, really difficult th thing to say, and a huge accomplishment because I've been in crypto since two thousand and eighteen and I've used fucking every single wallet and I've had issues with every single one of them. And it's a huge accomplishment. And now you have the mobile wallet. I've seen a lot of people, good people in the Ethereum ecosystem praising you, which is awesome. And man, super I'm super glad to have you. So yeah, can you tell me what you've been up to lately?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, I'm happy to hear that as well. So yeah, a lot of people, I've heard quite a couple of comments like, well, Empire appeared out of nowhere and now everyone is talking about it. But this

Kris Ha yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire is not completely true. Empire started building a wallet in 2020 and it initially launched a web wallet and a mobile wallet. But recently in last two years, we started... picking very nice traction. So the years of building are now slowly reflecting and there are numerous reasons for that. We can go a bit deeper into those.

Kris Ooh I'm curious about what was the turning point if you remember it. but for those who don't know, can we go even back? I think you guys started like way earlier and then you pivoted into a being a wallet, right? I remember like reading something about it. Do you know any details? I I'm not sure when

Cinesius I Ambire Yes.

Kris you joined, but if you know like I'd love to hear it.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, I'm from, I've been at the company for four years approximately now, but the story of Ember began even before that with ADX. ADX was a decentralized

Kris A DX.

Cinesius I Ambire ad network. And while building this network, the team figured out that if you want to onboard publishers and people who are not completely fluent with crypto, self-custody was quite difficult back then. So... Basically the team started building what we today call account abstraction. So they built the first social login, but it was not like sign in with Google. It was a two out of two, you can imagine it as a two out of two multi-sig with email and with password. And this enabled easier on boarding. And while building the... the ad network, they also figured out, okay, now we have all those L2s and you need gas on each network. And this was not really convenient for someone who is publishing ads, right? People should

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire care about making great ads and publishing them and not like learning how to use Ethereum. So this was a great attempt. It was super early back then. Most of people used EOAs. So the basic accounts, most of them still do.

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire But smart accounts were picking up steam back then. Everyone used Safe Multisig, for example, as a smart account, but not many consumers actually used account abstraction, so smart accounts. So somewhere in 2020, I believe, the team decided to kind of fork ADX into M-Buyer and build a standalone wallet. which was initially, like I mentioned, it was a web, like a web wallet. But this came with a couple of, I would say roadblocks, were way bigger than we initially thought. When you use a smart account, this is a completely new account with a completely new address and people heard about Empire, okay, you can do. You can pay gas across chains and you can create an account with email and that all worked. People created an account, but most of them, so people who've been on chain for some time, they know that you can export your account with a seed phrase and private key and go to another wallet, import it and the account will work like

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire normally, which is not the case with smart accounts and account abstraction in general. People created a new wallet and then they were looking for, okay, where can I insert my seed? Where can I insert my private

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire key? And they got a completely fresh address which could be created like with email or with existing wallets like a hotkey with metamask or a hardware key with ledger. And then they saw a completely new address which was empty. So their first thought was, shit, I got drained.

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire my funds went somewhere and then they saw that their hotkey or hardware key is now a signer for that account. So this was a huge barrier. And then the next step is transferring funds from your existing wallet to a completely fresh address, which was like, I remember some of the signers that created accounts were holding like large positions and had like many funds. but almost no one decided to transfer funds to a completely new account. Nowadays...

Kris Yeah, I kind of I vaguely remember me being that guy. I think

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris I do. Because I was so accustomed to just, seed phrases, write them down, this and that and private keys, save everything like in whatever password manager if I'm using the temporarily, s like store everything kind of off offline completely if if it's like a long term savings or whatever. And then like installing new ones and like requiring a not allowing you to import your seed phrase was like What's happening here? I remember back in the day using one inch a lot because one inch was like literally just generating them new and new and new instead of creating like a derivative off of your like one private private key, you know? so I I yeah. But I vaguely remember being that guy. Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, and if you compare it to some apps today, for example, the latest trend of FOMO,

Kris Mm-hmm.

Cinesius I Ambire I think that they nailed the onboarding. FOMO is as well a smart account, but they nailed the onboarding. They have a super nice flow for depositing from existing addresses. Of course, you cannot import your seed and private key, but I think that one of the things that we missed back then was focusing more on the onboarding UX. And of course nowadays we have so many different smart accounts. have PreV and ZeroDev and a lot of other

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire companies building with smart accounts. So I think that UX is improving a lot. Of course you will always have people who prefer having a seed or a private key. I'm one of those. But for new people making an account with email, Makes a lot of sense because they are used to that flow from the web to space or when signing up for apps.

Kris Yeah. Can I can I ask like real quick question? We we don't need to get into this, but what makes FOMO's onboarding experience so good? Did you say they figured out the depositing? So is depos I s I recently used a Neo Bank that was really good. You it actually lets you like connect your account in order to like deposit to you, like you can click connect, you know, Empire, MetaMask, whatever, and you just like immediately deposit so you don't have to like say like, send to this account or like to this address or What makes

Cinesius I Ambire Yep.

Kris them so cool? Can you tell me?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, when you create a new account, you get a very nice deposit button and then they structure the deposit flow in three ways. You can deposit from your existing wallets. You can onboard funds with Apple Pay,

Kris Yeah, I can't ramp.

Cinesius I Ambire like an on-ramp. And third one is super easy onboarding from the centralized exchanges. They have like, I think there is some... in build flow where you are like you get redirected directly to Binance. So they have they really thought into they broke down the experience into different steps and they lead a new user.

Kris Yeah. I think they covered everyone, right? Yeah, okay. That sounds cool.

Cinesius I Ambire Also nowadays, transferring and sending funds is not the most convenient thing in crypto and there are many attack vectors on the way. have address poisoning, people mismatching the addresses and so far. So I think that they really nailed the onboarding UX. So yeah, props to the team. And I think that many wallets can learn. a lot from that flow, including Empire.

Kris Yeah yeah yeah. Yeah, we have to learn from each other, of course. I wanted to ask you while you were talking, what what's the first wallet that you've ever used? Do you remember?

Cinesius I Ambire Yes, it was Ether wallet and then Metamask. How about you?

Kris I I think I started with Exodus. Do you remember Exodus?

Cinesius I Ambire Yes.

Kris I think I saw them last la last year I th I saw them being listed on New York Stock Exchange. But I it's it's so funny. I never see them on Twitter online, I don't see anything about them and yet they, supposedly are killing it. But yeah, it it was Exodus and I remember it was just way back when and I invested in Bitcoin and I was like, Okay, I also started looking into Ethereum and I was like, Okay, this looks interesting. So I wanted to do a swap. And then I did a swap, and little did I know at the time, like we did we don't have as efficient bridges as we have today. And I sent like whatever, I don't know, 500 euros of of Bitcoin to my Ethereum address. I I did it from within the app, so it was good, but because the bridges were inefficient and we didn't even have bridges, I I have no idea how they handled it. It took a long time for that money to actually arrive on my Ethereum address. And during that two hours I was fucking going crazy. What's happening here? Like talking to the customer support and everyone calming me down. And after a while I saw my deposits like, okay. And then I like I learned by putting my money into everything. And fucking like God only knows that that cost me a lot over the years. But I I did learn.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah. But that's the way to go. When did you start? When did you go like...

