Simplifying DeFi and Cross-Chain Solutions with Tidus Wallet’s Dan Mulligan

Episode Overview

Episode Transcript

  Dan Mulligan: Oh, why am I paying to take this step? Why is it so expensive? And then on top of it, they could do it in three clicks and they don’t have to feel like they went and found it. It is something that is given to them up front and explained to them in layman’s terms. And that’s really what we’re trying to do with all of DeFi is put everything in one spot. This way, a user could quickly access it, quickly know what they’re doing in it, and then there’s no additional barriers of entry that they have to go to.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Hey, welcome to Pay Pod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist, and thanks for listening. Decentralized finance is one of the most exciting and complicated frontiers in fintech today, and simplifying it is no easy task. My guest today is Dan Mulligan, founder of Tidus Wallet, a platform that’s changing the way users interact with DeFi by focusing on simplicity, security and innovation. But today, we’re not just talking about crypto wallets. We’re diving into the future of decentralized finance, the human side of digital ecosystems, and the bold ideas that are shaping Web3. It’s a fascinating topic and an enlightening conversation. So please welcome Dan Mulligan. So you’re a marketing guy by trade. Your background is heavy in marketing and your career. How did you go from marketing guru to crypto wallet founder?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, I was working in big data analytics marketing to start my career and then kind of wanted to do something that was a little bit more adventurous and dove into SaaS startups and working with a Y Combinator company called AD Hoc at the time. And that’s kind of where I think my skill set started broadening. And I got a little bit into operations, a little bit into sales, a little bit into product. And that’s also around the same time that I found crypto in about 2016, 2017, um, immediately made the pivot of trying to work in Web3 and DeFi wherever I could. At first, it was working with these small projects that were launching NFTs, going over basic content strategy, things of that nature and like product design, basic stuff. And then that kind of evolved into getting a full time job as a director at a centralized exchange. Um, that at the time was top ten. And then from there, uh, building the wallet while I was kind of working at the exchange, I was moonlighting, bootstrapping the wallet with myself and my co-founder. Um, and then that slowly kind of started to eat into time. And once the FTX crash happened and a lot of the exchanges were very affected by it, I decided, why not double down on DeFi and decentralization and do my own thing full time? And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

 Kevin Rosenquist: What drew you to space?

 Dan Mulligan: Um, the people I think crypto. Well, it’s the new frontier of finance, right? And to be at the start of something that is trying to do so much innovation in such a old and adopted space to me just sounded excellent. Right? I think there’s, you see, like it’s like being here for the beginning of the internet to some degree, and you don’t get a lot of opportunities like that. So it was immediately interesting to me solely off of an innovation perspective. And then all of the people in crypto are extremely into innovation, into trying to build the next new thing into, like the evolution of technology as a whole. And everyone is extremely helpful. It’s just a really good group of very intelligent people, and I don’t think you get that a lot in traditional spaces. And I think that sometimes people are not as helping when in more traditional spaces. And in crypto it’s, uh, everybody’s helping everyone. Everyone just wants to build. And of course there’s levels of competition. But at the end of the day, you’re all trying to push the same envelope for decentralized finance.

 Kevin Rosenquist: You know, there’s like a.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Psychology aspect to DeFi as far as the fear of loss, the trust angle, the the risk taking, you know, just trying to like you made the comment about such an old traditional system of finance that were that that that crypto and DeFi and are kind of breaking up a little bit. How does the psychology and the human factor sort of shape the way people use DeFi platforms, and how do you design for that?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, I think, well, there’s two things going on there. I think people just at a base level are not super trustworthy of technology when it first happens.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Sure. Right. Look at AI, right? Yeah.

 Dan Mulligan: You could use. Yeah. Ai is a great example. And then you could take it further back and you could go back to the phone. Right. The first iPhone and that type of stuff. And how hesitant people were to spend $500 on a phone. I was actually yesterday watching this thing.

 Kevin Rosenquist: I pay $500 for a phone. Right.

 Dan Mulligan: And now everybody’s like, wow, an iPhone for $500 sounds excellent. Yeah. But I was watching this thing about BlackBerry. And BlackBerry was essentially saying, well, iPhone will never make it. It doesn’t have a keyboard. And you think about the way DeFi now, like UI and UX people, myself included, would tell you it is extremely clunky.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah I agree.

