How Dynamic Powers Embedded Wallets at Scale

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Itai. I'm ecstatic to have you on today, man.

Thanks for having me, and I appreciate you bringing back GM, GM to conversations.

Yes, yes, of course, of course. I mean, just saying good morning to each other, that's all it is.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, man. I'm really excited for our audience to kind of learn more about yourself, Dynamic, the story behind that acquisition with Fireblocks, Fireblocks itself, lots to unravel in about 30 minutes time. So without further ado, perhaps would you like to just start with an introduction about yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. So, hi everyone. I'm Itai. I was the co-founder and CEO of a company called Dynamic, which at the time raised mostly from a16z and Founders Fund. And we were fortunate enough to partner with Fireblocks late last year. Fireblocks acquired the company in October of last year. And since then, we've been happy partners and working together on growing the business. Before that, I was mostly in tech throughout my entire career and have been a crypto geek since about 2011. So I felt late to the game at the time, and I still sometimes feel late to the game. But very excited to be here. We can talk about what Dynamic does in a second, but that's overall who I am.

Amazing, man. And I guess was there any particular thing that kind of drove you to go into the crypto scene and then kind of start a company in that sector?

Yeah, so it's a great question. You know, my co-founder Yoni and I actually met in college together. So we went to college between 2007 and 2011 at MIT. And at the time at MIT, folks were talking about crypto and Bitcoin. It was a really exciting time. The white paper came out at one point. And that's where things were being dove into. We had a distributed systems class where we talked about it then. And so since then, we were pretty excited about everything crypto. Every time, we were like, this is awesome, we can invest, we can save, we can do all this type of stuff. And the excitement over the years got higher and higher. When Ethereum came out, we were like, oh, we're late to this. And when Solana came out, we said we're late to this. The conversations between us as to the future impact of these had increased since 2010, 2011, all the way to about 2020. In 2020, Yoni and I dreamt of starting a startup together for a very long time. And we tried a bunch of stuff before. When we said, okay, this is it, we're starting a company, it was very clear to us that we were going to start it in crypto. It was very, very clear to us that this is where the future of finance is going. Specifically, we had this impression in our mind that if you open your phone in five years, every app on your phone will have a crypto component. So it was a very clear problem for us. We'd been tracking it for a while, so it was a no-brainer that this is where we're starting a business. When we started in 2021, we said crypto, and we specifically tried to double-click on the problem of, okay, everyone loves the concept of crypto, everyone loves the fact that you can move money globally in seconds with very, very low fees, but the complexity is way over what it should be, and that's where we can help contribute.

Amazing. And yes, this is a good segue taking going into the origin story behind Dynamic and the inspiration behind you guys starting it. I was going to say it's very difficult typically to use a crypto wallet, and yeah, I'd just love to hear the origin story behind Dynamic and why you guys started it.

Yeah, double-clicking on that, double-clicking on crypto is hard. We actually dove in at the time when Solana came out or NFTs got popular on Solana. Magic Eden was just starting out, and we tried to buy some Solana NFT airdrops, and it just failed miserably. It was a terrible experience, and it was very, very clear to us that this is not the future. By the way, fast-forward a year and a half, we got the chance to actually power Magic Eden's sign experience, login experience, and embedded wallet experience, which was a full-circle moment for us. But the premise of Dynamic, the origin story, was: hey, there's this great tech out there that is global-first fintech and global-first money movement, and it's really hard to use. You've got to think about storing keys, gas, and broadcasting things on RPCs. You as a developer had to know so many things in order to take advantage of the benefits. It also had to be front and center; you had to show people things around keys, storage, and gas. All that complexity could not exist there in order for Western Union to use it. And so that was the premise: how do we abstract that away? How do we take care of the security of storing your keys? How do we take care of the user experience of not having you see any of those, gas, or anything like that? And how do we make sure you as a developer can pretty much within a weekend build a global fintech app?

Yeah, I mean, that has all the makings of a successful startup, and that kind of speaks for itself with Fireblocks' acquisition. Could you take us through the story behind the acquisition and how that all came about?

