The Magic of Wallet-Based Authentication; Our founders joined Matt Walsh at the On The Brink Podcast

Our founders, Yoni and Itai, joined Matt Walsh at Castle Island to talk about Dynamic's founding, wallet-based login, early adopters and much more. You can read more here, and listen below.

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Matt Walsh: Today in the podcast, I sat down with Itai Turbahn and Yoni Goldberg, the founders of Dynamic, a Castle Island portfolio company that's focused on wallet-based logins. The concept of a universal cryptographic login has been a space that I've been fascinated with for some time, and Itai and Yoni, you're definitely at the cutting edge of this category. I enjoyed this conversation. I think you will too. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Itai and Yoni from Dynamic.

Matt Walsh and Nic Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All views expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only

Matt Walsh: All right, Itai and Yoni, welcome to On The Brink. You've just told me that this is your very first podcast appearance, so I am very glad that we have the pleasure of that being On The Brink. I'm sure first of many.

Itai Turbahn: We're very excited.

Yoni Goldberg: For sure. For the record, I had a podcast. It was called B-Function years ago, but it was before podcast went cool. So it's electronic music and tech, but you're talking about 10 years ago. But it's a first interview with Itai and first interview in a while. So we're very excited.

Itai: I will just add to that at the podcast, I think, was while, Yoni, you were at MIT, right? And it was like at 3:00 AM in the morning and Yoni would ask me to wake up and listen to it. And for the life of me, I told them, I think for years, that I listened to it. I never listened to the podcast.

Matt: Well, I thought that was the thing about podcasts is you can listen whenever you want. So I guess you got in really early to the game.

Itai: Don't tell him that. Don't tell him that. That's a secret.

Yoni: It was live radio, and later there was podcast. So it was on iTunes for a while, but I think it disappeared in the last couple of years. I did it with Rachel, which is my wife now, who used to be... Yeah. It's been a thing. But yeah, first one a while, for sure.

Matt: Well, I'm excited to have you guys on and we recently invested in your company, so I'm excited to hear more about Dynamic. Why don't we just start off with a little bit of a background on you guys? So maybe a quick introduction and how you came to start this business together.

Itai: Yeah, absolutely. So this Itai. We can share a little bit more about our background. So Yoni and I are both Israeli, grew up in Israel, served in kind of different units within Israeli army intelligence for a couple years. Then Yoni moved to Boston to start at MIT. I moved a year after. We actually met at MIT. There aren't that many Israelis at MIT, so we've met there and we've been friends for a very long time. There're actually like two Israelis at MIT so we had to be friends. Wasn't really a choice. We did our undergrad together in computer science. Yoni continued as a master student. Did his master's in computer science and did his thesis at Google, and we kind of stayed best friends for the last 15 years. Or at least I would like to think we're best friends. Yoni might correct me later. But we stayed friends for a long time and we always hacked things on the side. We would have ideas for side projects. I think we applied to Y Combinator unsuccessfully in 2012 with a terrible idea at the time. We always tried to think about ways to start a company. After graduation, Yoni continued on the engineering track and ran software teams across multiple companies at Gilt Groupe and at EVEN Financial as a VP, and at AQR. On my end, I mostly stayed on the product side. So I worked in business-y stuff. So I worked for BCG for a while, worked for IBM Research, then did my MBA at Harvard. Started a startup company called Villy and then worked at Zenefits. But across all these, Yoni and I kept trying to come back to how do we think about starting something together? And at one point we kind of just said, "Okay, this is it. We've got to go for it." And now we're here and we can talk more about Dynamic, but that's kind of the very quick overview of how we got started.

Matt: I'm always fascinated with people that come at crypto from different angles. And so you guys presumably had been familiar with blockchains for a while and had been exploring it. But what was it about this idea that really got you guys to go full time in the space?

