#34: Evgeny Yurtaev, Co-Founder & CEO @ Zerion | How building in DeFi since 2016 led to launching a wallet that generated 80k+ active users in less than 6 months

Zerion is one of the OG crypto companies, operating since 2016. It started as a tool to do fundraising through token sales.  Then it transformed into a DeFi exploration tool where you could track & invest in different assets. Then it expanded into NFTs & other web3 assets. And a few months ago, they also joined the wallet space and already got 80k+ users.

What inspired them to start? Why they made so many pivots? And why they're confident that they can compete in a hard wallet space? I spoke with Evgeny, Zerion's Co-Founder, who shared the backstage perspective of the last 6 years of running Zerion.

TIMESTAMPS:

0:38 What’s Zerion and why they pivoted a lot since 2016

2:20 Evgeny experience at Google, with chatbots and with a crypto trading app that got 1M+ downloads

3:59 Why meeting Vitalik inspired them to start Zerion

6:10 How they started as a smart contract developers’ team

7:10 Why the 2019 bear market prompted them to pivot to build a token tracking aggregator

8:30 How a blog post about fundraising inspired them to go to San Francisco to earn funding and get the first users

10:33 Why they entered the aggregators & wallets space, and why are these markets less crowded than Mac thinks

14:05 Why there are so few wallets on the market and why the timing is so important

16:45 Which use cases do they cover with their wallet

19:05 How they designed the wallet so it’s useful both for beginners and more advanced users (Web3 Citizens)

20:52 What was the hardest part about making the wallet multi-chain

21:47 How they want to battle MetaMask and why web3 helps them to do it

25:22 What web3-native marketing tactics such as NFT collections and community-building let them acquire tens of thousands of users

28:32 How does their NFT collection that changes based on your wallet activity work

30:45 Why on-chain information can be a goldmine for marketers

33:42 The vision behind their API, why it’s been used by Rainbow Wallet and StakeDAO, and why having it centralized might be okay

36:05 Why wallet can become an e-mail on steroids

38:19 Why open architecture of web3 makes it better for users

39:35 Why building the wallet was the hardest decision Evgeny had to make while running Zerion

40:45 What would Evgeny build if he wasn’t building Zerion

41:25 Why would he fix privacy with his magic web3 wand

42:25 Which web3 projects he found interesting

45:40 Where to learn more about Zerion

46:30 Ideas for other web3 builders