Yeah, absolutely. So within a month after starting Dynamic, when we were raising our seed, one of the potential investors actually said, hey, you should talk to a reference. They connected us, and that reference was Michael, the CEO of Fireblocks. So we actually met Michael pretty much a month into starting Dynamic. Fireblocks at the time was an extremely fast-growing company and still very much is. In talking to Michael, we got a couple of things out of the conversation. First, good verification that the investors bring. Second, that Michael is an extremely sharp individual that we wanted to partner with. And third, that we're competing in very different parts of the market, so working together actually is a very good idea. We got those out of the conversation, and throughout the years, we've maintained these relationships with Michael, with Idan, who's the co-founder and CPO, and with many others across the Fireblocks organization. It was very clear to us that there's a lot of collaboration opportunities. Fast forward three and a half years, when Fireblocks approached us to partner more deeply, it was a very natural fit for us. Fireblocks is pretty much the global leader in enterprise crypto and enterprise wallet security. If you're a global bank, if you're the SoFi's, Robinhood's, or Revolut's of the world, or many others, you have to secure massive amounts of assets and transactions, and those all rely on Fireblocks infrastructure. If you're doing global crypto money movement, that all relies on Fireblocks infrastructure. But then if you're that same company and you want to start building in the embedded wallet space, if you want to start offering these neobank-in-a-box for your customers, or if you're building remittance apps like Western Union or payroll apps like Papaya Global, then you need the simple SDKs that Dynamic offers. It was very clear to us that this holistic end-to-end solution, from very advanced Fireblocks capabilities for global institutions to something you can plug into your app and offer your end customers, worked hand-in-hand together. So that's pretty much how it came to be. It was a very natural conversation as to a single unified offering that just accelerates this for customers. If you want to bring crypto into your app, you should not care about any of the complexity of it. It should just be a simple integration for you, just like if you want to bring text messaging to your app, you bring in a Twilio API and it takes care of the rest. The idea of the Fireblocks-Dynamic integration and why this acquisition worked so well is that you get this holistic, one place where you as a customer can integrate everything crypto.

Amazing. And congratulations on that acquisition as well. Yeah, I'd love for folks to see this all in action. I'll pull up your screen and you can take us through the demo.

Yeah, let's do it! So what I figured we can do is—can you guys see my screen?

Yes, it's on stage.

Love it. Okay, perfect. What I figured we can do is actually, rather than just talk about Dynamic, go through what Dynamic feels like. Now, Dynamic's very much anticlimactic to demo because it's in the background. The goal is to abstract away complexity. So by demoing this, I'm actually demoing what you won't see versus what you will see. The best way to do it is actually on customer apps versus a Dynamic app. What we're seeing here is an app called StablePay. It's by this really cool company out of Asia called Stable, who are also a chain, and they built a global Venmo and savings app. What you see here is their global app. It's a really cool theme: you can save, you can earn, you can pay and request, all very, very quickly. The goal of this is that you shouldn't know anything about crypto. So here I have a balance of $16.50, and I want to pay someone on the other side of the world. I can pretty much just click Pay, choose whoever I want, select that I want to pay them 1 cent—I'm pretty cheap, so I don't want to pay that much—click to pay, use a passkey to actually verify the transaction so it's secure, and I've sent payment. All of this didn't need to involve anything crypto. The payment was sent, that's it. The other person received the 1 cent on the other side of the world. Now, all this happened without any of the crypto complexity. You didn't have to think about gas fees, broadcasting, or adding your private key anywhere. It just kind of worked. In the background, this all runs on Dynamic. Dynamic spun up an embedded wallet for me, the user, spun up an embedded wallet for the recipient, sponsored gas, did all the rule engine to make sure it's all compliant, etc. It did it in a non-custodial way so I control my funds, I can export my key, and it did it pretty much in a single click. So that entire flow lets StablePay build this magical app without any of the complexity. In the same way, if I now want to take a dollar here and save that money, I can go and say, hey, I want to invest and save at 6.79% APY in this case. I can say I want to invest a dollar, continue, check this, confirm deposit, use my passkey for security, and I'm done. I've deposited and now I'm saving. In the background, there was orchestration with Morpho, which is a popular DeFi protocol for lending and borrowing, and orchestration with broadcasting and securing it. But it all happened in the background. So me as a user, I just clicked two buttons, and it kind of just worked. This is the type of magical experience you can build. Maybe just one more quick app is an example where you can take it a step further. This example of BankApp can actually very quickly let you not just save and earn, but also do more sophisticated stuff. You can very quickly withdraw, send balances, or even add a card. So every time you tap your card, it withdraws from your embedded wallet, or you can one-click deposit funds to earn or save. All of this is powered by our technology in the background, but the idea is to abstract away the complexity of crypto. It feels and looks just like any other app on your phone, just with global finance enabled in it with one click. That's a very, very quick demo. You can do a bunch of things with it, but the coolest thing of all is that pretty much you can wake up on a Saturday morning and by Sunday afternoon, you can build your global remittance app, payroll app, or neobank app, all with Dynamic tech in the background without any of your users ever knowing it.

