Dialogue with Trust Wallet CEO: After being acquired by Binance, how did we get closer to the ideal decentralization? ?

Guest: Trust Wallet CEO Eowyn
Interview: Nian Qing, ChainCatcher
 
If it had not been acquired by Binance in 2018, perhaps not many people in the Chinese-speaking region would be familiar with the cryptocurrency wallet Trust Wallet. Zhao Changpeng once described Trust as a "diamond buried underground." The project has kept a low profile for a long time, but its technical strength should not be underestimated.
In its early days, Trust Wallet was more like a community open source project, contributed by developers in the community. Its founder, Viktor Radchenko, was a "tech geek" who rarely appeared in public and was more accustomed to focusing on product development and writing code. After the acquisition, Viktor also joined Binance as the project leader.
In the same year, Eowyn Chen bid farewell to her financial management consulting position and Wall Street, and became an assistant to Binance co-founder He Yi, responsible for Binance's growth and community operations. Because they joined Binance at the same time, Eowyn and Viktor became good friends and often discussed issues about user growth. In 2021, Viktor said that he really didn't want to do anything other than technical development, so Eowyn wanted to help Viktor reduce his burden, so she joined Trust Wallet as CEO.
Eowyn graduated from Harvard University, after which she devoted herself to the financial consulting industry in New York. Although she gained a lot of experience in the hustle and bustle of Wall Street, in the process Eowyn gradually realized that the traditional financial system was losing its vitality for innovation.
With the exploration and reflection of new things, Eowyn said goodbye to New York. She seized the opportunity to explore the overseas expansion of Bike Share in San Francisco and joined ofo to expand the US market from 0 to 1. In the experience of "Little Yellow Bike", she not only deeply understood the importance of business and cash flow, but also developed the skills of going to the city hall in the morning and rolling up her sleeves to repair bicycles in the afternoon.
After leaving ofo, Eowyn did not rush to invest in the next project. Instead, she spent a lot of time to establish her own values ​​and deeply thought about the impact of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology in the future society. Eowyn attaches more importance to decentralization and checks and balances. Although the Internet allows information to circulate, it does not bring the pain point of real value circulation. In 2018, He Yi attended Eowyn's private party at the introduction of a friend. This accidental encounter opened a new door for her. He Yi clearly showed Eowyn how blockchain technology can become the underlying infrastructure for Internet value transfer.
After the ICO bubble in 2017, the crypto industry calmed down in the bear market in 2018. As a contrarian thinker, Eowyn felt that this was a better time to take a closer look at whether the industry was truly anti-fragile. At that time, Binance had just been established for a year and was facing many challenges and was in a difficult time. After a ten-hour "interview" with He Yi, Eowyn even accepted a 30% pay cut to join Binance because of He Yi's vision and sincerity.
In the first few years of Binance, Eowyn participated in building the global community and growth team from 0 to 1, and was also responsible for Binance's global market operations. But as Binance grew, more and more new users came out of the circle, and Eowyn found herself getting further and further away from the industry. In contrast, she hopes to be closer to the forefront of Crypto innovation and directly serve the industry and users, so in 2021, she and Viktor hit it off and decided to jump out of their comfort zone and try to bring more users into the on-chain world in the practice of Trust Wallet.
At present, the number of downloads of Trust Wallet client has exceeded 60 million times, with users mainly scattered in Europe, America, South Asia and the Middle East. Nearly 60% of the users have increased in the past year. Since the launch of Trust Wallet web plug-in wallet in November last year, the number of downloads has also ranked among the top three in the industry.
What is special about Trust Wallet? What are its technical advantages? How has it developed since it was acquired by Binance in 2018? Recently, ChainCatcher interviewed Eowyn Chen, who had an in-depth discussion with us on Trust Wallet’s positioning and development status in the entire Binance ecosystem, the competitive landscape of the wallet track, and the current obstacles.
 
How does Trust Wallet position itself in the Binance ecosystem?
 
1. ChainCatcher: Trust Wallet was acquired by Binance in 2018. Are there any differences in its development paths before and after?
Eowyn: The most obvious difference is that we didn’t have money to hire people before, and we were purely contributing to community development. Now we have financial support and can hire people. Before Trust Wallet was acquired in 2018, it was equivalent to an open source community development product. At that time, wallets didn’t have a good profit model, which was the main reason why Trust Wallet sought acquisition.
