Ani from Brave Wallet Team

If you were ever thinking about wallets other than Metamask and Rainbow, you were probably disappointed with what's available out there. I mean, not that there are no options, but they are all pretty much the same. You may also have wondered how secure these different wallets are and if you will still have your funds 10 years from now. 

That's where Brave Browser's native wallet comes in! Prepare to be captivated by Ani from the Brave Wallet team as he shares his journey → from hardware to software wallets → from novice engineer to becoming a crypto wallet expert → and how he was gifted Bitcoins on his first day at work!

Don't worry; it's not all just developer and crypto jargon. Ani is great at explaining complex topics in a simple and understandable way.  We talk about his time in Ledger and how a hardware wallet can be your ticket to a new life in a different country. We round up with a conversation about the promise held by the account abstraction technologies as a potential game-changer in the user experience of wallets. 

This episode is a great intro to the Brave browser's native wallet which has many unique security benefits because it's a part of the Brave browser core. If you are not using it just yet, maybe you should check it out … after the episode, of course!

Enjoy this exciting crypto journey with Ani from Brave and myself!

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BFG: 1:10

Hi guys, so this is another ETH Milan chat. Now I'm here with Ani. Ani works on a Brave browser wallet he's basically the Brave team and I heard his talk and it was really interesting and I think a lot of you may change your opinion about you. Know which wallet you are using and why, so let's get into it. Ani, tell us a little bit about you. Know the history, how you got started with crypto and what was the path to get to Brave.

Ani : 1:45

Hi, thanks for having me. I'm Ani. I work at Brave. I'm a staff engineer, I do a lot of web3 initiatives, but most notably, I work on the wallet, and I've been doing wallets for a while. Before Brave, I was at Leisure to work on hardware wallet stuff for financial institutions like exchanges, brokers, family offices, and I have an interesting story. How I got into crypto? My former boss was the one who was generous enough to gift me some big coins on my first day. So and here I am. He's the one who's responsible for me to be in crypto.

BFG: 2:36

I love this story, it never gets old. The boss gives you crypto, but yeah, especially Bitcoin, it's a good one. So you know, I want you to you know, explain a little bit for, like non-technical folks, why Brave browser is different and why Brave wallet is different than your typical JavaScript extension. Yeah, I'll leave it up to you to be understandable.

Ani : 3:08

So just to lay down some context here, brave is an internet company. Our most popular product is, of course, the browser, which is focused on privacy and blocks ads and trackers by default, prevents websites from fingerprinting you and all sorts of defenses against malicious websites. We also have a search engine, which is a privacy preserving search engine that doesn't manipulate the order of the results or doesn't track you based on your activity or keywords. So we have a whole host of products at Brave, and the one I work on is the Brave wallet. Now, this wallet is a bit special in the sense that it is natively part of the browser. So if you have Brave on your phone, on your iOS, android desktop, wherever you can install Brave, it will have a crypto wallet. So what's the point of having a wallet right in the browser natively versus like an extension? Well, it provides a bit more security and performance compared to extensions which are not this, which don't have the security capabilities that browsers can offer natively, and I think it also is more well distributed. So the idea is that we want to bring the wallet to the browser because you use your browser for visiting dApps and checking your email, watching news and so on, but we don't want your browser to be inside your extension wallet, which happens a lot with all the wallets out there. You have no choice but to visit these websites in those extension wallets, which is bad for your privacy. They track you and they don't have the kind of protections that Brave browser offers you out of the box.

BFG: 5:47

So one of the most interesting things which I remember from the presentation, and why I would probably now start using my Brave wallet a little bit more, is that you guys kind of and I may be saying it in non-technical terms like you, compartmentalize the open tabs, which means in every tab which I have opened, I can be on different chain if I am using the Brave wallet, which is one of the things which drives me crazy on other wallets.

Ani : 6:23

Absolutely one of my favorite features that I'm really proud of. So one of the things that has always left me frustrated is that if I visit Uniswap and connect to Optimism on one tab, I go to another tab and open, say, one inch and connect to Polygon. It's going to change the network on Uniswap as well. You cannot have two different networks on different tabs. It's just not how most wallets work In Brave. It is not the case. You can use whatever network you want for a particular tab and it doesn't impact your tabs on other tabs. This is because we have a level of isolation in permissions and this is guaranteed at the browser level. It's kind of like when you grant permissions to access your camera or your notifications or your location. When you visit Google Maps In Brave, you have similar permissions for accessing your wallet. So you can do cool things like block access to a particular site or DAP, and those permissions would be enforced at the browser level, which is very difficult, or rather close to impossible, to circumvent. You have this kind of really nice isolation between different sites.

