‘Completely useless’: It’s official decentralized crypto wallets are a pain. Blockchain company Fun aims to solve this
Fun, a firm that aims to solve sizable decentralized crypto wallets, has just announced a pre-seed funding round led by a Tinder co-founder’s VC firm.
JAM Fund is a venture capital firm created by Justin Mateen, co-founder of popular dating app Tinder, and it has invested a good portion of the US$3.9 pre-seed funding round raised by San Francisco firm Fun. (Not to be confused with a crypto-gaming focused project that goes by the same name.)
Other major VCs, including SOMA Capital, NOMO Ventures, and Great Oaks Venture Capital, have also participated, along with Cory Levy — apparently a prominent early-stage tech investor.
What is fun?
It is a blockchain software development company that is building cross-chain wallet infrastructure on the Odsy blockchain – which is a security-focused network of decentralized wallets, also known as dWallets.
Considering the amount of continued risk associated with wallet hacks and cross-chain bridging between assets, not to mention how notoriously difficult crypto wallets actually are to use, this is an important area for the industry to address.
To that end, Fun plans to use the funds to “develop more dynamic, secure and expressive wallets and access control applications”.
‘Clear momentum’ towards more intuitive wallets
To learn more, Stockhead posed some questions to Mario Baxter, Fun’s CTO and a former machine learning engineer at Meta. (Warning, this gets a bit cryptographically technical in a few places. We’ve linked to explanations where appropriate.)
Hi Mario. Without mentioning anything in particular, even the most widely used decentralized crypto wallets are complex and difficult to use for beginners in the crypto space… would you agree?
“Yes, there are many pain points with current decentralized crypto wallets. A user unfamiliar with many of the technical details will find them completely useless.
What do you think are some of the main barriers or problems people face with them?
We have found that traditional Web 2.0 users are not aware of the implications of losing a private key or seed phrase, and they do not understand or care what network they are using and lack many cryptospeak terms such as decentralization, trustlessness, permissionlessness, etc .
The good news is that if we look at the evolution of crypto wallets over time, there is a very clear momentum towards more intuitive and user-friendly wallets.
Simplicity will breed mass adoption
Do you think improving crypto wallet usability is a big part of unlocking more widespread crypto adoption?
Just as the internet was unable to reach mass adoption until connecting to and using it became available to the everyday person, blockchain technology will not reach mass adoption until it becomes easy enough for the average person to use.
The average internet user today does not know the difference between HTTP, TCP and SMTP, but is still able to send email. Similarly, crypto users should not need to know the ins and outs of the protocols they use under the hood, and all of this should be abstracted away from the end user.
So how is Fun going to solve crypto wallet usage issues?
Managing private keys and a technical awareness of the underlying blockchain protocols at work are two of the main usability issues traditional Web 2.0 users face when interacting with Web3.
Our product roadmap aims to attack both of these problems: a more intuitive management of private keys by leveraging recent innovations in dWallets and ZKML [zero knowledge machine learning]and abstracting underlying blockchain protocols by leveraging the native interoperability features of dWallets and user-focused design.
Why Odsy?
Why did you specifically choose to build on the Odsy Network?
While there are a few entities building towards this vision today, the winner of this race will necessarily have a strong cryptographic background, but just as importantly, they will have a comprehensive cybersecurity background. The Odsy Network team is by far the best equipped in both these dimensions.
Turing-complete MPC (multi-party computation) will undoubtedly be a fundamental building block for the entire blockchain industry over the next decade.
Odsy Network’s dWallet primitive and the work we do at Fun will be core puzzle pieces on the journey towards decentralized wallets that can be used by the masses.
How will Fun and Odsy reduce the risk of cryptohacking/bridging, or other exploitation risks that you are aware of?
The Bridge hack has resulted in more than $2 billion of compromised user crypto funds to date. These hacks will be much less likely to happen with interoperability protocols built on top of the Odsy Network due to the explicit division of labor.
The Odsy Network is focused on building a general infrastructure that exposes the dWallet primitive to developers. They have some of the best cryptographers and cyber security experts in the world working to make this infrastructure maximally secure.
Developers building on the Odsy Network, like Fun, can take the dWallet primitive for granted and build on top of it without worrying about the technical implementation details.
So this allows developers to implement MPC interoperability applications with orders of magnitude less logical complexity than was previously possible. This reduction in complexity makes bugs much less likely to creep in and hacks less likely.
Stockhead has not provided, endorsed or otherwise assumed responsibility for any financial product advice contained in this article.
