Reown AppKit: An All-In-One Toolkit for Web3 App Builders

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or have built in Web3. So whether you're a fully fledged Web3 startup or a weekend hacker or anything in between, this is your platform to showcase what you've built to the Web3 community. And today I'm ecstatic to welcome Joe Hoffend, who's Head of Product, and Rohit Ramesh, Head of DevRel at Reown, formerly known as WalletConnect. Reown gives developers the tools to build user experiences that make digital ownership effortless, intuitive, and secure. If you stick around for today's show, you'll learn all about Reown AppKit, how it works, and how to start building with it today. All right, let's get into it.

GM, GM. Welcome to the show, Joe and Rohit. Pleasure to have you both.

Thanks, Narb. Thanks for having us.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, for sure. And an extra special thank you to Rohit, who's in Singapore for Token2049, so it's quite late for him, so quite the trooper for coming on. But yeah, ecstatic to have both of you on and really looking forward to hearing all about AppKit. But before we get into all of the goodies you have prepared, perhaps would you both like to give a brief introduction about yourselves?

Sure. Thanks so much. So hey, I'm Joe, I'm Head of Product here at Reown. And my crypto journey goes back to the 2000s where I got pretty interested in sound money, gold and silver, and eventually stumbled upon Bitcoin in 2012. And I'd been working in tech my whole career, so I was basically looking at Bitcoin and saying, hmm, this blockchain stuff, this is basically tech and sound money thrown together in terms of Bitcoin. And then I saw Ethereum come in 2015-ish and smart contracts were just such a no-brainer, made total sense. And, you know, just ever since that first day of finding Bitcoin, I've been pretty obsessed with this space and now I'm working in it, so having fun.

Hey everyone, I mean, I'm Rohit. I'm from India. I've been working in Web3 for around four years. Before that I was more into machine learning and natural language processing. I'm an engineer and I was more focused towards research, writing research papers for professors. I was more in academia. To me it felt like I'm just applying what I know and not doing something innovative. And one day in 2021, I randomly stumbled upon a meme where it said you could screenshot an NFT. I had more faith in tech so I started like going into the Web3 rabbit hole and four years from now I'm in DevRel and I've been in DevRel for quite some time. And it's been a fun ride.

Yeah, yeah, that's excellent. I guess did both of you start your professional careers in Web3 with WalletConnect or did you guys work somewhere else before that?

No, yeah, I had an esports startup to start off my career many years ago, then I worked in software services, then I worked at a company called Fastly. So I've been all over and, yeah, started working in Web3 about four years ago.

So, I mean, I've worked for a couple of companies. They were two small startups in the beginning and then my big Web3 leap was when I started working for thirdweb. And then I was working for Crossmint and now WalletConnect is sort of my third big Web3 company.

Awesome. Excellent. Yeah, I'm always curious to hear the journey folks go on to get to where they are today. I guess before we bring up the slide content, I'm just curious. So recently WalletConnect went through a bit of a rebrand, changing names to Reown. So could you perhaps give a brief kind of overview of how that kind of came about and why the change occurred?

Yeah, sure thing. So earlier this week, WalletConnect Inc. rebranded as Reown and the WalletConnect Foundation was launched and there's a WCT token that was launched by the foundation. And the idea for a long time now has been to continue to find ways to decentralize the WalletConnect network. And so, you know, rather than having centralized servers powering the network, which had been the case prior, over a year ago, we have been gradually decentralizing the network. So we will have node runners basically powering the network. So there's some other bits and pieces there of how it's all going to come together and work. I'll review what the network is in just a moment as part of the deck, but overall it's super exciting and we're playing a role in the entire decentralization of the space and all the infrastructure.

Awesome. Love it. Yeah. Great. I guess with that, I will bring up your slides. It's a good segue. And there you go. Floor is yours.

Amazing. Thanks so much. So hey, you already met us, I'm Joe. And so yeah, Reown is extremely focused on building user experience toolkits for builders. And so we've got two flagship products, one's called AppKit, the other's called WalletKit. And I'm going to be specifically talking to you about AppKit today. And we are just extremely focused on upvamping everyone's game in terms of UX and that comes down to making digital ownership effortless, intuitive, secure, and really just kind of available and easy to use for everyone.

