E117: WalletConnect Founder: Why Your Digital Identity Will Replace Your Passport

0:00My mission is to make wallets work together. Because a future where wallets don't work together means a monopoly, where only one wallet takes the whole market. Because someone is always afraid of sharing a bit of the market share, which is kind of counterintuitive that you have to share market share. But the reason you share market share is that you grow the market as a whole. Pedro Gomez is the founder of Wallet Connect, an open source protocol that securely connects users to decentralized apps. trusted by over 45 million users and powering 275 million plus connections. 90 % of the time your legal identity is tightly coupled to some financial benefit, whether it's taxes, salary or investment.

0:42So if your blockchain address was directly related to your salary, investment and taxes, what is more important to you? The national passport or your blockchain address? How do I approach investing? Any investing that I've done has mostly been because I know the founders. I believe in their dedication, strength, and willingness to make the project succeed. Too many times people get too caught up with the idea. Even the worst idea could be successful if you have a very strong founder behind it. The other day you mentioned Ukraine war forcing you to think about decentralization. Yeah, this one was a tough one.

1:17It definitely caused us to really think that this is needed much sooner than we think. But Volkan had this very bad episode where we actually ended up sanctioning Ukraine and Russia. We had to like completely drop the connections and everything. And this was when I realized this is why decentralization exists. What's the future of Wallet Connect?

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2:58Actually, I never really thought about it, but it's actually always what I wanted. I was like, how do I do something that everybody agrees on that it's the most credible? And for that, you need to only associate yourself with big founders and big brands. And even at some point, if you want to monetize, the only people who can sponsor are the big brands. So you need to, it's kind of like this kind of flywheel, but that is kind of hard to build. And then I never thought about having other kind of smaller people on, to be honest. I always thought like this is going to hurt the brand, etc. But there's probably a way to do it.

3:32In the long term, maybe it hurts. Not in the short term. In the short term, it actually adds incredible value, right? Because you establish your brands and then in the long term, then you eventually will plateau. So you need to really like figure out how you're going to scale it. and creating a new segment is the best way because then you don't dilute the existing brand and you can still expand and grow. When you say in the long term, you can't hurt your brand, like do you have examples, like real examples? For example, of a luxury brand that would have done it wrong. Right, so luxury brands. If you are selling, whether it's like luxury cars or luxury fashion, eventually you will run out of clients.

4:13Sure, you can launch a new car, but then it's always going to be the same thing, right? And then your market will hit a plateau. And if you then create a new car, which is an affordable version of your luxury car, now all the people that dream of having the luxury car can buy this new segment because one day they will eventually get the luxury car. Or at least that's the dream that you're selling. You're not just selling the car, you're selling the dream of the high brand. And the podcast is the same. This applies almost to everything. Who are you? I like to call myself like an engineer, like, and that's what I always identified myself.

5:00But I started realizing that my biggest value is actually understanding beyond just engineering. Too many times I meet these developers and they are too caught up with the actual engineering to understand that what they're building has a much bigger impact. And I think what WallaConnect has done and that I always focus on is just connecting really people. And this connection goes beyond technology. It also goes through designers, marketing people, and everything. We're all trying to solve the same problem, but we can't talk to each other. So, yes, I'm an engineer that is not so engineer. What's the moment that you went from engineer to an engineer that is not so engineer?

5:52It definitely happened gradual, but it actually happens. I was working back in 2017 on a wallet for ITM. I was just another engineer on this team. And, you know, Wallet Connect came out as a solution. but then this solution got like so popular like on twitter it kind of just blew up right it went from like this demo 27 of march remember the day perfectly and like one month later everyone was talking about it and then the ethereum foundation was like we're gonna like provide you a grant and that got me out of the team went full-time solo and then i realized that now i have to be the bd i have to be the marketing i have to be the legal the operation i have to be everyone and now engineering was only like 20 of what i did i had to learn every other task that i had to do and i realized that connecting with people like i don't even like calling it bd because i think it's too reductive of what i do it's really to act as a mediator between all of these companies to work together that was the biggest shift so how much do you like your role versus being an engineer right very focused because you have to be yeah people connector right i miss the engineering part i have to be honest i miss it a lot but there's this really interesting middle ground which i currently fit in which is like these standards right because standards are highly technical but standards only work if multiple participants are involved and that's where I really found my niche which is I have to understand incredibly technical topics but they only work if I get competitors if I get people who don't talk to each other at all to work together and build these standards together so it is like this intersection between like business development and engineering, but neither can do it perfectly.

