The History of WalletConnect
The History of WalletConnect
How Pedro Gomes has improved the way people use products built on protocols
Watching an idea leap out of a whiteboard and onto the internet is what gets me up in the morning. I can vividly remember John Collison explaining Stripe’s startup-focused distribution strategy in 2012 and Gavin Wood drawing out ideas for Ethereum in 2014.
Another moment that is seared into my brain is when Pedro Gomes walked me through his ideas for WalletConnect in 2018.
At the time, Pedro and I were working on an interface for Ethereum called Balance. We were creating apps for the web and mobile phones. We needed a way for them to talk together. The most popular way for Ethereum and the Internet to work together was through MetaMask, a browser extension that most folks used with Chrome. What we wanted was a transport layer between phones and desktops.
This was what Pedro sketched out for me:
At the time, the Balance team were all working together in Medellín, Colombia. It was the best time for the company. We came together in person and worked every hour we could to start shipping the product that we knew the community wanted. We prototyped Balance Manager for the web, WalletConnect the protocol, and Balance Wallet in under a month—it was amazing!
After we published the website, code and prototype applications, the Ethereum community started to rally around the idea. We quickly started working with prominent projects in the space to ship integrations as quickly as possible.
It soon became clear that Balance the company could not fund the development of WalletConnect on its own—we needed some help. Pedro and I sent in an application to the Ethereum Foundation for a grant. We were over the moon when it was accepted just a few weeks later.
Even in the depths of the bear market, we were starting to see all the pieces fit together for this trend known as DeFi (Decentralised Finance). Teams were building digital dollars, lending markets, and insurance systems. You can see that picture becoming clearer here:
In order to share the ideas more widely, I attended a wallet-focused Ethereum meetup where all the wallet providers got together to debate these ideas. It was an incredible get-together which helped seed the idea in many other teams’ minds.
In the presentation, I was doing my best to convince everyone that we wanted this to be a neutral system. BalanceConnect would be lame. It would have been centralised on a single company and dependent on us. We were trying to help usher in a decentralised and open source financial system. WalletConnect felt crucial to that.
Facebook Connect was one of the ways in which it grew the company so quickly. By embedding itself into the Internet’s infrastructure, logging in with Facebook became ubiquitous. We did not want the same thing to happen in crypto.
Over time, Pedro and I started to view the project as something more akin to Bluetooth. It was a standard that needed broad support from lots of companies, developers and stakeholders.
Pedro was fighting an uphill battle to convince other wallet developers to adopt the standard. Coinbase employees pretended that they were interested in helping us and then launched a competing standard. This started to confuse dapp developers and made the message more muddled.
It became clear that we needed to separate WalletConnect from Balance entirely.
Pedro left Balance in 2018 and I sent him the entire grant from the Ethereum Foundation. He used that capital to develop the protocol and get it to a 1.0.
I think that grant has been one of the most successful and impactful grants from the foundation ever. Pedro has done an enormous amount with very little capital.
He began travelling the world to almost every Ethereum conference to talk to developers about what they needed and why. He was relentlessly giving talks, interacting with community members, and assuring everyone that WalletConnect was separate from Balance.
As the year continued, Pedro made some incredible progress. He got the system integrated into multiple wallets and dapps. Transactions started moving across the protocol. People were learning how to use products built on entirely new open source financial protocols. Pedro pressed on and kept doing the conference grind.
Shortly after DevCon, Balance released our beta for the full wallet experience and tried to lead the way in making the experience as smooth as possible. I was incredibly proud of what the team had put together.
The magic of an open source protocol is that it allows anyone to build or contribute at any time. Pedro created an ecosystem around the standards and did the hard grunt work to get them integrated.
After all his hard work, WalletConnect is absolutely thriving. Billions of dollars are moving around the world through an open source transaction layer available to anyone. WalletConnect has integrated with several layer 1 protocols, dozens of wallets, hundreds of dapps, and is continuing to go from strength-to-strength.
It has been 3 years since Pedro kicked off this idea. With WalletConnect 2.0 just around the corner, I wanted to provide people with a quick history of the protocol.
While I eventually had to wind Balance down as a wallet, I have been really happy to see our open source work spread out into the Ethereum ecosystem and beyond. Balance produced a bunch of ideas for interfaces that have found their way into products all over the place. WalletConnect is one of the offshoots from Balance that I am most proud of. I am so glad Pedro agreed to leave a traditional, closed source fintech company in London to come and work on open source financial systems for the world.
What really strikes me about this story is how well Pedro fits the bill as a protocol founder. I am so excited to see where he takes the WalletConnect community in the future!
Great story of vision, perseverance and open source grass roots community building!
Congrats on being brave enough to expose Coinbase' unsavory (Microsoft like) move with WalletLink. It does create unnecessary confusion. Hope Coinbase has a good reason for this and they are willing to speak up about it.
What a great story. Had no idea of a lot of the origin of Walletconnect and Balance!