Kris Joy that's a funny story. yeah, I started computer science in Belgrade, right? And I had a friend who just came, we were like, you know, practicing for some exam or whatever, and he told me this was two thousand and thirteen. And he told me like, Hey man, there's there's this cool thing like Bitcoin, it's a cool kind of cryptography thing. Like let me set up the miner for you, have a good computer at the time. I really had a good computer. And he set it up and he was like, Okay, you're you're basically mining at this rate, blah blah. So if you use it half a day every day for for a month, you're gonna be able to mine about three Bitcoin. I remember doing that calculation and Bitcoin at the time was like two hundred dollars, two hundred, three hundred dollars, something like that. And I was like, Man, for like six hundred dollars, you know, I cannot use my computer for half a day. It just doesn't make sense. And I just quit after a month or so. So that's like the first my first kind of brief interaction with crypto, but then I I kinda went all in in two thousand and eighteen and nineteen.

Cinesius I Ambire So I'll be over super early.

Kris yeah. yeah, dude, I lived through it all. like you know, we were there for the creation of DeFi. D like first DeFi summer. I remember just like one day and I caught it so early, I invested in Ethereum when it was like two hundred two hundred dollars or something. And I went all in, and when I say all in, it was like all my savings at the time, which was five thousand dollars. but that five thousand dollars turned very quickly into a lot of money. just me buying DeFi products at the time. You remember like Uniswap and Ave and all these guys haven't even came come close to their all time peaks, which were at the time when I invested. but then like meme coins came around and people were like, you know, all the stories and everything. So I was fucking throwing money in there, losing money. So yeah, I made a lot of money. I lost even more. So I had to kind of get it all back. And yeah, dude, I I I I've been through it all, trust me. I should probably have some meme coin on on the podcast and just talk about meme coins for three fucking hours and I can tell my entire story. Finally get it off my chest. How about you? Are you occasional degening into something?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, sure. I mean, I love putting like usually when testing the wallet or testing different products in general, I like to like just allocate something here, something there just to see how it works. I'm not a big fan of memes at all. Like at all. But people love them. And yeah, for me, it was my best friend who... spill the tea. It was early 2017 and we were on a walk

Kris U

Cinesius I Ambire and the guy said to me, I started putting some money into this crypto thing, it's gonna change the world, the world and... and it was in a brawl.

Kris And trust me, bro.

Cinesius I Ambire He invested in Nio at that time.

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire It was unshare, so I know, yeah. I think it was Nioh. And then at the first, I didn't believe him, like, okay, you are getting scammed, you have this like money, can you even cash out and so on. Then he kind of convinced me. Then I bought the top, like the Pico top. And then in the college years, I started hearing about Ethereum more and more, and it really like picked my... I started to get very like, okay, this stuff is smart contracts.

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire mean, this has some super nice potential. And since forever, I've been a big fan of using apps and like wallets in general. So I started out with my ether, but then I quickly went to Metamask and I've been loving wallets since forever. Then I was super happy to get the opportunity to work

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire at Aimbayer.

Kris It's you dude yeah. Okay, let me tell you a little quick quick story. Like in two thousand and eighteen or nineteen, when I was just like peak crypto hype for me and my interest and my love for crypto. I was like, Man, we should create a wallet. It's it's gonna be a simple wallet. we can use it for whatever. I th I think like wallets are kind of entrance to crypto. You cannot like do crypto without a wallet. And I I was talking to my dev friends at the time, like, let's build it, let's build it, let's build it and everyone was saying There's Exodus, there's MetaMask, there's Trust Wallet, there was whatever the wallets that were there that were at the time. And everyone kind of convinced me, or I let myself be convinced that it's not a good thing to start it. And years later, wallets became I don't know if you remember this, but I feel like this was like three, four, five years ago or something like that, when wallets were absolute like mania phase for wallets. There were so many of them. And I remember doing the research and I was like, Does it even make sense to start something now? So let me take a quick look and I did a little bit of research and I think I like somehow I found like a list of probably three hundred wallets at the time. So a lot of them were like they had a different go to market strategy. One was like focused only on whatever NFTs, one was focused on memes, one was focused on trading, one was focused on whatever. One was focused like originally. Okay, this is a wallet just for, you know, France, or this is a wallet just for like fucking Australia or whatever, right? So they different goal to market strategy, but there was a lot of them. And yet again, I let myself be convinced not to start one. but I was gonna say like there were so many at the time, and it seems like that there was around that time when you joined Empire, you're you were like very lucky to to pick a good one, man. You could have easily just picked like one of the probably three hundred that we don't know if they exist even today.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, just the other day I was looking at the wallet connect and I think there is approximately 500 wallets in there, approximately. And yeah,

Kris They

Cinesius I Ambire as you said, the wallet mania was huge, but still I think that Metamask to this day has by far the biggest, like by far. No one is even close. I think that Metamask is... Let's just talk about extension installs. I think they have approximately 10 million and then followed by Rabi, which is 800k. And then there is another huge void to 100k, which is Rainbow, Zirion, someone else. Yeah. And that is.

Kris What do you attribute what do you attribute their success to? Is it like a first mover advantage and people just associate crypto with MetaMask or I mean they're yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire No, yeah, it must be a combination. Like having a first mover advantage is huge for sure. But also Metamask did a lot of cool things on

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire the way. They're also behind so many standards. at some point, I think it's in 2021 when Rabi started, really, Rabi really understood what are the pain points of of people and they went really hard at tackling case per case, problem per problem. I think they first started the huge, the first one was phishing protection and then the second one was locating positions and defy tracking in general. Then they did, I think they pioneered also batching with EOAs for the ability swap.

Kris huh.

Cinesius I Ambire So yeah, they understood the problems very well. But in general, Metamask is the first mover. Wallets are a very sticky business. It's very...

Kris Yeah, I was gonna say I was gonna say you can be a first mover at something else, but users are gonna jump ship, and they're gonna say, this guy's like better UI, better UX, better whatever, you know, better rates. But when it's about your money, dude,

Cinesius I Ambire Yes.

Kris that like especially when you have a huge company behind MetaMask, like Consensus that commands trust, reputation, all of that stuff, you're not changing. I use MetaMask to this day. but yeah, I literally have you know, in my browser installed Embire MetaMask and Soulflare. That's it.

Cinesius I Ambire nice

Kris but yeah. speaking of l let's kind of turn the ship back around here. I wanted to ask you, so you said that Empire few years ago there was a turning point. What was the turning point? Do you remember? Like let's let's talk about that.

Cinesius I Ambire Yes. I would say there were two turning points. The first one was that we understood that the web wallet approach and mobile approach with smart accounts only was a no-go. We still have all the infra, like we maintain everything, users can access their funds and so on. But we decided to pivot to an extension. So

Kris Okay.

