gm, welcome back to interop/acc.
While most complained about crypto’s UX problems, Kurt Larsen, co-founder of Rhinestone, went back to the drawing board and tried to solve the problem from first principles. That path led him to wallets, the interface layer that touches literally everything we do onchain.
As crypto evolves, so do the demands placed on wallets. That’s where smart accounts come in, wallets designed to work the way the onchain world actually works today.
But good ideas don’t always take off right away. Smart accounts hit the usual adoption walls: fragmentation, lack of standards, developer inertia. Progress has been slow, but it’s happening.
And Kurt’s bet is that, eventually, every wallet will become a smart account. In this episode, he explains why.
Two Takeaways
1. It’s not just about better UX, it’s about new behavior.
Smart accounts, powered by interop rails, shift the wallet UX from “moving funds” across chains to “spending instantly” on any chain. Once the hard stuff is abstracted (chains, gas, bridging), new behaviors emerge: smaller, faster, more frequent transactions. It’s a shift in how people use crypto, and eventually, how AI agents will use it too.
2. Good narratives don’t die, they get repackaged.
Crypto loves a new buzzword. One week it’s Account Abstraction, next week it’s Chain Abstraction, and next month someone’s going to pitch you Crypto Abstraction™ (or is that just another way to say DeFi mullet?).
The point is, it’s important to realise that narratives are often not competing ideas. Each narrative builds on top of another, especially if they’re being applied in the same vertical. For instance, Chain Abstraction doesn’t replace Account Abstraction, it extends it.
As a builder, the trick isn’t to chase every new narrative and pivot your entire vision to fit in. It’s to understand how each new narrative fits into the arc of the old ones, and to use that to your advantage.
Enjoy the full episode!
- Arjun
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