Vivian Phung, Founder of Snowball

Sep 14, 2023

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Today, I'm joined by Vivian Phung. Viv is the 23 year old solo founder of Snowball, a Web3 dev tools provider focused on mobile apps and webapps. Snowball's first product, Igloo, will give developers a simple solution for SSO authentication, AA smart wallet, and onramping in one SDK. Igloo is currently in private alpha on testnet. Prior to starting Snowball, Viv was co-founder of Dora, a multichain block explorer search engine, and she was an engineer on the Instagram feed team before that. In this conversation, Viv and I dive into the challenges facing mobile crypto app developers today, her approach to smart wallets, and her ambition to create the Vercel for mobile crypto devs. It's always fun getting to meet a dynamic and relentless founder as Viv, especially at such an early stage in the company's journey. Her persistence and enthusiasm are inspiring. 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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Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction (00:01:37) What is Snowball? (00:04:17) Passkeys, a replacement for passwords (00:07:00) Challenges with passkeys today (00:08:40) Passkey Smart Wallet UX, explained (00:12:40) MPC (Multi-Party Computation) and DKG (Distributed Key Generation) (00:15:20) Turnkey (00:16:40) Snowball's AA providers: Alchemy, Fun (00:17:30) Facilitating mobile dapp development (00:18:55) The EU will jailbreak iOS 2024 (00:20:40) Viv's background building apps: College programs, Eventbrite, Apple, Facebook (00:24:00) Apple: Passionate cult-like culture, intense work, codename database (00:26:20) Facebook: Open, strong intern program (00:28:00) Instagram: Building multifeed (00:30:00) Working in Web2 vs Web3: Dora (00:32:05) Mobile dapp dev is too hard right now, everyone rebuilding the same tooling (00:36:50) Session keys (00:41:40) Embedded app-specific wallets vs shared wallets (00:45:20) WebAuthn Passkey UX challenges: Create vs Authenticate (00:51:30) EIP-7212 (00:52:30) Viv on gaming (00:54:00) Appchains and gas subsidies (00:58:00) Where to find Snowball and Viv