Cinesius I Ambire we... did an extension with supported EOAs. So EOA is basically just a basic normal account that you generate in Metamask, Rainbow, Rabi. And this was big because people started importing EOAs, but they also could use smart accounts. Again, we need to have a very clear distinction. This is for like for average user who does not. know about the technical stuff and they even shouldn't. It's very hard in terms of UX. EOA is an EOA and then you have a smart account. An EOA can never be upgraded into a pure smart account, but an EOA can get a delegation to get some of the smart account features. And this was the second big point when Ethereum started supporting EAP 7702. So this was the Pectra. which is a year and a half ago. And this basically enabled all accounts, so EOAs, to get some of the smart account capabilities. I'm talking about transaction batching, about gas abstraction, and everything down the line. So this was one of the biggest things in terms of UX and also security for us.

Kris Are you saying that those features were specifically responsible for like you getting more users or like I'm I'm I'm I'm you know just curious, d do you attribute the your growth and like mo turning point to those features or like that was like one of the things that happened to like you you did you did announcements and like people were like, this is so cool, let me go and try it, and they kind of stuck around.

Cinesius I Ambire It's definitely one of the things. Yeah. Still, there are many, many limitations and it's very granular. For example, if you use a ledger device and you import it into AMBAYER or MetaMask, you still cannot atomically batch transactions. Like everyone on Twitter is saying, we should get rid of token approvals and we should have a proven swap in one transaction. but still to this day if you use Ledger or Trezor you cannot do that because they still do not support 7702. While there is one hardware wallet, Grid Plus supports it and it was the first combo that we did. But yeah, now it's up to Ledger and Trezor to decide whether they want to support it and sadly they did not. enable this neither for Metamask users, neither for Empire users, so the adoption is that definitely caused adoption to slow a bit. But in general, most of networks support it today. Most of wallets support it today. Metamask and Empire have by far the biggest and the widest support.

Kris Do you think this is a design choice that like potentially could be okay, I'm not sure about this? And I feel like if you're a hardware wallet, you don't implement something unless you are 110% sure that it's not gonna in any way, shape, or form impact the safety of the user's funds. So do you think this is specifically this like a choice for them? Like not yet. Or is this a definite no or how do you how do you assess this situation?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, that's an amazing question. I would say that the thing is not yet. And in general, when we talk about 7702 and support in general, I think that it comes down that wallets prioritize, at least in last year and a half, two years, they prioritized features and development that incurred or got some revenue. There is almost nothing. to gain from 7702 in terms of revenue. Like

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire zero. I mean,

Kris man

Cinesius I Ambire that's one of my thesis. But yeah, basically Ledger whitelisted the Metamask and M-Bar contract in the beginning, and now they put it on hold. Trezor is actively working on it. I think they should have it supported in the upcoming months.

Kris Alright. Nice. yeah, I'm all too well familiar with people just prioritizing any type of integration and effort. only if it contributes to their revenue or user growth. If

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris it doesn't contribute to those two, like get the fuck out. I don't want to talk to you. But you guys

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, but this.

Kris have done like really cool like the there's there's something and I like I'm pro maybe I'm biased because I work with DNS and I come from the ENS world. And integrating ENS, it's debatable whether in contributes to your revenue or to your user growth. But it definitely adds to user attention, it adds to a bit of safety with transaction like spoofing and mimicking and all of that stuff, possibly clipboard hijacking and a lot of address related stuff. So but it's so hard to communicate that and it's hard so hard to get people actually to do it, even a simple resolution, On let alone sub names, the the stuff that we work with. so yeah, I'm I'm very well familiar. but that's like how all businesses work, right?

Cinesius I Ambire I'm curious on that. What's the latest update with the namespace? And I saw some Numera, AI, some Agents, Numera.

Kris Namera, yeah. Namera, yeah. Namera is a Serbian word for intent. You should probably you probably know it. Yeah, namera. It's it's just it's so weird because

Cinesius I Ambire that's where it comes from.

Kris my my team members started pronouncing it namera, but in

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris Serbian I would never say namera for that word. Like

Cinesius I Ambire No matter.

Kris you'd say namera. right? Sick name

Cinesius I Ambire Sick name. Amazing.

Kris because it's like it's literally just an intent. And we work with basically agent permissions. We want to be the permissions or policy layer for all agent transactions on chain. and we also have this like kind of modular, very granular approach to building these policies. So you can kind of like Lego blocks, like build them however you want. And these policies only like define the scope of what agent is allowed to do and everything is sort of enforced on chain. which is really cool. I'm not sure which direction is gonna go. we have like fifty, sixty people in the in the subscribe to test the beta and there's testing ongoing. You know, we're kind of improving the UX and and whatever else, but yeah. And on the

Cinesius I Ambire I'm very curious to get your thoughts about agents and wallets in general and how they relate because like I am totally for it like a hundred percent, but I'm very curious how many people actually use agentic stuff in with wallets or in wallets

Kris look, yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire themselves.

Kris The only thing that I find that I found out, and I shit you not, the only thing that I found out that is the like potential, like a small user group that actually uses agents and agent wallets is just devs having fun. That's it. Like I've never seen anyone like use them in production for like a specific thing. To manage some portfolio or allocations or in DeFi context or whatever. I'm sure there's things happening. But I just I'm just speaking for myself. I wasn't able to find it. And if there's anyone out there listening who knows a very good use case of how agents use crypto, I would love I would love to learn because we are literally building with this what I think is one of the primitives, and that is like permissions. We have to figure out permissions, otherwise know, we we we're fucked. but yeah the only thing that I found out, yeah, just devs having fun and experimenting. And this is I I I found this out when OWS came out, open wallet standard. I think it was like a some kind of a collaborative initiative with who's like Moon Pay or Moon something like Moon Moon something big company in crypto. they launched it and they had pretty much the support for the entire industry. I remember seeing all the Arbitrum, Polygon, all these big networks announcing it as a like a partnership. And it was basically the same thing. Like you get a smart account, you get you get like locally stored you know permissions for your for your agent to not to go out of the scope that's like you defined and yeah that that's pretty much it. And To be honest, I did I don't see any adoption. OWS, I I feel like I I think I recently

Cinesius I Ambire you

Kris looked into their GitHub repo, not a lot of updates. So yeah. I wish I had a better answer, to be honest.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, the most familiar thing that comes to my mind is the, I know that Metamask launched an agent, which also has

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire pretty nice scoped permissions. But yeah, so our sister company, started building like a proposer. nothing executes like automatically you just like prompted hey I want to revoke all my approvals make a batch and so on but yeah I'm very curious to to actually see some like from personal like things like I would love to get some some yields proposed but I don't feel comfy

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire like automating anything at this point

Kris You you're gonna feel comf comfortable with Namera, I'm pretty sure, because you literally say you literally give so you create a smart account and then smart account has a session key. And then session

Cinesius I Ambire Okay.

Kris key is like a private temporary key that this agent uses to spend funds. And that session key has a bunch of policies that you can attach to it. And when I say a bunch of policies, I say like for example, you can literally just copy paste the the Ethereum or USDC contract like USDC contract for example on base and you can say you're only allowed to spend this from like this asset and you can say like up to a hundred dollars. And there's literally no way to break that policy. Like

Cinesius I Ambire Nice.