I love that. Easy developer experience is always champion in this space. And I guess on that front, what would you say are the best developer tools or SDKs around this off the top of your head for people to get started and get up and running?

Yeah, so to get started—you're asking about Dynamic specifically or in general?

About Dynamic.

Yeah, so Dynamic is extremely straightforward to get started. All you need to do is go to docs.dynamic.xyz, choose your friendly AI agent, point them to the docs, and say 'build a neobank'. We have JavaScript SDKs, Swift SDKs, Kotlin, Flutter, React Native—pretty much whatever your heart desires. You can either manually follow the guide if you are still writing code by hand—artisanal code writing, perhaps—or you can send your favorite AI agent to just pull information and implement. But it's pretty much just docs.dynamic.xyz and app.dynamic.xyz to create your account. You can actually do all that programmatically as well. We have a dashboard CLI, so your agent can actually interact and make any changes and choose the right chains, all very, very quickly. It takes a couple minutes to get started. You don't need to talk to anyone to get started. You just log in, sign up, and you're pretty much good to go.

Amazing. And yes, viewers in the audience, all those resources are in the description of the video below, so definitely you'll want to check that out and maybe do a weekend project with Dynamic and get something up and running real quick. Going under the hood of Dynamic a bit, from your experience in building it up into what it is today, was there one memorable technical hurdle or something along the way where you guys were building where you can share how you overcame those challenges?

Yeah, absolutely. In short, Dynamic was very challenging to build because you're building a thing that did not exist before. There are types of companies you can build where you go after an existing behemoth and try to outcompete them by building a new version of the product, or there are other types of companies where you're in a completely greenfield trying to explore something that didn't exist before. Both can be very successful companies, and they both face very different challenges. In the case of going after a giant, you face the challenges of trying to compete against a company with thousands or tens of thousands of employees. In our case, the challenge is that you're building with your customers. The market is evolving very, very quickly, and you're learning a lot about what actually works in practice, not by just building in a silo, but by talking to customers every day. One of the challenges we realized over time is how much of the complexity we have to shave off. We started by saying, 'Hey, folks know what RPCs are, and folks have gas fees, and they just need an embedded wallet.' Then we realized some folks don't know what RPCs are or don't know what gas fees are, so we said, okay, we've got to add that. Then you start talking to fintechs, and you realize they don't know any of this, nor should they care. They just want the ability to plug this in and know that it works. The level of complexity we had to quote-unquote simplify and simplify in order to get to a place where any developer globally can use this—we're still very much on this journey. You have to constantly challenge the assumptions you have about what developers know about your part of the world. In your world, you live in cryptoland every day, and you think about this stuff, but no one else knows, nor should they care. The challenge we face—and it's a challenge we're still facing—is a daily conversation about: can we abstract this away? Does this thing need to exist? Does this thing need to be visible to our customers, or can we take some of that onus? We're expanding that by saying, wait, what are other things folks need to face when they tackle this stuff? Do they need to face on-ramps and off-ramps? How do you move money in and out, and how do you abstract that away? The challenge is not just building the thing, but thinking about all the things going through a developer's mind when they try to implement new technology that we can abstract away and put into very simple APIs and take care of behind the scenes. That's really our focus.

I will say one thing, which is we've seen this really huge shift within Dynamic: if you move back two years, what you see is a lot of crypto-native companies trying to build new experiences in their own very silod land. Today, a lot of our customers are massive fintechs, again like the Circles of the world, Western Unions of the world, and many companies like that, and the Stables that we saw. The goal there is for them to just be able to move money faster, make it more efficient, for payees and contractor payments to get paid faster, for remittance to your family members on the other side of the world to get remitted to faster. The idea is really to abstract away more and more of that, which is my point from before, of just moving things out of the way to let you build your next global competitor for Revolut. You can play around with all of this on demo.dynamic.xyz, so don't take my word for any of this stuff or any of the experiences, try it out yourself. It's very, very easy to implement, and it's a lot of fun because again, you get to create what Venmo created in seven years, you can create in pretty much a day or two. Or if you want to just build your own fun payment app with friends, completely doable today.

Awesome. That was a perfect way, the last few statements, the plugs, to kind of end things off, as I know you got to run. But I just wanted to say thank you so much, Itai, for taking time out of your busy day to come chat with us. I'm quite fond of what you guys are doing and wish you guys nothing but the best of luck going forward and helping solve the crypto UX issues that have plagued us in the past.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate the time. It was a fun conversation, and thanks for having me.

My pleasure. And with that, I just want to wish everybody a very happy Thursday, and we'll catch you back here tomorrow for another great episode of DevNTell. Until then!

Bye.

Have a good one, folks. Bye!