Despite this, users still prefer to trade with centralised entities over self-custodial services. Only 10% of all trading takes place on DEXes (Decentralised Exchanges) and this is a problem. With account abstraction on the move, it is, more than ever, imperative that we provide a similar or better experience than centralised parties to trading and investing in assets. Our roadmap addresses some of the biggest blockers of mass adoption. Let’s take a look at the milestones of the Pillar roadmap for the first half of 2023.
Onboarding Web2 Users
One of the main stumbling blocks in Web3 is the onboarding of users, Web2 users are quite comfortable with signing up to a new app or service by using their social logins or email. The majority of wallets and services are dependent on a key-based wallet set-up where the user is asked to save their 12 words to be able to access their wallet. This is a subpar onboarding experience as the education hurdle on risks associated with losing their 12 words and managing them is high.
Pillar will therefore be introducing in partnership with Web3Auth, a secure and non-custodial way to onboard users using social logins and e-mail, avoiding the seed phrase backup completely. Users will be onboarded in the same Web2 way that they are comfortable with, while retaining the self-custodial aspect – bringing users a frictionless Web3 experience by combining the power of Web3Auth’s social login onboarding and Etherspot’s Smart Wallet infrastructure. This is superior to centralised entities as the wallet set up does not require KYC nor any other personal information.
Social Logins on Etherspot’s BUIDLer component
Etherspot’s smart contract-based wallet infrastructure comes with great benefits that can abstract away bad user experiences with one tap. It comes at a cost however, unlike key-based wallets like Metamask, smart contract wallets need to be deployed in order to be used. This is why we will be focussing on onboarding users to layer2 (Optimism & Arbitrum) and EVM-chains (Gnosis, Polygon & BNB) where the costs of deployment are not only minimal, but also provide enough incentives to be used. Once users are comfortable enough with these uses, they can, at any point, choose to deploy on Ethereum mainnet, at a higher cost.
Streamlining Purchases And Selling of Assets
Almost all fiat on-ramp and off-ramp solutions require users to upload their documents to purchase or sell their assets which again is a burden to the onboarding process of users. Only one solution exists today that has sufficient coverage of currencies, assets, chains and acceptable fees that do not: Mt Pelerin. Mt Pelerin leverages Swiss law and allows up to 1000 CHF per day to be purchased and sold without uploading KYC documents. We have been working with Mt Pelerin since last year to make their widget compatible with Smart Contract-based wallets such as Pillar – which has now been completed. The next step is to integrate their widget into the Pillar Wallet.
While Mt Pelerin is great for European and other countries, they currently do not offer their services to the U.S. market. Our partners at Ramp Network will continue to provide this coverage for the selling and purchase of assets to the U.S. market (along with the other regions).
Investing and Trading
Investment strategies are ripe in the Web3 space but sometimes require jumping through plenty of hoops to earn a yield on idle assets. The current required user actions involve cross-chain swaps, obtaining gas tokens on the destination chain and buying two tokens to supply liquidity. Etherspot abstracts away all these complexities, allowing users to simply perform all these actions with one-click investment opportunities.
Our focus for the first half of the year is to provide access to investment opportunities, for our users, that allow them to earn real yield, where the asset is the native gas token instead of a newly created token that can be high risk. One of the projects that have separated itself from the usual yield farming (where the reward is the newly issued token) is GMX. GMX is providing their liquidity providers with real yield in the form of ETH from their derivatives platform.
The Pillar DAO has been working on a staking solution for PLR holders where they can stake their PLR to earn ETH from validator staking. The first batch of subscriptions will start the first quarter and can be expanded into more validators.
These two strategies will be the first of many investment opportunities provided to users, all presented as a one-click opportunity leveraging the transaction batching power of Etherspot.
For advanced traders, we will also be introducing limit orders for going long or shorting with leverage on assets.
Token Analytics & PnL
For every token provided on the wallet, we will be introducing token analytics where users can review a token on any chain and its trading volume, price action, trades, liquidity pool size and token info to do their due diligence.
For existing positions, we will be working to introduce a PnL (profit & loss) view for assets that are swapped and positioned in protocols across the DeFi space.
Pillar Wallet Dashboard
Users already have access to their Etherspot Smart Wallets on the Etherspot dashboard, we will be introducing a styled version of this that allows users to also control their assets on Pillar V1 – also known as Archanova, the first smart wallet we introduced.
Pillar Wallet is dependent on app stores, as are most mobile apps, to be approved by Apple and Google for its distribution. Along with other crypto wallets – we were asked by Apple to integrate their SDK to capture 30% of fees of all NFT purchases. Seeing as this is technically impossible to implement, we were forced to remove NFTs altogether.
This is the reason why it is important to allow users to control their assets without being dependent on a mobile app and Pillar Dashboard will provide this functionality, along with more functionality that involves investment, trading, swapping and Pillar DAO participation.
Capturing CEX Users
While providing a better user experience to new users to the Web3 space, we must also focus on capturing existing users from centralised exchanges such as Coinbase and Binance. We will be introducing Coinbase Pay to allow users to transfer their assets from their Coinbase app to Pillar Wallet. For other exchanges, we will be introducing Layerswap which provides coverage for Optimism, Arbitrum and BNB from Binance, Kraken, Kucoin, Crypto.com and others.
The Return Of Keybased And Archanova
Historically Pillar started as a key-based wallet similar to Metamask but moved to a Smart Contract wallet codenamed Archanova which is now also known as Pillar V1. When Etherspot was introduced (Pillar V2) – the UI was focused on migrating assets from Keybased and Archanova. This was too big of a leap for most users due to the cost involved and large amounts of assets remain on Keybased and Archanova wallets to this day.
To provide a more sensible approach to migration, we will be introducing a holistic view of all the user’s assets on all wallets, allowing them to swap, bridge, invest and trade from wherever the asset is but pointing them to the Etherspot address as the recipient address.
New users coming from social logins, will only experience a single wallet address while existing users can move their assets more easily to Etherspot.
Even More Security Features
Security is one of the key aspects for any wallet holder. It is, therefore, important to provide a wide range of functionality that will protect the user. Besides recovery options where users can expand their access levels of shares, removing and adding signers that can interact with the wallet. We will also be introducing whitelisting. This will allow users to hand-pick which protocols, trusted addresses, and tokens their wallets may interact with, as well as set daily spend limits.
We will be looking to explore implementations that allow different ways of onboarding without leveraging social logins and still provide a frictionless onboarding experience.
The first part of the year, we’ll be focusing on implementing features to simplify the user experience and make Pillar Wallet more secure. Stay tuned for our updates!
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