ETHeology

WalletConnect, a multi-chain solution for connecting crypto wallets to dapps and each other, made headlines recently for raising $11m in its latest round of VC. ‘You could imagine this today as if a Telegram user and a WhatsApp user could message each other’ is the official spiel the co-founders are giving, but considering it’s also billed as a product for ‘connecting Ethereum wallets’ only, it’s more like if a Facebook and Instagram user could message each other. Digression. I realize most of you probably don’t spend all day mucking through the brown note echo chamber that is web3 Twitter, and consequently have no idea what the literal shit I’m talking about.

Please let me elaborate, through the lens of my current existential crisis, per usual. 

We talk a lot about the blockchain here, but really, it should be the blockchains. Like with credit cards, religions, or high grade Alaskan Thunderfuck, technologies / socio-cultural systems / recreational substances rarely converge on a single consumer option. Blame late-stage capitalist pigs, Jesus, or Seth Rogen. Point is, in the case of these new permissionless, immutable transaction logs — which it turns out aren’t actually new at all, but that’s a whole other thing — there can’t be only one. This is called the ‘multi-chain trend’ among degens, or, among the rest of us, Theology 101. 

Currently, you’ve got the big dogs, Bitcoin and Ethereum, looming over the rest like Judaism and Christianity, respectively, while chains such as Solana and Tezos carve Taoist-style niches with their messages of efficiency and eco-friendliness. And new age usurpers like Polkadot and Avalanche have gained traction of late for being more easily digestible to newcomers and learning from the mistakes of their forebearers.

Then you’ve got sidechains, which are basically like sects and/or cults, springing up around an existing system with a slight tweak in functionality, like Polygon, a slightly more efficient take on Ethereum, or Quark, a Bitcoin sidechain most famous for hosting the Cthulu OFFerings. (Because what would this belabored metaphor without a stand-in for Scientology?) If that weren’t enough, existing blockchain protocols will occasionally make fork upgrades, a change in their governing rules that will validate transactions that were previously invalid — and, in the case of a hard fork, vice versa.  Point being, there’s a reason why the ‘decentralized web’ has nevertheless turned into a SXSW-style pissing contest between dudes in pajama pants vying to attract the most degens to their centralized solution while looking like they care the least.

See Vitalik Buterin at ETHDenver, continuing to tease ETH2.0 — a long-hyped but highly theoretical hard fork to the more efficient proof-of-stake model — like Eminem hyping the latest Detox single. As with Zucc and Jobs and the rest of his unspiritual successors, Buterin is riding the high from a large market share toward a pipe dream of being the entire market. But the truth is, there will always be a need for different sets of systems to log different types of information for different purposes. And the real market winner won’t be a single database technology, like blockchains, that no average consumer will ever give a shit about anyway. It will be the user interfaces that utilize the technology in the consumer-friendliest ways. 

Which brings us back to multi-chain wallets. These companies are basically doing the hard work of turning transfer of information across chains into a 1-click process instead of 10+. WalletConnect is getting the hype and VC, but aside from primarily being a tool for connecting different wallets on a single chain, it’s also built for developers first and foremost, so the antithesis of everything we’ve been saying here. Our money, then, is on Tidus Wallet, a genuine multi-chain and multi-layer custodial wallet, with an emphasis on, you guessed it, first-time user experience.

So, if the past five paragraphs have provided you, too, with a splitting migraine and newfound affinity for atheism, you can register for access to Tidus Wallet Beta here. Or just delete your Internet presence, sit crisscross applesauce, and thank Yog Sothoth you didn’t buy the OFF dip.