Itai: Yeah. So we've been passionate about crypto, I think, for 10 years. I think if you were to record conversations between Yoni and I for the last 10 years, I would argue that a disproportionate amount would be crypto related. But the thing is about this idea and how it came to be, as you interact and everyone, I would argue, on this podcast has probably done this. The first time you go to a Uniswap or an OpenSea and you connect your wallet and all your things show up, is this one-way door. It's this magical experience. You can't unsee it. It redefines how you think about things, because it is fundamentally a better way to interact with a website or an app, than creating an account and adding your information and redoing everything. The fact that your information sits with you and you move it across sites, is this phenomenal experience. So it's for us that triggered an excitement about, okay, how do we make that happen for everyone? Not just necessarily Web3 companies or crypto companies or dApps, but how does everyone move to this concept of wallet-based authentication, where you have things on your wallet, you have things that are with you, and you can choose what to share with the site or how to interact, but the information belongs to you and you can move it from website A to B. The state of portability, I think we saw this. We were early in the Solana NFT game. And the fact that you can wake up in the morning and put something on digitalize or Solanart, and then take the same thing and put it on Magic Eden, is this really cool thing. It's this fascinating thing. So that's how we started with Dynamic. It's that realization that wallet-based authentication is amazing.

Yoni: Yeah. And I think one more thing that Itai glanced on is that we spent four years thinking about identity before we worked together. We spent four years thinking about identity and what it means to identify users across different markets. We did KYC across 20 countries and we did it to millions of users. So we really spent a lot of thinking, what does it mean to identify someone, knowing that someone is really them. I think with the decentralized world and doing it on the blockchain, it's like just opening another world of thinking and possibilities of how to implement it and what we can do there, and how to improve the overall experience on Web3.

Matt: As you're talking, I'm smiling because I had a very similar experience the first time I used an Ethereum-based wallet. And I even think back to the first time I used Bitcoin. I read the Bitcoin white paper and I wouldn't say it was something that immediately clicked for me, but I made a Bitcoin transaction for the first time. And I remember thinking, this is just incredible. I can't believe I just moved value from point A to point B, and there was no one in between. Just from a payments utility perspective, I thought that was a fascinating concept. Probably the second time I felt that feeling was when I used MetaMask to log in and just see things that I owned in the wallet. That sort of clicked to me that, hey, this could be like a universal login across a bunch of different websites in the future. That's kind of where my mind went.

Itai: That's exactly right. And the beauty is, it's universal login on shared rails, in the sense that tomorrow, a competitor comes along and there's no lock-in, in the sense that a customer, an end user has the benefit of being able to move from wallet A to wallet B, which creates this fundamental, different way of... We think about it as, had all these standards existed, all these shared rails existed, would there be more competitors for the login with Google or login with Facebook, that try to improve on experience? So to your point, it's this magical moment. You geek out over it. It's this one thing that you're... I think the last time I was so excited was Ajax in 2004, where you're like, "Oh, this thing actually works and you can communicate back and forth." It feels the same way.

Matt: Yeah. I agree. It's one of these things where you do these logins, and the first thing I thought was, this is just the way the world is going to work. Objectively, this is just a better system versus having your identity tied up with a trusted third party that owns all the data. And so why wouldn't you build it this way?

Itai: That's right. And by the way, even if you don't believe in doing this on crypto rails, I think everyone actually fundamentally agrees that you want to move away from passwords and move away to private public key-based authentication. So even if you look at things like Apple's passkey or WebAuthn, they're all fundamentally saying the same thing, which is you want to move away from username password to private public key-based authentication, which is significantly more secure and a better customer experience. The beauty of doing it on crypto is you can carry a backpack of a lot more things on this private key, or on this public key, essentially, and share them across sites.

Matt: Well, I definitely want to go a lot deeper on that in the why crypto rails question. Maybe before we do, why don't you guys just set the stage in terms of what Dynamic is building, what type of customers you guys work with, and how the product works?