So what is AppKit? So AppKit is essentially the easiest way for you as a builder to get users to connect and interact with your dApp. And so you've probably seen something like this as you've used different crypto dApps. And essentially what we allow for is you as a builder, you want to focus on your core competency of building the dApp and the experience that you have in mind. You shouldn't have to worry about how am I going to get users to connect, what if they don't have a wallet, how do I let them use the wallet that they already have or they prefer to use, how do I make sure they can do everything they need to be able to do to interact with my dApp, such as on-ramping funds into the wallet or swaps or anything else that might come to mind. And so AppKit is basically what we've created and maintained that is the easiest way to get users connected to your dApp within just minutes and some basic lines of code that Rohit's going to show you shortly. And we are continuing to build this out and just make it the best modal and connection experience possible.

So talked to you a little bit about the WalletConnect Foundation, but what is the WalletConnect network? And so the WalletConnect network is basically all of these different dApps, tens of thousands at this point, that use AppKit or the relay to connect users from their mobile wallets to desktop applications. That QR code you may be familiar with. We've also got AppKit which I just talked to you about for the dApp side of things, for dApp builders to use to get those users connected. We've got the protocol itself which is essentially like a messaging layer that has the apps and wallets talking back and forth to each other to establish the connection. And then we've got WalletKit which is for wallet builders, used by over 600 wallets at this point, where they kind on the other side of this basically build in WalletKit and it allows for them to seamlessly talk to AppKit builders as well and communicate back and forth. This especially comes into play and is important when we think about some of the new standards and innovations that are coming to Ethereum for example, which I'll touch on as well shortly. And to that extent, the protocol itself is chain agnostic, it is a messaging layer, it's a communication mechanism back and forth. So any chain can essentially use the protocol itself. AppKit does have some chain dependencies which I'll talk about in just a moment as well, but this is why it's so widely used. We've taken a chain agnostic approach with the relay and are excited to continue expanding support around AppKit.

So we talked about how Reown is really focusing on UX, but why is UX so important? Well, it may seem somewhat obvious, but we've still got a ways to go in Web3 compared to Web2. And so when you think about you're building a Web3 experience, well there's basic expectations that users have when it comes to things they do in Web2. So being able to easily register, log in, not having so many clicks to work through, that's a pain point with a lot of the different wallets and experiences we have now with connecting and signing messages. And so we just feel that it's important for us to play a role here in providing tools that allow you and ultimately users to have just the best experience possible. And so we are always looking at certain tactics such as how can we reduce the number of clicks that are available. So a few months ago we released something called One-Click Auth. This takes a two-click experience of connecting to a dApp and then signing a message to prove you own the wallet down to one click, it combines those two into one. We also think about meeting users where they are. So one of the biggest pain points in my opinion with Web3 up until now has just been the lack of focus on the mobile experience. And so you know, very desktop oriented for a long time. And we are continually thinking through how to improve the mobile experience. So we introduced something called Link Mode for example, which makes it so a native mobile app can very seamlessly and easily, almost instantly connect to a mobile wallet. And we also have different platform support for builders who are using Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, etc. We're always thinking about edge cases. So crypto is very much global and so we are thinking through making sure users, no matter where they are, can access and use our toolkits. So with on-ramping for example, when you're trying to add funds to your wallet, maybe you're not able to access Coinbase. So we want to add other providers to make sure that everyone can on-ramp funds, swap, do whatever they need to do, etc. And we're also always thinking about, like I said, the device itself. So no matter where the user is in the world or what device they're using, making sure that everything just works. And then there's latency. I mean something that's just kind of assumed at some point, but you know, we are just constantly finding ways to shave off seconds from every point of the experience. We recently came out with a blog post a few days ago kind of outlining some of the recent improvements we've made. Shout out to Chris, one of our engineers who's done just a ton of work there looking at every piece of the stack to eliminate latency. And then obviously stability. Anything around services not working, any kind of error messaging, we just want to eradicate all of that. And so not long ago we announced something called WalletConnect Certified, which is one of our initiatives to help improve this, where we are going to be certifying certain wallets who abide by certain UX standards and have kind of the latest and greatest UX in terms of what's been established as the criteria. So we're just constantly thinking about this every day and finding ways to just up our game and then help provide those tools to everyone else.

