Interview: Jack, BlockBeats

Editing: Kaori, Jaleel, BlockBeats

Binance recently announced the launch of its Web3 wallet, with technical support provided by the Trust Wallet team that Binance acquired back in 2018.

On November 8th, at the Binance Blockchain Week held in Istanbul, Eowyn Chen, CEO of Trust Wallet, stated that the collaboration with Binance to launch the Binance Web3 wallet is aimed at helping users participate in on-chain practices, increasing adoption of blockchain, and allowing users to enjoy both centralized platform transactions and true on-chain experiences.

Trust Wallet was founded by "tech geek" Viktor Radchenko in 2017, when Viktor was working at a mobile banking company. Due to the ICO craze at that time, Viktor created a mobile wallet and released it on GitHub, quickly gaining a large user base. In 2018, Viktor did not want to step away from his love of technology to take on the operational and development work of the wallet, so he approached Binance to sell Trust Wallet. CZ appreciated Viktor and his team, and advised him to join Binance, giving Trust Wallet full autonomy to focus on wallet technology development in the way they wanted, without having to worry about economic issues.

In March 2022, Viktor Radchenko announced that he would step down as Trust Wallet CEO, hoping to spend more time with his family and other interesting projects. He will continue to support the Trust Wallet team as a user, mentor, and community contributor. Former Binance Vice President of Marketing, Eowyn Chen, has taken over as CEO.

On April 12th, Trust Wallet held a "Mass Adoptionis coming..." Meetup event in Hong Kong. Eowyn Chen spoke at the event and stated, "The long-term opportunities provided by this industry should convey hope to people, not FOMO and Fear." As a wallet, Trust Wallet's core focus is on giving users the right to fully manage their assets independently and providing them with peace of mind instead of fear. In the past year since Eowyn Chen took office, Trust Wallet's team has tripled in size and now serves over 10 million users.

BlockBeats had the opportunity to interview Trust Wallet CEO Eowyn Chen, to gain a deeper understanding of her contributions in the cryptocurrency industry, as well as the opportunities, challenges, and future prospects of Trust Wallet.

From Harvard: "Binance's Strong Woman"

When it comes to the term "powerful women" in the cryptocurrency industry, most people think of He Yi, also known as the "First Lady of Binance". However, there is another "powerful woman" at Binance, and her name is Eowyn Chen.

Eowyn graduated from Harvard University and entered the financial industry on Wall Street. Although she gained rich experience there, she also realized that the industry was losing its innovative vitality. With a spirit of exploration for new things, she came to San Francisco and joined ofo, a startup company, to participate in its journey of exploring the American market. Here, she not only deeply understood the importance of business and cash flow, but also honed many practical skills.

After leaving ofo, Eowyn did not rush to find a new job. Instead, she spent time establishing her own values and thinking about the impact of artificial intelligence and blockchain technology on society. She became increasingly concerned with decentralization and balancing power, believing that the internet currently only promotes the flow of information and has not yet brought about true value circulation.

In 2018, Eowyn entered the cryptocurrency industry after meeting He Yi. At that time, Binance was planning to enter the international market. Initially, Eowyn worked as He Yi's assistant, helping her to grow Binance's international market from 0 to 1. In 2019, nearing the end of the bear market, Eowyn began building the foundation for user growth and took charge of Binance's growth team, overseeing both the advertising and organic growth businesses.

Before joining Trust Wallet, Eowyn Chen held multiple key positions during her time at Binance.

During her tenure as Vice President and Head of Central Marketing and Growth at Binance, she led the central marketing team, including user acquisition, user lifecycle, and brand and community management. She had a significant impact on the marketing strategies of more than 10 product lines within the Binance ecosystem.

In terms of Binance's international user growth, Eowyn Chen played an important role during the period from 20 to 21. She had contacted local partners in Argentina to discuss sponsorship with the Argentine Football Association. In the sponsorship cooperation, they proposed an interesting idea of combining NFT with fan tokens. Eowyn Chen and her team chose some countries with football fanaticism, rather than just sponsoring the World Cup, because they believed that the emotional connection of football is more related to the national team or players themselves.

Within a short six months, the team led by Eowyn Chen achieved explosive growth, attracting 45% of the total new users and achieving a payback period of only 1-2 months. By optimizing SEO and ASO, they successfully increased the market share of organic user acquisition to over 60%, surpassing other major competitors. The team also successfully doubled the total number of community members to over 10 million people and became a leader in the fintech community worldwide. In addition, Eowyn Chen also trained over 300 global ambassadors as pillars of the community and increased positive coverage, gaining more exposure in mainstream media such as Forbes and Bloomberg.

As a manager of the team, Eowyn Chen manages a team of 50-100 people globally, covering the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas, and Europe. She is committed to cultivating and enhancing high-potential talents and helping them successfully integrate into the team. In addition, she also sends 15% of talents to other departments of the organization and optimizes 10% of talents in the existing team who are not matched with their positions.

Since taking over from Viktor in March 2022, Eowyn has worked as the CEO of Trust Wallet for one year and three months. What made Eowyn decide to leave Binance and join Trust Wallet?

