Making Web3 Resilient & User-Friendly With Mayur Relekar

I recently spoke with Arcana Co-Founder & CEO, Mayur Relekar. During our discussion, we explored the current challenges within the Web3 space, focusing on the imperative for solutions that resolve user-centric issues and the necessity to expand Web3's accessibility beyond the crypto-native audience.

Furthermore, we discussed the future of Web3, emphasizing the crucial roles of innovation and industry maturation. Hope you enjoy it!

Hello, Mayur. Thanks for joining me in this conversation. Let’s start off with your origin story and how you came up with Arcana.

Hey, Dan. It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

I have worked in tech for the last 18 years. I am from Bangalore in India which is known as the Silicon Valley of the East. So, after the first few years in Indian “big” tech, I had to startup. It was almost like a rite of passage.

I had two startups between 2010 and 2013. One was in the cloud telephony space, and the other was e-commerce. Both didn’t see great success, to be honest, but I learned some invaluable lessons along the way. Most importantly, I learned that I was in love with technology, particularly platforms. I’ve always found it beautiful, almost elegant, that the cost of reproduction of a digital product or service was almost zero, and platforms especially epitomized this.

I continued to work in tech, and then fast forward to 2017 which is the year I discovered blockchains and Bitcoin and Ethereum. The technical aspects were all-consuming, but I was completely enamored by the philosophy behind their existence. In what almost this moment of clarity, I knew my life’s work lay here, in this direction.

In 2019, after having spent a few years building and voraciously learning about this burgeoning technology, my co-founders, Aravindh and Abhishek, and I decided we ought to build something real in this space. It felt like a calling, felt like it would be a disservice to all the knowledge we’d gained and how we collectively felt about the space if we didn’t do it. So, we took the plunge.

Our forte has been to ideate, visualize, and realize products fairly fast. In Q3 of 2019, we built and took to market a PoC of a decentralized storage solution to market. We then realized nobody cared about decentralized storage!

But we had built all this tech, so we ended up dogfooding it to build a browser extension that allowed you to send end-to-end encrypted attachments in your email. While doing so, we realized that a lot of things we did to make this product delightful to users could be generalized.

By combining the latest in applied cryptography and our know-how of building useful products, a platform to help people and teams build useful products that could attract the masses was there to be built.

That is how Arcana was born.

What are some of the existing problems in Web3 preventing widespread adoption?

Over the last few years, we saw a lot of products getting built in the Web3 space that are Vitamins, at best. They are nice to have but don’t really solve any problems. A mildly differentiated fork of Uniswap, yet another NFT collection but this time with a frog or apps built “for the culture” are valiant attempts, but we need to get past this.

We need to build Painkillers. We need to build apps that solve real user problems and many of them.

Another problem I’ve noticed is many of us in Web3 build only for crypto natives. As long as it’s something novel, then great, but if we want adoption, we have to start to look at all user personas that qualify as being internet savvy. If you talk to such users, for example, gamers, most will tell you that the UX in Web3 just sucks. Downright sucks.

Most non-Web3 people entering the space still don’t know how to create a wallet or, more importantly, manage their private keys properly. Not to mention transactions, which often add much more friction due to high gas costs, steep learning curves, unfamiliar processes, etc.

Developers face a hard time integrating such features into their applications, mainly due to the absence of a robust and intuitive UX stack. We’re bridging this gap—it’s key to onboarding the next one billion users to Web3.

For example, we built SendIt, which enabled Web3 platforms (or anyone) to send crypto via email or by using their Twitter ID. It gives a massive adoption boost, besides showcasing the potential of Arcana’s holistic stack.

Since you mentioned SendIt, can you tell us more about it? What other products are you building?

Very recently, in an interview with Lex Fridman, Brian Armstrong said “Action produces information. Keep doing stuff”, he further goes on to mention he borrows this line of thinking from a Paul Graham quote where he says “Startups are like sharks, if they stop swimming they die.”

SendIT was more or less thought up along these lines where we simply wanted to showcase an app built on top of our SDKs that end users could interact with, and perhaps devs could learn more about the things that can be built with Arcana.

Sending crypto to someone is a great way to introduce them to the crypto world. So we thought why not build something where users can do this, but the flow would not involve newbies figuring out what wallets are or having to deal with seed phrases? Can we make a PayPal for crypto where users can send crypto to an email ID?

That was the genesis, and we set ourselves up with a lofty goal of getting 50k users in 2 months. We got 50k users in 6 days, 100k in 12 days. Today, we have upwards of 500k users who have performed around 1.5M transactions in 2 months!

By launching SendIT, we not only ended up building a Web3 consumer app with insane traction but also learned so much about our backend, all our metrics on our other products, our socials, and our docs, all of them shot up. So I’d say what Brian Armstrong said is 100% true and something we will vehemently abide by in the future.

Speaking of the future, we have some very exciting stuff brewing in the Arcana kitchen. We are soon to be launching our Gasless SDK in partnership with Biconomy, we have an NFT checkout feature coming soon, we have our app chain going live with its test net, and so much more…

To wrap things up, please tell us where you see Web3 in the next five to ten years.

The eternal optimist in me believes the future will all be frogs, llamas, flying unicorns, and rainbows. But the pragmatist in me feels like we are at an inflection point.

On one side, we have a deep bear market amplified by geo-political unrest + grim macroeconomic outlooks, and on the other side, you have an industry that has seen many projects die and smart, talented people leave for greener pastures or jail!

All the ingredients for the perfect underdog story where the handful of high integrity, hardworking teams have to answer the call to really innovate. Innovation that leads to adoption.

There are clear signs that we, as an industry, are becoming more mature. Echo-chambers are being rejected, and product lead teams are coming to the fore, placing the users and their needs first and then starting to build products that address those needs.

Idealism is being rejected with acceptable trade-offs being made with usability and user experiences taking center stage.

These are strong foundations to build on top of and attract builders and users alike. Money will follow.