Obvious Smart Wallets with Himanshu Retarekar & Jebu Ittiachen

Sep 20, 2023

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My guests today are Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen, two of three co-founders of Obvious.

Obvious is a smart wallet company with three products. The Obvious Wallet is a multi-chain 4337 account abstraction smart wallet that was among the earliest full featured AA consumer products on the market. Obvious Embed is an AA wallet that third-party devs can integrate into their own dapps. Obvious Money is a stablecoin focused smart wallet app aimed at emerging markets in Africa and South America.

On this episode we discuss the team's path from building a traditional EOA software wallet to account abstraction smart wallets. We get into the tradeoffs of Shamir, MPC, and Passkeys, and the challenges building smart wallets in a massively multichain world. We also talk about fiat money platform incumbents, like M-Pesa, India's Unified Payments Interface, IBAN, and how crypto fits into the mix.

It was a pleasure chatting with Himanshu and Jebu who are moving quickly at the intersection of cutting edge smart wallet tech and global consumer applications. I hope you enjoy the show.

As always, this show is provided as entertainment and does not constitute legal, financial, or tax advice or any form of endorsement or suggestion. Crypto has risks and you alone are responsible for doing your research and making your own decisions.

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(00:00:00) Intro (00:01:42) Interview start: What is Obvious? (00:03:10) Himanshu Retarekar and Jebu Ittiachen's backgrounds (00:06:40) The Obvious Smart Wallet UX (00:07:58) Why embed an EOA in a smart wallet? (00:09:30) Obvious product offering overview (00:12:13) Obvious Money: hedge inflation with easy access to stablecoins (00:15:35) Regulation compliance (00:16:50) Digital banking status quo worldwide: M-PESA, UPI, Interac, Venmo (00:20:17) Bangalore: vibrant for crypto startups (00:23:52) Obvious Card: An AA signer Credit Card (00:28:00) Paymasters with Biconomy: Paying gas in any token (00:30:10) Login services (00:30:45) Obvious Shamir and seedless recovery (00:36:30) Does AA require an EOA admin? (00:38:20) Passkey challenges in multichain world (00:39:40) Seedless recovery cannot key rotate (00:40:40) Why MPC?: Lit Protocol MPC Distributed Key Generation (00:45:16) Passkey synchronization between platforms, EIP-7212 secp256r1 verification onchain (00:48:00) L2s with 7212, Halo2 Know Nothing Labs (00:50:30) Silence Laboratories: Jay Prakash (00:54:00) Is secp256r1 curve safe or compromised? (00:55:00) Future of Account Recovery (00:59:00) Permissions architecture for AA wallets (01:01:14) How the smart wallet wars will play out (01:02:15) Social login != smart wallet passkey signer (01:04:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:04:20) Address book and AA wallets importing phone contacts (01:06:20) CCIP-Read: How Obvious is using EIP-3668 to build obv.id vanity ENS-style addresses (01:04:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:13:15) Obvious combining cross-chain assets into a single token balance (01:15:00) Passkeys on shared domains (01:16:30) Westerners' blind spots (01:20:05) UPI in India (01:21:13) Goodbye