The founders Viktor and CZ had very compatible ideas, and they basically finalized the acquisition after talking for an hour or two. After the acquisition, Trust Wallet recruited three new employees who had previously worked on open source projects in the community. Since then, the team has remained relatively small. From 2018 to last year, although the number of our users has reached tens of millions, the team has only grown from 3 people to 20 people.
After the acquisition, we have more energy and professional people to support user growth and brand operation. As the parent company, Binance can also provide better advice and support in terms of law, technology, etc. We can use Binance's risk control and security infrastructure, such as the Security Scanner function. When the transfer encounters risks, there will be a corresponding pop-up window to prompt that the address is a medium-risk address or a high-risk address. In addition, we have integrated Binance's underlying risk control and security system. The competitiveness of Binance's underlying data in the industry also determines that Trust Wallet will be stronger than others in this regard, which is also our unique place.
In addition, another benefit of being acquired is that we are different from other wallets. We don’t have to worry so much about survival, and the team can focus more on product development. CZ’s goal for us is to focus on user growth and not consider revenue for the time being, so we have a lot of freedom to lower the threshold for users and focus on products. Of course, as a good commercial product, being able to realize economic value by bringing value to users is an inevitable growth path, and it is also a sign of industry maturity. We are also actively exploring and trying.
But Trust Wallet has always been operating independently, and its data is completely isolated from Binance. The team and legal entity are also independent of each other, which ensures that we can run as fast as a startup team, while also ensuring that Trust Wallet can be more objective in the industry and better implement the principle of protecting user privacy. Binance leaders such as CZ and He Yi play more like a board of directors. We only need to make regular reports every quarter, and the "board of directors" will provide some resources and suggestions based on the difficulties we encounter.
2. ChainCatcher: What is the current positioning of Trust Wallet in Binance’s entire product ecosystem?
Eowyn Chen: Binance's ecosystem can actually be roughly divided into several sections - CoinMarketCap is a traffic product and industry traffic portal, Binance Exchange is a centralized platform for custody services, and Trust Wallet is positioned as a Web3 decentralized platform, providing self-custody services and Web3 open portals that minimize censorship. Provide different solutions for different user needs. Users have the need to protect privacy, want to manage their own on-chain assets independently without trusting the operations of a third-party centralized team, or want to explore dApps on different chains without restrictions. At this time, Trust Wallet can provide more options.
As a centralized exchange, Binance has certain limitations. Why do people regard Binance listing as a milestone? Because Binance will screen these coins, set listing standards, and require protection of user interests, and the final supported coins are about 250-500. But Trust Wallet integrates 70+ public chains, and users can access tens of millions of different coins and NFTs. As a decentralized tool platform, Trust Wallet has no threshold, is fair and open, and has no inclination or preference. We hope to support the development of any public chain and high-quality projects.
3. ChainCatcher: Many CEXs have launched their own decentralized wallet products, and their brands are all within the same system. However, Trust Wallet and Binance are relatively independent. In addition to isolating data, are there other considerations?
Eowyn Chen: The Trust Wallet team has a strong belief in idealism and decentralization. We firmly believe in the ownership of personal assets and data, the importance of privacy protection and opposition to censorship. Such team culture principles have shaped the concept and brand image of our products, allowing us to better serve and support the decentralized world. Therefore, it is more appropriate for Trust Wallet to obtain certain support and empowerment in the Binance ecosystem while having a high degree of independent operating space.
We choose to keep Trust Wallet and Binance relatively independent. The most fundamental reason is that we believe that the brands, concepts, and products of Trust Wallet and Binance are different for the user groups they serve, and their respective products and brands can complement each other. If a user attaches great importance to data privacy, Trust Wallet's user chain data and behavior will not be connected with Binance's user data, which is a consideration for user privacy protection.
Although Binance has a very strong brand influence, like all brands, it has its own meaning, which means that it has limitations in certain scenarios. For example, users have higher expectations of being taken care of by the Binance brand, so a product similar to Binance Wallet is different from Trust Wallet. Users have higher expectations for Binance Wallet in terms of connecting to external applications and security protection. Once a security problem occurs, it will damage the corresponding brand. Then, the choices provided to users by this product are still limited because it involves operational review, security protection, etc. Binance is seen as a brand that represents centralization in the industry, which makes it difficult to serve users who insist on decentralization.