Kris literally no way to break it because it's enforced on chain and it only has even the knowledge and the context of that of that contract. Right. You can do the same for like Uniswap or maybe pools and you know whatever else. So when you give it a specific policy, like you, for example, you can only trade these three assets from these three pools. There is literally no way to fuck it up. And that's a that's a good point because we were thinking about this when building it. We wanted to like not to compromise on autonomy. So we wanted agents to be autonomous, but like how do we make them autonomous and as safe as possibly gets? Right? And this is our version of of of the product. I'm not sure if it's good, I'm not sure if it's bad. We'll see eventually. but this is our bet. And I would love if you guys tested it, you guys are obviously

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask. Is it live for testing yet or not yet?

Kris yeah, I I think yeah, you should probably you should have probably gotten the invite if you subscribed on the wait list. We sent them out yesterday. And I think tomorrow or the day after tomorrow it's gonna be open beta. So anyone who wants can sign up, get an invite code automatically and just start using it. Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, think everyone loves agents and obviously everyone who works with AI understands how powerful this stuff is. yeah, the agent stuff started like a year ago, year and a half ago. And honestly, I was expecting bigger, some bigger use cases, like more people using this stuff. But it's okay. Every new update, every new tech takes some time to adopt, so it's better to go slow than...

Kris we can we could probably talk about that as well, dude. Sometime I I feel like we're man, we're so early. It's it's like we're building for the industry, for the market, for everything that it doesn't even exist and probably won't exist for like another however many years. And this is why I tell my my team, and everyone who like tries to advise me on like, you should build this because this is what works. you should like build the you know, try to like incorporate Namera in Open cloud because open clo cloud has these developers, And sure that makes sense as a a logical go to market strategy. But we're building for guys who are experimenting. We don't know how agents are gonna be used in crypto, and we wanna provide this a very bare bones playground that people can compose these policies, compose this whatever, however they want, and let's see what sticks. And that's it. It's not like our mission is not like to, you know, make as much money or like have a million agents or whatever. I I I know it's too early for that. but yeah. I guess like what I want out of this is when the time comes and things sort of crystallize a little bit in one direction and like a few directions, we're gonna be ready and that's it. And it's built also like as an open source thing, so everyone is welcome to contribute.

Cinesius I Ambire Thank you.

Kris We can one thing that I think is could be a good selling point is to have as many policies as possible so you don't have to like compose them yourself. So for example, if you want, for example, your agent to be able to trade on like let's say safe, like safe DeFi DeFi blue chip, you know, products, we could have like a catalog of like twenty of those, like Ave, Morpho, blah blah blah, whatever, and you just like click this DeFi DeFi blue chip policy. And it just automatically adds those twenty contracts in there. So your agent only is allowed to trade these twenty tokens, nothing else, right? So

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, exactly as you described, the UX is getting much, much better in terms of agentic stuff. mean, you can just type. But yeah, UX has to be nailed here, which is often a problem because you have some technical limitations that you cannot really go over. And yeah, it's very difficult.

Kris Well, let let me give you a fair warning. We haven't figured out UX. So you're

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah

Kris probably gonna get annoyed a little bit, but we do have a feedback button and please use it. Don't be shy to use it.

Cinesius I Ambire Stick. Stick.

Kris I we we just we briefly mentioned go to market for agents and like I s I I mentioned that we're quite early. I'm curious about like what's your go to market for Empire. And one other thing that I wanted to know, from earlier conversation, you said that you've built a bunch of features that are for normies, not super crypto, native users. do you have a way to estimate how many of your users are normies and how many of them are crypto natives? This could be a weird

Cinesius I Ambire No,

Kris question, but like

Cinesius I Ambire we have zero. Yeah, that's very hard to estimate. But I'm very confident to say that most of people who joined Empire in last year and a half are people who are not new. Those are people who used wallets before and they heard about Empire. We also get quite a couple of requests and questions in Discord, Telegram, and in general, which are fairly new. So that's super nice to see that it's a mix, but I would say that the OGs and DeFi power users outweigh the general public by a margin at the moment.

Kris Yeah, so what's your strategy? I'm curious. go to market strategy for I obviously want you guys to be super successful. I I guess part of the strategy is, you know, mobile wallet, right? but yeah, I l I wanna hear you talk about it maybe.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, the like two years ago when we started building the extension, we said, okay, let's start going like one-on-one with people and let's start noting what are the pain points when they use wallets. And we started inviting people to use their interviews, which is basically just one-on-one Google Meet. asked people to install the extension fresh. We top it up with some funds and then just observe and just see. And by just observing what people do, this is 10 times more powerful and better than getting text feedback. So to all wallet app developers, whatever product to do hop on a call with someone from discord or go out to Twitter and invite them, Hey, can you take fucking 30 minutes? Let's do feedback for feedback and you will learn 10 times more than just looking at stats or at getting, hey, do me some text feedback. It does not scale. It takes a

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire lot of time. So many people from Empire do this on regular basis. And this has been basically our go-to-market strategy. I think that we did. I'd say more than 300 interviews this year alone, maybe even more.

Kris I I love that. That's very old school,

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, it's very old school, but it also, you kind of get to know each other and then someone is, it's a mix. It's a lot of people who work for other projects. It's also people who do not work in crypto at all. And, usually when you go, like, if someone is working on an app, we ask them to install Empire and then use their app with Empire. And on the way I provide feedback to the app and then also some things on how we can iron out UX and we propose stuff like... This scratches my mind, but there are three big problems that we need to fix. First one.

Kris Let's go.

Cinesius I Ambire This is very general, but yeah. First one. Connecting any wallet to any app. This is still a big issue. If you have Metamask, Rainbow, Rabbi and AmbiR installed. And when you go to some app, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Kris Dude, probably like the worst fucking thing ever. And it's sorry. Like you just you know, this is this is what like tells you that like

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris you're fucking on point that because I got annoyed. Dude, it doesn't matter whether it's I I only have two right now, so for testing, I have Embire and I have MetaMask. Sometimes I want to use Embire. Sometimes I want to use MetaMask. And then some app will just like If I wanna use Embar, it will just be very persistently annoying that I use MetaMask. And vice versa. Sometimes I wanna use, MetaMask to test something, because I have some MB fans there. And the the the app is gonna be like Embar Embar and I don't know how to fix this. I really don't know.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, so this problem really picked up in I think that Zirion was the wallet that has like the biggest contribution to this. There was one guy, I don't remember his name, but he did an an amazing keynote at I think Defcon and he described it as the big wall of crypto. Just being unable to connect the wallet you want to the app. And there is an EIP for this and if both app and the wallet support this EIP, I think it's 6398 or something like this, then the app will display all your wallets that you have installed in the box and you can just pick the wallet that you want to connect and it connects. if both,

Kris That's really cool.

