Abstract, The Builder's Platform for Consumer Crypto

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every Friday, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between to come on the show and showcase their product. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome Abril Zucchi, who's a DevRel from Abstract. So if you didn't know, Abstract is the builder's platform for consumer crypto, enabling a powerful way to create, deploy, and scale your web3 dapps. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll see Abril give us an overview of the Abstract chain, highlight its features, and tell us how we can get started using it today. All right, let's get into it. But first, a word from our sponsor.

[Arbitrum Sponsor Segment]

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Abril. A pleasure to have you on.

Thank you! Very happy to be here. This is my third time, I think, on the show.

Oh wow, right on! You're a veteran of the show. I love it.

Yeah, yeah, I love this show.

Oh, thank you so much, we appreciate that. Yeah, so we got a great episode lined up. We're going to be learning all about Abstract chain today. But before we get into all the goodies, why don't you introduce yourself for folks who might not be familiar?

Yeah, so my name is Abril, or April, or whatever pronunciation you've got is good. I'm from Argentina originally, and now I'm living in New York. I moved to America like a couple of months ago, almost a year ago. I've been working in crypto since 2020. I was previously working as a front-end Solidity engineer for almost two and a half years, and then I switched to DevRel and have worked in a couple of projects, and now I've been working at Abstract for almost a year.

Right on, right on. Congrats on reaching a year. And I guess, like, have you always been into tech? Did you start your career in web3 or did you have a web2 past?

So my first job actually was in a gaming company, was not crypto-related. It was just a gaming company from Latin America that was developing different cool games, and I was just a front-end developer there. So I was working with Angular and legacy technologies that I do regret working with! I didn't know React at that point. But yeah, that was my first job and it was not crypto at all. Then I switched to Solidity developer where I was working at an agency that works with a bunch of different DeFi protocols. And then I worked at one of the biggest exchanges from Latin America called Ripio. Which is funny because that exchange is now building a chain for Latin America on zkSync, which, you know, is ironic because Abstract is built on zkSync. So everything makes sense now. One of my first crypto jobs is now built on zkSync and now I work on Abstract. But yeah, that's basically how my path was.

Got it, and full circle. It's interesting how things play out sometimes. But I mean, yeah, it's wonderful to see you land here. And I know you have quite an inspirational story on how you've come to this point. I know probably a lot of Crypto Twitter knows this story, but there might be some folks who are listening for the first time or seeing you for the first time that might not know. Did you want to get into that a little bit?

For sure, yeah. So I will start by saying that I dropped out of high school when I was 17, so in my last year. It was during COVID, so it was very hard for me to just do the school online. I didn't like it at all, and I had a bunch of time to just study something that I really liked to do. So that's why I got into programming, tech, and crypto. I was 17, had no money, coming from Argentina, a very low-income neighborhood. I basically just started to learn to code myself, just watching YouTube videos. I remember I was just getting Udemy courses, stuff like that, which was very good. The amount of resources you can find on the internet is insane and you can actually learn whatever you want if you want to. So I kind of did that to get a job in tech, to land a job. And I got my first job at this gaming company but I was getting paid 100 bucks. So it was pretty bad. I mean, for Argentina and someone who was 17, it was good, but at the same time, they were exploiting me. So it was very bad. I wanted to switch to an industry that gives you this opportunity where people invest in you. I've seen this in a bunch of people who were literally coming from nothing that ended up working in some of the biggest companies in crypto. So that's why I switched to crypto, and because in Argentina we were dealing with a lot of inflation and devaluation of our national currency. So crypto and stablecoins especially was like the big thing, right? Like the big thing if you actually wanted to keep value of your money. And it was actually really easy. We had a lot of companies that offered debit cards that you can pay with USDC, USDT, stuff like that, and they make it very easy to access for the general consumer. And the community in Argentina for crypto is amazing. Founders of OpenZeppelin, Hardhat, POAP, all of these companies basically come from LatAm. LambdaClass, all of these really good companies, really talented engineers, especially in the Ethereum ecosystem, it's just insane. It's the best place to be at, I will say, in the Latin American community. So I got into crypto, and I basically just scaled my way up. I didn't know English back then. This was like two years ago when I got my first job in an actual American company. And that was like the way that I literally just scaled so fast and so high because I think the US or the North American market just gives you opportunities that you cannot find anywhere else, especially coming from Latin America. And so that's why I was very committed to learn English and get into a better market and better opportunities. And I started to invest time into growing my social media account, like Twitter. Twitter is like the best tool, at least in my case, because it gave me all the opportunities that I had and I have right now. Literally how I joined Abstract is pretty much Cygaar messaged me on Twitter being like, 'Hey, you want to grab coffee, talk about DevRel?' And we had a simple chat, and then that's it, because I was around the timeline. And that's how people get opportunities. So yeah, that's pretty much the TL;DR of my story.