Finally, the issue of team resources also needs to be considered. It is crucial to let the right people do the right things. We need to persist in creating a broader space for the industry, while also providing good products, technologies and services for the depth of the industry and the on-chain world. We have been actively exploring the entry point for closer cooperation between Trust Wallet and Binance, as long as this can meet the increasingly complex needs of more and more users and provide more choices. We are willing to try all possible ways, as long as they can help more users experience the on-chain world and feel the transparency brought by blockchain technology. This is what we are willing to do.
 
How to differentiate yourself from the competition?
 
4. ChainCatcher: As the entry point to Web3, the competition among wallets is becoming increasingly fierce. What is the differentiation path of Trust Wallet? What are its unique advantages?
Eowyn Chen: Compared with other brands, after 5 years of exploration, Trust Wallet's product experience logic is mainly simple and applicable to user habits in most regions and different cultures, making it easy for most people to get started. This is also our main vision: to onboard more people into Web3 and crypto. Because compared to what to do, what not to do is more of a test of product judgment. Although other wallets have more functions and are more gorgeous, I think simplicity is a result of in-depth thinking about user habits.
Trust actually developed many functions before but later removed them because although the functions for Degen users are more powerful, they caused confusion for many novice users, which was also a trade-off we took the initiative to make. In addition, Trust Wallet grasped the development direction of multi-chain very early. It has spent four years from 2019 to now, and has put a lot of effort in supporting multi-chain. Our web plug-in wallet has been online for about half a year and can support all EVM and mainstream non-EVM chains such as Bitcoin, Solana, Aptos, Sui, Doge, LTC, etc., which is rare in the industry. We have also established the industry's multi-chain wallet interaction standards. For example, Solana's Phantom wallet recently supported the multi-chain interaction method used by Ethereum, and adopted our interaction logic.
Trust Wallet mobile app already supports 73 chains. The wallet team will know that supporting multiple chains is actually not a skill, and supporting each non-EVM chain requires repeated work, but it takes time to accumulate. Therefore, most emerging wallets will choose to go against the trend and only support one or two chains, and optimize the experience on this basis.
In addition, in terms of security, Trust's security is divided into two parts: the security of the team's operations (including code) and the security features for users. We have conducted more than 30 audits on the team's operations in the past 6 months, both internally and externally. We have very strict audit coverage and service agreements to improve the security of the code, and we also provide bounties to the external community to support security improvements. Technology mainly depends on the team's hard power. To be honest, no wallet has never had security problems, because there is no 100% security, but all teams can do is to minimize and avoid security risks. Everyone is rapidly improving their skills in the process of constantly fighting hackers and scammers. Therefore, after experiencing accidents in history, the probability of not making mistakes in process, technology, and operation will be lower. How to do well after making mistakes is more important, and it is also a process that the team must go through.
Another part is the security features provided to users. We mentioned before that the Security Scanner works with Binance’s risk control and security teams to warn users of risks when transferring money and using dApps. At the same time, we will also launch the Transaction simulation function recently to help users visualize what may happen after the signature authorization. In order to improve the security of the industry, we will open source this tool to the community, and we have also authorized EIP-6865, hoping to improve the security environment together with the industry.
5. ChainCatcher: Trust Wallet recently released a security report, mentioning that the new wallet addresses generated between November 14 and 23 last year contained vulnerabilities, and quickly patched the vulnerabilities and implemented compensation plans. What impact and experience does this incident bring to Trust Wallet?
Eowyn Chen: One of our reflections is that we were not frequent and careful enough in conducting security audits on the open source underlying code. So the experience we gained is to provide the corresponding audit frequency and speed in the internal process, including allowing more experienced people such as the Binance security team to intervene and participate in the audit. So there is also the policy of more than 30 internal and external audits in the past six months and SLA repair of security-related bugs mentioned above.
After this incident, we quickly released two third-party security audit reports, and we will increase the frequency of audits in the future. Therefore, we will see more audit reports coming out in the future, especially those related to the authorization of users' private keys.
In addition, the team has a stronger sense of safety after this incident. We have also mentioned this incident many times in internal meetings and discussions, which has helped everyone prioritize safety when making decisions.