7:59You have to be right in the middle. You have to be a mediocre engineer and a mediocre BDE, but like the right standards guy. What is your mission?

8:12Honestly, it's unifying everything together. You go to these places, like conferences, you take video calls, and you hear everyone basically screaming out the same problems. And you see the solutions very easily, which is like, you guys just need to work together. Like, sometimes I try to actually do too much. For example, now I'm kind of trying to get Ethereum layer twos to work together. And that's a little bit outside of scope. But at least my mission is to make wallets work together. Because the future where wallets don't work together means a monopoly, where only one wallet takes the whole market.

8:54and then you have this distributed decentralized permissionless blockchain which is controlled by a single wallet and we just basically reinvented banks we reinvented facebook and we now have one company owning the blockchain how do we avoid that um well first of all i think people need to read on history right this has happened before like it happened with email email is probably one of the most distributed decentralized technologies that is solely owned by Google. And people don't realize that, right? Like email only works because Google just took over. And that's obviously not a great situation for decentralized technology.

9:38And social media had so many moments in time that it could have been decentralized, but then Facebook took over. And that's why it works. We've done this multiple times and the reason we always end up in this centralized solution is because someone is always afraid of sharing. Like sharing a piece of technology, sharing a bit of the market share, which is hard, right? It's kind of counterintuitive that you have to share market share. But the reason you share market share is that you grow the market as a whole. and I hope that we build better networks that incentivize growing the markets together rather than killing markets to build monopolies.

10:26It's completely counterintuitive to the founder mindset. If you look at wallets now, MetaMask probably still used a lot but kind of old school, right? And you have Phantom Wallet kind of taking over everything because it's simple to use and because at some point I feel people just, it's all about trust, right? and the most trusted or the most used becomes the most trusted, which becomes the most used, which becomes the most trusted. And then the other ones could come and be more secure, whatever argument they have, right? Yes. I don't see how we end up in a different place than email in crypto wallets, for example.

11:07You just have to let go of the technology part, right? Like if you let go of the technological modes and you focus on the other modes, which are not, you really can't scale trust. Trust is a very, very difficult to scale. And that's why blockchains were invented. Like blockchains were invented to scale trust beyond borders, beyond nations, beyond everything. I like really the term 1KX, one of the first investors in WalletConnect. They actually call blockchains trust machines. And I think that's an amazing way of putting it because it scaled something that was unscalable before. But even then, you cannot scale customer relations.

11:56And wallets are customer relationship for blockchains. but that does not mean that they have to own the technology does not mean that they have to like now close close source close apis and essentially recreate the same problems that we have in web with siloed data siloed infrastructure you can still own the customer relationship and it's very hard to win over a new customer right that's already a very strong moat anyway how do you change an entrepreneur mindset from going from close to open? We have the example with AI, right? AI US, open AI, then you have like the kind of Chinese version, completely open source.

12:43You have to have someone who come and is very strong and open sources everything that shows the way and actually kind of forces the market to do that. Otherwise, no participant will have the incentive to do it. I think it's not that hard to sell on this vision in blockchain because things change every month. So even if you closed source, your moats today might be old school three months later. So it really becomes speed. It's all about speed. And closed sourcing or open source is not going to change the fact that you have to just innovate incredibly fast to even stay in the game. The only thing that will remain is your relationship with your customer.

13:31And that's what you should put all your resources into. That relationship has to be not just the marketing team, not just the BD team. It has to be the leadership team, the engineering team, like all of these individuals that work for startups, big corporations that believe that they can just like clock in and clock out and do their job. They have to understand that they are actually in a relationship with their customer. And that's something that's slowly starting to be understood in crypto. And we're starting to see these founder-led marketing, team-led marketing. And they're realizing that people stick to their products because they like the people in those teams.

