Starknet & Argent x Crypto Challengers AMA Recap

Dear Crypto Challengers community,

📍 Here is a recap of the AMA held with Starknet & Argent on 12th May 2023, a session where we got to know more about Starknet & Argent where the team answers the community questions from Twitter. The AMA session was divided into three parts consisting of Introduction, Twitter segment with the prize of ERA whitelists.

This was an AMA session with the Ecosystem lead of Argent. The aim of this AMA session was to learn more about Starknet & Argent by collecting the questions from community and having the Starknet & Argent team answer them.

Below is the recap of the AMA session that took place on 12th May 2023. In the AMA, we had Antoine Sparenberg, Ecosystem Lead at Argent. Let’s see what was discussed.

Part 1 — Introduction and questions from the host

Could you please provide a quick self-introduction for the community?

I am Antoine, based in Brussels Belgium

I started my career as a telecom consultant where I helped telco companies finance the roll-out of their new generation networks (5G and fiber optics) to accommodate a surge in usage. There is a parallel to be made here with how blockchains look for scalability solutions.

I went 100% into web3 in January 2022: organised a Blockchain Week in Brussels, did some consulting for companies and individuals and worked for a while as a partnership manager for a global IP venturing into NFTs

I’ve been with Argent for two months as Ecosystem Lead i.e. main point of contact to dApps for everything related to Argent and Argent’s products. I’m also very keen to discuss how we can improve UX in web3 to onboard the mainstream (hint: it’s thanks to Account Abstraction).

Can you briefly introduce the project STARKNET and how do you think you stand out among the competitors if there are any?

Starknet is an Ethereum zk-rollup

Starknet has 2 main characteristics which make it stand out:

1. In order to optimize Starknet’s capabilities, it is not a zkEVM meaning that smart contracts have to be written in Straknet’s own language called Cairo

2. It has native Account Abstraction (AA), meaning that AA is embedded at the protocol level (contrarian to Ethereum L1 and most EVM L2s ). This makes the adoption of Account Abstraction on Starknet much easier (e.g. all wallets are Smart Account wallet, there is no Metamask on Starknet)

As a supportive wallet on Starknet & Zksync Era could you please introduce Argent to our community? What are the benefits of using it?

Argent develops smart contrat wallets (smart accounts) on zkSync and Starknet. We currently have a mobile app for zkSync and a browser extension for Starknet.

The end-goal is to improve web3 UX to a point where users won’t notice anymore that they use a blockchain-powered product (done through Account Abstraction).

The benefits of smart accounts are endless as you can literally program your account to behave as you wish (vs current one-account-fits-all model).

Some of the most widely discussed use cases are:

✅ 2FA for better security: your wallet can request 2FA (email, phone number, Ubikey or Ledger) in some pre-defined case (e.g. using an untrusted device or sending a transaction to a new address)

✅ Social recovery: no need for a seed-phrase anymore. In case you need to trigger recovery of your account, it can be done using relatives (friends and families) or a 2FA method

✅ Transaction limits: request 2FA above x$

✅ Multicall: batch multiple transactions to improve user flow (no more ERC-20 token approval, web2 online shopping experience on NFT marketplaces…)

✅ Sessions keys: authorize your wallet to automatically approve a pre-defined set of transactions for a limited period of time (e.g. for a fully onchain gaming session)

✅ Gas-less transactions or paying for transactions with non-native tokens ($DAI, $USDC, $PEPE 🐸)

I want to emphasize that this is all done while preserving self-custody for users 🔥

Can you share the achievements Argent team has made so far ? what are the major achievement target Argent is yet to achieve . If possible also share your roadmap.

🏆 Achievements:

🏆 Argent is an industry reference in Account Abstraction. See this blog post by Julien, one of Argent’s cofounders for a better understanding of AA and its implications: https://www.argent.xyz/blog/wtf-is-account-abstraction/

🏆 Argent is the N°1 wallet on Starknet (75% TVL market share)

🏆 Argent is the N°1 Smart Wallet on zk-Sync Era. We are still in Early Access and have a waitlist of 350k people

🏹 Target:

🏹 Become the n°1 wallet for the next billion users by offering a web2 UX with web3 magic

🚀 Roadmap

🚀 In the coming weeks and months, we’ll release the following products:

• Web wallet: an email sign-in wallet on Starknet (no app, no download, no seed phrase)
  - Argent Shield: 2FA and improved security on Starknet
  - Merge of zkSync Era and Starknet into our mobile app
  - Something around NFTs (shhh still a secret)

Could you share a bit about security?

Sure, self-custody comes with great security risks for users and we believe this is something we can improve using technology and leveraging AA. Use-cases such as Social Recovery, 2FA or even multicall serve a UX but also a security purpose.

In everything we do as a wallet, security is our n°1 purpose

Both Argent & Starknet don’t have a token yet. Could you please share a bit about the upcoming tokens of both?

Starknet has announced $STRK and it has been deployed onchain already but not distributed

$STRK will serve 3 purposes:
- Governance: decision-making and voting power
- Payment of transaction fees: $STRK will be used instead of $ETH while mechanisms will be put in place to allow users to pay with $ETH
- Staking and participation in the network’s consensus mechanism

Token will primarily be distributed to dapps and developers. There is no guarantee tokens will be distributed to end-users

However, best way to try and benefit from the airdrop if you’re not a dev is probably to interact with the ecosystem and hope projects will distribute their allocations (+ there is 8% of the supply which is still unallocated)

I can’t comment on a potential Argent airdrop 😉

Part 2 — Questions from Twitter

Will there be a direct bridge from metamask to argentX?

Answer is yes ! Actually there is one already, it’s called Starkgate and you can easily deposit funds from L1 to Argent X

>> https://starkgate.starknet.io/

Can u tell me what would be the nature of these NFTs. Will it be available on opensea or own Starknet platform?

You are referring to the NFT campaign we are running at the moment. The goal is to encourage users to try Starknet dapps

NFTs won’t be available on Opensea but on Starknet NFT marketplaces called Mintsquare and Aspect

There might or might not be more utility in the future for these NFTs…

Can I use Argent on Layer 2 or sidechains? (Optimism, Polygon etc.)

Argent can only be used on Ethereum L1 (it is called Argent Vault) and on Starknet and zkSync which are the only chains with Native Account Abstraction

We are bullish on native AA on the long-run and believe this is what will bring people to blockchain

Why most of times network is congested? And transactions take more time than in other networks!

Many questions about Starknet’s performance on Twitter but it is important to remember that Starknet is still under construction

- Cairo went through an update and dapps are still rewriting their smart contracts from Cairo 0 to Cairo 1.0. This year Starknet will go through its last breaking change before full decentralization — Regenesis — which is the process of shutting down Cairo 0

- Throughput will be improved through the introduction of new Sequencer in Q3 2023

- Transaction cost will be decreased thanks to Volition in Q4 2023

Early testing and benchmark show promising results

More info on the roadmap here: https://medium.com/starkware/starknet-goals-and-roadmap-for-2023-fe7b89eead3b

There are so many blockchains, what strategy do you have to differentiate Starknet from the other chains?

Starknet is the only blockchain with native Account Abstraction and smart account wallets only. Users will naturally use the solution which offers the most simplicity and UX close to what they know from web2

Note that I’m not talking power-users here but mainstream, next billion users

About Starknet and Argent:

Starknet is a decentralized layer-2 network that enables Ethereum to scale securely and dapps to achieve unlimited scale for transactions and computation.

Argent X is a browser extension wallet that allows you to easily explore the StarkNet ecosystem.