In fact, during this process, we also learned a lot of other experiences, such as how to communicate with users after a security incident. We found that many users don’t actually read messages, and even if some users read our product prompts, private messages, etc., they will not take positive actions. Some users even simply deleted the product after seeing the risk warning of the application. After all, everyone has experienced the baptism of scammers, which also reflects that it is very difficult to communicate with users in this industry. Therefore, we have a deep understanding of user behavior in this incident, and we have also summarized our own experience on how to handle compensation for accidents.
Although the handling process was not easy, our team still had a very strong sense of belief that we did the right thing, proactively disclosed the problem, and immediately provided a compensation solution. In the process of implementation, we also hope to set an example for the industry and accumulate some experience in handling accidents.
Recently, our two-month reporting window has just ended. We are still waiting for many users to provide the required proof to ensure that they are the owners of the wallet and the cases they are complaining about are related. We will also release a formal reflection and summary later to tell everyone what we have learned in this process. At present, we are surprised that most of the affected people have not actually complained, and because of privacy and not collecting user data, we do not actually have the contact information of the affected users. At the same time, most of the cases complained are not related to this incident, and there are many unreasonable user demands. Overall, customer service compensation in the decentralized world is actually very difficult, and there is still a long way to go.
6. ChainCatcher: In what specific aspects does Trust Wallet ensure the security of users' assets, such as some risky address detection, interception of shell apps, etc.?
Eowyn Chen: We have always had special security monitoring on shell apps and fake apps, so that we can report to the corresponding App store in a timely manner. In order to prevent shelling, Trust Wallet has also changed from an open source wallet to a closed source wallet, but of course the underlying source is not closed. After the product is closed source, the probability of fake wallets will be reduced, but they will still exist, so we will strengthen monitoring and reporting.
Next, we will launch a very important feature called "Transaction Simulation". When a user authorizes a smart contract, we will simulate the specific interaction process and remind the user what the result will be after the operation. This feature will be developed and completed in the second quarter. We are currently promoting it to the developer community, and the corresponding function will also be open source. We hope that more developers can use this security feature, which can generally improve the security level of the industry and make the environment cleaner.
In addition, we have expanded our security team and strengthened internal training and communication with industry experts.
7. ChainCatcher: Trust Wallet has launched new features such as key cloud backup, social login, crypto taxation, and fiat currency in and out. In addition, what other user-friendly features will Trust Wallet launch?
Eowyn Chen: We are still testing MPC. This function is relatively early and is still in the 0~1 stage. Therefore, our team still needs to consider the final form of the product, the degree of user acceptance, and the difficulties encountered by users in the actual use process. These problems cannot be solved by launching this function in the short term, and continuous iteration is required. In addition to MPC, we will also consider functions such as Smart Contract and AA, but I think what we need to think about next is how to integrate these different scenarios, which is also a problem faced by the industry.
We launched the customer service support function two months ago and introduced ChatGPT, hoping to use AI to share information with users in a timely manner, to help users solve some problems when they are in an anxious state, and to provide pre-education.
In addition, some very practical functions for users, such as staking, airdrops, cross-chain flash swaps, and fiat currency deposits and withdrawals, will continue to be iterated and improved, and these are on the agenda for this quarter.
8. ChainCatcher: How many users does Trust Wallet have now? Which regions have more users?
Eowyn Chen: The client has been downloaded more than 60 million times worldwide, 60% of which actually grew last year. In the second half of last year, we launched a web plug-in wallet, which has been the third most downloaded wallet plug-in in the world for several months.
Trust Wallet is the only wallet among all the top plugin wallets that supports the BTC network. It also supports non-EVM networks such as Solana. We hope that the plugin wallet can not only support users, but also support developers to use it as a cross-chain dApp deployment tool to better develop products.
In terms of regional distribution, our main users come from Europe and the United States, followed by Southeast Asia and Central Asia. In particular, the number of users in Southeast Asia has grown rapidly. The proportion of Chinese-speaking users has not been particularly high but has been growing steadily. Perhaps users in Chinese-speaking regions have their own characteristics. We are currently exploring growth in this area and hope to allow more Chinese-speaking users to use Trust.
 
What are the current obstacles to the development of the wallet track?
