The Wallet As The Hub For Crypto UX: CoinFund’s Investment Thesis For Leap Wallet

Republished By Plato

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I am thrilled to announce that CoinFund has co-led Leap Wallet’s $3.2MM seed funding round! Wallets are one of the most important yet least well developed applications in the crypto ecosystem. Today, wallets serve primarily as a transaction signing layer, with users finding and interacting with DeFi and NFT applications directly. Major use cases such as swaps, launchpads, notifications, transaction tracking, portfolio tracking and visualization, and staking are performed elsewhere and basic UX is generally lacking. This is sufficient for the early adopters in crypto, however, for the next billion users to onboard into Web3, a more curated experience will be required and the wallet UI will be the hub for all transaction-related activity. There have been two primary strategies that wallets have taken to-date: go wide (multi-chain) or go deep (one ecosystem). I believe both can be incredibly successful, meeting different user needs. The most successful wallet today, MetaMask, has 30 million monthly active users.¹ This shows just how early we are in the arc of broader crypto adoption. The addressable market is orders of magnitude larger and the wallets that best meet consumer needs will have user counts in the billions.

Over the past 18 months, Terra (LUNA) has seen exponential growth. Driven by demand for its UST stablecoin and significant adoption of liquid staking protocols, Terra TVL currently sits at $31.63B (12% of total crypto TVL), which is 2nd only to Ethereum.³ This growth has been a result of adoption by a super active and engaged community of users (known as LUNAtics). However, to take that next step forward to broader mainstream adoption of Terra and UST, it is necessary to build a hub for new users to make the UX around application discovery and usage more accessible. Leap Wallet is doing exactly this. Leap is building the most native, deeply integrated, feature rich wallet in the Terra ecosystem, designed specifically for Terra users. Launched originally in November 2021, in just the past few months Leap has already vaulted well ahead of the feature set of the dominant wallet within Terra today, Terrastation. The team’s vision is to build Leap into the nerve center for activity within Terra, and to build an interface designed around seamless application integrations (versus the largely transaction signing based tool wallets are today). While other wallets in the Terra and Cosmos ecosystems have focused on going as horizontally as possible early on and pursuing a cross-chain strategy immediately to acquire users, Leap’s go to market centers around being the most vertical, going as deep as possible on features designed just for Terra users. The Terra ecosystem is differentiated from other major layer 1 ecosystems (UST adoption focus), which requires a vertical approach to best serve users. Leap already offers in-wallet integrations with Anchor, Astroport, Stader Labs, and Terraswap — some of the most widely used applications on Terra, and plans to build a scalable dapp store, allowing a wide range of Terra applications to plug into the Leap wallet experience. Leap is also building advanced transaction features, portfolio tracking, NFT management, push notifications, a launchpad, and a whole host of other tooling not available in wallets today. Additionally, the mobile experience is a core element of Leap’s strategy. In Web2, users of the dominant social applications (Instagram, Twitter, TikTok) and financial applications (Robinhood, Venmo, Cash App) spend a majority of their time accessing these applications via mobile apps. As crypto grows from early adopters to mainstream users, mobile will increasingly become the preferred interface and Leap is building with mobile at the core of its product strategy from the onset.

Leap has taken a product and ecosystem focused approach that gives it the potential to quickly become the dominant crypto wallet in the Terra ecosystem, However, success ultimately comes down to the team and their ability to execute on the vision. Leap Wallet is led by Sanjeev Rao, who has the unique combination of a deep technical and business / go to market background, the ideal experience to lead Leap forward. CoinFund is proud to be supporting Sanjeev and the rest of the exceptional Leap Wallet team as they build one of the foundational products for the Terra ecosystem and beyond.

To learn more about Leap Wallet, visit: leapwallet.io. Leap is expanding the team and is actively hiring.

Disclaimer: The content provided on this site is for informational and discussion purposes only and should not be relied upon in connection with a particular investment decision or be construed as an offer, recommendation or solicitation regarding any investment. The author is not endorsing any company, project, or token discussed in this article. All information is presented here “as is,” without warranty of any kind, whether express or implied, and any forward-looking statements may turn out to be wrong. CoinFund Management LLC and its affiliates may have long or short positions in the tokens or projects discussed in this article.

Endnotes

The Wallet as the Hub for Crypto UX: CoinFund’s Investment Thesis for Leap Wallet was originally published in The CoinFund Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Time Stamp: April 5, 2022