If you’ve ever signed into a web3 platform or web3 website and have been prompted to login with your Gmail address, there’s a high likelihood the backend system is powered by Web3Auth.

Since its inception in 2018, Web3Auth has been the backbone behind countless crypto projects, providing white-label wallet solutions that power thousands of applications across the web3 industry. The company now has over 20 million users per month across its different applications and platforms, with tens of thousands of developers on its platform as well.

“We’re a wallet as a service company that enables email login or Google email login across different dApps within the blockchain space,” Zhen Yu Yong, chief executive officer and co-founder of Web3Auth, said to me during a recent interview. Web3 applications such as  Mocaverse, Animoca Brands, Keplr – the largest Cosmos wallet– as well as Universal Studios, Sony and McDonald’s use Web3Auth’s product, he said. 

Previously, Yong worked a stint at Visa and built the Ethereum Name Service at the Ethereum Foundation. But web3 wasn’t necessarily the path he initially envisioned.

“I was initially a business kid,” Zhen said. “I went to business school, and before uni, guys in Singapore have to go through two years of national service. So I was a fireman for two years and at the same time also tried my hand in a few small startups, which really shifted me to business school. But in business school, they train you for investment banking and consulting, and I got swept up into that.”

Wallets here! Get your wallets here!

Zhen pursued consulting and investment banking while at university, but ultimately discovered he hated it. But around 2016, while interning at a venture capitalist firm, he chanced upon Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.

“It was just as Ethereum was starting up and Vitalik was doing a roadshow at some FinTech accelerator in Singapore,” Zhen said. “Typically everyone wears a suit and tie at FinTech accelerators, but Vitalik came in wearing his unicorn shirt and sandals. He was super eloquent and it was at that point Ethereum really resonated with me.”

But Zhen still took his first job at VISA, mainly because he could.

“Like a lot of Asian kids, you’re guided to a lot of the big brands as a ‘safe job’ first,” Zhen said. “But as soon as I could get a job at the Ethereum Foundation, which was setting up in Singapore, I did.”

It was there Zhen met his co-founder and Web3Auth spun out of their initial meeting as a side project of the Ethereum Foundation.

“When we started Web3Auth, MetaMask was the largest wallet at that point, and still is,” Zhen said. “They were just starting to monetize and we were just starting to see the ridiculous volumes they were generating in swap fees. The fact users could type in uniswap.com, swap currencies there and save whatever percentage MetaMask was charging on top—but yet still chose to swap with MetaMask was ridiculous to me.”

Today, users can still go to Uniswap and still save the fees, but most choose to swap using MetaMask’s UI. This indicated to Zhen that dApps weren’t the point of trust, it was wallets. He recognized wallets owned the user interface, which owned users’ trust, and thus it was ultimately wallets that were worth pursuing.

“With a wallet, you interact with a lot of different dApps,” Zhen said. “It’s a combination of the wallet being where all of your assets are held, the wallet sort of acting like a bank account, and the wallet being the first thing you see and have to understand. It’s a constant across all applications that users might interact with, and it’s statistically backed up in how they’re able to charge fees in UI that people could easily avoid but don’t.”

Zhen and his team had two hypotheses: First, that web2 would definitely come into web3, which is where most of the wallet distribution would come from. Second, that large enterprises breaking into web3—that already had existing user bases—would want to keep that kind of monetization for themselves.

“Why would Sony—a company breaking into web3 right now—want to give its user base to MetaMask or any of the wallets in the space?”, Zhen asked. “Wouldn’t it want to own that UI, all of those swaps and all of that functionality for itself to continue to own the user? That’s what really drove the thesis of Web3Auth forward to where it is today.”

Today, Web3Auth wants to improve the UI/UX one step at a time to allow more users to onboard across different applications, driven by the belief that the barrier of entry for web3 adoption is becoming increasingly complex.

“It’s becoming more complicated to enter the web3 space,” Zhen said. “Now, users have to understand what chain a specific currency is located on and what type of asset is on that chain. It’s almost like if we had to have credit cards for each different country instead of a credit card being able to work across the world. Each different silo chain having a wallet, having an asset, is like requiring a credit card instead of one credit card being able to traverse across the world.”

That’s the problem Zhen and his Web3Auth team are currently tackling—for users to use any chain with any asset—and have a solution tentatively scheduled to launch later this fall.

“We want the user to conceptually use crypto as one,” Zhen said. “We can reduce the level of complexity that dApps and wallets can offer to users and remove mental overload, because it’s only going to increase. The number of assets is going to increase and the number of chains is going to increase—and until that stops, these things will continue to grow.”

lead image: Zhen Yu Yong