Beautiful. And yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of determination to, especially at a young age, to kind of drive yourself to learn to code, much less end up moving out of the country and starting a new life. So kudos to you on that. And yeah, again, the power of building in public. I'm sure you were sharing quite a bit of content on socials as you were learning to code and whatnot, right?

Exactly, yeah. For sure. That's like the thing that, you know, I did at the beginning in Spanish, and it blew up. I was sharing Solidity content in Spanish on blockchain development. And because there's not a lot of resources in Spanish on that specific niche, it literally is the way that you can grow your account. When you're from a specific country and there's not a lot of content in that language, it blows up. So that's how I grew and I would recommend anyone to do so, honestly.

Yeah, and it's been tried and held true for a lot of people at Developer DAO and web3 in general. You scroll the timeline, lots of cool people building cool things end up having or landing great jobs, and eventually coming on the show, unselfish plug here. But anyway, before we get into Abstract itself, just another fun angle. What is a fun fact about yourself that maybe not a lot of people know, outside of web3 or something?

I would say, this is a hard question. I would say at the beginning, I was very 'fake it till you make it'. I remember for someone who was 17, with no high school degree, no anything, I was like, how can I figure out how to land in a job? So I pretty much just made a website, a landing page of a fake company, LinkedIn, everything. And I landed to my first job saying, 'Yeah, this is a project that I was working for'. And it was literally my own! And I was like, 'This is a company I was working freelance and I did this and this and this'. And I showed actually the things that I did, but it was literally just for myself, and I was pretending that it was a company I was working at. That was the way that they hired me. Otherwise, I had zero experience. So I needed to literally just make shit up to actually land in a job. And I think, you know, there's nothing wrong with that at the beginning if you're someone who just wants to get in a job, and then of course you will actually experience something real with real team members and stuff. But that was a fun fact.

Awesome. And I mean, work is work, right? It's not like you didn't do the work, it was just like you spun the story in a positive way. Exactly, what it takes. But yeah, that's amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that. And yeah, I guess let's get into all the great stuff you have for us from the Abstract end. I guess firstly, what is Abstract if you had to do an elevator pitch of it?

So I don't want to define Abstract like another L2 that is built for consumer. It's like the same speech for every other L2. In fact, I'm kind of bullish because people just recognize us as the actual consumer chain. And some people think we're an L1, which I don't know if it's bullish or not, but I'll just say that. But we are a chain that is basically focusing on getting the consumer phase of crypto. And what I mean by this is that, you know, we're facing a real issue that is the industry is very small if you think about it. It's very small and it's hard to onboard people because the current UX is very complicated, like the traditional wallet UX. We don't even need to mention it that much because we all know that MetaMask is... not because I want to shit on these wallets, but it's really a hard UX for people that are not crypto natives. If I want to onboard my grandma, literally I send money to my grandma on crypto because it's easier than just sending Argentinian pesos, converting from USD to Argentinian pesos and doing all of this. So I don't do that, I just send her USDT. And I needed to sit with her for like five hours, explain her everything. And she's still dealing with understanding how to transform that money into Argentinian pesos, and how to not make the wrong transaction to a wrong network, and it's just very complicated. So I will say that Abstract is trying to fix this. Abstract is fixing the current UX by just building... we have a wallet that is basically a cross-application smart contract wallet that uses native account abstraction underneath. And we use Privy underneath, Privy is amazing tech. So what we do is that we have a wallet that is integrated in our website, and you don't need any other browser extension or anything like that. You just have your wallet, you interact with all the dapps, you fund, you send, everything in just one app, which is our web app, abs.xyz. So we will do that walk-through later. But basically, we're trying to fix the onboarding to basically bring more people, the masses. We're always talking about mass adoption and stuff. We're actually trying to fix that. And I will say we're trying also to be the most fun place on-chain. Like on Abstract, you can find games, you can find NFT collections. We just did a partnership with Red Bull Racing, which is insane, for the F1 that is happening this week actually in Monaco. So we're just trying to be really the consumer place for crypto and to make it fun. I would say, not because I work here, but it's a very fun website. It's addictive, even.

Yeah, yeah, you guys have a lot of neat features like streaming and an App Store that you'll get into lately. Does Abstract cater to a specific niche, like are they just for gaming, just for AI, or more of a general purpose?