14:15Dear When Shift Happens family, The following message is probably the single most important thing you should take away from today's podcast. If you're serious about your crypto investing journey, please take some time to learn how to self-custody your assets to make sure that nobody can take your coins away, ever. If you don't learn how to be your own bank, it is very likely that one day you will lose all your hard-earned crypto. The safest way to hold your crypto is in a cold storage that we also call hardware wallets. Hardware wallets are not complicated and they give you peace of mind. I personally use a hardware wallet called Treasurer.

14:49It is open source, very easy to use, and the first hardware wallet created ever. As you like to say it in crypto, not your keys, not your coin. You can order your Treasurer wallet with a 10 % discount by following the link in the description down below and by using the promo code WSH10. And now back to the episode. 100%. We'll talk about personal brands a bit later on. you talked about unifying everything right you lived in multiple countries which led you to question a concept that most people do not question nation state identity yeah what is i mean tell us about your life especially around that part right moving around and seeing the problems and explain the concept of nation-based identity and why it doesn't make sense?

15:46I think that most people, and when I say most people, I see literally not beyond our cryptosphere, they tend to be born in one place, get raised, go to school, get a job, and then they don't get exposed a lot and a lot of the times people get exposed to other countries through tourism but tourism is kind of like you getting a sample in a supermarket but you actually didn't like have the whole product so you actually don't know if you really like it like very few people actually have spent beyond the 7 to 14 days on a single place to really feel another country and the more time you spend abroad the more you realize that's all the same so all the special quirks and everything that you put yourself as like this is me were just like environmental influences on you right they were just things that you heard every day they were just things that you saw every day and then it wasn't really you like the true you is the one that actually will persist no matter where you live so this national identity thing is kind of like just you sticking to your environment and it doesn't really make sense for us to hold on so dearly because what's the actual social benefit of it what's the actual economical benefit of it like isn't it better that there is more economic growth and isn't that economic growth going to come from having more people participating in it.

17:26One of the worst things about Europe is the language barriers. We have united Europe, but there's still language barriers. Even if you removed the actual borders, which were done through the Chegnan Treaty, people still don't talk to each other as much because of the language barriers. And that actually influences commerce, that actually influences business relationships. And if we just shared one language, our economy would 10x right away. And I think people don't want to share a language because they're still holding on to their national identities. I mean, some people would argue that this is actually the beauty of the world history, right?

18:08And not everything is about business. Yes. Why does that make for someone who's moved a lot? I mean, for me, for example, I'll give an example. I mean, now I live in Singapore. I do some charity trips to Cambodia sometimes where we go help kids there. And I'm always thinking, and I thought that all my life actually, I mean, all my life, at least the last 10, 15 years, why is being born somewhere, you know, you can be born like an hour plane away from another place and it's going to kind of define everything about your life, right? Just because of where you're born and just because of these borders that were kind of invented by humans, which don't make any sense.

18:47because if you actually walk on earth there's no border right it's just anything everything that was put by people why is that even the case and why is it so hard for people to move what's the benefit there like what's the reason why we have this nation these nations and these nation-based identities the reason borders exist is because all of these countries had hits like glorious days at different stages in life if we all just started our countries at the same time we would have had a very different distribution of power but like most of these civilizations actually you know started at different stages and the glorious periods of one might have been the dark ages of another one and the borders were ways of containing those problems like for wealth to stay within the glorious days of one country and not just like dilute into the dark ages of another country right but right now like it's 2025 and the difference between the glorious days of one country or another are getting smaller and smaller and with the internet what we've seen is that we actually are very similar like we can have like people contributing in so many different ways from so many different countries and then these borders are starting to like matter less and less and now with blockchain we actually broke another barrier before we broke the information barrier where people can just talk to each other across borders now people can exchange value at this point the borders are starting to become really meaningless and we are starting to see the economical benefits of us having very different backgrounds different cultures even different languages, but sharing economies.

