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ZenGo Built A Keyless Crypto Wallet With Compound
ZenGo is a crypto wallet for mobile devices that has done away with private keys. The “keyless wallet” is a radical new approach to crypto asset management that requires no passwords, no special hardware, and no complicated backup schemes.
ZenGo announced that the wallet now supports earning of interest, which is powered by the Compound protocol behind the scenes.
What does your tech stack look like?
We could not build a universal crypto wallet using existing tech stacks based on private key or even smart contracts. They were either too complicated or not calibrated to grow with the industry. We had to use a different cryptographic approach.
ZenGo uses MPC (Multi-party computation) and Threshold signatures. This is the only crypto app/ wallet to do that to date at such a level of performance. This enables us to provide keyless wallets and ways to onboard users to crypto with unprecedented smoothness.
We call it 3FA. It’s a new way to authenticate with 3 factors using no password. We use, among other things, advanced, live biometrics to secure the accounts of our customers. We built our stack with C++, Rust, React Native, Redux-saga, and Node.js.
What interested you in Compound?
It was very well documented and coded. It was a delight to build on top of it. We took our time to really study the Compound protocol, in particular, the liquidator part for which we documented our research, available to all here: https://zengo.com/defi-research-understanding-compound-liquidators/
What are the next steps and goals for ZenGo?
We are building a lot more than a crypto wallet. ZenGo wants to become your default mobile crypto bank for all needs with a crisp, smooth user experience where users are in control.
We are adding, one-by-one, the service layers of the app. We are patient in our approach but try to make sure it fits our standards. We will introduce groundbreaking financial and security services very soon that only MPC can power.
Try ZenGo. But more importantly, try any other wallet first before you try it :)
Ouriel Ohayon, co-founder and CEO of ZenGo
Argent Raises a $12M Series A
Argent is a mobile crypto wallet startup that never holds user’s assets. The team recently announced that Argent raised a Series A with several investors.
The wallet aims to keep user experience simple by removing common barriers associated with crypto. No seed phrases, gas is behind the scenes, and Fiat-to-crypto on ramps work with as few taps as possible.
What went into building the initial product?
We set out to build the first non-custodial wallet with the ease of use and security of the best new bank apps - without the bank. Crypto is unfamiliar to many, so we asked ourselves what mental models from the traditional world could help. That helped us with our recovery method, Guardians, which is a bit like calling your bank to regain access to your account if you lose your card.
What does the tech stack look like?
Our mobile clients are native (Swift & Kotlin). This gives us complete control of the user experience and limits dependency on third-party security frameworks. We use AWS (with Terraform), Postgres, and Java.
Our smart contracts are written in Solidity. We've chosen a modular architecture for the smart-contract of our wallet. Each user has a unique BaseWallet contract that holds their assets and identity, and that contract defines a set of modules that are authorized to invoke and transfer the assets. The modules are shared amongst the Argent users and each of them contains a piece of the wallet's functional logic. For example the CompoundManager module is a contract that orchestrates the interaction between the wallets and the Compound protocol. This unique approach makes the Argent wallet extremely flexible and easier to audit.
What comes next for Argent?
We want to be the easiest and safest place to access DeFi. We encourage the Compound community to test Argent and share their thoughts on how we can eliminate all the barriers to using crypto. Skip the queue by tapping this link on your phone: https://argent.link/compound
Itamar Lesuisse, co-founder and CEO of Argent
CoinTracker’s Portfolio Tracking Interface Supports Compound cTokens
CoinTracker provides crypto portfolio tracking tools as well as tax tools. Compound users can use CoinTracker to get their taxes completed quickly and accurately.
Why use CoinTracker?
CoinTracker makes cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and taxes easy. We support 3,000+ coins across 300+ exchanges/wallets/platforms (including Compound!). At the core, we want to help increase the economic stability and prosperity of the world. To date, this has been in the form of making cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and taxes extremely simple.