Itai: Yeah, absolutely. So the short version, the one-sentence version is we're really building an auth0 for wallet-based-authentication is we're really building an Auth0 for wallet-based authentication. We think about it the following way, which is wallet-based authentication is a completely different way of logging in. Two things, in our opinion, happen for which Dynamic is based on. The first one, we talked about, which is everyone moves to wallet-based authentication, and not just Web3 companies, but Web2companies. The second is, there's going to, be for a while, this chaos in terms of competition in the space of wallets, right? Different wallets, different chains, and so on. So, as a developer... and a large number of these really interesting identity protocols are coming up, right? The Lens Protocol and the LID Protocol, and what the Spruce folks are building, Kepler, which is a phenomenal group of folks. There's going to be this chaos and a lot of really interesting things. So, what we're trying to do is say, "Okay, look, how do we abstract that away for developers, so that they can focus on their product?" The way to do it is, two things. It's this set of SDKs that a developer can get, that they set up on their site and they can get multi-chain and multi-wallet login. But then, as soon as they set up the dynamic SDK, they can go to their developer dashboard and they can start interacting with these different protocols, right? So, they can turn on an access list or NFT-based gating, or they can do information collection, or one day a Lens Protocol, or a CyberConnect, or anything of that sort. So, the idea of what Dynamic is building is really saying, "Okay, look, there's so much going on in authentication and identity in Web3. How do we abstract that away from the vast majority of developers by giving it an extremely simple SDK that they can use, and then kind of a bunch of toggles that they can add to leverage the more sophisticated things you can do withWeb3 identity?" That's really what we're building. Again, the short version of it is Auth0 for wallet-based authentication. The longer versions is what I just attempted to describe.

Yoni: In addition to the Auth0 analogies... We are a developer shop, everyone at our team is an engineer. Really, our goal is to build tools to make not just the wallet integration and authentication easier, but also any type of future integrations. So we have a bunch of them, they're all optional, but it's all about building the tools and the integration, and making developers' life easier, and mass adoption of pretty cool things that exist onWeb3. If it's access control, NFT gating, and there're going to be some cool messaging tokens, protocols may come in the future, how do we enable that? Basically, making any type of integration easier for developers. That's our promise, and e really want it to be a few minutes of integration, and that's it, and things will just work like magic.

Matt: If you have the view that most services online will transition to some sort of a public-private key cryptography login standard or system, at some point we're going to get there, where just mass-market things that we all use today in web 2.0, or on things like this. But the way to get there is obviously the crypto-native projects that are using these things today. So, when you think about your customer base and the things that people are actually using wallet authentication for, what does that look like today? I'd be curious, what do you guys see that evolution looking like?

Itai: Yeah, it's a really good question. I think, to your point, we see several types of customers, right? We see anywhere from the native Web3 crypto-type dapps... so the more extreme, like the DeFi types of services... to a lot of folks that are starting to tread Web 2.5, essentially, which is analytics on top of NFTs, or the ability to move things from one marketplace to another, or other examples would probably be around gaming, right? So, all these web... so we see the core interest that we're getting is from folks that only interact with wallets, and are going multi-chain, or are trying to add more wallets, and the maintenance or implementation cost is just terrible for them. Or DAO tooling, by the way, is another one. But we do think that, very quickly, we're going to start seeing more Web2 companies implement wallet-based authentication. As a good example, Twitter has fundamentally implemented wallet-based authentication, right? Because they did NFT verification on your profile, that's really wallet-based authentication and connection. Or a second example, more in Web3, is Farcaster, right? They have done wallet-based.They're essentially building a decentralized social network, and wallet-based authentication is a very good way for them to authenticate NFTs, or what you're up to on blockchain. We do think, and sorry, I know I'm rambling here, but we see an interesting use case for the Figmas of the world, or the Linears of the world, or Asana, et cetera, which is how do you start allowing DAO, for instance, to collaborate on top of a Figma, right? For that, you really need wallet-based authentication and NFT-based gating, right? So, those are types of customers, or potential customers... sorry, they're not our customers today... but those are types of use cases that will be super-interesting to start seeing being implemented, which is how a Coda, or how a Linear, or Asana, or a Notion, start implementing wallet-based authentication. I think once they do it, you're going to start seeing this acceleration, Web2, of more and more companies wanting to support this.

Yoni: Another belief that... just to emphasize, is that we think more and more people in the world are going to have wallets. Right now, it's still a minority. You see browsers like Brave that basically has embedded wallet inside. Probably in the near future, every user, whether they use Chrome or other type of popular browser, will have a wallet at some point. We want to be ready for that. We know we're a little bit ahead of the game, in the sense, right now we have a bunch of early adopters, but the Web2 will catch up to that. I think it will become, as some of the usability issues that exist today with wallet will get solved and become easier, it will reduce the barrier for adoption. I think this is where tools like ours will shine, basically. Because it'd be very easy for a site that already has authentication platform base to just add a wallet as another layer of authentication.

