A consumer web3 wallet with no seed phrases.
Leading product for a consumer wallet that makes web3 accessible through account abstraction, cross-chain swaps, and AI DeFi actions.
01 · The problem
What Pass actually needed.
Self-custody is the promise of web3 and the reason most people never make it past the front door. The standard wallet asks a first-time user to write down a 12-word seed phrase, understand gas, hold the native token of every chain they touch, and bridge assets manually between networks they have never heard of. Each is a cliff, and adoption falls off every one. Pass bets that web3 goes mainstream only when web3 disappears, when self-custody feels like any other modern app. If the experience still feels like crypto, the addressable market stays the few million power users it has always been.
02 · Context and insight
The reframe that set the direction.
The technical ingredients for a consumer-grade wallet had only recently matured. Account abstraction decoupled an account from a raw private key, opening the door to passkeys: the same Face ID and fingerprint people already trust everywhere. Intent infrastructure let users declare an outcome while solvers handled routing and execution underneath. I treated the three as a single thesis. Passkeys remove the onboarding cliff, intents and cross-chain swaps remove the operational cliffs, and AI-powered DeFi removes the literacy cliff. My job was to lead the product teams to ship that as one experience, and to make the hard calls on how far to hide the chain before hiding it costs users trust they want to keep.
03, The approach
The decisions that mattered.
Make passkeys the front door, and own recovery
The first 60 seconds is the biggest lever on adoption, so passkeys built on account abstraction became the primary path in: authenticate with the biometric you already use, no seed phrase to write down. The harder decision was recovery. A seed phrase is also a recovery mechanism, so removing it means owning the 'I lost my device' path end to end. Passkeys could not be sugar on top of a seed-phrase wallet.
Users declare outcomes, solvers build transactions
Standard wallets make users assemble a transaction: pick the chain, the route, approve, bridge, swap, pay gas in the right token. Built on intent infrastructure, users declare the result they want and solvers handle execution. The tradeoff I owned was the trust transfer. When the user stops choosing the route, the wallet has to be visibly fair on price and execution, so the work was deciding how much of the solving to surface so the abstraction reads as confidence to the user.
Use AI to remove the DeFi literacy cliff, carefully
AI-powered DeFi actions let a non-expert do expert things: express intent in plain terms and have it become safe, executable DeFi. The judgment call: in a self-custody wallet moving real funds, an AI that 'mostly' gets it right is unacceptable. So scope was bounded to actions where intent maps cleanly to execution and the user confirms before funds move. A wrong guess never reaches the user's money unseen.
Run it as one product
Passkeys, intents, cross-chain, and AI only matter if they add up to one coherent experience. Leading multiple teams, I built the roadmap around the end-to-end path: get in, hold value across chains, do something useful. I made the calls on what to cut so the experience held together as each capability landed, and no part of it felt bolted on.
04 · How it's built
Close to the stack, not above it.
Pass is consumer-facing but infrastructure-deep, so leading product meant being fluent in the stack itself: account abstraction and passkey (WebAuthn) flows, solver behavior, and cross-chain routing across major chains. My background as an engineer, an AI founder, and someone who has shipped Solidity and trading systems meant I could work through the abstraction tradeoffs side by side with the engineering teams: where to hide a chain, how to surface a quote, and where an AI action does or does not get custody-level reach.
Pass is positioned as a leading consumer wallet that makes web3 accessible, built on one idea: self-custody no longer has to feel like crypto. Under product leadership the wallet brings passkey onboarding, cross-chain interoperability, and AI-powered DeFi into one experience aimed at users who would never have made it past a seed-phrase screen. The role is active, so what's here is direction and momentum. The result is still open.
What I’d carry forward
Abstraction is a trust transaction. Every time the wallet hides something (the seed phrase, the route, the chain) it asks the user to trust it is handled correctly, and in a product that holds real money the cost of being wrong is total. Most of the job was choosing where to hide complexity and where to keep the user explicitly in the loop. When in doubt, I shipped the narrower surface that users could trust over a broader one that leaked.