Trustlist - Union Square Ventures-WalletConnect

Introduction

Union Square Ventures 817 Broadway, 14th Floor New York, NY 10003 Albert Wenger – Mar 9, 2022

description

For the original web to be widely adopted, people needed a web browser This seems trivial today as every new computing device comes preloaded with one or more browsers But early on this was a chicken and egg problem There were a variety of ways this problem got solved including AOL sending out millions of CDs and ultimately Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows

Web3 is in a similar phase There is a Cambrian explosion of decentralized systems being built on all sorts of different new protocols, including projects on Ethereum, Bitcoin (via Stacks), Algorand, Flow, Solana, and many more Yet accessing these decentralized applications (dapps) requires that end users have cryptocurrency in a wallet and for the wallet to be connected to the application

For the web, the connection between the browser and the server was the heart of the formal HTTP protocol But no such specification exists per se for connecting Web3 wallets to dapps This leaves two options: many different ad hoc approaches or for a de facto standard to emerge WalletConnect is a contender for the latter with over 100 wallets and hundreds of applications already supporting it

This alone is quite extraordinary, but there is more Connections via WalletConnect really provide a general purpose messaging layer So rather than just connecting to a decentralized app to make a payment or invoke a smart contract, WalletConnect enables communications For example, a dapp can inform an end user about an event, or even let end users send messages to each other

We are excited to be joining 1kx in backing Pedro and the WalletConnect team on their mission to provide the communications layer for Web3 WalletConnect is working towards eventual decentralization of this layer To get there they are building an amazing team and are actively hiring