Cinesius I Ambire yeah, and that fixes all of the problems. But somehow not all app devs are aware of this yet. most wallets, I think all wallets support this now and it's a big pain and there were many workarounds which were completely terrible. For example, we were guilty as well like a year and a half ago when not many apps supported this. Basically the wallets started erasing to replace Metamask with M-Bier or with Rabi or with Rainbow which is even like 10 times worse UX. So

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire the solution if you are an app deaf listening to this, please look at this EAP. It's very simple to implement. Most of connectors support it today. Maybe you just need to update your connector and things will be solved. I don't see a single reason why you would limit people by which wallet they want to connect to your app. Basically, you're gating yourself to Yeah, you're getting

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire your mentors out.

Kris And second and third? This is the first issue? I'm not letting you I'm not letting you get off that easy. Let's hear number two and three, baby.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, then the... Yeah, so number two, I would say is for apps to support batching. Again, there is an EAP, it's 5792, and this enables to do approve and swap, approve and deposit, approve and claim in a single transaction. Most of major apps support this today. And the biggest pro for this is it just eliminates the need to manage token approvals. I don't see a single reason why someone who started using crypto yesterday should know what a token approval is. And it's very dangerous. think that over revoke cash has some stats and it's been over a billion around a billion lost due to unlimited and open approvals. And then the third is supporting to pay us with any like with gas tank, gas accounts, Rabi, Amber, both have those features. We should not limit people to paying us in native only. And we can also add the fourth to support clear signing. So you basically, you just need to describe as a team, need to describe your contracts and users see a humanized version. They don't see a hex.

Kris Yeah. a lot of people are are excited about clear signing and I think a lot of people are integrating it. there was an initiative in ENS led by the team called ENS Scribe, which was basically in charge of naming the contracts. Like so we we had a I think it was like ten thousand Ethereum in is in incentives to for teams to name their contracts. So when

Cinesius I Ambire Sick.

Kris you yeah, so when you actually have to sign something or in a ma in the wallet. you would actually see which concept contracts you're interacting with. So and if you if there were like I don't know, whatever Ave contracts and Ave has them named, you can literally see by the Ave. It was

Cinesius I Ambire Amazing.

Kris really cool. I'm not sure what kind of results it yielded, but I know like there were a lot, probably like 10, 20, 30, 50 teams implementing this. but yeah, that was kind of our efforts. to fix that and address that issue. But yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, there are so many low hanging fruits and as an industry we can do a lot better, especially on the front of avoiding the jargon and weird terminology basically everywhere in apps and in wallets themselves. And I think that EF is doing some campaign. in four wallets to just unify on the phrasing. For example, you have a recovery phrase in one wallet and you have a seed phrase in another wallet. Now someone who

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire is completely new, will think that that might be two different things. So there are many low hanging fruits where we shoot and we can like unite as an industry because it doesn't make sense to fragment the whole

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire thing even. even further.

Kris Yeah. can I ask like how are you guys we we briefly mentioned the AI agents. So I I guess like I'm curious, you have these three main things that you wanna address. do you wanna mess around with agents and Empire Wallet itself, or do you wanna treat agents as like a separate thing? Or you wanna keep Empire Wallet just for humans? or do you planning

Cinesius I Ambire Thank

Kris any AI features, functionalities, something like that?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah. So when we started the convo, the ADX, the first company got pivoted to agentic stuff mostly it's now called HeyAura. And in some time, yeah,

Kris I think I read something about that, yeah. Yeah, sorry, go.

Cinesius I Ambire in some time we will be open to doing agentic stuff in M-BAR as well. But right now, at least in my opinion, no solution is matured enough to give. I like to put it on an Empire front end. mean, wallets are like you as a dev, a wallet builder, you need to make sure that whatever you ship is completely secure and not some experimental stuff where people can lose their money. So I think that it will take quite some time for wallets to go fully into agentic stuff. And even then, I'm

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire not completely sure if I'm convinced. for example, for swapping, right? Is picking amounts and tokens manually better than like typing swap USDT into Ethereum?

Kris Look, dude, I'm skeptical.

Cinesius I Ambire I'm skeptical too, like very skeptical.

Kris I'm building agents. I'm building agents and there are so many cool things, but I'm skeptical. You know?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris We'll see. We'll see where it goes.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, even in, even in Dreadfy when using Revolut or whatever brokerage account, we are used to like clicking, like selecting manually. So this is a completely different UX, which is, yeah, it's going

Kris You s

Cinesius I Ambire to be very interesting to see.

Kris That's exactly why we have the approach that we have. I don't wanna chase you know the I don't want to chase after spaces and like environments where people build the most with agents and accommodate to them in order to build something. We have our product like kind of defined that we wanna be the permission layer for all economic activity on-chain. When where that's gonna happen, I'm not sure. When it's gonna happen and if it's gonna happen at all, I'm not really sure. If it happens, what is gonna be used for? I have no fucking idea. I don't know. Because right now devs are just using it to experiment and build stuff and fuck around with agents or they throw in a hundred dollars and say like, hey, go make me a million dollars or something like that, you know? So they actually so they

Cinesius I Ambire Make sure

Kris actually Yeah. So they actually benefit from less restrictions because they are testing agents and testing capabilities and stuff like this. in TreadFi you said it yourself, man, like I would never, I would probably never trust an agent. To do something more than I would trust myself. That just doesn't make sense. If I'm managing millions and hundreds of millions of dollars, why would I delegate the trust to the to the agent to do something? Even like I see it in a sense that like if you, for example, you could you could use like agentic mechanisms for like some automation and stuff, and you can use it for pretension in a sense, like if you use, for example, the meta to say to your agent to to serve to say to like a specific smart account that has some assets, to say it like, hey, you are not allowed. To spend or to swap in any other assets other than these three or five. And then I would use it as a a control mechanism to actually stop me from doing stupid shit myself. But

Cinesius I Ambire you

Kris I would never let autonomous agent autonomously move funds and do all of this. So I'm not sure. I'm skeptical too. We'll see.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, but in terms of ideas, like if we think about the timing always needs to be right. For example, I think that SAFE or Gnostic, they built a prediction market in 2018 or 2019.

Kris What?

Cinesius I Ambire yeah, it didn't work out. And it was like I just heard and Rats and tweets, but it was very similar to what Polymarket is today. So there are many ideas, like you said before,

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire that are already built or we are building them right now, but they will fail now, but in some time they could be like amazing. So

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire a lot of things need to align for something to take off.

Kris That's the that's the story for of or on chain identity. Identity is the piece that no one has figured out. And everyone implements their way of identity. We don't have the portable identity. We don't have like a ZK based identity where you actually, you know, allow some information about yourself or your agent to be proven without revealing the whole aspect of information. Like w no one has a standard or a schema that everyone likes or agrees on or abides by. And yet id identity is arguably one of the most important things in the world. It's literally what makes you you and what makes your agent your agent. And not only that, like but it's also it it attributes to businesses as well. It's what makes your business a business. You know, we rely on reviews, for example, and then reviews are just like one sort of benchmark to assess whether a restaurant is good or bad. But there are so many things for so many things that you can say or or attest to on or whatever that kind of builds this reputation that is also just part of the identity. So identity no one has figured it out. There's so many interesting solutions and takes on it. I was recently I I was just looking into X401. Do you know about X401? So it's sort of like a

Cinesius I Ambire Yes, but just briefly, I'm not, I'm no expert there.