So just as an example if you're still trying to figure out what is AppKit, why should I use it? So on the left is basically a screenshot I took a couple days ago from a dApp I was trying to use. And when I went to click to connect my wallet, the left is what came up. It was homegrown, the builder obviously just threw something together really quick and basically said, hey, either use MetaMask or this other wallet to connect. And I said to myself, hmm, well I have other wallets that I use, you know, MetaMask is awesome, it's popular, but you know, at this point people are using all kinds of different wallets. So in this case, this builder unfortunately is probably just blocking out a whole ton of users from actually being able to even connect or use their dApp. Whereas on the right side, this is kind of the out-of-the-box experience you would get just from installing AppKit and what you would see right away when a user goes to click connect. So in this case you can see we've got the ability to create an email embedded wallet, or they can create an embedded wallet with a social login. This is for the user who wants to create a fresh wallet or just doesn't have a wallet period. But we all know that there's certainly tons of crypto-native folks out there like us. So below that you can see we've got the classic WalletConnect experience here to pull up the QR code and connect, or it's already automatically detecting the wallets you also have installed such as MetaMask in this case. Or you can go and search for any wallet you choose through the 'All Wallets' view there. And so this is all customizable. You can disable different pieces, you can change the look and feel, which I'll talk about. But again, this is just, you know, you not having to worry about building a connect wallet experience or how users are going to access your dApp. AppKit gives you all that out of the box essentially.

So again, we see just so many people still trying to build a modal. Maybe they don't know about AppKit, they don't understand the benefits of it. But you know, with a basic modal, it's on you the builder to figure out how am I going to get all of these users connected based on whatever wallet they want to use, whereas we've got 600 wallets out of the box. Basic modals are hard to customize, again it's all on you. We've got docs explaining exactly how to customize the experience, whether it's what social logins show or are available, what wallets you want to prioritize, the fonts, the backgrounds, you know, everything. You can go just look and it's super easy to change the settings around. And this ultimately just makes something non-intuitive much more intuitive because you're in more control of what's showing and you're not having to do so much work. And as I'm going to talk about just shortly more as well, we are bringing AppKit to be more multi-chain and multi-platform. So you know, whether you're building on web or mobile, we've got different platforms available to use AppKit on and we're also expanding our chain support. So at the end of the day, a basic modal or maybe the modal you used a while ago that's old or not maintained, very hard to maintain, whereas AppKit just has lots of other features that are available for you, makes your end-user's life easier and we're constantly improving it.

So as an example of what it's got available out of the box, there's a little bit more than this screenshot shows, but just some things to highlight. In terms of users and where they're at with an account, they can create an embedded wallet if they don't have one yet. We've got smart accounts enabled, which I'll touch on more just shortly. We've got what's called graduation, so if the user creates an embedded wallet they want to take over the private key and do self-custody, that's available. Passkeys is grayed out because it's coming soon, but we'll have passkeys integrated shortly. And then in terms of transactions, just everything the user would need to basically on-ramp, swap, smart sessions I'm going to touch on in just a moment. And then we've also integrated the ability to sponsor transactions. So another friction point here is that users have to have gas available, they have to, you know, maintain that. You know, there's different points in your experience when they may have to pay for something. You can now sponsor gas on behalf of the user, just like a typical infrastructure cost, just to reduce that friction on, you know, the user having to maintain something else. And to that effect underneath, we've also released the ability for the users to use any token they prefer for gas. So as long as it's an ERC20 token, you know, they can use USDC or whatever else they want to pay for gas. And then once you've got your users, we've also got, you know, ways to engage with them such as push notifications. So if you want to create custom off-chain notifications to tell them about specials you're running, the rates you have going on DeFi lending, for example, anything like that. We've got that available and then we build in the infrastructure into AppKit so you don't have to deal with needing to find an RPC to use, maintaining anything with the relay, it's all out of the box. And to that effect underneath, we're adding support for more chains for AppKit specifically and continuing to build out the multi-platform support as well.