 Dan Mulligan: And that’s something that I’m trying to solve for is the clunkiness of it. Because it should be web three and it should be decentralized, but it should always have that look and feel of something as simple as an iPhone or something as simple as just a piece of technology you’re already using every day, right? I think it’s more of an integration that we need to get to, versus just trying to replace old systems with new ones. A lot of people call it web 2.5. I believe it’s just web three just done correctly. Um, and I think we’re moving towards that as a whole. And that’s something, like I said, that we’re trying to build over at Tidus, um, make things two clicks and be the Robin Hood of crypto. Crypto everything app. Eliminate as many points of failure as possible. Make it where users know what they’re doing, and make it as simple as possible. And make it as cheap as possible. Right. One of the big things that we’ve been sold on DeFi is it’s cheaper than traditional finance, and it’s yours. It’s permissionless. And I think that with a lot of the fees and a lot of the network fees for on ramping and off ramping and all that type of stuff. We’ve kind of started to stray from that a little bit. And I.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Think.

 Dan Mulligan: Um, in the coming years, we’ll see a big push towards better UI, better UX, uh, cheaper fees and scaling to reach the masses versus the niche group that you see now.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I’ve talked to other.

 Kevin Rosenquist: People on this show before about about, you know, you know, when you set up a wallet, it’s it’s sort of a weird almost like you feel like you’re doing something wrong, almost like you’ve got it’s this it’s this process of like these weird codes and all of this, like, I don’t, I don’t know, like you said, clunky. Clunky is a good way to put it. And I think we’re sort of trained to when something doesn’t seem easy, we’re skeptical of it. We’re like, uh, is this legit? Should I be doing this? Should I be entering my financial data here? So how do you go about that task of making it user friendly, of improving the UX, of not making it feel real and less scary?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah. One of the biggest things that I look for first when it came to building the wallet or ideating. It in general was how do we eliminate touch points? If you look at crypto right now to get in, if you want to get into a meme coin, right. You’re downloading a wallet, you’re activating that wallet, you’re funding that wallet one way or another. Then you’re going to pump that fund. Then you’re going to crypto Twitter, then you’re doing all the research, or maybe you’re just spraying and praying, but whatever you’re doing, you’re taking 3 to 5 different tools to get one, to take one action. Tidus is trying to eliminate that. We do everything where it is embedded in the wallet. The idea of having a web browser in your financial application doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t go to your Chase app and open up a separate web browser if you wanted to send Zelle. You wouldn’t go in your Amex and make a payment on something or do anything like that while you were opening a web browser. There’s just no need for it. So one of the things that we’ve done is we’ve added in a lot of the elements of DeFi that are most important, most liquid eliminating those touch points and giving people direct access in about two clicks to give you the example of lending and borrowing. We’re the only app on the market where you could go, and you could lend and borrow against your assets as collateral directly in the wallet, in a completely decentralized way.

 Dan Mulligan: And it’s going to take you three clicks total. Wow. The same with staking. Right now, you’ll have wallets will offer staking on a particular asset. Maybe it’s Ethereum, maybe it’s Solana, and they’re charging an egregious fee. You could only stake on their validator. It really limits you into what you’re getting out of your DeFi experience. And for us, we work to connect directly with places like Lido and Marinade who are giving the best possible yield. And then the fee we take is pennies on the dollar compared to some of our competitors. So that’s how we made it, where people don’t have to feel, oh, why am I paying to take this step? Why is it so expensive? And then on top of it, they could do it in three clicks and they don’t have to feel like they went and found it. It is something that is given to them up front and explained to them in layman’s terms. And that’s really what we’re trying to do with all of DeFi is put everything in one spot. This way, a user could quickly access it, quickly know what they’re doing in it, and then there’s no additional barriers of entry that they have to go to.

 Kevin Rosenquist: What do you think DeFi platforms can learn from traditional banking?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, I think how to be sticky. Traditional banking clearly has done a really good job of being sticky and creating a need. And the trust layer, um, whether that be with sheer size and just how big and known their brand has become, whether that just is over time, whether it’s partnerships, whatever it was, I think that we need to kind of head in that direction. I think in order for crypto to be adopted from a retail audience and an everyday user perspective, we need to take those old models and refresh them and definitely add on to them and optimize them. But take a little bit of it, take a little bit of the reasons why they’re sticky. I think web2 and traditional finance, they do really good jobs with like rewards programs and things like that. And I think you saw a little bit of that happening with crypto, especially with airdrops and everything that’s gone on over the last year or so. But I think we need to have better models where onboarded users are being rewarded for being a first time crypto user. Right. And that’s through a wallet, not through an exchange, because those are centralized entities. There’s not really a ton of difference between setting up a centralized exchange account versus a bank account, right? The KYC is essentially the same too. So we want to be able to keep people decentralized, only have them KYC if they absolutely need to, to on and off ramp to their bank account, keep everything in a really seamless way and make it so you’re just using another app in your phone, right? Like, there should be no difference between my wallet and what I would use on my banking platform or my Venmo or whatever it might be. They should be very seamless and easy. Um, comparisons as far as the user experience goes.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, I wanted to talk a little bit about social recovery because that’s one of the standout features that you guys have. How does social recovery work and why is it such a game changer for improving both security and the user experience?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

