The beginner's guide to Argent

The new investment from the Creandum Funds, and the best thing to happen to Crypto.

Many of you know that I've been quite critical of crypto in the past. So far, it has been dominated by a speculative boom and bust, more or less fraudulent ICOs, and by the gradual centralisation of crypto-betting at Coinbase. However, we believe that the long-term potential of crypto is not about a few random people suddenly making a lot of money on a hot new ICO. It is to profoundly change the world by making it more decentralised.

Amara's law states that people tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term, but underestimate its impact in the long term.

I think that's exactly what has happened with crypto, and that's why I'm incredibly excited about Creandum IV backing Argent, the smart wallet that brings the foundational benefits of crypto to the mainstream.

We have known Itamar and Gerald, two of the Argent founders, for years, and have tremendous respect for them. We only met Julien, the third founder, about a year ago, but quickly saw that he's one of the smartest cryptography experts out there. And when they started describing their incredibly bold vision, backing them was the obvious thing to do. Seeing over these last few months how they have built a top-notch team, and now launched the product, we are very happy that we did.

Argent is a smart crypto wallet. You download the Argent app on the Apple App or Google Play store, and Argent keeps track of your crypto tokens, plus lets you make transfers and transactions against other tokens. In crypto-speak, argent is a decentralised wallet, where your funds are held in smart contracts on the blockchain, with multisig and ENS addresses.

"Isn't that what Coinbase is doing?"

That's the question I often get when I describe Argent. Now, Coinbase is an amazing company, but it's not more of a crypto company than the bank Revolut, the broker Robinhood, and the derivatives exchange CME Group. All of them let you invest and speculate in the price of cryptocurrencies, and in exchange, you hand over control to them and trust that their servers won't get hacked, that their employees won't commit fraud etc. I'm not saying that that's an unreasonable thing to do, but that is what you do by using any of these services.

People who are really into crypto all have their money in crypto wallets. A crypto wallet is a bit like having cash in your pocket instead of in a bank account, except it's in a digital form. It's a piece of software that stores the keys to your tokens in an encrypted part of your device, with a password that only you know needed to unlock it. From a technical perspective, it is incredibly secure. But from a real life user perspective, there are some problems. First and foremost: What happens if you lose your device? Or if you forget your password? Different wallets have different solutions to that, but none are slam dunks.

Another issue is that using these wallets is like using the internet before the browser. You need to really want to in order to bother. And most people don't. Which is why the vast majority of crypto holders still have their money on Coinbase or similar.

From a cybersecurity perspective, Argent is 100% on par with the best wallets out there. But where Argent stands out is on usability. Instead of a clunky Windows 95-esque design and codes that nobody can remember, you interact with your Argent wallet through the beautiful Argent app.

What's even more exciting is how lost or stolen devices are dealt with on Argent. The solution is Argent Guardians. You can read more about them here, but in short, you assign other Argent users that you trust to be your Guardians. This gives them certain rights for your wallet. They don't have access to take tokens out of your wallet - you don't have to trust them that much - but what they can do is confirm that you are you. Specifically, if your phone is stolen, you tell your Guardians. They then block your phone, so whoever stole it won't have access to the tokens. And when you get a new phone they confirm that that phone belongs to you, after which you'll get access to your tokens again.

Argent also has a number of other cool features like ENS addresses instead of 42 random characters (I've obviously secured bjarke.argent.xyz), easier and less stressful transfers (how do you feel about copy-pasting those 42 random characters into a text field and hitting Send?) plus easy token exchange through integrations with third-party exchanges.

All of this happens on the blockchain. This means that you're not dependent on Argent as a company: no matter what happens to Argent the company, not only your money, but also all the functionality of the Argent wallet is intact.

The grand vision

Pulling back a second, fundamentally, a blockchain is a decentralised database. It doesn't exist only on a single computer, but rather on a network of computers that jointly secure its integrity. Bitcoin was the first of these databases, and, and the data in the bitcoin database is the list of transactions: the bitcoin ledger.

The database is the most fundamental part of any piece of software, and in 2013 a guy called Vitalik Buterin invented a way to use the blockchain to build a decentralised computer: Ethereum. Ethereum lets you build and execute any piece of software you would want in a decentralised way: not on a single computer, but on a decentralised network of computers.

So if we have a decentralised computer that can run decentralised software, we could build a decentralised business. Except it won't be a company where profit goes to the owners, but rather a network where contributors share the profits based on how much they contribute, and consumers pay for the service based on how much they use it. Imagine a decentralised Uber, where the profits go to the drivers instead of to a tiny group of already wealthy shareholders.

This decentralisation is by far the most exciting prospect of crypto, especially because it has the potential to reverse the massive concentration of wealth and power that we're seeing today, fuelled by the winner-takes-most dynamics of software, data, and algorithms.

For all of this to work, we need a point of access to these decentralised networks. Since interactions with the networks will include transactions in tokens, that point of access needs to be able to hold tokens for people, and make it easy to send and receive tokens.

You probably see where I'm going here: by becoming the leading crypto wallet, Argent will be in the best position to become that point of access to these decentralised networks that a lot of other smart founders are building across the globe. A bit like how you log into apps with Facebook Connect, you will soon log into decentralised apps with Argent. Without having to hand over all your data, assets and control to a centralised computing platform.

I think that's one of the most exciting things to be working on right now.

At Creandum, we believe any industry can be disrupted by the right entrepreneur. Check out our website or follow Creandum Family on Medium to learn more.