"At that time, I felt that my initial intention for joining the cryptocurrency industry had deviated a bit, and I didn't feel that I had a deep enough understanding of the industry. If my brand was replaced with any other brand, the job itself wouldn't have much difference," Eowyn discussed these thoughts with CZ and He Yi, hoping to cultivate more well-rounded leaders in the industry. Eowyn is more interested in developing her career in business, but has not yet found a suitable opportunity."

By chance, Eowyn is good friends with Viktor, the founder of Trust Wallet. Viktor was tired of working for four or five years and wanted to take a break and return to his family. Eowyn believed that Trust Wallet was an excellent product and team, and it would be a shame not to continue its development. Therefore, she hoped to take over and apply her experience in user growth and other areas she learned at Binance to the decentralized field.

Eowyn said that the main reason for choosing Trust Wallet was because of Viktor. Viktor's values are very upright, and the decisions he makes are very accurate. The entire team is also very down-to-earth and has been working on infrastructure construction for the past five years. "Viktor is a very selfless person who is willing to share all the knowledge he knows."

The team of Trust Wallet has always been committed to providing users with excellent products and services, which has established a good reputation in the cryptocurrency industry. Despite not participating in any activities or marketing, they have been working on an open-source project called Wallet Core for the past five years, aimed at helping developers of other mobile wallets.

On November 8th, Trust Wallet announced the launch of Trust Wallet WaaS (Wallet as a Service), which helps startups and traditional enterprises expand their products through decentralized solutions. This enables companies to provide their users with various decentralized services, such as asset management, cross-chain transfers, and integration with existing ecosystems.

The products developed by Trust Wallet are very user-oriented, which is why many OGs in the European and American crypto circles recommend new users to use Trust Wallet. It is very in line with users' habits, so it does not need to do too much promotion to attract many users to participate. "As a marketer, I especially like this kind of product that is very strong but does not have too much market promotion. It has established a good user growth foundation, so further development becomes very easy."

The vision and values of the Binance team are very similar to those of Trust Wallet. When collaborating, they tend to consider the technical advantages and reliability of the team, rather than just short-term profits. In Eowyn's view, although the industry is in a relatively relaxed and unlicensed environment, Binance and Trust Wallet still maintain relatively strict standards when there is an opportunity to support other projects. Eowyn hopes to bring some of her experiences learned at Binance and work with the team to achieve more goals. Trust Wallet will continue to be the preferred decentralized wallet for users and provide a convenient and secure cryptocurrency usage experience for more people.

Aside from her contributions to Trust Wallet and Binance, Eowyn Chen is also very concerned about the power of women in the cryptocurrency industry. The technology world dominated by male developers seems to have turned cryptocurrency into a boys' club, so Eowyn believes that her own success in the industry can help attract more female talent and users. "This is also why I am exposing myself now. I don't think the cryptocurrency industry is a boys' club. I have been working in Binance's management team for almost 4 years, but I always stay behind the scenes and empower others. However, most people don't know that most of Binance's executives are women."

Mobile market share surpasses Metamask, opportunities and challenges in the wallet race

As Eowyn said, the Trust Wallet team has been very low-key from the beginning. Although the Trust Wallet client has been downloaded more than 60 million times, and the web plugin wallet has reached the top three in the industry since its launch in November last year.

The leading company in the wallet industry, MetaMask, which was once a monopoly, currently holds about 20% of the market share, while Trust Wallet holds approximately 38% to 40% of the market share on mobile devices. Following closely behind is Coinbase Wallet. If we look at user activity and compare third-party data, we can see that the top three wallets basically occupy 70% to 80% of the market, with Trust Wallet being the wallet with the largest market share.

As an EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) wallet, Metamask only supports Ethereum and related chains. However, for users, it is not desirable to have a separate wallet for each chain, nor is it possible to have 50 wallets for 50 chains. Therefore, Trust Wallet has spent the past five years perfecting the underlying structures of many non-EVM chains to support them, in order to create a wallet that meets 99% of users' needs.

Sometimes the most basic needs of users are not very sexy, but it is very important to be able to meet these basic needs in the simplest way possible. Currently, the Web3 industry is still exploring the pain points and preferences of users, but most pain points are not very obvious, and most benefits are not that obvious either. However, for most people in the world, blockchain meets the need for financial security, especially in decentralized storage management and cross-border transfers.

Before being acquired in 2018, Trust Wallet was essentially a product developed by an open-source community. At that time, the wallet did not have a good profit model, which was the main reason why Trust Wallet sought acquisition.

After being acquired, Trust Wallet has more resources and professionals to support user growth and brand operations. As the parent company, Binance can provide better advice and support in legal and technical aspects. At the same time, Binance's risk control and security infrastructure, as well as its competitive underlying data in the industry, also help Trust Wallet operate more steadily.

However, the Trust Wallet team did not boast about expanding into upstream and downstream of the wallet industry or developing hardware wallet businesses. Eowyn repeatedly mentioned the word "focus" in an interview. Currently, the Trust Wallet team has 60 people, and Eowyn still feels that resources are relatively tight in software development, so they need to be more focused. "It is difficult to imagine a larger team developing both hardware and software, which would require higher demands on managers and pose greater challenges for the team to focus on their own fields."