 Dan Mulligan: So it’s from a security perspective. It’s actually not an improvement. It is kind of a baseline, right? You are taking some level of risk by keeping your keys on your device locally stored. Um, we still do not have access to them as a company. We never will. Um, we are totally non-custodial. On the user experience side, though, it creates a lot of, um, trust, right? It a user that has to write down their 12 seed password. Most of them don’t mind doing it, but there’s a level of apprehension that comes with that.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Um, and these.

 Dan Mulligan: 12 words, they’re in a very specific order. If you forget them, it kind of makes it seem like your entire life is lost and you have to save them. You only have that one opportunity to save them unless you’re going in the wallet. And for us, we wanted to have that as far as being non-custodial, but we wanted to give people an experience where they didn’t necessarily feel like it was a doomsday set of numbers. Um, for that, it was two things. It was the social recovery, which just gives them the peace of mind that, hey, if absolute worst comes to worst, as long as you have this device and your other passwords and mechanisms, you could still access this account. And then on the flip side of that, we also added it where it’s one click to create a wallet. You know, that wallet will give you a seed phrase that covers ten different networks. You only need it for each network. You don’t have to have five wallets and then five seed phrases, and then do all the importing and all that type of stuff. We’ve made it as simple as possible for a user experience perspective, so you’re essentially deciding if you want social recovery, taking a screenshot or writing down your seed phrase however you like to do it, and then you’re in. You don’t need to do anything else, and then you’re in for every single account, and you could immediately start doing things like swapping, staking, lending, borrowing, and so on and so forth.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Very cool, very cool.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And you, you guys integrate with tools like Maya and Swift and Wormhole, right. Um, to kind of enable the cross-chain transfers. How do you see cross-chain transfers evolving? Is that going to keep evolving, do you think?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, I think there’s two ways where you could kind of go about it in the way that it’s being built is in a modular way, which is what Tidus does. Right. When you go from Solana to ETH, you know that you’re on Solana, you know that you’re on ETH, despite the fact that the UI only changes in color and logos and things like that. Okay. Um, or you could have the other side of that, which is you just chain abstraction. Everyone could select anything from one screen and it’s a dropdown that becomes, in my opinion, and for a user, I think it’s a little confusing and a little bit more prone to mistakes. Where in Tidus, the way that we’ve embedded bridging is you’re bridging directly to your other wallet in Tidus, so you don’t even have to enter your address, for example, it’s just, hey, I’m bridging from earth to Solana. Select the asset you want to bridge. Hit one button. It will then bridge it directly to your wallet and it’ll take much less time. It’s on our network and you could see it every step of the way. So I think it’s going to play a major role. I think you’ll also have chains that will kind of fall off and go away, or become very specific for a particular niche, um, I think right now, like you have, you have all the major chains, right? Bitcoin will always be the store value king.

 Dan Mulligan: You have Ethereum, you have Solana. Now you have a base. Um there was optimism that was on the come up for a little while. Arbitrum like you have all those l2’s now you have new l1’s coming out. You have a parachain, you have a monad and all these different chains. Right? There’s essentially some sort of chain wars going on, and there will be one that will be the most adopted or most used on a retail scale. Um, there will be one that will be used, maybe from a business perspective, because of the way it’s set up from security standards and whatnot. I think that figuring out what chain that is and keeping it as simple as possible is like the most major thing that we could do, because those chains will fall off, um, as usership degrades and usership goes to other chains. And we want to make sure our users have that same access but never have to string up new things and whatnot.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Um.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Is there anything about decentralization that you think has like a hidden downside. Is there something that people aren’t talking about in the DeFi space that you think needs to be addressed or needs to be fixed?

 Dan Mulligan: Nothing that no one’s not talking about. I think things like Sybil attacks. Right? having points of failure or something. That’s proof of work. But there’s only two miners. There’s a lot of different things that are decentralized being fully decentralized, in my opinion. You need a little bit of a window where you’re semi centralized.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Um.