We take great pride in ensuring that user's tax reports are correct. We have gone to the extent of personally meeting with the IRS in their Washington DC headquarters multiple times to ensure that we are getting this right. Many famous executives from top cryptocurrency companies use CoinTracker for their personal cryptocurrency portfolio tracking and taxes
What went into building the initial product?
We started with a super simple minimum viable product. Basically a simple web app productionizing the spreadsheets we were using to track our own cryptocurrency portfolios (here is how we were thinking about cryptocurrency portfolio tracking in January 2018). Our tech stack is made up of Python, Flask, Redis, Postgres, React, React Native, and Heroku.
What are some technical challenges being tackled at CoinTracker?
Price History: 10B+ rows of pricing data for every coin on every exchange for all history that have to be matched to every symbol and deduplicated for overloaded symbols, plus matched for mismatched symbols (e.g. BTC and XBT are the same).
Cost Basis: We need to be able to calculate cost basis on the fly when a user adds a new transaction to their history. This is particularly challenging when a whale trader with 1M+ transactions adds an old wallet and their whole cost basis and capital gain history needs to be updated quickly with optimized algorithms and data structures. We also have to apply local tax rules depending on the user’s location.
Chandan Lodha, co-founder of CoinTracker
ETHLondon 2020
The ETHLondon 2020 hackathon spawned several awesome, new DeFi applications. We’ll shed some light on the new innovations developed using the Compound protocol.
1hop.io
The 1inch.exchange team of “crypto maniacs” took 4th place with their newest hackathon project. 1hop.io is an easy to use collateralized debt position (CDP) manger for migrating positions between DeFi providers like Compound. Here is a link to the 1hop.io Devpost submission page which includes code on GitHub.
Laxmi
Laxmi is a P2P, non-custodial and gas-less payments app with a built-in reward system for transactions, powered by DeFi protocols. The team that built Laxmi won the Pepo UX prize. Here is a link to the Laxmi Devpost submission page which includes code on GitHub.
PatronDai
PatronDai is like Patreon but with a DeFi spin. The service enables people to deposit DAI and earn interest using the Compound protocol. The interest is intended to be distributed to creators or projects the patron supports. Here is a link to the PatronDai Devpost submission page.
Spells.fyi
Spells.fyi is a dashboard for DeFi contract changes. It monitors time-lock transactions from origination to execution for Curve.fi, Compound, Dharma and more. It was built using The Graph and React.js. Here is a link to the Spells.fyi Devpost submission page which includes code on GitHub.
Links & Discussions
We have seen the first community-built Compound Governance Interface! Check out the code in the GitHub Repo and also the live Governance Interface hosted on GitHub Pages.
A new product is emerging from ETHDenver 2020. SaveDAI is in-progress of being built by Spencer Graham (@spengrah), Kseniya Lifanova (@devgirlla), and Mehmet Alkanlar (@mehmetra). It was announced on Twitter, and will be a decentralized high-interest savings account with built-in insurance.
Opium Network’s swaprate.finance (in beta) supports USDC and DAI. They’ve just announced that they support DAI.
The Compound Protocol saw a record amount of account liquidations on March 8th due to the rapid drop in the price of ETH.
Compound continues to show strong signs of traction. For several insightful data visualizations on the throughput of Compound over time, check out this article from The Block.
Markets Update
Crypto prices plunged over the past week. ETH/USD checked in at a high of ~$250 on March 7, and at a low of < $100 on March 12. At the time of this writing, the price of ETH/USD is approximately $122 — the stats below reflect this price volatility.
Current supply is at ~$116 million from ~16,500 unique addresses. In the past seven days, approximately $113 million (gross) was added to Compound, across over 10,000 transactions. About 43% of this volume was ETH; 26% was DAI; and 25% was USDC.
Open borrowing is at ~$32 million from ~1,800 unique addresses. In the past seven days, approximately $24.1 million (gross) was borrowed from Compound, across over 1,400 transactions. About 78% of this volume was DAI; and 16% was USDC.
For live figures please refer to our Markets page.
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