So it's got a lot already, but where else are we going? What else is exciting that's coming up? So we've got a huge roadmap of things we want to do over the next quarter into next year. A couple things I wanted to touch on specifically. So you know, AppKit was very EVM focused up until just recently. And we've spent the last few months totally rearchitecting it to be much more elegant in terms of multi-chain compatibility. And so just today we announced Solana support at Breakpoint. So that's our first next big chain that we've added support for in addition to EVM. And we're going to keep adding more and more over time. And we're actually going to in a few weeks announce how it's possible for you, a community member of other layer ones who are non-EVM compatible, to go ahead and build in the support yourself. So there'll be some more announcements there on how you can add, you know, support for any chain that you prefer or want to build on where we maybe just haven't added the support yet ourselves.

And so Solana was announced today at Breakpoint, and coming soon, Bitcoin and Polkadot as well. So Bitcoin obviously has been catching quite a DeFi narrative lately, there's a lot more smart contract options on Bitcoin now that are being built out. So we've had requests for Bitcoin and then Polkadot as well, there's a number of builders out there who need some kind of a solution here to get their users connected. So super excited about that and the other chains we're going to add over time as well.

Next one I'm particularly interested in. I think this is one of the biggest user experience unlocks that's happened in quite a while. So we're calling it Smart Sessions. And this is based on a new Ethereum standard, the number is 7715 for anyone that's curious or wants to look into it more. But basically what this does is where you as a user, you may want to have a certain interaction, or you as a builder may want to offer a certain type of functionality to a user, but it's quite literally just not possible today because of some of the limitations in how users can set permissions with different dApps to spend on their behalf. So what Smart Sessions is, is basically you can now have different interactions where as a builder maybe I want to offer limit orders or dollar cost averaging to my user. Well, if the user wanted to have, you know, Uniswap buy them $100 worth of ETH every Friday, the user would have to manually show up every Friday unfortunately, until now, and click and buy $100 worth of ETH. What Smart Sessions allows for is that you can establish a permission between your account, your wallet, and Uniswap and say, hey, every Friday buy me $100 USDC worth of Ethereum and I'm going to set it and forget it. And that's just going to happen now behind the scenes. So you don't have to be there to sign the message, you don't have to worry about it, and this is just a huge unlock in terms of all the other possible use cases that can occur now.

And so some of the things that come to mind: subscriptions, like a total no-brainer, that should be possible today but just isn't because there's no way to accommodate this kind of asynchronous signing as we call it, where it's just happening behind the scenes. There's a bunch of other use cases here around making sure that you repay a loan on time so you don't miss something, you know, governance, staking. Another big one is just when you're playing a game. So a lot of the Web3 games, you might have seen some of the viral videos, but you're playing it and you just keep getting prompted to sign a transaction for something. This can totally eliminate that as well. You can just say, hey, if I'm playing this game, like we're good to go, you know, give it whatever permissions it needs. So this is just a huge unlock. I bet there's a ton more use cases here that aren't even on this list that you all can think of and we'd love to talk to you about them if you have some other ideas in mind.

And so when it comes to AppKit, we're just trying to again, for you as well, for the developer experience, trying to make it as easy as possible. So less code, easy to use, easy to implement. You know, how many minutes does it take to get AppKit up and running, which should just be a few minutes at this point. But that's our goal as well. We're ultimately trying to offer better tooling to you all as builders so that the end-users get the benefits of all this awesome user experience that's now going to be possible and continue to improve in Web3 over time. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Rohit to give you a little demonstration of just how easy it is to use AppKit. So I'll stop sharing my screen here and take it away.

Give me one second. Let me share my screen. Can you see it?

Uh, yep, yep. You're good to go.