 Dan Mulligan: If you are a Dao, for example. Right. You don’t want to just go from new product out to just giving the keys to everybody that has the tokens. It leaves so much room for error. It leaves room for people to be able to exploit it to attack it. That happened to Arbitrum very early on in their billion dollar, uh, layer one or layer two. So I think there’s nothing that’s not being addressed. I think it’s just a continued evolution, um, of what we currently have. It’s like original state of YouTube to YouTube. Now, what does that look like? How does it move? Um, what’s the security mechanisms behind it? How does it go about making sure you’re not uploading nefarious things? Um, all of those types of things. I think those mechanisms need to, like, be put into DeFi, and I think we’ll probably see that over the next five years time.

 Kevin Rosenquist: And yeah, I think, you know, as DeFi grows, you know, we see more predatory lending. We see rug pulls, scams. You know, you hear about the scams and stuff like that and people getting screwed on that stuff. I mean, what do you think platforms like Titus and others can do to create a safer, more and more ethical ecosystem?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, I think in order to keep it decentralized, um, wallets and just decentralized products in general need to continue to abstract the user experience without losing or keeping user data, um, the way like we do it with what I was mentioning earlier with wallet creation, there should not be a scenario where like, I think what happened with Magic Eden over the last week or so with the airdrop claim and having to create one of their wallets and their wallet connected to another wallet, and then there was a bunch of points of failure and you could get a drained. And then on top of it, there was all this stuff that you shouldn’t be forcing people to do things that are out of their norm. I think when you’re building something and the direction we’re going, we need to stay decentralized and then just give the same user experience and integrate properly with products. I should be able to claim anything that any other wallet should claim on my Tidus, and then do it very quickly and efficiently. I don’t think that there should be a lot of barriers of entry. I feel the more barriers of entry that we put up in the DeFi and crypto space, the more points of failure risk of losing decentralization, or from being centralized and being able to see or take people’s keys. and I think that is the major point.

 Dan Mulligan: And right now, I don’t think that a lot of people in the retail web2 side see the value of decentralization like they should. I think it’s also something that we need to educate people on as to why you want to be decentralized and what the advantages of being self custodial. I don’t think we’re there yet. I think there’s a lot of people that understand it on a base layer, but I don’t think a lot of people understand it on a high, high level. I think you’ve seen, let’s call it the last month or two Coinbase accounts getting frozen, right. People are cashing out. They have to flag stuff because they have to be compliant in their KYC and they have obligations of their publicly traded company, so on and so forth. I think people are starting to realize, oh wow, I don’t need that. I don’t need that barrier. I don’t need to have that. I could just off ramp elsewhere or have a wallet where I’m keeping my Usdc and no one’s ever going to question it, see it, and I have full control over it. And I think that the more that people understand that, and unfortunately it’s through example, the more trustful they’ll become of decentralized wallets, non-custodial understanding, security of seed phrases, um, social recovery and all that type of stuff.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I talked to somebody recently about something I thought was interesting and that was, you know, there’s a lot of talk about how to get people to, to understand and adopt, you know, crypto or decentralization in general. And somebody said to me, like, I don’t think people need to understand, you know, I think the point the the idea was that, you know, like a lot of stuff that happens with traditional finance is in the background. We don’t even know what’s going on. Right? A lot of the functionality and stuff. Do you think DeFi should or can reach the same level of invisibility? Where where people just things just work and they don’t really know what’s happening in the background, but they don’t need to know? Is that something that you subscribe to?

 Dan Mulligan: Um, no. I’ll tell you why. The reason that we need decentralization is because no one knows what’s going on behind those.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Are banks and stuff.

 Dan Mulligan: Right? There’s the catch. The flip side of that is if you read the book Dark Pools or if you are, if you’re into the finance side of things. Yeah. You know, what banks are doing with your money and your checking account. You have a pretty good idea of just the way those types of things work, but the average person doesn’t. The average person is paying fees and doing things, and it might not have custody of their money, whatever it might be that they’re completely unaware of. And DeFi is essentially supposed to be technology waking up to that to some degree. So I think you have to educate. I think the way we do it has to be on a very high level. I don’t think people need to know, um, exactly how the soup is made, but they certainly need to know the base level ingredients and the advantages of it. So I think it’s more of teaching the value of being decentralized versus the infrastructure of being decentralized.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Because you don’t have to get too, too deep in the weeds with the tech, you know, for everybody doesn’t need to understand the tech but just need to understand the decentralization process as a whole.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Exactly. Yeah, that makes sense.

 Kevin Rosenquist: We hear a lot about the metaverse and how DeFi and Web3, you know, when a lot of people think of DeFi or of Web3 in general, they think of the metaverse like that’s what they know. What do you feel about that? Do you have a lien on the metaverse? And if you see the worlds coming together, and where a wallet like Tidus would be involved somehow in that.

