#31: Ouriel Ohayon, Co-Founder @ ZenGo | How they built an MPC wallet to get rid of seed phrases and what they did to acquire over 700k users

Web3 Talks: Stories & Tips from the Builders

ZenGo has been the pioneer in MPC research and the most popular consumer MPC wallet in the world. Ouriel shares the backstage perspective of their early days, acquiring the first users, their product strategy, ClearSign wallet firewall, and marketing activities that led to over 700k users (which is a lot for a wallet!).

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0:37 Who’s Ouriel Ohayon and why ZenGo is special

1:03 How Ouriel transformed from a crypto skeptic to a crypto optimist by listening to a podcast episode in 2016

3:10 Ouriel’s story when he didn’t like any wallets on the market and decided to design his own

5:10 How they researched different options and learned they couldn’t get rid of private keys so started researching MPC (Multi Party Computation) and became one of the world’s leaders in that space

10:25 How does MPC work, why it’s different from a traditional wallet security, what trade-offs does it make and why it’s being used by Coinbase, Fireblocks & American banks

18:04 What would happen when ZenGo’s servers go down and how they protect the company from this kind of events

19:53 What’s the difference between MPC and Account Abstraction

23:38 Why Mac would recommend ZenGo to his father

25:13 How have they acquired their first wallet users by marketing cryptopgrahy before they started marketing the wallet and how do they promote it now

30:15 How do they take care of the user’s security & UX

32:46 How do they make money and what are their plans for new services

35:55 How does their ClearSign wallet firewall protects the users from attacks

44:10 Why Mac believes we can solve crypto security

45:10 Why Ouriel thinks of crypto as an early car industry and the story about Elon Musk’s driving McLaren F1 with Peter Thiel

51:15 What were some dead-end streets that they explored

56:06 Why would Ouriel fix gas with his web3 magic wand

59:22 What could be solved in the web3 mobile experience

1:02:40 What made Ouriel smile

1:04:50 Where people can learn more about ZenGo

1:06:09 Guest idea