So again, this is a very simple Next.js app and it took me less than 10 minutes to set it up. And you could see that my wallet is already connected, it shows me my balance, and then you click on it, it shows my profile, and it also shows the functionalities that Joe was talking about that makes the user experience much better like swap and activity and you could on-ramp crypto all from within an app without ever having to leave it. And not just that, the surprise is it's multi-chain. So when you click on network, not only do you see EVM networks but you also see Solana. And like Joe mentioned, soon there'll be Polkadot, Bitcoin, and many other different ecosystems that are completely isolated from EVM at this moment. But we will sort of act as the intermediary to tie them all together so one app could have it all rather than piecing it together provider by provider. So now if I click on Solana, it'll directly switch to my Solana wallet which is connected using Phantom. So I'm going to quickly, I'm not sure if you can see my extension but uh, it should be my Solana wallet that is connected. And if I were to switch to Arbitrum, it's going to again jump back to my EVM wallet address. And not just that, if I disconnect, you can still select the network and jump back in. So if I connect wallet, you see that it also has social logins, email login. And then all the wallets that are part of the WalletConnect network. So I can show you what the connection looks like. You select MetaMask, select Ethereum, connect your wallet. And now if I were to go to Solana again, it's going to ask me to pick the wallet of my preference. I select Phantom and then I select Solana. And that's how easy it is to implement AppKit. And if I were to quickly stop sharing and show the code that is running on my VS Code, you'll be able to see how easy it is to like capture all this user experience with just a few simple lines of code. Uh, give me one moment. Can you see it?

Yep, VS Code is now on screen.

So since I'm using Next, I have to like separate the context from config. So it's going to add more lines for user experience, but you could do all of this in less than 30 lines. And here you can see how I've configured Solana, and this is what I called the 'createAppKit' function. And this, you could fully customize it however you want. You could add as many adapters as you want, EVM and non-EVM alike, configure the networks, enable email and social logins, on-ramp and things like that. So it's super easy, super straightforward, and yeah, I just wanted to show a quick demo of what it looks like.

Yeah, that's amazing. And I really, I really appreciate the ease of use and the fact that all your slides were very mobile-centric, emphasizing the point that a lot of folks are going to be using Web3 on their mobile devices. So I love, I love seeing that. Um, I mean, we have some questions from the crowd if we want to entertain those or do you have any more content you want to go through before we get into that?

I'm good on my side.

I'm good too.

Excellent. Excellent, excellent. All right, we'll get into the Q&A. I think you touched on this briefly, Joe, towards the end of your slides, but Erick was asking if, um, sorry, not that one, but yes, to his point, Erick was asking is there a way for builders to help you guys grow? And I think he was getting towards adding more protocol integrations like you mentioned adding Bitcoin and Polkadot in the upcoming future, but are there any ways for folks to involve themselves in those integrations?

Yeah, so we're going to be having some, we just kind of finished this new version with the multi-chain support. So next up we're going to write up some docs about how different community members can involve themselves in helping us add support for different chains. So, you know, obviously lots of different chains that are non-EVM compatible want and need something like AppKit to be able to provide to their builders in those ecosystems a way to easily get users connected. And so we've kind of built this with an open mind of, hey, we're not going to be able to get to every chain ourselves, let's allow others to contribute and help out. And so we're just drafting up what that process is going to look like so that there's some quality control and some other things just to make sure that, you know, everything is in order and up to standards. So we're definitely going to be announcing that by probably mid-ish October.

Awesome. Right around the corner. Excellent, love to hear that and excellent question, Erick. Question for me. So you touched briefly on people being able to preload gas for their users so that they don't have to think about it. Have you guys started to think about using Smart Sessions to kind of enable that for the end users?

Yeah, it's funny you mention that. I was just talking to our team members this week about that because we're doing the two initiatives in parallel and I want to make sure that when they kind of come together and are both done, whether you're sponsoring a synchronous or an asynchronous Smart Session or just any kind of transaction, that it's all configurable, super easy to understand and use, and we're trying to make both the experiences on each side of that super clear and super flexible as well. We're also looking at different grant opportunities for how to make it additionally beneficial or give some folks $50, $100 of just sponsorship money to start with. We've recently secured grants to make sure that the smart account deployment itself, when the account goes on-chain as a smart account, that's already going to be sponsored on major chains like Base, Polygon, etc., etc. So.

Awesome. Love to hear that. And as far as I understand, these Smart Sessions are an EVM concept, correct? Have you seen other non-EVM chains looking to adopt that or are you guys going to be porting that to other chains so it supports the multi-chain wallets that you support?