Kris It's I'm no expert as well. I was like reading it trying to understand it. man, I I do have a technical background, but like some of these things just fucking go above my head. I'm reading them and I'm like, I don't understand it, man. but yeah, X4012 is sort of like a X401 X401 is similar to X402, X402 is just for payments and X401 is for identity. And it basically just asks and checks who controls the agent, what the agent is about, does the agent does what it's what it's supposed to do? And is it allowed to do that and all that stuff? But how they handle it, I'm not really sure. But they're calling themselves the like the HTP HTTP version for like identity. yeah. Interesting stuff all around, but we are so early that no one is using it. So the biggest this the like the biggest companies has have the biggest distribution. So it's also difficult for a small guy to compete, like We could build the best identity solution, but Matamask can build one and they have the distribution. GoDaddy can build one and they have distribution. They have something called agent name service, which is identity for agents. And they can immediately just launch it to like hundreds of millions of businesses and people and users. Cloudflare is the same. They launched usernames. I will forever be angry with them for not using ENS for usernames.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris But yeah, you you see what I mean, there's a lot of opportunity, yes, sure, especially with AI, but companies have like a really, really big upper hand. when since they have the distribution and now we've reduced the cost to software to almost zero and anyone can build anything, and the distribution is more important than ever. so and

Cinesius I Ambire Yo, 100%. 100%.

Kris and big companies have have the distribution, so it is what it is.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, on identity and privacy, think they kind of overlap a lot. I totally agree that I believe that when someone who is completely new installs a wallet and then they see those like a fat address of OX and... It makes very little sense. mean, at the beginning, it's at least partly alien to everyone. We have Iban, which is also numbers, but this looks like something completely different. So yeah.

Kris yeah, I could talk about ENS all day, but I don't wanna bore you. yeah, I

Cinesius I Ambire No, no, no, no. I'm completely on the side that we need to do way better in terms of identity. And this is, think that mostly on wallets and Embodied is guilty here as well. mean, we support ENS, like many features, we build many warnings and so on. Like if your result address changed, you will get a warrant. If your address is about to expire, you

Kris Yeah, yeah. That's really cool.

Cinesius I Ambire get a warning. But we never... We did not implement any subnames yet or names where you can name your name in the onboarding flow. It's something that we've been talking for a very long time and I would love to see added. But yeah, we got quite a couple of user requests. But one of the main drop-offs point I believe is that you need to have funds to...

Kris No.

Cinesius I Ambire No, you don't need, but if you want to get, if you want to get like right now, if you go to, if people go to ENS page and you need to buy like a, is it like a three or five year subscription right now? I think that this is the biggest drop off point that, yeah.

Kris You can but you can do sub names. For sub names they don't they don't pay anything.

Cinesius I Ambire That yes, but what we hear is like, okay, they hear about ENS and then they need to go to app and then they need to have some funds on Ethereum to register the name. That was at least from our feedback from the community chats, the biggest drop off in terms of.

Kris Yeah. You know how we you know how we see the how we see the user journey for best ENS experience is that all apps and all like app services, wallets, whoever, even even chains like BASE and Cello who have implemented this, the best kind of user journey is that you offer subnames first because they are very customizable in a sense that you can mint them on any chain that you want. You can sponsor the mint so users don't even have to pay for the mint and yet they get an NFT on any chain that you want. but also you can issue them off chain, which is data just a database that you control, or if you delegate it to us to namespace, we can manage it among like among other like millions of sub names that we've already managed. I think you're also underestimating how simple this is to do. Like we have the skills for this. You can literally hack it together yourself in like a few hours. And your experienced developers can probably do it in twenty minutes. But anyway, so like how the ideal user journey looks like I come to Embire, I just register a username. I don't know if you've ever used Uniswap wallet. They have a really, really cool experience. So you register using uni.eth. So you can like use embire.eth or embire dot id or whatever if you want to expand into other ecosystems. Like I don't know if you ever plan to support like Bitcoin or Solana or all of these all of these assets on different chains. and you just register a subname. And after that, you allow people, once they receive some funds, you can allow them to graduate to any NS name. That would be ideal because graduating to ENS name actually contributes to the NS DAO and the DAO revenue because you register a name for five dollars. But having a subname is totally fine. And one of the like super underrated values and benefits of having a subname is because when I have MBR.e subname and I if I set that to be my primary name. I carry Empire brand with every single transaction on chain that I do it. whether it is like I'm on some leaderboard, whether I'm on some DAO voting dashboard, whether I'm like wherever. And if they have resolution implemented, my kep.mpire.eth is gonna be displayed. And I think people just like underestimate the value of this. Also, you have a really strong community, so I'm sure people will be rocking like empire.eth subnames on on X as well and wherever else. But yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire I didn't think about that a lot, but it's a very nice point from the branding perspective. And now when visiting websites and apps, see that more and more people support the DNS resolution.

Kris Exactly.

Cinesius I Ambire Some scanners do not yet.

Kris Which ones? Which ones? Tell me. We have a perfect solution for them.

Cinesius I Ambire Just the other day I was looking, so some user sent us some... some screenshots saying, yo guys, you hold, there is a large holder of like 50 % of our token. And I said, no, no, no, that's like, that's a staking, sorry. That's a, sorry, I had my mobile. That's a staking contract

Kris That's good.

Cinesius I Ambire and we have it labeled as staking.embire.eth or something like this. And I'll find it out and I'll send it to you.

Kris yeah, thanks. I I appreciate it. We we we build a bunch of products and and tools for every possible way that you can use an experiment with ENS. and I just actually kind of rebuild the the the products page on our website so it's you don't have to like scroll and scroll and scroll. You can just like look at all of them in one view. But anyway, I know we schedule for for one hour, but we can go for like I I

Cinesius I Ambire the

Kris enjoy talking to you. We can talk more. And I have a there's one more question that I wanted to ask, that I kind of remember through out talking to you guys. You guys are big on privacy. So tell me about privacy and your just relationship with in in with Ethereum Foundation in the context of privacy or even like bigger context.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, privacy has been thrown all around recently and it's one of

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire the hottest narratives. But what I particularly love is that it seems to be a narrative that it's sticking. So people are valuing and caring about their privacy more and more. And wonder not, there's a lot of weird news of people getting tracked and so on online and so many breaches of... Email databases and so on, many sad stories. So people really started caring about, about privacy. And Vitalik did a very nice tweet or a point. I'm not even sure it was, if it was about privacy on like, in on Ethereum or it was privacy in AI, but he said that if you want your privacy to be complete, you need to have like all your house polished. every room. It's not enough if you just have your kitchen sorted out, but your bedroom is a mess. And this was an amazing analogy of how privacy works when you like interact with anything in terms of crypto. And on wallets, most people when they hear about privacy, the first trigger or the first association is private transfers. It's stuff that you can track on chain on explorers and so on. But there is another side of privacy which a lot of people like to call the off-chain privacy. And this is, for example, the part of when you open up your wallet and how your wallet gets all the data, which tokens you hold and so on. we kind of build a middle layer on how tokens get fetched. So you're not talking directly. And this was, I believe, also one of the main reasons it was one of them on why EF decided to fork AmbiR for the Kohaku privacy initiative. We've been building this wallet from the ground up to be privacy preserving. It's not the easiest way. Like whatever you do, you can go with a simpler option that is not private. So this takes a lot of time. And we decided to build... a special section in the wallet, it's called privacy opt-outs, which basically enables you to opt out of everything, like out of M-BAR API, out of fetching also, ENS.