Matt: That makes sense. One of the ways that this really goes mainstream fast, I think, is on the back of NFTs, and not necessarily NFTs that are used for speculation, but NFTs more in the sense of your example, Itai, around Twitter. So, imagine a world where brands start doing living receipts that are based on NFTs, and they start to engage with their customers based on a token that represents, "Hey, I bought a pair of sneakers six months ago." In that type of a dynamic... unintentional pun there... really, wallet authentication becomes a core way that you just need to engage with your customers. So, curious if you guys see the NFTs as really the standard that starts to push brands and just front-end services to start to adopt wallet authentication.

Itai: Yeah. Absolutely. I'll start by giving an example for one customer that we had that exactly threads the physical-virtual, and then expand to that. First, so we had this, one of our early customers was Pop Art Cats, and they wanted to do something super-simple, which is they wanted to give anyone who was an NFT holder for a while, a shirt customized to their NFT, Right? So, you go in, it's a shirt that has a pocket of your specific NFT. It was pretty cool. For that, really, what do you need? You need wallet-based authentication. You need NFT-based gating, and you need to understand which specific NFT they have in their wallet, and then redirect them to their own Shopify checkout page. Right? That's a membership use case that they could easily implement with Dynamic. Now, to your point, in our opinion, very quickly, a Nike or anything like that would need to start spinning up membership only-websites, right? Or start interacting with online-offline type interaction, where you can show the NFT that you have, which is your membership card. Right? So, yes, I think that to your point...and by the way, there's a second conversation here, which is, what is a wallet, right? Does Nike have a wallet on their app, for their use case, right? And soon. Is there a single wallet? Like, do I have a single wallet or do I have five as a user, right? Which is a separate conversation, but the short answer to your point is, yes, I very much agree. I think that the NFT, and specifically NFTs and brands, is an accelerant use case because it creates a new way for brands to interact with their customers.

Matt: It's a fascinating concept when you just think about the way that customers will engage with some of these brands going forward. One question that comes up a lot is just, people are really bad at managing keys, and so people lose stuff all the time. So, how do you guys think about the challenges from a user perspective in this wallet authentication world, and how do you think about securing pass phrases?

Yoni: One of the biggest problems of adoption is really about, how do people manage their passkey and the password? One of the approach we took right now is, we know it's a complicated problem, Dynamic not necessarily is going to be the one to solve it, but we have opportunity to solve it, because we are acting as a user management platform. That gives us the power to find solution, and help customers at least mid-way between wallets if they want to. But I do think it's a challenge for wallets, and more and more wallets are going to solve it. The innovation will come from there. We don't have our favorite wallet. I think there's going to be a favorite wallet at some point. I think the wallet that will win is the wallet that will provide the simplest usability. So, however the the seed phrase is being managed, whether it's with MPC or whether it's social login it's going to be, whatever it is that is... ...or biometric or Authn, it's going to be something that will reduce the barrier, that anyone would be able to use it. Hopefully, we're going through the basics here, that by using Dynamic Hopefully, we're going to the basics here, that by using Dynamic as a website developer, you don't need to worry about what's going on in the wallet space. You just integrate with us, and we will just keep integrating with all the wallets, and whatever comes to the market and what's going to lead it, you're going to have it, basically. So I'm going back to the basic of what our promise is. We allow developers to focus on the core product and the innovation that they want to bring, and not worry about how they manage the interaction and the communication with the different wallets and now user manage them.