Yeah, Smart Sessions is quite unique to Ethereum at the moment. I do know that there's some different options available on Solana. I don't think they're designed quite the same. I was actually literally reading about it yesterday to try to get a handle on that. But I think it's going to be again, it's just one of these UX basic expectations that I should let a user do something with my dApp without them having to be present, you know, in the moment. And so, you know, if any of these chains want to keep up essentially at this point or allow those kinds of user experiences, they're going to have to have some kind of solution there. So, you know, some of the newer chains are probably going to have it a bit better support out of the box per se, whereas Ethereum has had to add and get approved a bunch of standards to accommodate it.

Fair enough, fair enough. And I guess in your guys's opinions, I'm always curious to hear what folks think, but like what kinds of trends or developments in the Web3 space in general are you both most excited about or looking forward to? Obviously Smart Sessions is one thing, but anything else that kind of comes top of mind?

Yeah, I mean for me it's chain abstraction as the other concept. So if you're not familiar with that term, that basically means, you know, when you're a user on Ethereum for example, you've got so many layer twos that are out there, whether it's Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, the list goes on and on. Well, you might have, for example, let's just say for sake of argument, one ETH on eight different of those L2s. It's a real burden in terms of UX for the user to understand how do I bridge between the chains, what if I just want to get something done and say like, buy me, you know, 3 ETH worth of this other token, you know, they have to then bridge, figure out the swapping. Chain abstraction basically just says like, forget about everything with bridging and the different networks, just tell us what you want to do. And so what we'll essentially have built in eventually, which many people are working on and we're working on our own implementation with some of the best people in the space doing it, is that you can see as a user, hey, I don't have one ETH on eight different chains, I just have 8 ETH. And then I just want to say I'm going to swap, you know, 3 ETH for this other token and behind the scenes it'll do all the bridging, swapping, necessary to basically just get you that use case completed. And so to me that's the next huge major unlock beyond Smart Sessions because you're just abstracting away the next big source of complexity for an everyday kind of user.

Yeah, definitely. That would be great to rid us of manual bridging. We all know how painful that is. What about yourself, Rohit? Anything top of mind that you're excited about in terms of Web3 development?

I mean, this is not going to be super high level. One thing I'd like to say is that, you know, even though I work in Web3, just using Web3 applications is always a nightmare and I always try not to do it as much as I can because it's such a hassle and a pain in the ass to like get it to work. And we are quite technical and if we struggle, imagine an average consumer, right? So I would like applications to get to a stage or at least protocols to get to a stage where no one has to know that it's even on the blockchain, it's just like as intuitive as using Facebook or Instagram. I know it didn't start out like that but it can get to that stage by, you know, following traditional mental models like don't reinvent the wheel. Everybody uses internet one way, just because you do it a different way with better tech, I don't think the end consumer cares about it. Like all they care about is is it useful, is it solving something, am I going to use it again. And that's what the primary focus should be.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think a large part of it has to do with us just being like super nerds and being really excited about the technology, so we just keep building things kind of catered around that, but yeah, you make an excellent point that most people are not going to care what the underlying technology is, they just want a cool app to use. So definitely agree. All right, I guess, yeah, Django brings a good point: good tech does matter though. Yes, the underlying tech has to work for the app to have a good experience. So definitely agree with that as well.

So we're more or less at time. I just want to end off with what is the best way for folks to kind of keep up with all things Reown and reach out if they start hacking something with the new AppKit that you demonstrated today? Yeah, what's the best way for folks to reach out?

Yeah, so we keep our blog quite up to date now with lots of new content. I just wrote something about Smart Sessions if you want to understand it a little bit more in depth or a bit more detail. We've got, you know, obviously on X/Twitter our @reown_ account. Follow us on LinkedIn and we also have a Farcaster account as well. Or you can follow me personally @joehoffend on all the major platforms. I post little demos, videos, content as well about what we're up to.

Beauty. Excellent. So unfortunately we are at time, but this was another excellent session here. Thank you so much, Joe and Rohit for coming on and giving us that wonderful overview of AppKit and Reown overall.

Thanks Narb, it was a pleasure.

It was awesome.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right gang, with that, I just want to wish everybody a happy Friday, happy weekend wherever you may be and that will catch you back on DevNTell next week. All right all, have a good one. Cheers.

Bye-bye.