I would say we're just more general consumer. We do have a lot of games, but I wouldn't say we're a gaming chain. I wouldn't say we're the AI chain. We're also... we have this new game, Monsters.fun, which is an AI agent game that is minting today. So you can mint and then play later on. And it's very exciting because it kind of mixes the gaming and the AI agent stuff. And we just have a lot of different things. I would say one of the easiest ways to onboard consumers is through games, so we do focus on that. But we also want to have experiences outside of crypto, like this Red Bull Racing. Because I think that's the way that people can be aware of what Abstract is. And imagine someone that goes to the F1 and they hear about Abstract, they mint the NFT, and you know, things can happen that way, when you're making noise somewhere outside of Crypto Twitter. So I will say our main goal is just to onboard any kind of consumer user.

Well said, well said. Can you get into any details around the Red Bull thing?

Yeah, pretty much just we're going to be... I'm not super aware of F1 or anything like that, but I know that there's going to be a couple of events this year in different locations, different cities, this week in Monaco, then in Miami and Singapore for the token for the nine-week. So in each week there will be events happening on Abstract that you can mint NFTs and participate in the experience. But yeah, we will be announcing all of it on our Abstract account but also in the Red Bull Racing Twitter account.

Awesome. Yeah, looking forward to seeing that. And I guess this is a good segue to kind of see what Abstract is all about. Did you want to get into the walkthrough?

Yeah, so let's share screen here. Let me check. Okay. Can you see my screen?

Yep, floor is yours.

Perfect. So we'll do a walkthrough here, but first let's go to the main landing page. This is the first thing that you will see when you get into abs.xyz. We just actually announced this new landing page, I love it. And see, we focus on saying that we're the builder's platform for consumer crypto where you can find our apps. We try to build some kind of App Store. I think we got inspiration from a lot of different apps or places that we found very interesting, like the App Store. You can find all of our ecosystem listed here. And then, here is the Portal, and our developer docs, which they're very good, by the way. Not because I'm in the DevRel team, but they're very good. We try to make it easy for everyone to understand how to integrate the Abstract Global Wallet. So now let's get into the Portal. Here is pretty much the first thing that you guys will see. You have your profile, which if you're a first-time user, you will have your address here instead of your username, and you will be able to edit that here, your description, and to connect with your social media accounts. Which that will give you rewards here. We kind of give these kinds of badges to incentivize users to do stuff on-chain. For example, if you fund your account, you will get this badge. If you connect your Twitter, you will get this, and if you play different games, like the Big Coin game or Multiplier, you will get different rewards, and that will be displayed on the XP side every single Tuesday. We update and we give XP away to the users that interact with the Abstract ecosystem.

So if you stream or interact with streams, with games, anything, that will be rewarded here on the XP. So this week, for example, I got 8,000 XP, which is pretty high, but I've done better, like this week, 18,000. So depends on my interactions with the ecosystem will be better. Then we have basically the wallet. So here is all the meme coins that I'm currently holding, very bullish on all of this. But also, you can see your NFTs here. You can see the transaction history. It's like pretty straightforward when you want to kind of see everything that is happening on your account because, as I mentioned this, but Abstract Global Wallet is this, right? Like it's exactly this. You can fund your account, you can send through here. It's just very easy. I can just send to someone and it will be immediate, and you don't need to just learn different things, use a private key. We're pretty much easy to log in. For example, I will just show. When you're a first-time user, you can just create your Abstract Global Wallet account by using your Google, a previous wallet, or a passkey. So this is something that, you know, completely changes the game because we're used to the 12-word phrase or whatever, the private key. And like, how can I onboard my grandma to that, right? How can I onboard someone who is not crypto native using that? So this is just very easy. You just connect your Gmail account and you have already your account on Abstract, which is a smart contract. It's pretty straightforward. And then if you want to fund your account, you can just use the bridge, you can just use a centralized exchange, Coinbase, MoonPay, we have a couple of different options, and it's everything here.