This is a challenge as well as an opportunity. "Focus is not an easy thing. Frankly speaking, our team's advantage lies in software development, not hardware wallet development. If we want to grow, developing upstream is a logical approach, but this will lead to the team's attention being diverted." Eowyn always believes that no field can be dominated forever, and this is not a good state. In the early days of the industry, instead of completely monopolizing upstream and downstream, she believes that a better way is to maximize the team's strengths and create a product form that meets the needs of most users.

The development trend of the Internet is towards the cloud. Eowyn believes that software wallets are more user-friendly, convenient, and may be more secure compared to users managing their assets themselves. The core value of hardware wallets is security, like a gun that most people don't know how to use, but it can be an important backup in critical moments.

Eowyn said that in this situation, "it will not prevent users from transferring funds, nor will it restrict their freedom. First, because there may be problems with the data; second, you may know about this situation. However, we will provide users with sufficient prompts, and the final decision will be made based on these prompts."

Targeting novice users, serving a user base of one billion with Binance

Most of Trust Wallet's users come from outside of East Asia, with a relatively even distribution across Europe, America, Africa, the Middle East, and even some parts of Central Asia and Southeast Asia. Choosing Metamask may be because their web plugin experience is better or more familiar. However, for users who have just started using Web3, their main concern is having a place to store assets, being able to transfer them, and being able to transfer various types of assets.

"Usually, 90% of people trade on centralized trading platforms, but for the remaining 10% of brave individuals, they will try to figure out what an on-chain wallet is. They need to research the content on the on-chain wallet they need to use, remember the mnemonic phrase and private key, and keep a backup. I haven't counted how many steps these processes require, but it takes at least 10-20 steps. That's why we are partnering with Binance to launch the Binance Web3 wallet. We hope to bring a true on-chain experience to users who are on centralized trading platforms. Trust is working with Binance to help users participate in practice. We can now easily create an on-chain wallet. We hope to increase adoption of blockchain, so that users can enjoy both trading on centralized platforms and a true on-chain experience."

Eowyn Chen expressed Trust Wallet's vision at Binance Blockchain Week. This time, Eowyn chose to stand with Binance again, serving a user base of one billion.

Related reading: "Trust Wallet may once again assist Binance after acquisition, TWT surges over 20% in 24 hours".

According to the latest report from Grand View Research, a US market research and consulting company, the global cryptocurrency wallet market is expected to reach $482.7 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 24.4% during the forecast period. Meanwhile, according to Triple-A's report, the global number of cryptocurrency users is expected to exceed 320 million by 2022. As of August 2022, the number of global cryptocurrency wallet users has reached 84.02 million, compared to 76.32 million users in August 2021.

However, user conversion remains a problem in the cryptocurrency industry. Current wallet products have not yet gained widespread recognition, and many people still primarily use trading platforms to manage their assets. This indicates that there is still huge potential to be developed to improve user experience and promote wider wallet adoption. Unlike MetaMask, Trust Wallet's product concept, design path, and even the entire team's focus are all centered around helping novice users solve problems.

Metamask is very powerful in terms of developer support, as its initial goal was to provide tools for developers. Therefore, the advantages of design, core functions, and the entire team are focused on this aspect. Trust Wallet, on the other hand, initially aimed to facilitate ordinary users to hold various tokens, and its product ideas, design paths, and team focus are dedicated to solving the problems faced by ordinary users. Because advanced users have rich resources, they can always find tools and channels that suit them.

Many times, very talented developers, especially technology-oriented development teams, are prone to a misconception, focusing too much on the approach to solving problems and ignoring the problems themselves. The value that Eowyn has established for the team is that although technology is the foundation, the ultimate goal is to create products and services for people, not machines.

When asked how overseas Chinese should develop products and expand their market, Eowyn said that they should return to the essence of things. To understand users, one must first have contact with them, chat with a few users, listen to their stories, understand their pain points, how broad their coverage is, and how much of it is their own imagination. How much of it is what users actually tell you they want. "If you really want to grow your user base, you need to understand your users and set aside your own assumptions. Users often have a higher tolerance and do not expect perfect products. Instead, they expect you to listen and respond to their problems."

It is precisely because of the value orientation of "if we really want to serve users, then we should be willing to put aside our ego, not necessarily using this or that means, and forget the voice of users, what they need, and the limitations of human beings" that Trust Wallet requires all members of the leadership team to do customer service. "Whether it is the technical leader, product leader or financial leader, only by experiencing customer service in person can they truly feel the difficulties and challenges involved".

The ideal software wallet may be invisible and imperceptible to users. The wallet must first fulfill the role of a channel, which is the construction of infrastructure. If the infrastructure is not built, considering application integration is like building an unstable building. What truly supports the success of the application layer is not dependent on the wallet itself, but on the application developers and product teams.

The ultimate goal of a wallet is to provide integrated functionality, seamless operation, and security.

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