With improving user experience (UX) being a key area of need for the Ethereum ecosystem going forward, Argent’s mobile smart wallets are Ethereum’s newly arrived guardian angels.
This week, the London-based Argent team launched its smart wallet app to the public after more than a year of beta development. The firm’s wallets are notably underpinned by Ethereum smart contracts, so they offer advanced features, e.g. account recovery and transaction limits, that simpler account-only wallets can’t match.
For Argent, then, the idea is to bring a mainstream-feeling app experience to the Ethereum ecosystem that is powerful, secure, and abstracts away crypto-centric elements that aren’t friendly to users, like seed phrases — a decentralized bank in your pocket, as it were.
“By making decentralized finance so easy to use we can expand economic opportunity globally and help people to take control and benefit from their digital assets and identity,” Argent CEO Itamar Lesuisse said on launch day.
One-Tap Mobile DeFi
In recent months, the ecosystem has seen more wallet projects directly integrating with decentralized finance projects.
Back in March, for example, the Coinbase Wallet team unveiled they’d integrated their app with two of the reigning DeFi platforms, Compound and dYdX. The move was a cause for celebration around Ethereum at the time, but it marked but a taste of what can be done on this front. That’s where Argent comes in.
Indeed, upon Argent’s public launch, the smart wallet app has taken DeFi integrations to the next level with a currently unmatched array of “one-tap access” options. To start, Argent offers integrations with Aave, Compound, Kyber Network, MakerDAO’s Dai Savings Rate (DSR), PoolTogether, Uniswap V2, and TokenSets.
Having such integrations in Argent is promising for DeFi projects like Uniswap, the decentralized exchange’s founder Hayden Adams said on the news:
“We’re excited about Argent adding a native integration for Uniswap V2 liquidity provision directly inside their wallet. Having multiple, high quality, interfaces is important for decentralized protocols, and Argent’s implementation provides UX improvements that are difficult to do without smart contract wallets.”
Moreover, Argent’s first wave of DeFi integrations is already extensive for an Ethereum wallet project, but it’s also exactly that: a first wave.
“In the months ahead Argent will integrate more Dapps and focus on further refining the user experience of crypto,” Argent confirmed in a press release shared with Blockonomi.
On the Heels of a $12 Million Series A
Argent has been hitting its stride so far in 2020.
In March, the smart wallet makers announced they’d secured $12 million in a Series A fundraising round from firms like Paradigm and Index Ventures. Paradigm’s managing partner Matt Huang explained at the time:
“Argent has systematically solved some of the biggest usability and security issues in crypto. Their team has a unique combination of cryptographic expertise and experience scaling mobile apps to tens of millions of users. We’re thrilled to partner with them as they help make crypto mainstream in the years ahead.”
Beyond the Series A, Argent has also previously secured an additional $4 million in venture funding, bringing the startup’s total fundraising to date to $16 million. In the past, Argent has said its growing war chest will be used to hire more experts that can help extend smart wallets’ possibilities.
The Mutualism Factor
The relationship between Ethereum and Argent is mutualistic. Argent can help bring in and retain more users around Ethereum than ever before thanks to its superior UX, while a rising Ethereum will bring new users to Argent in kind.
In this sense, by servicing the Ethereum space in an excellent way, Argent serves itself. That’s one of the key advantages Ethereum has right now: a Cambrian explosion of projects that work by making Ethereum that much better.