Then we have the streaming section, which this is the thing that makes me feel very proud of my team. This was something that when they told me we're trying to build this, I was very excited because, actually, crypto needs more content creators, more streamers, and more people that actually put the work on showing what's going on on-chain. So here is basically all the streamers that are currently creating content on Abstract. And one of my favorite things, let's say I follow this guy, he has a lot of people watching now, three people. So we're going to give him support by sending him a tip. So this is something we built, it's basically our native tipping. So you can tip on-chain on ETH, USDC, PENGU, NOOT, or ABSTER. Which is pretty awesome because we're used to seeing, you know, in Twitch, if you stream and you get tips, you get paid, I think, a few days after, and you don't get paid the full amount that people actually sent you because it takes fees and takes, you know, commissions and stuff. So if I want to send merheb just... let's see here. Oh, I don't have any USDC. So let's see, I will send him 500 PENGU. I will send the tip, and it will be pretty immediate. So I just tipped him 500 PENGU, and he already got that immediately. And we have this chatting section, which is pretty cool. I just feel like this is something that people don't realize, but streaming is one of the ways to onboard consumers to crypto. We're trying to get more streamers on Abstract that can stream different things, like some people stream games on Abstract, some people just chat, some people just like do some fun shit, and we are just trying to be the platform that people have fun with. So when I say it's one of the most fun places on-chain, it's because of this. You not only have different games but also a streaming section that you can just, you know, be watching for hours. And if you go to the transaction history, he just... see, he just got the transaction immediately and no fees.

So the other part is the App Store that I was talking about. And this is something that I also love, which is the Upvote section. We kind of... I would say this reminds me of Product Hunt because in Product Hunt you know that you vote apps, and then the ones that are voted the most are on the top. So this is pretty much the same, and you are able to vote this. It's basically we have a smart contract, this is an Abstract voting contract. So this is also on-chain, so any dapp can also implement, for example, Roach Racing can give rewards to people if they upvote from their app. And it's just pretty much just interacting with the apps and giving them support on this. And we spotlight different apps every week. For example, this week OpenSea is the first because we have a lot of NFT collections and things happening with OpenSea this week, so stay tuned. But if you can see all of the most popular apps, which is Gigaverse, Roach Racing, Gacha, pretty much games, and this prediction market will be on the spotlight apps, and then you can just search based on the category of the apps. See, we have social, we have trading. It's pretty much easy to understand and interact with. That's why I love it for consumers. I think if you're a first-time user on some crypto app, this is the way to actually understand what you can do on-chain.

And then the last part will be the trading section. We also improved this a couple of weeks ago. Now you're able to just trade your tokens, swap with whatever token you want, the top meme coins in Abstract right now. And then you can see the chart here: market cap, volume, liquidity. You can access to the Explorer here, the Dexscreener, and you can explore all the top tokens. So that's pretty much what the Abstract Portal is. And yeah, it's pretty fun. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions.

Yeah, yeah, that does look very fun. For the streaming part, is there any part of that stream that's saved on-chain, or is it just like a regular old stream?

Um, do you mean if we use some kind of API on the streaming?

No, like, for example, if you go on a stream, is that stream recorded on like a decentralized storage protocol, or is it just saved in a web2 manner?

Yeah, I think for now, it's saved in a Web2 way. We use, I think, GetStream is the API we use, I'm not really sure. But yeah, it's not currently on any decentralized storage right now. You just basically, if you want to stream, you start your stream in StreamYard or OBS, and then you copy the stream key, and basically that's the start of the stream. So we use that kind of way to start the stream.

Got it. Cool, cool, cool. And Billy, Billy's asking: 'When D_D abstract stream?'

You know what? I made a mistake. We should have streamed this at the beginning on Abstract. I completely forgot. Yeah. But the next time, you're more than welcome, I will get you accepted, and you're more than welcome to just, you know, join the Abstract Streamers community every time you stream with some other builders.

Ooh, ooh. Perhaps DevNTell will start to stream on Abstract. Maybe some alpha. 'Approve it' as Billy says. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, there's also a couple of other questions from the crowd that I'd like to bring up. So D13mp1sec asks, 'Is or will Abstract jump into RWA?'

Um, I don't think we have any plans anytime soon.

Got it, got it. Fair enough. And great question. And a question from Naomi: 'Any plans on adding more OAuth2 providers besides Google? Discord would be super interesting for game builders.'

Yeah, we're planning to do that. We actually get asked that a lot of times, honestly. Depends more on Privy than us because, as I said, Abstract Global Wallet is built underneath Privy. So it's based on their authentication methods, but not pretty much on us.

Got it. Cool, cool, cool. And great question again. And another question from my end, is there any type of mobile native app for this Portal, like on iOS or Android? If not, any plans to do that?

