Matthew Wright, growth & strategy lead at Argent, believes that in solving user experience, the entire industry can help people enjoy the benefits of crypto without needing to know, or worry about, all of its complexity.
Matthew Wright, Growth & Strategy Lead at Argent:
“We haven’t made the most of the existing tools on the market yet. One big limitation we have is we really want to adhere to the ideological best practices of crypto. How can you know enough about the user without engaging in the dirty growth tricks of Web 2.0?”
If you’ve been in the Web3 space for any amount of time, you’ve surely heard that the user experience needs to improve. This has been the rallying cry at conferences, in newsletters, and in blog posts. But the truth is, there are companies working on the user experience of onboarding new users. Argent is a great example. Matthew Wright, growth & strategy lead at Argent, believes that in solving user experience, the entire industry can help people enjoy the benefits of crypto without needing to know, or worry about, all of its complexity.
Founded in 2017, Argent is a non-custodial wallet that lets people easily access decentralized applications and manage digital assets. They have raised $4.1 million to date and have built out what they bill as the most secure cryptocurrency wallet on the market. You can recover their mobile wallet without a seed phrase, as well as lock it and set a daily transfer limit.
We had a chance to sit down with Matthew to talk about his views on growth. We talked about the struggles facing Argent and Web3 as a whole, and we discussed possible solutions.
How do you define growth?
We have a couple of things. One is assets in wallets, and the other is total number of downloads. Then we look at total loaded wallets through Argent.
What has been the most difficult part of growing your company so far?
Starting with the most macro difficulty, I don’t think crypto has a really killer use case for a mainstream audience. That’s the question I get most from friends and family who aren’t in crypto. They don’t even get into the granular features of different wallets and Dapps because they don’t know the use cases.
The next part is building products that show why this is interesting and what they can do with crypto that they couldn’t do with non-crypto products. In the crypto space, we also have to build up trust. We (Argent) were the first smart contract wallet in the space, so we had to convince people that could be relied upon. The Parity hack had a lot of people scared. Also, why should people move from their existing wallets to Argent’s wallet?
What do you think needs to happen to overcome those struggles?
It’s a mix of use case and usability. For example, you can use Argent as a global Venmo, but there’s still more work to do on lowering the on and off ramps. Ultimately, there has to be something where you don’t have to care about crypto to use it.
What tools do you wish existed to help you with the growth struggles that face all of Web3?
We’ve really focused on just building the product. One big limitation we have is we really want to adhere to the ideological best practices of crypto. How can you know enough about the user without engaging in the dirty growth tricks of Web 2.0.
What are your predictions for Web3/Blockchain growth in 2020?
I still think the focus will be DeFi because the momentum is there. The interest in crypto is so financial that it makes a lot of sense. DeFi is showing you what you can do with crypto that you couldn’t do with traditional finance, i.e. open, borderless. In the longer term I think a big driver will be the growing societal and political desire for an alternative to big corporate monopolies, tech giants and banks.