Itai: Yeah. To Yoni's point, I think there's some fascinating wallets out there. Zengo for instance, that is taking kind of an MPC approach. Short answer is, it's a problem, but it's a problem that exists for every early-stage industry. It's a solve problem. They're fascinating. There's the Argent approach of guardians, there's Zengo's approach of MPC. The market will sort itself out. Personally, I think MPC is a very promising kind of way to solve it. I think guardians is also fascinating. Yeah, you're not going to need to...I think, by the way, one more example is Coinbase's kind of part MPC, which allows them to recover it for you through customer support in the regular app. So, short answer is the market's going to solve it. I'm actually not very concerned about it. I think it's a matter of time. The way to think about wallets, in my opinion, is a bunch of startups trying to kind of compete in this market. And by definition, that's probably one of the biggest feedback points they get. And so I bet there are a bunch of extremely incentivized folks who spend every day, and are much smarter than us on that, trying to solve this fundamental problem, which is login and recovery. So I'm actually not that concerned about it. I think it's an artifact of early stage technology. It's going to get solved very, very quickly.

Matt: I think you're right that just the immense competition is going to lead to this getting solved very quickly at the wallet stage. It's a lot different, to be fair, from where we were back in like 2014 with Bitcoin wallets and just the lack of user empathy that you would see in the industry. Basically just because there was no product people in the industry yet at that point. Just a bunch of engineers expecting that people would write down seed phrases and keep them safe, and that's how they would engage with their Bitcoin wallets. But I think it's just an unrealistic expectation, frankly.

Itai: Yeah. And by the way, it comes back to your point about, I'm biased obviously as a product person, but to your point... and we're usually wrong. I don't know if I speak for all product people here, but the one thing I would say is that you're going to start seeing, in my opinion, not just wallets on their own, but wallets as part of application. Again, Coinbase is a phenomenal example of this. Coinbase's main app kind of turning into a wallet, or maybe one day a Robinhood turning into a wallet. And then you're just going to see it as a tab within an application and kind of maybe a roll up into the existing login authentication system there. So I think you're going to start seeing a lot of these companies that want to own the consumer relationship for the wallet compete on easier kind of authentication methods, kind of abstracting away parts of the components of wallets, so that you can get kind of the benefit without the complexity. So it's a matter of time.

Matt: That makes sense. I want to get into standards and decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, and how do you guys think about the market structure right now as it relates to standards versus things that are actually being built in front of customers?

Itai: Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the reasons we got into this space is the fact that there's this promise of shared rails. It's the promise that, over time, if you're unhappy with wallet A, you can move to wallet B. If you're unhappy with chain A, you can move to chain B, or unhappy with Dynamic, you can move to a competitor. And we are trying to very much optimize for that. So, Dynamic kind of looks at two sides. It looks at what we provide developers and our customers and how we interact with kind of standards internally. And the way we think about Dynamic is kind of a buffer or a dampener on top of kind of a bunch of noise that the market has in terms of which standards when, and how do they involve. So short answer is Dynamic, over time you'll see us try to push for more and more standardization, and push for phenomenal things like verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers that we think kind of accelerate how things are built, while on the developer side providing kind of ease of integration so that if a wallet uses a standard, great, if a wallet doesn't use a standard, also great. A developer actually should not care about it. Or if a wallet is on Solana, or a wallet is on Ethereum, we should care about it as Dynamic, and we should strive for standardization and kind of push wallets to kind of use the same rails, but the developer should just be able to wake up in the morning and say, "Hey, I just want to support everything, and I don't really care." And as Dynamic, our promise is you shouldn't. Just implement our thing and then we will handle all the kind of noise and complexity there. I don't know if I'm making any sense? The short version of saying it is we very, very much care about standards and pushing for standardization, and until everything moves to standardization, which historically it takes the market time, and there are a lot of competing options, until then we will kind of try to dampen the noise of the market and just build something that works.

Yoni: The other development on the protocol and development, especially I want to call out it Verite, for example, that I think the promise is very great about how the identity will be managed and how it's going to be verified across different applications or sites that act as the verifiers, butI think it's very early. And I think across the space, if you look at the spec is relatively new. There's starting to be adoption and we are definitely reading the papers and the spec, and we are very much familiar with it. Things that we're going to introduce over time. I think also we're talking to most of the customers, we are talking them, we see interest, but it's not the top priority. I think we're still solving a lot of basic things and this is where we are focusing right now. Where we're focusing now is where the pain point is, and then we can build on top of it.