Kris Nice.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, like you can go like full, full way. So basically you can use, very soon you'll be able to use the wallet just as a RPC wrapper. Like transaction simulation is directly with an RPC. there is no third party provider like fetching the balances and so on. So you can granularly exclude, you can opt out of 4337, of 7702, of ENS fetching, of clear signing, of...

Kris You're building it like a transformers.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. So we put really a lot of consideration, but this does not, how to say? So again, this is not something that... that monetizes. This makes zero revenue to us.

Kris I was gonna say I was gonna say why do this? Like as a business decision, like why do this? But then

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, yeah.

Kris as you know, nerdy experimental, like contribute back to the community, fight for fight a good fight, I understand it. But so you guys seem like you're kind of balancing between those two. You're sort of like as a public good thing, but you're also like work as a business.

Cinesius I Ambire Yep. Basically, I'd say that we just recently started to look into monetization a bit more. Of course, we monetize via Swap and Bridge, which is now like it supports all major aggregators. It gets really amazing quotes, but there are people, most of our users, I'd say that swap outside the wallet. Like you go out to an app and you swap without any

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire fee. But I've been pushing to be bit more proactive on the monetization part. So yeah, one of the most exciting things, like what people love is private transfers with Railgun and privacy pools. Basically a bit back to the Kohaku. Kohaku is you can imagine a toolbox like an SDK of features that any wallet will be able to implement so you have a feature of private transfers it would be super difficult for a wallet to like decide and just build the whole support for privacy pools and for Railgun and this is also not one of the things that makes money to wallets right what makes money swaps its perps its built-in prediction markets So we have said, OK, privacy on Ethereum sucks. Let's spin up a project and let's make a toolbox, an SDK for all Ethereum wallet builders to easily support privacy stuff. this is Kohaku basically. And it has many primitives, different features, yeah, private transfers with Tornado, Cash, Railgun and Privacy Pulse are the most hyped and people care them about a lot. We finished integration for railgun and privacy pools. We're testing it internally now, so it should be live fairly, fairly soon.

Kris Yeah. Can you just tell me you mentioned something by the way, that's like really awesome. can you tell me you s you said there was like a middle layer that you guys built that allows you to not pull the tokens from what what did you say?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, so basically the middle layer, it fetches price for example from Coingecko API and so on and then it saves those prices. It refreshes, I believe on every three minutes now or something like this and then when an address needs data, it fetches the data from that. So from our layer, it doesn't dox the address directly to the RPC.

Kris okay. Okay, that's really cool.

Cinesius I Ambire So it's a nice privacy preserving feature. You can disable it at any point or you can edit your customer PC inside. And even that's one of the amazing stuff. If you're on your own mode and if you want to just use your RPC, when you install the wallet, you can configure it in a way so never phones back before importing your accounts. You can create a wallet, assign your RPC, do privacy opt-outs and features like... as you fit and then you import your accounts so you never get doxxed. Yeah.

Kris Got it. Yeah. Man. So cool. but tell me what's next for you guys? well, how does the next year look like? How do the next five years look like? Maybe not just you, just like wallets in general as an industry. Where are we going? like this brings

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, that's an amazing part.

Kris me. Yeah, just qu for a quick second. Do you remember like when the crypto was in very early days, 2017, 18, 19, and people were complaining how like a necessity to have a wallet in order to plug into this world of crypto or the new world, blockchains, new internet, new everything is just a flawed design. And people were s were saying like wallets have to be built into the entire kind of experience so users don't even have to know or like have to download it or this or that. Like can you imagine using internet and a browser and like having a prerequisite of something to do. Do you remember those days? you're muted.

Cinesius I Ambire Sorry, Yes, this is a topic that we can talk about for another year, for another hour

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire and half. But yeah, the whole thing was like the fat wallet pieces. So a wallet should have everything, should have swap built in purpose, like to do everything inside the wallet. And then on the other side, the skinny wallet pieces. I think that both will succeed because the market is big enough for both. You will always have people who will prefer to have a design to use everything inside the wallet, but you will also have people who want to go outside. So I would say that there is no reason why we should champion just one design. Yeah,

Kris Which camp do you see guys in?

Cinesius I Ambire we are more on the skinny wallet. This is. Basically, we don't have purpose. We don't have prediction markets. We don't have on the ramps at the moment. So there is a lot of design space for us in that direction. But at the moment, we are not taking it. We paid a lot of attention recently to safe multisig and supporting it natively inside M-Buyers. So I don't see doing purpose or prediction markets. built inside the wallet anytime soon. But this is an amazing point that you made and I hate to see people on the timeline bashing one another like you know, fuck your thesis, it's not okay. The only thing that we should care about is that user should be free and should have free hands for migrating from one wallet to another. which in case of smart accounts, that's not the case. If you create your account with, let's say in some smart account wallet, like if I create a smart account in Empire, I cannot take it to safe because there is no seed, there is no private key and you get basically locked into using one wallet, which is terrible. But most of people won't say that because yeah.

Kris Yeah. But

Cinesius I Ambire Portability is huge issue also the debate over the weekend with passkeys and so on. Yeah, they are amazing. They like the UX is great. But like I can't transfer my wallet from one to another if shit goes down. Like what's the point? That's not crypto. Truly. It is self-custody, but it's not something that the initial idea of Ethereum was.

Kris Maybe people look at it from the perspective I I agree with you, but maybe if I had to give a carta argument I would say it's good enough that I can just transfer assets from one wallet to the other. I don't have to necessarily transfer the entire account itself. But it's a it's a pain in the ass if I have a lot of assets and I have the history. That's like a huge issue as well. Like the reputation should a reputation should be transferable. Your identity should be transferable. If I have a wallet

Cinesius I Ambire Exactly.

Kris If I have a wallet that I have been v voting in different DAO governances and that I used, for base in Avon, airdrops aside, it's just a like I think one of the things that defines the quality user is the history of that user's wallet and the contents and the assets in that wallet. And if you cannot transfer that or or if you like transfer the assets but you cannot transfer the entire history, like you lose a lot, you know.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, it's not really exactly as you described and this basically goes back to the point of us doing smart accounts only in the beginning. People don't like that. So yeah, but there is a lot

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire of design space open for everyone. I think that we need to focus more on growing the demand for Ethereum and not like bashing one another with like

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire There is a place for everything. You'll have maxis in all directions, but please no unnecessary drama on the...