BFG: 8:03

One of the things which I will probably try to showcase in the podcast on a video. But one of the nice things you showed me is basically that the Brave wallet works on a desktop, but I can find it in my Brave on iOS as well, and it's basically the same wallet. I don't want to install anything extra, it just works. Is it like that?

Ani : 8:27

Yeah, absolutely, and that's one of the advantages of building a wallet natively in the browser. You build it once and you use it on every platform where you can install. Brave, because the user interface would look different on desktop and iOS, for example, but the core logic behind the software core that drives that wallet is the same. It has the same level of security, it has the same features and so on.

BFG: 9:02

So what are other cool things which are coming to Brave wallet? I think we discussed a little bit about it.

Ani : 9:12

One of the features I'm personally really excited about. So Bitcoin was my first love and we are bringing Bitcoin support to Brave wallet very soon. And for those who are also interested in Dogecoin, I mean, bitcoin and Dogecoin are pretty similar, so if you follow Elon Musk and bought into the Dogecoin hype, we have a wallet for you to securely keep your Doge and maybe down the line. What I would love to see happen is for the Bitcoin wallet in Brave to act like to interact with dApps the same way as Ethereum wallets do today. So wouldn't it be nice if you go to your favorite dApp and you're able to list all the ordinals that you own? You're an NFT guy, right, you would understand or even place bids, sell your NFT, swap your NFT ordinals and so on. That's pretty much unheard of in Bitcoin world and I think it would be one of the first Bitcoin wallets in the browser. That's native. There is no other wallet like that.

BFG: 10:50

Yeah, I think it would be nice to have one wallet for them all Sounds good to me. Anything else you are excited about from the brave world, security world, wallet world, because you are an expert living it.

Ani : 11:09

Yeah, I'm excited about this new development in Ethereum called account obstruction. And well, it's a really technical topic and even the most technically informed guys wouldn't be able to explain what it is. But let me try to paint a picture in front of you and you tell me if it excites you. Wouldn't it be nice if you could touch the touch bar on your MacBook or even use the face ID on your iPhone to create a wallet, so you would not have any recovery phrase, any 12 words or 24 words. You just unlock using your iPhone and there you have a wallet. So that would use the hardware that's built into these devices. So kind of everyone gets a hardware wallet for free, and this is possible with account obstruction. That's what makes me really bullish on this technology. And we can have even other user experiences, like create a wallet using Google sign-in. That's also possible with account obstruction. So sky is the limit. This is something that really new and I'm excited to see how that evolves.

BFG: 12:47

Well, yeah, let's not dig too deep into the topic, but I can see why we would be excited. I would kind of be excited as well, because one of my pet peeves around hardware wallets is that I've already lost two, and it's kind of annoying, of course, because a lot of things disappear with it often. So having it somewhere and also using your previously mentioned trick, like just memorize your recovery phrase and then just go buy a new phone, and then you can actually have your hardware wallet with all the things which you had in it before your phone was stolen Amazing I will be definitely up for it.

Ani : 13:31

Yeah. So if you guys are into crypto, you would have a wallet already with 24 words. So I was just chatting with some guys from Ukraine and one of the interesting things that I realized was a lot of people were able to set up a new life in another country because they had a non-custodial Bitcoin wallet or Ethereum wallet. You can take your wallet with you across borders and that kind of it's like a passport of a different kind. So understand the value that wallets have protected with your life and, in the process, have fun and please watch every podcast, every episode of Web3Magic. It is where all the exciting things are going to happen.

BFG: 14:33

Thank you. Thank you, I'm glad you didn't forget about this party. It was not planned originally. Oh no, he's great. Okay, thank you very much. I was great. You guys go check the Brave wallet because a lot of you don't even know you have it.

Subscribe Before You Leave

Ani (Anirudha):

• on Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/onybose

• personal website: https://anirudha.co

Brave:

• on Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/Brave

• Brave Browser: https://brave.com/

• Brave Browser Wallet info: https://brave.com/wallet/

That's it, friends. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and let me know what you think on Twitter (X) or Farcaster. Till next time … keep it colorful!