Deep Dive w/ HERE Wallet Founder

What’s Next After 1 Million Users in 2 weeks? 

The studio sat down with Petr, founder of HERE Wallet, to discuss the latest Telegram Integration, the NEAR Ecosystem, and HERE Wallet’s long term vision for their role in and beyond the NEAR Ecosystem.

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What prompted the idea of the Telegram integration? 

Petr: The idea came up when we asked Ilia about anything else we could do to help NEAR Grow - telegram is really popular on WeChat in China and they have really great payment services inside, but they also have certain restrictions. Telegram also has a similar SDK, and you are able to build the same kind of product that is extremely popular on WeChat. 

Another large part of this decision was the support we got from the NEAR Foundation: The NEAR foundation has a huge vision on the direction of onboarding users to NEAR, and the Telegram ecosystem as a whole, is going to be huge in the coming cycle for crypto users. After some discussion and research, we were able to find the solution for the top level .TG name with them and implement from there. 

Are you planning any other major releases for HERE wallet in the coming months? 

Petr: The goal for this year is to onboard ten million users - right now we have 1.5 million, so we’ll keep working in this direction. Our goal for these people, is to onboard them to crypto inside of Telegram, so we will provide for them the application inside of their telegram experience: swaps, gaming, etc. We don't want people to have to worry about downloading a crypto wallet, it's really complicated for most people.. 

With the $HOT coin we have a huge vision for it - I can’t say more than that, beyond that people will be able to do more in the NEAR ecosystem in a couple months with $HOT. We think that with this plan we will be able to push this on a  few million people to actually try applications on NEAR. This is the main vision and foundation looking forward to what we're working on.

Ilia has been talking a lot about account abstraction to the point where you can use a NEAR account to trade on other chains, they just released a blog about that multi-chain strategy. How are you thinking about NEAR Account Abstraction with 1.5 million users on HERE wallet - are you planning to build on that front? 

Petr: The long-term plan is that you will be able to use $HOT to explore any chain on any application. We will create for you some background, a wallet with your chain signature on NEAR and you’ll be able to use your HOT.NEAR to cover gas prices in your chains and maybe more. So this is definitely like a long-term direction. 

The best solution for crypto as a whole, is if NEAR would provide the infrastructure level for these users and they will be able to play games for example from BNB Chain where there are a lot of really nice games. This is a really huge vision, but we are moving in this direction. It will probably take a couple months to execute. If we can come to see these two million users of HERE Wallet using $HOT to play games on the BNB chain, it could be a game changer.”

You’ve been building on NEAR Now for around 2 years: How have you found the NEAR Ecosystem?

Petr: I’m really excited about the technology that stands behind NEAR and with the chain signature as well… It's a game changer. I love all that NEAR does with chain abstraction and I see a lot of use cases inside. With HERE wallet we actually changed direction after the NEARcon in November. We stayed around the NEAR Ecosystem: we figured it out and we’ll move forward in the account abstraction niche and the idea where you can create your EVM account and you can replace your seed phrase, it's so sweet. This is just one of the use cases and I love NEAR in this direction. I think on the ecosystem side some things could be articulated better but on the technology side, NEAR is great.”

For HERE Wallet, which upcoming use-case do you think will be most successful for user onboarding and engagement (within NEAR or as a multi-chain approach): DeFi - NFTs - Gaming - etc? 

Petr: “I think the next future important use-case is payments, which is still like the main use-case for crypto and we have a lot of users from countries that have problems with payments, so that they have real use-case for crypto… and the second one is we will build new access infrastructure for applications for users and try to remove all barriers for users. This will be built kind of like other app stores and utilize the economics around $HOT. It will be the crypto ecosystem of the average person where you don’t have to ask people to give you money just to try your product. The application will be available exactly the same as it is in GooglePlay, and if people like it they could probably  pay for a subscription but there will be no entry barriers. So this is like the huge vision for HERE wallet for the next couple years, we have to change how people think about cryptocurrency.

What are your long-term goals for HERE Wallet - i.e. what does a best case success scenario look like, and how do you see it evolving in the next few years? 

Petr: “A lot of people after this launch have $HOT. To use $HOT, they created the chain 

abstraction account inside HERE wallet which you cannot imprint on Metamask because the chain abstraction account works a bit like chain signature and you must use the NEAR indicator which is complicated. So the best scenario we have is like ten million users who have a wallet that they can use only inside HERE wallet and we become the main standard for chain abstraction, as NEAR’s interoperability capacities increase. 

Eventually we will be able to monetize access to our users across any blockchain: If you want to work with our users, you have to support our economics and you have to play with us… it’s like Ledger live. If you want Ledger live you just pay them because they have thousands of users. It's the same idea. And you can purely use Ledger from any other application like they’ve created a data key that is very open but is really bad so many people use Ledger live and the same idea will be with HERE. We work with the main wallet with millions of users, with a chain signature wallet and we will charge applications to be inside. The best version is to be Ledger live for all chain abstraction wallets in the next three years.”

Petr, thanks for the time - we are looking forward to your talk on account abstraction at ETH Denver. 

Note:This interview took place before the 2024 ETH Denver Conference.

Be sure to follow HERE Wallet on Twitter for the latest updates.