Observing the wallet-related discourse of this past year has been equal parts inspiring and amusing. When I started my journey in the crypto space in 2017, wallets were relegated to the (often second class) category of “solvable UX problems”, with much more attention diverted downstream towards the “harder problems” at the protocol layer. Coming from someone who’s worked on real world adoption of crypto-enabled products, this reckoning can’t come soon enough.

Bear market-induced or not, it’s exciting to see the puck start to move towards users. Part and parcel of this shift is a wave of attention on the new, very broad “wallet space”. Everyone seems to be building wallets (or at least talking about them). To me, the missing piece to this discussion is introspection- what are wallets today, how did they get this way, and what do they need to be if we hope for crypto to ever reach real people?