3 big questions with Privy CEO Henri Stern
The Stripe-acquired firm has big plans for a streamlined, multi-wallet future
Privy and sunnnnn/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
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Wallet provider Privy is under the hood of a lot of your favorite crypto platforms, like OpenSea, Pumpfun, Jupiter, Hyperliquid and even Digg 2.0.
In June, payments giant Stripe acquired Privy, which says it’ll remain a separate product but that now they’ll be able to move faster and ship more.
Privy’s chief executive and co-founder Stern has a background in finance and engineering, most recently as a research scientist at Protocol Labs before starting the crypto wallet firm.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Kate Irwin: I’d love to get your thoughts on consumer crypto.
Henri Stern: The way we look at the customers [is] we serve is across three main angles. So there’s fintech, which is to say payments, treasury management, remittances, buying and holding dollars. There is DeFi and trading. And then there’s consumer engagement.
And I’m increasingly starting to think that those are the wrong categories, to some extent, because the definition of “consumer” has kind of changed. If you harken back to 2021, or even 2018, we used to say there’s “consumer crypto” and “fintech crypto.” And historically, it’s also been that the “consumer” in crypto was a developer, for the most part, because there was no broader adoption. And so, like, even through DeFi summer, the average consumer was a hyper, like, technically literate person.
And I think now we’re seeing the emergence of a new “consumer” category, which is “consumer finance.”
…Broadly, I wonder if we’re misusing the word “consumer” from now on. And I don’t know what that does, right? But it used to be that more or less you had “finance,” and that meant B2B, and you had gaming, DeFi, and NFTs, collectibles, creator economy, and that meant “consumer.” And I think actually the two are kind of blending, in that now there is, like, “consumer finance,” which is this new, maybe third, category. But I think for us, it’s a major part of our work.
We started serving companies like OpenSea, and Proof of Play, which does a huge amount of gaming. Today we serve Farcaster, so it’s a huge part of what we do. And I think, frankly, it’s kind of at the frontier of how you work through better UX. Because if a game can deal with the wallet experience without having transactions pop up in your face every other second, you’ve probably built something that’s good enough for any other type of consumer platform.
KI: Do you think the future of crypto involves each crypto user juggling many wallets?
Stern: Users do not have a single identity. You don’t have a single identity. I don’t have a single identity. The way I am at a crypto conference is different than the way I am with friends. It’s different from the way I am with family, and likewise, online, the way I use my bank, my grocery store, whatever else, is completely different based on the situation.
As more and more things come onchain, you will need to be able to tune your experience differently, your wallets differently, your risk settings differently.
Having a wallet for applications is problematic. So I guess my take is, broadly, [that] we’ll end up having some version of profiles, where you have wallets that you sort of cluster around, and then you reuse around types of applications that operate in similar ways.
And then the second thing, I think, is we’ll just get much better bridging between apps. I think it is inevitable.
Let’s take it as a premise that users will have multiple wallets. And then from there, the question becomes, how do we actually make it super easy for them to move assets across them very, very easily?
I think that’s a completely unsolved problem, and one where users will need a platform where they can broadly manage their identity and their assets across these. And my take is that I think of it a lot like Apple System Preferences.
I think when you use your iPhone, you come onto Uber, and Uber asks you, “Do you want this app to have access to your location?” You can say “yes,” “no,” [or] “just this once.” And you don’t think about it again. But if you ever wanted to manage that setting, you could in your System Preferences.
We’ll end up having a like, meta-level control center where they can manage their multiple identities. That’s something we’re thinking about a lot.
KI: What do you think about the rise of crypto “superapps,” where players like Coinbase are combining crypto wallets with social media and other features? It’s kind of uncharted territory, but I also wonder if it’s going to catch on.
HS: I guess it’s uncharted territory in the West because of how things came about, but WeChat is doing great, and has done this. And Line has also done this. So I think the thing is, there’s such path dependency on technological adoption that I don’t know that [just] because it has existed, it will exist again.
But we’re seeing it with apps like Farcaster. Like is Farcaster a wallet? They do have a wallet, we’re very happy, that’s powered by Privy, but they have mini apps. And so I spend an unholy amount of time playing Farcade, which is a gaming platform within Farcaster, and spending assets I have in my wallet to do so.
I think let a thousand flowers bloom and we’ll see.
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