In this episode of the STARK Struck Podcast by StarkWare, host Henri Lieutaud is joined by Julien Niset from Argent to discuss about Argent, blockchain, and rollups.
Read our notes below to find out more.
Background of Argent
Argent is a smart wallet to bake the flows and security mechanism that users expect in a non-custodial way.
Built on zkSync and StarkNet, Layer-2 on the ETH network.
Goal of Argent is to enable normal user experience on the blockchain.
Vision is to build a mobile wallet that billions can use to access the blockchain.
Also has a browser wallet, Argent X, and Argent Vault on ETH itself.
Argent has around 38-39 people currently.
Argent app
Mobile was the natural choice for them even though browser access is the most widely used method to access blockchain today.
Believe that the future is on mobile.
To them, it is a no-brainer that wallets should be in a phone.
Phones are the remote control that stays in our pockets at all times, and that is the best way to secure your identity and assets.
It is natural that this remote control/access point is on the phone and in the pockets, and to leverage the security that is available there.
Experimented with a browser application on StarkNet.
Built Argent X as a browser extension.
Even though they feel that the future is mobile, browser extensions are relevant today.
They are still experimenting and certain applications can only be properly accessed through browsers.
Background of Julien Niset
1 of 3 co-founders of Argent, which started in 2017.
Responsible for smart contracts, research and innovation in Argent.
Originally from Brussels, Belgium.
Did a degree in engineering in physics, and PhD in Quantum Information and Quantum Computation.
Did his Postdoc at University of New York.
Worked on a project back in Belgium for 4 years, joined a M2MI (Machine to Machine Intelligence before getting into blockchain.
Was one of the first developers to deploy a contract on StarkNet.
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How Julien Heard About Blockchain
Heard about BTC in 2009 in a lab and disregarded it.
Heard about ETH a few years later and disregarded it again.
Read about blockchain tech in 2017 after Gerald (another co-founder of Argent) sent Julien an article about it.
Got excited about blockchain tech since then.
Eventually led to the co-creation of Argent.
Why Focus on Smart Contract Wallets
Initially started by looking at applications because the other 2 co-founders were consumer focused.
The way to interact with blockchain was completely clumsy and broken.
Realised the way to interact with blockchain apps made no sense and there is a big gap in this area.
Julien thinks the idea of writing down your seed phrase on a piece of paper does not make sense when people have been taught not to write down their passwords previously.
Decided to build a non-custodial and secure wallet that is easy to use even for non-technical people.
Used DNS (Domain Name System) as reference to come up with the idea revolving around identity.
Idea of staking to be some kind of savings account, adding some financial primitive on the accounts.
Combining the previous two points, started to give the vision of what Argent is today.
Hexadecimal strings, seed phrases, and gas were also problems to address for them.
They started focusing on the problem of seed phrase as priority.
The only way to correct this user experience was to use a seed contract instead of a seed phrase.
Majority of users will lose their seed phrase or delegate the responsibility to someone else and we end up being in a custodial world which is not much different from the current financial system.
Did Argent consider using MPC (Multi Party Computation)?
At that time, research was not there, but it is much more mature tech today.
It is a topic debated within Argent previously, and still debating about it.
Julien feels it is more prone to censorship resistance issues than Argent’s model.
MPC has benefits as well, such as having one clear identity across multichain.
Currently researching the use of MPC in smart contracts.
Argent team is still very convinced that the proper foundation is a smart contract wallet.
Why ETH?
Only considered BTC and ETH at that time in 2017.
BTC did not have the programmability for their model.
It was a no-brainer that it needed to be a chain with smart contracts and ETH was the natural choice at that time.
Always felt that ETH was the best ecosystem for what they wanted to build.
Censorship Resistance and App Store Listings
Did not face issues with listings on app store or extensions.
The other 2 co-founders had a close relationship with Apple from previous applications.
Knew what are the do’s and dont’s on the app store.
Always assumed that Argent could disappear as a company due to censorship.
Focused on making sure that users still have ultimate control even if everyone disappears.
Reinforce why using smart contracts makes sense because the gateway may be lost but the smart contract is still there and have true ownership.
Example of Argent on mobile, long pressing send produces data of the code which can be cut & pasted in Metamask and executing the transaction without going through Argent.
Being purely non-custodial enables them to innovate and move much faster because they are less prone to regulations that CEX has.
Argent was able to orchestrate calls and integrate with Compound in two weeks while Coinbase only managed to replicate that two years later and got destroyed by regulations.
How Julien Got into Layer-2s
Sees Layer-2s as part of ETH ecosystem.
Argent used to subsidise gas fees and assumed that transaction fees would go down.
As transaction fees spiked, it started to be clear that the future of their model was not on Layer-1.
Needed something that was cheaper but with the same security guarantees of ETH, which was Layer-2.
A criteria was scaling transactions while making it cheap and maintaining the security properties of ETH.
Identified rollups, specifically ZK-rollups, for the previous point.
Identified zkSync and Starkware as the two best new homes for Argent.
Does not mean they are not considering other rollups.
Cannot be everywhere right now. Want to focus all energy for the ultimate user experience on 1-2 chains for now.
Programming with Cairo on StarkNet
Experimented first proof-of-concept on zkSync v1 while waiting for zkSync v2 and StarkNet.
Was monitoring both in parallel and StarkNet was more ready to be experimented with.
Started writing smart contracts on one of the two Layer-2s in end-Nov/early-Dec 2021.
Started digging into StarkNet as zkSync v2 was not ready.
Realised the same problem faced on ETH was present in Starknet of “How do we connect to the protocol?”
Started building the first wallet on StarkNet and started writing in Cairo.
Learning a new language is not difficult for Julien.