20:36And I think that too many times when I talk about this, like breaking borders, people focus too much on like, oh, you want to kill our cuisine and our like music and our culture. I'm like, well, those things actually don't influence economy. I would like a global economy. It does not mean you cannot have local culture. When we talked the other day, you told me blockchain helps rethink identity beyond borders just as it challenges financial systems. Can you explain with more concrete examples? Because you said, oh, like blockchain enables a more global world, but like, can you give some concrete examples of people who are less familiar with blockchains or have some concrete example of, oh man, this is a big change?

21:22I guess we just have to think from first principles is like, why do you even care about your, like passport or your id 90 of time like people care about it because either they need to get a job or they want to make some financial investment or they want to pay taxes in such country so when you think about it like 90 of the time your legal identity is tightly coupled to some financial benefit, like whether it's taxes, salary, or investment. So if we globalize finance as a whole, then what is more important to you, the national passport or your blockchain address? If your blockchain address was directly related to both your salary, investment, and taxes, then that truly would be more important than your password we need an internet level identity to one day get truly global identity what does that mean currently the only forms of identity that we have are owned by companies like you contact me either through email or telegram or a phone number and all of these forms of digital identity are owned by companies they're not native to the internet blockchain is the first form of identity that is truly decentralized like you don't point to a single company and say they can shut down my id with telegram facebook twitter google like even phone numbers there is an actual corporation that can make a decision to shut down your id and it doesn't mean like i think too many times people think oh but google why would they shut down my id like google doesn't care like google doesn't want to shut you down but in external forces can make them shut down right for example like countries sanctioning a certain country or even military forces like there's multiple ways through where they can be coerced to shut down your id so if your id which could be tightly coupled to your income investment and taxes or even like your residence was completely detached from any organization then it would actually be yours it would actually be your id and you could take it anywhere you want a new way to not solve this entire problem but at least do your part in helping people get this kind of digital identity that goes beyond beyond border um your way is called wallet connect you're the founder of wallet connect what is wallet connect if you had to explain it to your mom so wallet connect i i really like the name because it really explains in a single word it connects wallets but then it doesn't say what it connects to and that's intentional because we don't want wallets to purely connect to on-chain applications like it does today we want wallets to connect to everything we have actually had people in our community build several experiments where they actually use wallet connect to connect to an atm to literally withdraw cash we had like someone do a gallery exhibition where you could actually connect your wallets to an actual digital arts on a digital frame we had people actually connect to cars through their like interfaces so you can really connect anywhere with wallet connect and it's trying to break the barriers of both wallet monopolies where we don't want one wallet to own the infrastructure and also the barriers of applications where one application would essentially control or dictate what wallets are good and what wallets are bad you know living in this like permissionless nature for wallets will then have a direct impact on your identity because wallets control your identity on the blockchain and if even the blockchain was truly decentralized the wallet could control your identity so if the wallet can't control your identity the blockchain can't control your identity and not wallet connect can control your identity then we would actually create a better environment for you to trust your identity You previously worked for a neobank in London before all this crypto journey started, right?

26:16And neobanks are supposed, I mean, were supposed or are supposed to solve the traditional banking issues, but they don't really. How did working for a neobank lead you to discovering blockchains and more particularly Ethereum? on yeah so i got this job uh back in 2016 for the neobank and i was really excited because um prior to that i was very involved into photography and e-commerce and i really got excited of this idea of like online payments and one of the most important parts of the online payment was like the visa card and actually having a bank but like even if visa built like the best infrastructure the bank would essentially influence how that user experience would look like and around that time there was a derivative by the european union which is called psd2 that made neobanks possible it just made like the banking more open and it allowed for more people to essentially build banking experience so i was super excited to be part of like this new generation of banks but it was still built on like fundamentally flawed like infrastructure where we actually weren't a bank per se because banking licenses were still incredibly hard so you had to operate under the license of a big bank so what we actually were building was a bank in a bank and that meant that we had to listen to the big bank what they wanted we had to listen to what the regulators wanted and for me the most disappointing time was like spending like six months working on this like new feature that was what if you and your friends could share a savings account where you all deposit into the savings account to do a trip to Iceland and everyone contributes equally and after six months you have enough money and you book the trip to iceland and now you spend the funds from that savings account for that trip it's almost like an ephemeral savings account that you contribute with friends to build a trip or any goal it doesn't have to be a trip and that feature ended up like completely changed and ended up nowhere near where we originally designed because the big bank didn't want this and the regulator didn't want this and then they just kept cutting down features until we ended up into basically a savings account and it just ended up looking like a personal savings account and that's when i realized that like yes they did create an environment for innovation where technically new banks could exist but they just ended up being interfaces for the big banks and the big banks were the ones benefited because we were onboarding customers for them we're almost like a sub-bank and i just didn't feel like that was going to be the future of finance and later on ended up discovering about ethereum and realized that literally anyone could build a wallet and a wallet could do all the things that we always dreamed of doing in the neobank and yeah ended up in this crypto journey after so many years.