We do have plans. Right now, we do not have the Abstract Global Wallet for mobile. But you know, we pretty much optimized the mobile experience to be one of the best experiences as we can. But I do feel like we will definitely have the mobile experience very, very soon. And we do have a couple of games on the Abstract ecosystem that are fully on mobile. So if you want to use the SDK for a mobile game, for example, for Abstract Global Wallet, you're able to do so. It was pretty complicated at the beginning because the SDK is pretty much React only. So some people were using Flutter, some people were using Vue or some other frameworks. But because we integrated WalletConnect, now you're just able to do mobile games and integrate the Abstract Global Wallet on it. So I would say it's pretty straightforward right now.

Great, great to hear. And in terms of getting listed on this App Store, what's that process like? What are the minimum requirements for people to show up there, basically?

So if you go to the Discover part, I think it was here... well, I actually do not remember where it was, but you can basically upload your app here, your information. And you can basically... we chat with all of our ecosystem dapps. The only two requirements though to be listed on the Portal is to have at least a Tier 1 audit on your smart contracts, and to integrate the Abstract Global Wallet because we need every single app to have our native wallet. Because that's the way that we track all the XP, the interactions of the users, the rewards that we give to the badges. So it's, you know, that's pretty much the two requirements that we have for Portal, and then, yeah, just open to chat with anyone building a consumer app, and yeah, just support them with the AGW integration.

Awesome. And yeah, I guess to kind of continue on that last bit, if devs want to get started with Abstract today, what's the best way for them to do that?

So this is our docs. We have... I would say the most... this is something that I forgot to mention, but we're now EVM equivalent. So we were not EVM equivalent before, we're built on zkSync, zkSync just released that like last week. So we're now EVM equivalent, we use an EVM interpreter. So you can basically just deploy code using Foundry. I would recommend still using the zkFoundry because using a regular Foundry or using the EVM interpreter will be 4x or 5x higher, like the fees. So I would still recommend using zkFoundry or just the regular zkVM. So here is our docs, pretty much very straightforward. Smart contracts, hardhat, foundry. You can connect to Mainnet here, to Testnet here. And then for the Abstract Global Wallet, this is the SDK. We have the Session Keys part as well. This needs to be whitelisted. So if you integrate session keys, which removes the friction of having the popup every time you approve a transaction, so if you want to integrate this for Mainnet, you need to get whitelisted before. We review the code, we try to make sure that everything is very safe, so we whitelist your code after it's reviewed, and then you access to the session keys part. But pretty much everything is here: the wallet linking, the actions, the Abstract client. And then you can see different demos here and our YouTube channel. Pretty much that's it, and here is the API reference if you need it. We just added this actually. But yeah, that's pretty much it.

Amazing, amazing. And yeah, we'll link, we'll be sure to link to these docs in the description below. And one last question to squeeze in before we end off. Naomi asks, 'Games are pretty big on Base. What's the biggest selling point for game devs to pick Abstract instead of any other chains in your opinion?'

So I actually do not know any really big games on Base. I know that they kind of approach the same kind of consumer facing. But I will say for developers, it's just a way better experience because, for example, if you have a game and you want to, again, make it very smooth, like the experience needs to be very smooth, seamless to use and everything, we have the session keys in our wallet, which allows you to just remove the popups at all. Like you won't have popups, you will just play the game and forget that you're on-chain. That's one of the things. Like the experience in general of the wallet of the games are very smooth. But also, we drive a lot of volume. We drive a lot of volume, growth. Our community is just super big, and we keep growing. So for any consumer founders that are building for the first time a game and want to grow and want to actually get users, I think Abstract is the best place to be at because we literally just keep growing. Like our ecosystem, even our NFT collections. Like no other chain... I can't think about other chain that is actually just being very big on the NFT side. I think we're literally trying to get back to the NFT era with Abstract. So if you go to OpenSea, Magic Eden, some of the top NFTs are on Abstract. So it's just a very fun place to be at, and as I said, because we list them on the Portal and we give on a weekly basis just different badges to users for different games, you just have a lot of volume, growth, and presence. You have a lot of presence. So you will be on the top of the Portal if you're building a cool game and you have a good reputation and everything. So yeah, that's pretty much it.

Awesome. Yeah, the gamification of game. Exactly. Great question, great answer. And yeah, unfortunately, this brings us to time. Abril, thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come talk to us about Abstract and sharing a little bit about your background as well. It was amazing to have you on.

Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

My pleasure. And before everybody leaves, I'm going to drop the link in the chat for you to be able to claim your attendance badge on BitBadges for watching us live today. So if on-chain collectibles are your thing, definitely check that out. You'll have about an hour to be able to claim that badge. And with that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Wednesday. We're Wednesday today, this week we have a double header on DevNTell. Hope everybody has a great day, and we will catch you back here on Friday for another great episode. All right all, have a good one.