 Dan Mulligan: So I was subscribed to the metaverse when it started happening with the NFT things. And I still think that there is a place in Web3 in the world for the metaverse and however you want to, whatever you want to call it, VR, AR. I think, though, it starts with probably the adoption of AR. I think augmented reality will be significantly more popular than virtual reality in the short term, and I think that crypto will be a part of that. I think you’ll see things like you’ll be able to go to a store, see a discount on an item using your meta glasses or whatever it might be, and then be able to hit a button that then pays for that item from your wallet at that discounted price. Um, I think real world adoption is just pushing that way. I think the way that things like Tidus would fit into that is better integration, right? It should be super easy for me to scan my phone and pull money from my Tidus to pay for a good.

 Dan Mulligan: And I think that everyone that’s where we need to get right. We need the payment rails. And you see a lot of things where you see USDt, Usdc doing a ton of funding into payment rails, um, into bringing retail on board, uh, small businesses coming on board to accept those types of payments. I think you’ll see that. And I think the metaverse, it’ll kind of be folded in there. I think the metaverse angle of it will be video games, augmented reality, blending with crypto in a way where it’s just a part of your life.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Um.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Obviously this is a fast moving industry, a lot of ups and downs. It’s, uh, it’s volatile to say the least. I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but you know, do you? Do you see it sort of leveling off? Do you see where we can get to a place where it’s less,I don’t know, volatile, less. Less bumpy roads, less of a roller coaster.

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think there’ll always be more volatility in the crypto markets than there will be in traditional markets, just because of the sheer amount of things you could do with crypto and the way it could be implemented into different businesses and applications and whatnot. Where I think on the traditional side, it’s pretty, you know, what you’re getting. You know what? You’re you’re all the systems are the same. They haven’t really been evolved or added upon too much. So, um, yeah, I think from, from like a full on DeFi perspective, that adoption just needs to happen in like this cycle. I think that volatility will slow down as adoption happens. I think the more people you have that are okay, holding and staking crypto and doing things with it, the less volatility the markets will be, because people won’t just be using it strictly for speculation or strictly for just buying and selling. And I think that as you see, governments,like enforcement, start to come and regulations, especially in the US, start to happen, you’ll probably see things like meme coins that are super volatile and kind of bring that casino mentality. Those will start to kind of fade away and DeFi will become more of the forefront.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, casino mentality is a good way to put it because I feel like a lot of people look at it that way. It’s like, oh, I wonder if I can make some money, you know? And I’m guilty of that too. You know, like I’m like, oh, I wonder if this will pop. You know, maybe I’ll maybe throw a little move a little bit over into this thing. This has got some buzz, you know. So there is sort of a casino aspect to it. That’s a good way to put it. I like that. But we got to get away from that to some degree, huh?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah. I think you just write like meme coins. They’re awesome. They’re awesome for onboarding more degenerate users, people who are trying to simply just make a bag as quick as they can with as little money as possible. But the realization is trading remains PvP and people. There was always a loser on each side of the trade. Uh, and people that lose usually are less inclined to come back. So while I understand onboarding a billion users through Pumped Out Fun or Moonshot, or any of these really cool apps that are very meme focused is a great idea. Retaining them is not going to be through meme markets, right? Meme markets have proven that memes go to almost absolute zero during bear markets, like there’s not even any chop or anything to trade there. Right. And then it’s you kind of placing these very strategic, I’ll call them bets on a bunch of different things and hoping they pop for the next cycle. Yeah. And that’s not really a use case for DeFi. It is like casinos are casinos and it is what it is. Yeah.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Sports betting. Same thing. I mean people.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Right, exactly.

 Dan Mulligan: But the LTV of that is not like going to be great. The amount of people and users that you have on that are now checking it every day, or doing it in a way where they’re gaining every day from it or using it as a part of their everyday life. That’s just not the path, right?, so I think the next phase is like utility tokens or rwas decentralized infrastructure. Those types of things are what’s going to usher in like true adoption, where right now we’re kind of just onboarding and then not giving anything else to do after that.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a good way. That’s a good way to put it. Yeah. Retention. That’s that’s the next step huh?

 Kevin Rosenquist: Absolutely.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. All right. Well, Dan, the company’s Tidus. What’s the best way for someone to get started with,with the Tiduswallet?

 Dan Mulligan: Yeah, we’re available in the Apple and Google Play store. Also on the desktop as well. you can go to Tidus Comm or NY Crypto Co to check out the app. It’s free to download, free to create an account. You can kind of get started right there. And you could reach me on Twitter anytime. If you have any questions. Kind of happy to chat about this stuff 24 over seven.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Awesome.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Well, Dan, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate your time and insight.

 Kevin Rosenquist: Awesome. I appreciate it. Thank you