Marcel Harmann on multichain interoperability at THORWallet DEX

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investmentpitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have marcel harman founder and ceo of thor wallet dex marcel welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time hi ashton thank you so much for having me very much looking forward likewise i'm excited to dive into the thor ecosystem i'd love to kick

0:23off our conversation by just hearing a little bit about yourself you know your experience as an entrepreneur and in blockchain and what led you to starting your wallet yeah sure absolutely so originally i have a background in finance as well as i.t roughly one year after my master's degree and working for a bank i decided that i want to start my first

0:47own company since then i've been in the startup space in various different roles from founder investor but also early member early management member and after discovering blockchain around 2017 through a friend i immediately got hooked pretty much because it's the synergies of my two favorite topics finance and i.t and then since the blockchain technology

1:12is so diverse and i wanted to become an expert i decided to start a phd in blockchain crypto finance and at the same time i also joined the ceba bank one of the fully licensed crypto banks here in switzerland as one of their first or early employees and yeah but at the heart i'm always being and always will be an entrepreneur with the drive to build something new

1:39i was always constantly on the outlook of building something new i was interested in building something that has like an immediate impact has the potential to scale globally and technology is ready or close to being ready for like mass adoption and there were many ideas circling around but in the end like tour wallet manifested itself that's exactly what i

2:06i wanted it to be as now the first non-custodial wallet with the integrated cross-chain decks where you can swap native tokens unwrapped and also earn yield on them if you if you pull those assets so that's in a nutshell the story incredible and yeah i that's a feature that even i would like to use myself and great backstory there you know i

2:33love finance and i.t as well and this is the perfect industry so i'm excited to dive more into you know thor wallet you know there are so many wallets that are already available and i'm sure you're familiar with you know more than a few of them and obviously that function that you just mentioned there sounds like super important but i feel like we're even though there's so many

2:53wallets we're so far away from mainstream adoption that we need it to be easier for people to get wallets and be using them for every day what else can you talk about with the distinguishment of thor wallet as a wallet solution in why it's prepared for you know mainstream adoption and heavy use yeah absolutely i think what really distinguishes us is that

3:21well first of all we're the only native ios and android app in let's say the torch and ecosystem but also the wider ecosystem or space and that enables cross-chain defy so you can swap native tokens from one chain to another and the user does not need to care about wrapping or even know what it means and so on and this is something very important also for

3:47from asset option to make those things easy and now we also launched our web app that give customers basically a full suite of possibilities how to interact cross training and yeah i'd like to compare it often to the days of when you when you want to print something out and a few years ago when you had a mac computer you need to have a mac printer otherwise you simply

4:15couldn't print and windows the same you need to have windows printer nowadays you can buy whatever printer you want and from all the systems including linux you can just simply you know print and this is because there was some effort put into to make those things interoperable make it mass friendly everyone can plug it in with the usb and the same thing is happening in

4:42the blockchain technology and through training and for wallet i believe being one centerpiece to enable that good to know marcel and yeah i feel like the amount of coins on different blockchains you know you need to have like a multi-chain wallet that can just support it all and not have to be like this blockchain over here this blockchain over here i need to trade

5:06like how do i trade across blockchains you know making it hard some i'm glad to hear that you've thought that through and i really do like the functions of the decks and being able to do you know kind of decentralized swaps i feel like it's the future but what we've seen from the numbers of people that are using centralized exchanges compared to dexes

5:29i feel like we're like not even at one percent you know can can you talk about you know obviously there's clear advantages to using dexes but the stage that we're at right now and how early it is and why has it not been adopted sooner sure i mean on the on the positive side on certain days the volumes of the decentral exchanges are on par with decentralized exchanges

5:56or even bigger they do grow faster which is also nice so it's the fastest growing industry currently the d5 sector which is here to stay not like just a high and definitely more the technology just needs to evolve further and then and everyone is working on that cross chain but also lowering the fees

6:25proof of stake ethereum that is coming it all plays together basically and this combined with better user experience and user interfaces making them basically as easy to use as coinbase or decentralized versions is definitely key you need to be able to push the technology in the background so the end user doesn't know doesn't feel that he's

