15. Ivo - Founder @ Ambire

Building the gateway to web3: lessons from pioneering account abstraction

Welcome to product3 - where we decode the art and science of building in web3 with the people making it happen.

Meet Ivo Georgiev (@Ivshti), founder of Ambire - a smart wallet that's been pushing the boundaries of what's possible with account abstraction before it was cool. While many wallets are just now figuring out their token strategy, Ambire has been running an established token economy for years, learning hard lessons about governance, distribution, and building sustainable flywheels.

In about 700 words, Ivo shares:

• Making novel features click for users

• Why security and ease of use aren't enemies

• Building a token economy that actually works

• The vision for web3's gateway

What are some unique challenges you have faced building a wallet product, and how did you tackle them?

A key challenge that we started facing years ago and still face to this day is integrating cutting-edge features that nobody else has integrated before, in a way that is seamless and understandable. The best examples are the batching feature which allows you to compose multiple action transactions, and the gas tank, which allows you to prepay for transaction fees and use the prepayment cross-chain.

Both are account abstraction-specific, and they took an incredible amount of time to get right in terms of UX. With us being the first to implement them, there are no established user flows. We're still working on making those features more intuitive to this day. What helped tremendously was conducting one-on-one user interviews which taught us several things:

• For cutting-edge features, you can't expect the user to discover it on their own.

• Sometimes buttons with unknown functionality are scary (like "Add to batch").

• Sometimes unfamiliar things make UX worse even though long-term they make UX better.

• The fixes are often very simple - help tooltips, removing unnecessary info, changing names.

What's been your approach to balancing security with ease of use in your wallet product?

We firmly believe that security and ease of use are complementary, not opposite! When you think about it, most funds are lost due to phishing and lack of clarity (blind signing) rather than anything else - and we have been heavily focused on those issues. So in this sense we don't see a conflict between the two.

In our architecture, key management is secure enough that we don't need to add extra steps as a band-aid. Instead of piling on friction, we focus on solving the root causes of security issues.

What metrics do you find most valuable when measuring success in web3 products?

Even though we're a wallet, we find TVL to be really good, as it directly measures the overall trust placed into the product. Our north star for a long time was number of accounts holding over a certain threshold of value, with the threshold set in BTC to cancel out market fluctuation noise.

However now we've reverted to the simpler scheme of looking at TVL and active accounts separately, and we find this works better. Sometimes a valuable user would start out with an empty account but as long as they're retained they will import their larger accounts.

Ambire has had a token for a while now, while many other wallets are just announcing token launches - how has having an established token shaped your community-building approach?

Having a token is a high-reward, but extremely high-effort process, and we believe that one of our main strengths is having a lot of time to establish the token's strong points:

• First, functional governance that users care about can work as a supercharged BD department to bring in partnerships, while also creating demand for the token.

• Second, the flywheel effect: product usage leads to increased demand, which leads to increased product usage.

I believe we nailed both and established a very good foundation, mainly thanks to Ambire Rewards, which is essentially the fair distribution mechanism of $WALLET. It rewards you based on a formula that takes into account your activity and balance, which goes back to the product metrics question. But essentially, it distributes tokens, slowly, to our most valued users.

Over 60% of the supply has been distributed that way, and this will continue. This has helped get the flywheel started, as we have users who came for Rewards and stayed for the product, and users who came for the product but got interested in the token.

What sets Ambire apart?

What sets Ambire apart is that we are truly building the gateway to web3. I believe that we shouldn't simply be making an alternative to centralized exchanges, but focus on what makes web3 stand out: unified identity, dapp interoperability (being able to use the same assets everywhere), and that all of this can be done privately.

Another thing that sets us apart is Kohaku, Ethereum Foundation's privacy-focused fork of Ambire, which aims to develop privacy primitives and flows that can easily be ported back into production wallets.

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