Building an industry-first Web3 wallet that didn't need a seed phrase

The problem

Seed phrases are the standard way to secure a crypto wallet, and they're also the standard way mainstream users permanently lose access to their funds — one lost or mistyped phrase, no recovery, no support ticket that can fix it. For a platform trying to bring Web2 businesses and their non-crypto-native users on-chain, this wasn't a minor UX rough edge — it was the reason mainstream adoption wasn't happening.

The approach

• Led the product definition for a smart wallet with a social recovery mechanism, letting users regain access without a seed phrase — a genuinely novel approach at the time, not an incremental improvement on existing wallet UX.
• Balanced security and usability directly: recovery had to be resistant to abuse (no single trusted party who could unilaterally take over an account) while still being simple enough for a non-crypto-native user to actually complete.
• Dogfooded the wallet by launching Pepo, a video social app built on the same infrastructure, to stress-test the recovery flow with real, non-technical users before asking enterprise partners to build on it.
• Defined and maintained the APIs and SDKs that let partner engineering teams integrate the wallet without needing to understand the underlying blockchain mechanics themselves.

The outcome

• Shipped an industry-first recoverable Web3 wallet, ahead of the mainstream account-abstraction wallets that later became standard across the industry.
• Pepo, the dogfood app, gained real traction and was a standout at ETH Denver 2020 — proof the recovery flow worked for genuinely non-technical users, not just crypto-native ones.
• Became the infrastructure underneath 8+ brand integrations (including Animoca Brands, Grab, and Carousell), each guided from API integration through to their own token-economy launch.