6:52actually everything he's doing is unchained so this comes with a few challenges interacting with different chains different error messages and it's not on-chain transactions are not as fast as on centralized exchanges so if you execute a swap for example it doesn't appear instantly you might need to wait a few seconds up to a few minutes until the trade has settled

7:18depending on which training you stand this needs a new thinking of how to tell the user who is unexperienced that this is totally normal because what you do is unchained so those those are things i think are needed and then we're good to go just simply step by step making it better with every update we come closer to yeah making it possible to onward

7:47the mess to d5 maybe one last thing that comes to my mind is education it's education is needed and it can be done in various places within the app with learning just little blocks where they can learn how pooling works what impermanent losses etc on the website faqs yeah i guess that's also needed to

8:18make them comfortable definitely great point about the education i feel like crypto's doing a good job in trying to educate people or incentivizing them with you know learn to earn and giving them a little bit of tokens way more than the traditional financial industry ever did you know they didn't really offer anything they try to make it like a walled garden to

8:37make it sound hard to use you know when really crypto is trying to make it easy for everybody so i agree with you there marcel and you mentioned you know i'm just continually making more updates on the road to more mainstream adoption i know that thor wallet dex has like an extensive road map of things that your team is working on right now maybe you can talk about some

8:58of the major updates that you're focused on currently and you know throughout the summer of 2022 and this year yeah sure absolutely so as an example we've just launched a web app so you can also trade in the browser we've launched with the core functionalities of swapping but now build all the features we already have in the mobile application

9:23into the web application so that's definitely a key focus and what is important there is the possibility to connect what's your hardware wallet your ledger so for bigger trades you might want to use one of that so this will be possible too what is also impossible important is that our token our own native token

9:49tgt 12 governance token you can use it for various things to unlock premium features like multi-wallet but also reduce your trading fees and then of course governance it's currently in erc20 token you need to stake it everything we do is d5 it's on train so you need to stake it then we know that you are in a premium tier community community plus we call it then those

10:16features get unlocked that's pretty pricey it can price out some people because of the high fees ethereum has so we're implementing or start to work on getting on a layer 2 solution for example to enable better user experience that is faster and cheaper the same with we have different missions and learn to earn or

10:45those kind of things you want to have that with low fees to reach the masses right so that's definitely very very important then the switching between the mobile application and the web application that you really have this ecosystem feel and it automatically recognizes you welcome back and you feel yourself at home doesn't matter

11:12where you log in but still being completely defined so you actually do not have an account you're as anonymous as it gets obviously and yeah what we also announced is field on offram i think it's pretty important we have different tiers to a certain limit you can it's allowed to do without aml and kyc like a daily monthly yearly limit above

11:40that limit you need to do aml optionally for those who want to unwrap or off-ramp more money and the long in the long run our visions also have our own credit card so you can really spend your assets directly from a non-custodial wallet in the old traditional world wow a lot of updates there marcel and sounds really exciting you mentioned

12:08their the tgt coin and you know having it currently on ethereum i saw as part of the roadmap you know eventually not having that on ethereum and part of this chaos net or the thor chain main net can you talk about that and you know what's the timeline or what's important about that yes after rigorous like bootstrapping and stress testing the transition

12:37from the torch in chaos net to mainnet is imminent and it marks like a crucial milestone for the development of cross-chain finance mainnet will be handed over i would say to the community with the network distributed across 100 notes now anyone pretty much can empower themselves and experience true financial freedom through

13:03Tor wallet and thor chain every everyone who's disconnected yeah and it's imminent i would say that's the most important thing very exciting and you know i'm sure that will also just bring more people in make it easier and grow you know the d5 ecosystem with on thor chain i was looking at you know comparing the different ecosystems in d5 and i saw

13:27that you know the your guys ecosystem has like 250 million tvl total value locked but you know d5 is going up and down with the market sentiment over the last few months how do you know move through this volatility in the market and try to continue to grow the d5 ecosystem within thor right

13:54I think thor chain is a group of builders and also we at thor wallet are really just focused on building the market around us is volatile and it's it's nice to watch a bull market but it doesn't matter so much we're just focused on building something and to make it last and even

14:21even a bear market or just on the tip of a bear market or whatever we are right now it's not even a bad thing because you can fully concentrate on building like put your head down and just keep on developing and this is what tour chain has done the last several years and since we entered ecosystem we basically have the same dna regarding