29:44Like every great founder, you're before anything else a problem solver. So you discover this Ethereum thing, right? It's awesome. Kind of these new rails that this narrow bank or any narrow bank actually don't have. They're building on this traditional system. So even if they're trying to make things better, which actually to be very honest, they made things way, way better, right? If you look at Monzo, Revolut, all these guys, right? They actually got so many customers because it was just so much simpler. The fintech apps. But the problem is the background, the backend is still the old one. So you discover this Ethereum kind of new infrastructure and you think it's awesome.

30:30But there was a lot of problems. What was one of the big problems that you encountered with Ethereum that led you to build Wallet Connect? um i mean if you go back to 2017 and you're trying to build a wallet um you didn't have wallet connect so wallet connect didn't exist and that meant that you had to go to every app back then and convince them to actually use your wallet and it kind of didn't feel right right because you're building a wallet your relationship was with the customer like with the user like you're trying to onboard more users to the blockchain not onboard apps to your wallet like it's a b2c relationship but it sometimes felt like more like a b2b relationship and i didn't really understand why until i actually started like just really studying how wallets were built and realized that all wallets worked exactly the same with a few caveats over how they actually communicated to apps.

31:38So because they didn't actually talk to apps the same way, then the apps had to make a choice of which ones to talk to. And this conversation we're talking about is literally the names. Like when you connect a wallet to an app, just imagine if someone said the word accounts and addresses would be enough to break compatibility between two wallets. And this for me was just crazy. There was no reason one wallet would hold a monopoly just because the way they spell the interface between an app and a wallet. And standardizing that and unifying that into a single interface meant that apps, app developers specifically, do not have to make a decision on which wallets to serve to their customers.

32:25It also means that wallets will not hold these monopolies just because of a naming convention. And it also meant that, you know, we can actually have a more competitive market because I expected a blockchain to be more competitive than fintech, but then realized very quickly that the monopoly forces were way stronger in Ethereum in 2017 than even it was for banks. So Wallet Connect was trying to solve that. So Wallet Connect is used to connect different wallets, right? But you're saying it's not a financial product. It's not. You're saying it's a solution for digital identity. Yeah, I would say that is the actual goal, right?

33:13Even though financial has been mostly portrayed for Wallet Connect. Let's start with the basics. What is a digital identity? Because everyone uses this term since, I would say, a couple of years in crypto. digital identity, digital identity, this is so important. Like what is a digital identity? I mean, I think we have to even say what is identity, right? Like if you actually go to a club or to a government or to a bank, the first thing they ask you is, can you provide an identity with a photo? And that identity with a photo usually has a name and your face. that is like the two primary factors for identity.

33:57And if you think about digital identity, it's quite similar. It's a username and a profile pic. The only difference is that like digital identity doesn't force you to use your actual face. You could have a penguin if you want as your face and you could have a username that could be dgen420, you know, and that's your identity. like it really doesn't matter like right and then give us your anonymous username maybe i should maybe account djn420 djn420 with a pingu right that would be my next identity but what's the difference between that in your national identity the only difference is like one is more physical than the other one but you could hold like as much value or even as much influence through your pengu as you could through your like physical meat space face i just have to ask because the pengu i mean it's there obviously are you a penguin believer are you interested at all into these things or are you just locked in focused on the i i honestly i would consider myself the worst trader ever i i'm very much focused on wallaconec all the time i only hold pretty much what i call blue chip like assets like bitcoin ethereum solana like those who i've actually survived and been battle tested through winters as i like to say um any other form of trading that i've done was purely uh entertainment and it did not go well like as people say never invest more than you're willing to lose and that's exactly how i would consider like all nfts meme coins or other assets that i have put money into how do i push investing in this space i mean last time you told me do you bet on the jockey or the horse because you still do some investing, right?