Kris I I think I think it's fine to be a moxie for a technology or a product or a community that you like, but it's not okay to be the fucking shitty moxie which like it's a tribalism,

Cinesius I Ambire you

Kris right? I don't I don't subscribe to subscribe to tribalism because tribalism implies that like my camp is better than yours. No, but like being a maxi about Ethereum or Solano, like whoever, fine by me. Just enjoy, have fun. I feel like we're all working toward the same purpose. we're trying to rebuild the entire fucking world from the ground up. We start with the financial rails. There's an effort with identity rails. There's like a lot of good things happening in t tokenization and real world assets and stuff. So we're rebuilding the world and the the odds have been a lot against us over the last ten, fifteen years. Like stupid odds. Now things are looking up, looking better. So maybe that gives people a little bit of kind of flexibility to try to like pick fights or whatever. But I'm I'm not one of those guys. so yeah, I guess we agree.

Cinesius I Ambire same. It's very much the same.

Kris yeah, so what's what like tell me what's next? I have a thesis that like like wallets are gonna go into many different directions. You're gonna have like wallet like OG wallets MetaMask, even you guys and then like There there's gonna be a lot of wallets that are being run as a business, so they're gonna be obviously be adding purpose and trading and options and all of these things, which I'm personally against. I think there are gonna be wallets who just offer you very, safe assets. they're probably gonna be like DeFi oriented yields wallets for savings and accounts. So that's my thesis. I think we're gonna have wallets, For different industries, for different geographies, for different purposes. But I'm cu I'm curious to hear yours. Where where how do you see volets in the next five, ten years?

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, we did a super cool

Kris Ha ha.

Cinesius I Ambire analysis on how where wallets are moving and the current direction is a lot into the new banking space. So having a card and so on.

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire I think that Iterfy is a very good example of what we could be heading towards. So yeah, I think that most wallets did a card right now. So that's obviously the way.

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire And we will also explore it in some way because like it makes a lot of sense for a wallet. Every bank nowadays, every like threat fire, whatever has like a card where you can spend your assets. So that's a very common and a very logical solution for all the wallets. But in general, I would... pick your camp in terms of like there's gonna be multiple different like ways that you have Ave which now has their own app and it's

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire just for like yield and you will have like FOMO which is for the DJs where you basically have or paper trade and casino stuff you'll have that then you'll have the general kind of wallets which I think are MetaMask, Rabi, Mbuyer so Yeah,

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire it will go into a lot of different directions, but one.

Kris Maybe a better question is like what will change, what will stay the same? Can you predict like I know it's a it's a s weird question

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris to ask because we don't know what tomorrow's brings, especially

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris in crypto but

Cinesius I Ambire So one thing that I believe, and I also see like a trend when also like user interviews and like talking with people, we, right now, I'm talking with people who know a little bit about what they do on chain. A lot of people have like many, many different accounts and those accounts are like kinda right in your head. You have this maze. Okay, this account is connected to that account, but they cannot send funds to that account because I will dock that account. And we have tons of accounts because privacy reasons. So when we get privacy by default, no idea when it's gonna happen but Kohaku is a good starter will have way less accounts so things will get into yeah so you need way way way less account because you won't need to think okay i'm sending assets there now i'm interacting with Aave here but i cannot do that there so i see a clear trend of like if you have 10 accounts in your Metamask or Anbar today, you'll probably have three in the future. That's

Kris Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire my thesis.

Kris I'm trying to connect back to myself. I have a lot of accounts, but it's not for privacy reasons. You just I don't even know why. You know? I try to separate them. Like I occasionally I'll go like, I I'll create another account and I'm just gonna put like normal safe assets on this account. And that usually ends up being, you know, I invest in something

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah.

Kris which is like, this is interesting, you know. like Ave dropped like twenty thirty percent. I'm gonna throw my and then like it becomes like ten, twenty assets again. I'm like Okay, I need a fresh start. So I'll I'll do that a couple of times. But I don't think for me it's a privacy thing. I use Fluid Key, you g you Fluid Klay Fluid Key?

Cinesius I Ambire Yes, I love it. I love the approach and there is another app right now. It's called Cloaked Wallet or something like this. has... Yeah,

Kris Yeah, they use ENS, I know. Shout out to Cloaked.

Cinesius I Ambire they have very nice... Like, it's a good attempt. It's not like... it is privacy preserving. But if you screw up down the line, if you send from your address to some address that you do not want to send to it's I think it's a good partial solution. But yeah, it's super cool to see that wallets are finally building privacy preserving features because

Kris Nice.

Cinesius I Ambire one of the biggest problems like we talk about privacy, privacy is important, privacy matters and so on. The biggest thing is that and it's a big marketing challenges where for self-custody and for privacy. People don't care about it until it's too late. It's a very classical seatbelt problem. You do not care about your privacy and who gets your data until it's too late. So we need to be very proactive. We are going into some very, I don't want to say dark ages, but with AI and everything, I think that it's way better for us to have minimal privacy on the web. in terms of comparing it to exposing everything. So it totally makes sense to enforce privacy by default.

Kris Not not even AI. You mentioned AI in terms of potential potential to compromise your privacy, but like look at the laws. Look at the European Union laws for threat control. I just this morning I saw something else. I t like a something about some packaging or whatever. Like, dude, these guys are like I don't know what they're doing. Things things are getting serious. There's a there's a I should probably have him on a podcast. I'm not sure where what ended up being with that, but they were writing They formed a group of people who are advocating for privacy and digital identity done right in the European Union and Switzerland. So they had like this entire big draft proposal how privacy should be defined, how what should it should include and blah blah. But it seems like the European Union does what they want. So I'm I'm more scared of governments than I'm scared of AI. But then governments with AI, that's a that's

Cinesius I Ambire Haha

Kris a that's a doomsday scenario. Yeah.

Cinesius I Ambire Combo. Cool. Man, thank you very much. I will need to run. We did.

Kris Thank you, sir. I appreciate you so much. I enjoyed this conversation so much. We killed an hour and a half. It flew by. I

Cinesius I Ambire you

Kris didn't even notice it. one minute for you. send a message to everyone. Give us some bullish news. Tell us what to do. Go download Empire. Give us anything. Imagine you're famous and I just gave you a minute to This is imagine this

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, I would say.

Kris is going to millions of people.

Cinesius I Ambire Yeah, I would say to definitely try out the mobile app. So we recently launched it. It's access only, but ping me or Ambyr on X and we'll hook up with an access. We just do like invite code because we want to make it polish like with like a couple of thousand people and then release it into the world just so we are sure that it works. Periputure extension and one thing that I would like to say to everyone is try and start using Multi6 because they are an amazing way to protect stuff. So we are very bullish about Multi6, so have a look into safe and try it out with Empire, provide feedback and we'll be happy to build for you.

Kris There you go. Thank you, my friend. Thanks everyone.

Cinesius I Ambire Cap, it was a big pleasure. Thank you and everyone have a great day.

Kris Looking forward to seeing you next time, my friend.

Cinesius I Ambire Hope for the soon.

Kris Foi

Cinesius I Ambire Waiter.