 
9. ChainCatcher: Currently, the wallet market is developing rapidly, with more and more players. Not only have leading DeFi companies such as dYdX, Uniswap, and ParaSwap released their own mobile wallets, but many traditional large institutions such as PayPal and Reddit are also developing their own crypto wallets. How do you view the current competitive landscape of the wallet market?
Eowyn Chen: The competition is indeed fierce. Everyone thinks that wallets have great potential as traffic entry points, which is of course true, but in fact, wallets are not that easy to make.
Just like the security issue I just mentioned, when there are no security issues, the decisions and judgments made by the team are different. Every team has to go through its own exploration stage, which is an inevitable path to growth.
Of course, there is one benefit of fierce competition. As the industry grows, the user groups will diversify with different needs. The more competition there is, the more people will think deeply about who they are serving, and thus focus more on developing their own advantages. For example, some wallets are targeting DEX trading users, which are more Degen-oriented, but the wallets made by Paypal must be oriented to very mainstream Web2 users.
Faced with different user expectations, everyone started to improve different products and services. This will also save costs for developers, because before the user differentiation, everyone was in a state of experimentation and could only throw the product into the market to see the reaction, but now they can refer to the behavior and experience of competitors.
In such a competitive landscape, I am quite confident because I think users still have deep trust in us and we have a strong user base. It will not jump because of a short-term hot spot. It takes time for users to build trust in any wallet.
10. ChainCatcher: Do you think the current environment is a healthy competition?
Eowyn Chen: In fact, there are also concerns about vicious competition. I have observed that with the launch of different wallets, the interaction standards with dApps have become very divided.
I am an idealist, so I think the decentralization of blockchain should maintain an open ecosystem. Just like the TCP/IP protocol established by the traditional Internet, which stipulates unified standards and interfaces, just follow this approach. But now the interface between wallets and dApps has become a very political thing. Whose standards should be used and how to connect? Even the standard itself has become a project that needs to make profits and venture capital. I think this is wrong. Originally, this should be a very open industry with strong interoperability. In the end, it has become like some large companies that need to have their own USB ports.
I am still quite worried about the emergence of such a small number of products, so I would like to call on the builders in the industry not to raise the threshold on this matter. The real competition should be to make the product better and serve the most suitable users. If developers can reach a consensus on the standards, it will be a very important infrastructure for the industry.
Although Web3 is a trustless industry, there will always be trust issues as long as people are involved. It is understandable to hide behind the screen and not consider ideology, but I think a true builder still needs some idealism to actively establish relationships, which is also an important driving force for the development of human society, and our industry is no exception.
11. ChainCatcher: In addition to the industry standards issue just mentioned, what do you think is the biggest obstacle to the current development of wallets? What measures will Trust Wallet take to deal with it, and what are the plans for the future?
Eowyn Chen: I think the biggest obstacle to the development of wallets is the "impossible triangle" problem, that is, the balance between security, usability, and decentralization. Behind it is a question of trade-offs. Of course, the development of technology will make the trade-offs smaller, but the team is always faced with choices. For Trust Wallet, security is first and usability is second. This has always been one of our principles.
In addition, there is another big challenge for wallets, which is actually the potential compliance uncertainty. I think it is a very naive idea that "DeFi will definitely not be regulated." DeFi will definitely be regulated, but it is just a matter of how to regulate it. If our industry does not take the initiative to provide corresponding compliance solutions, we may passively accept a very unreasonable compliance clause. Therefore, we are now also working with Binance to communicate with regulators around the world through them, synchronize the development of centralized custody and wallets, so that they can have a more objective understanding of the industry, instead of directly forcing a very inappropriate clause. This is also a critical issue for mainstream adoption.
Finally, the biggest limitation for wallets is the potential for the development of the industry itself. Because the problem that Web3 wallets currently solve is mainly holding crypto assets such as BTC to cope with inflation risks, which is also the most direct scenario for wallets.
But if most users enter Web3 and the application scenarios have a real breakthrough in penetration into mainstream users, what is this scenario? At this time, the wallet is just a tool and path to help users access the application scenario. If there is no solid application scenario, how can the wallet serve as the traffic entrance of Web3? Therefore, this is a problem of the overall ecological development of Web3. The most fundamental value of wallet applications is to be safe and easy to use.