36:03Very little, but yes, I don't think I have enough mind space to even do investing. So any investing that I've done beyond like blue chips, like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana has mostly been because I know the founders and I've known them and I believe in their dedication and their strength and willingness to make the project succeed. so too many times people get too caught up with the white papers and the ideas and that's the the analogy of the jockey and the horse i i don't believe the horse makes a project i believe it's the jockey like the people driving the project even the worst idea could be successful if you have a very strong founder behind it you said i don't have much time to invest right how do you even have time to invest at all and put that in perspective i wanted to say like very bullish for what it connect because that's what every real founder in this space should be saying right i don't have time to all this investing thing and all this trading of follow all this drama i'm just locked in building this product right since for you it's since seven years that's bullish i mean you were telling me if a founder has a vc this is a mega red flag yeah i mean i know many founders who have vcs and you know i i like them a lot but either they have the best time management skills or they're diluting their energy uh it's just unfortunate that's true like because the best vcs that i know do not have time to build projects and the best founders i know do not have time to build vcs like both are incredibly hard to succeed so if you're doing both all i can think of is that you either have tremendous time management skills or you're not doing both at the best as you could and this is not a stab at like other founders who do have vcs i just think that all of the resources and time that you could have gained by not having a vc especially if you have investors which most people in this space or product have investor right it's just like the respect if you respect them you would rather focus on your on your company and building your product than starting to put another hat on which is the VC hat absolutely I mean I'm far from building any big product in this space I'm just a podcaster right but even that I don't have any time to barely I have any time to invest and everybody coming like hey don't invest in this in that I mean probably most of it is shit but like for me I don't even have time to to look at what's shit what's not I have no idea so I just don't look at anything because I don't have bandwidth like maybe it's because I'm dumb but I don't know how to manage my time maybe I'm too chaotic I don't know right but I don't know how other people do it for sure like I really I really don't know and honestly a podcast is a product in itself so you are a founder as well yeah sorry for another conversation I just always feel like because I'm talking to these big people in this space I'm like sometimes I'm like what the fuck am I doing man these guys are building like these mega multi hundred millions billion companies and I'm just there asking them questions with a bunch of cameras and some light like it's so simple right but yeah I mean even at that scale mine which is not that big right like with just a team of six people like i don't have any freaking time to spend like resurging and being in the trenches and do all this that that most people lose their money on anyway yeah so probably it's better to not have the time you said before i know a bunch of amazing founders like the best founders i know don't have a vc who are some of the best founders that you know that you like and why the best founders i know usually you end up finding them in the least expected places right because they are either very much involved in the product itself or they're very much involved with like their own teams there's like really two types of founders like there is the one who is more extroverted and they actually are building their products very externally.

40:34And they are essentially involved in expanding their network. They're involved in like listening to their customers directly. And those are just as impressive as those founders who are a little bit more inward facing, who are instead of building out from outwards, they're building out their teams. They're empowering their team members. They're educating their team members. they're growing they're essentially creating careers right which is a different type of founder right because uh i'm more of the outward facing founder like myself like i i probably not succeeded as much as building out an environment where people grow in their careers i was very lucky to have a lot of talented people surrounding me because they were drawn by the mission of wallet connect but that's a very different founder than some founders that i've met that they really have scaled teams and really build like these very cool environments where people are growing like they're going from juniors to seniors they're going from individual contributors to leaders and it's almost like you're building a mini accelerator inside your company like to turn the average contributor into a founder almost level right where your team members are as dedicated as the founder that's something that's very hard to achieve it's a very different type of founder skill set who do you think has an amazing job at that helping contributors of becoming almost founders i think it's very hard to pinpoint um one in particular but usually you see like these companies have a lot of spin outs right um oh actually gnosis is a good example of this um so gnosis is probably not as well known as a name today as it was in 2017 but you will know about safe you will know about cow swap and you will know about gnosis bay so gnosis has not only succeeded as a project but they also succeeded as building out incredible people that went to be founders and build great projects which is a very different type of like the founder like myself who goes into podcasts and really grows a brand they have grown people and these people ended up becoming very great founders in this industry and you know just like consensus has created like multiple successful projects on ethereum gnosis has also created multiple successful projects so they are a very impressive project that i think it's very under the radar because few remember that cow swap and safe actually came out of Gnosis and they were projects inside Gnosis.