14:45that so it doesn't matter too much to us like the total value locked of course it's a metric that is very important and you have the better to stick more stable and to closer to the main net the more people trust the system and lock their funds but this comes hand-in-hand with the continuous efforts

15:12to just build and build it to last and i would say this is also the focus that we have going forward and then the higher tdl is just the result that will come out of this i'm quite sure of that yeah i like that approach and i think you're right about you know just getting closer to the main net just build it and they will come you know

15:38if you build it properly so you guys focus on what you do best that's great and you know and now thor wallet as a wallet i'm curious on your take on some of these major players like robin hood you know creating more i mean more than just a basic wallet to try and compete with coinbase and other players maybe creating big wallets like that and if you see that as a good thing

16:02or a bad thing or your opinions on that yeah i think it shows that the crypto space is maturing and still growing even like if you look at the global economy and where maybe i'll bring over a global recession but big corporates or big startups with big user bases make strategic

16:29decisions and bets on crypto which is overall just a very good sign because those are bets and decisions you discuss with the board it's a long decision process it takes a lot of funds to build it and to roll out your plan it's it's not just something you brainstorm in an hour and then you make the decision so overall this is just a very positive sign

16:59i'm i'm not shy away of the competition it's good and it will further increase the adoption basically and that's all we want same with education competitors since the market is growing and we're still so early there is a lot of i would say space for competition and of course eventually there will be a period of consolidation

17:27again but that's totally fine overall i think it's very positive and i'm looking forward to it definitely yeah and you're right about this isn't a one-hour decision you know a lot of these large companies have a very long-term vision and if they are adding crypto that means that they believe it's going to be here for the long run and they're planning for that so

17:53it does bring a lot of promise and you're right i don't think it's to be looked at as competition because everything helps bring people into web3 in the future of finance i'm curious on your visions marcel for you know the long-term vision of defy and multi-chain and how it will all work when you know trad fi in the mainstream is all involved

18:18right i think my vision slash also my hope but i think we'll get there is that we can have an app as user friendly and easy to use as the current c5 apps or trade file apps you use them you can simply download them with in the store

18:45with a mobile phone you do not need to register an account you do not need to give your email address whatever it's completely trustless open i mean permissionless everyone can use it and transparent and the user does not need to know and doesn't know how everything in the back works right now i'm using a macintosh here a mac laptop

19:13and i even though i studied it i don't know through every detail how everything works and this is also actually fine now we're using soon and the same is there so pretty much have just this new decentralized financial system that is built on the characteristics of blockchain which again is spoken transparent

19:40permissionless and it can evolve next to the traditional financial system and eventually users can choose what they want to use and that the technology simply goes into the background and it just flawlessly works and also defy meaning any token to any token on rapt i'm personally not the biggest fan of bridges

20:07but simply being able to try one token from one ecosystem to another token that maybe is on another ecosystem and he again he does not need to understand how those tokens are transferred but it just simply always works it works fast reliable and he has all the freedom to choose the service and if he doesn't like this service because it's defy you can simply

20:35get his seat phrase and get to another provider and try that one right so complete freedom to choose who you want to work with who you trust so yeah that's that's pretty much my vision yeah i like that vision marcel and yeah i know freedom of choice is obviously a great part of that and i believe you know that's part of decentralized finance as the future i'm looking

21:00forward to getting to that point and thankful that your team at door wallet texas is a part of that vision and working to make it a reality so for the people that are looking to you know start using door wallet decks and learn more about you know this future d5 vision that you have what is the best way to get started with using that and to join in the thor wallet dex community

21:28sure the simplest way is actually to either go on our website or wallet.org or just go to your ios or google play store and download the app and give it a try have a look if you like it stick around if not go go to another wallet that's fine too obviously we hope that you like it we also have a discord server telegram we're active on twitter

21:56all over the place pretty much i'm sure if you're interested we're always happy for feedback we're always listening to our community also the premium features we've developed are basically derived and the feedback we get so if we think something is missing or something we should improve we will listen and we are happy to work on that

22:25great thanks marcel i will leave those links as well for the viewers in the description box below to make it easy for them all the best on all the updates you mentioned and moving towards the main net and let's follow up in the near future awesome thank you so much