Matt: What are the biggest barriers to standardization? Is it just that there are new layer ones that are popping up and people want to build on them? Is it just consolidating a lot of disparate opinions? How do we get to standards faster as an industry?

Itai: I think standardization has trade offs. By definition, when you create a standard, it means that if you are opinionated about a specific UX or UI decision, you can't necessarily implement it. And so again, the cool thing and the bad thing about the current space is there's so many smart folks trying to build in this space, and so you're getting a lot of extremely opinionated people that are trying to kind of accelerate things and move them forward. But, by definition, that means every day someone has a new idea for how to do something better, and it's very hard for a standard to keep up. A shout out to the Spruce team, for instance, for being able to cobble and bring people together around something like sign-in of Ethereum, which is anon-trivial activity to do. So short answer is, as long as there's a bunch of interest in the space and a bunch of folks trying to run very quickly towards implementing their own wallet or launching their own kind of... or you have more chains that are successful, like Solana, or things of that sort, you're going to see more and more differences of opinion for the right way to implement something.

Matt: Do you guys imagine that this will be the type of market where new L1s are just popping up onto the scene periodically and you'll need to support them? How do you think about what you guys will support as a company versus what's being used in the industry?

Yoni: It's all about prioritization at the end of the day. I mean, just go back to how protocols become adopted. So the good protocols win at the end of the day and there's adoption. Once the application built on top of them and the usage increase, these are the ones that sticks in. So, I think with L1s, the popular ones, the one that the application will build, will cause demand on integration, and then this is how we are going to decide and prioritize on our end. Right now we started with three chains. We're going to add more. We're starting with Ethereum, which is obvious, Solana, which we are big fans, and Flow. And we're probably going to add more. But at the end of the day, the market will decide. We are not the one who said like, "Oh, we believe that this L1 is great and we're going to push it to all our customers." I think it's going to come the other way. We see that there's adoption and there's a need for customers for integration, and we'll introduce it.

Itai: The interesting thing about our space is that there are multiple layers of competition. There's the authentication standardization. But now there's the messaging protocol standardization. There are multiple companies competing on messaging. And there's multiple companies competing on standards for KYC and KYC passports. Yoni mentioned Verite ID. That's an attempt in standardization of those. There's the XMTPs of the world, and I think WalletConnect is doing some interesting things on messaging. There are a lot of really phenomenal folks trying to build a bunch of standards and a bunch of protocols, and so that's the main challenge. The main challenge is not just standardization, but the main challenge is you get a bunch of folks trying to kind of think about the right way to build it. And it comes back to the market will decide winners and losers. It'll take time, but until then, and developers should know that when they wake up in the morning, they can support- Verite.id... Should know, that when they wake up in the morning, they can support Verity ID and they can support KYC Provider A and KYC Provider B, and it should be a toggle for them. And they should be able to support NotificationProtocol A and Notification Protocol B, and that should be a toggle for them.And that's how we think about it. So, while we try to push for standardization, we want to abstract that from developers, so that regardless of whether on Solana, there's a notification in messaging Protocol A and on EVM chains, there's Notification Protocol B, and you know this better than us, there are multiple competitors there, developers shouldn't care, it should just work for them. And hopefully, it makes it easier, by the way, for these protocols to gain adoption, right? The idea, is that, if you're a protocol, you shouldn't need to convince someone to just implement only your thing. You can convince them to just toggle your thing on, in Dynamic and have and support it.

Matt: Yeah, you could see how that would just dramatically accelerate the number of people that would be able to use a protocol like that, for sure. Itai, I want to go back to something you said earlier, just around, we have this just large rollout of PKI-based systems for login and why would you want to do one on a public blockchain, versus just using cryptography, in general? And so, what do you see as the major benefits here of building these things on public blockchains?