43:37You got into crypto because of Ethereum, right? So you must have, we're talking about investing here still, you must have or at least you must have had a bias towards ETH as an asset for a long time. I think Alex from Nansen has a similar experience. I think he's also on the board of WalletConnect, right? So you guys know each other really well? Well, to correct, WalletConnect, the company, rebranded to Rion. So technically, Alex is on the board of Rion. Okay. As a real builder in this space, what are your thoughts on Ethereum and on the rise of a competitor like Solana? Yeah. Fortunately, WalletConnect, like, this all goes back to my time when I was living in Berlin and I spent a lot of time with Cosmos and Polkadot people and I started realizing we need to build Wallet Connect for Cosmos and Polkadots and the same way I realized that all wallets work the same, blockchains also work kind of similar, so we ended up upgrading Wallet Connect to work with literally every blockchain out there.

44:44This means that now Wallet Connect that exists today works not just with Cosmos, Polkadot, and Ethereum, it also works with Solana and Bitcoin and so on and so forth. But I cannot deny that many of my contributions have been focused on Ethereum, not just because I was financially invested in it, but also because I have made my debut on Ethereum. That's how I started into crypto. So obviously I am biased. But I also, because I like Ethereum so much, I also, it's fair to say that I'm in a position to criticize it as well. And I think that Ethereum got a little too complacent. and we're recording in 2025 this might change but today ethereum has taken its position for granted and solana saw that and gained that opportunity too many times ethereum had the opportunity to outshine solana but they just chose not to because it just felt like it had one and it's impossible for any layer one to have won in 2025.

45:52When did you start taking Solana more seriously? Especially, you said before, I'm an investor in blue chips, Bitcoin, ETH, Sol, right? Yeah. So more like the investor hat. When did you start to take Solana more seriously and realize all my bias towards Ethereum because that's what I started with, right? So probably I hold more ETH than anything else. oh there is something happening here that i notice on the builder side and therefore also need to make some kind of adjustment on as an investor yeah so everyone knows what happened to ftx the impact that had in the solana ecosystem was it was literally gonna kill any other ecosystem like and for many they felt like solana was not going to survive this because it was just too strong of a hit and i was very surprised to see on the year after how vivid and dynamic the ecosystem was but it's actually only in 2023 that i saw this is not just ecosystem that survived ftx this is an ecosystem that is thriving at an incredible rate that is not only gaining new users and developers but it's actually growing a whole pie of developers and users beyond what was originally considered crypto native and this is something unique right because most of the time what we saw is bitcoin started the movement and then ethereum built on the shoulders of bitcoin but it still essentially had massive overlap with Bitcoin community.

47:32And then that expanded. And then other projects ever since were trying to build on top of the Ethereum shoulders. Solana was not only surviving FTX, but almost growing out of its own circle. And that created something really big because if you are able to capture that many users and developers without relying on the existing growth of previous blockchains you have the resilience to really win and then obviously seeing like other blockchains taking their positions for granted and ignoring solana's growth because obviously solana was more centralized and it did not follow the ethos of decentralization as strongly as others but it was capturing network effects that were not seen before and that's something that it cannot be ignored and i definitely noticed in 2023 and in 2024 i realized this is something that we really need to take more seriously how well building tooling when you say we it means you still identify as a well i don't know i think i think that needs to be everyone like it needs to be investors, users, developers.