Itai: Yeah, I think it comes back to two points. Which is, the concept of backpacks and the concept of user choice, right? The concept of backpacks, inherently means that it's not just about authentication. Authentication is a part of this, right? But, what matters is the fact that you can tie additional things to your public key and you can share, or not share them across sites. So, we gave an example of KYC, right? And KYC passwords, right? The fact that you can tie the result in a zero knowledge-proof type way, of the result of a KYC to your wallet and prove it from website A, prove it to website B, that's a really interesting concept. That's a concept that can only exist where you can tie more things to your public address, which is what, in our opinion, decentralization is all around, right? It's the fact that company A can tie it, company B can tie it, right? The fact that I can tie my social network through, again, a lens, or a forecast, or anything of that sort to my public key and share that across sites, that makes crypto-based public/ private key, much more interesting to me, because it's not just about authentications, it's all the things around it. It's about onboarding, authorization, right? What's in your wallet that matters. The second thing is user choice, right? It's the fact that you can wake up in the morning and say,"I don't like quality, I've had enough." And you can take your key and you can put it and we can talk... Again, we talked about keys and whether it's MPC, or anything like that, but fundamentally, you can take your key and move it to wallet B. And you're now a customer of wallet B. That's a magical thing, because the analogy here would be that Twitter's infrastructure is a shared infrastructure. And if you don't like the Twitter UI, you can switch to a different UI by a competitor, makes the market more competitive, which makes it better for end-consumers. So, the fact that we have shared rails and they're decentralized, and everyone can wake up in the morning and write their own UI on top of it and add things and contribute, will make for a long-term, better consumer experience.

Matt: I think that's spot on. I think, the interoperability is just a total game changer here, when you think about it that way. And Yoni, do you think about it the same way? And I'd be curious your view on just NFTs, as a primitive, that also makes this exciting.

Yoni: Yes. So, when we were exploring ideas in the crypto space, one of the things we started with, is we just helped a friend of us do a NFT mint drop on Solana. And one of the things we realized as went deeper with NFT, is just the concept of the uniqueness and how unique it is. It's obvious whatI'm saying right now, but the aha moment for us was that, with NFTs you can actually solve any concept of fraud, because it's so unique. If you care about ..., the moment you attach a physical good to NFT and any future transaction with this physical good, will require the transfer of theNFT. In theory, if everyone is doing it, you solve the fraud problem.Especially, that you can tell who minted it and when it was created, and you can expose specific information inside the NFT, like the serial number that is attached to the product. And at that moment, we were thinking, "Okay, what can we do with it?" So, for us, as software people, to start working with every manufacturer in the world, like the Rolexes, the Pradas, convince them that they should work with us and start tying NFT to physical goods, it's not something we're going to win. But, what we thought of, is that identity, actually the startups are still being involved right now. And we're probably going to touch them later. But, if you can attach something as an NFT, or a token, it's non-fungible. To an identity, there's a lot of form for us to innovate and play with it. And that's how we got to this idea today. We start by authentication. And if the wallet, which is magical, can also have a token that reflects who you are as your identity, your credentials, it's opened a gate for us for tons of features and integration that we can introduce over time.

Matt: That makes a ton of sense. Well, it's really exciting what you guys are building. Where can we send people to learn more about Dynamic?And to start using the product?

Itai: Yeah. So, folks can go to dynamic.xyz to check it out. You can start looking at our docs, there's a demo environment you can play around with. We're still in closed beta. So, folks can sign up to our wait list. We're building a pretty critical piece of infrastructure, which is authentication, it has to work, right? And it can't work 99% of the time, it has to work 100% of the time. And so, we're taking a little bit of time to onboard folks and run through our beta, to make sure things work properly. And so, for anyone listening and applying, bear with us for a little bit, as you apply to our beta, we're trying to build something magical and we're taking a little bit of our time to make sure we get everything right. So, yes, again, go to dynamic.xyz. Please apply, join our Slack community, or our Discord community, email us, we're available.

Yoni: Yeah. And we are looking for feedback and any type of criticism. So, any thoughts that the community have, we hear it all, we take it to heart and we'll try to improve and make the best product of it.

Matt: Well, I appreciate you guys coming on the podcast, your first Joint Crypto Podcast, first of many, I'm sure. So, really excited about what you guys are building and thanks again for joining us.

Itai: Thanks for having us.

Yoni: Thank you.

Matt: Thanks for listening to another episode of On The Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, castleisland.vc. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go toonthebrink-podcast.com, or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.