Cardano (ADA) creator Charles Hoskinson says that a new crypto wallet could help bring the smart contract platform to a billion users.

In a recent interview on the Big Pey podcast, Hoskinson says that the new Lace wallet will help onboard droves of new users to the Ethereum (ETH) rival’s ecosystem.

Lace, built by Cardano developer Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), is a lightweight multi-chain crypto wallet that aims to seamlessly connect everything in Web2 and Web3 to a single interface.

Lace would also allow users to create decentralized identities (DID), or verifiable credentials tied to one’s crypto wallet.

“So about last year, we said, ‘Let’s start a research project to imagine what a portal and interface to all of [Cardano’s] use cases would look like, to go above and beyond what a normal cryptocurrency wallet does,’ so [we came up with] an identity-first wallet with full-node security, but light enough to be on a phone. It was a very ambitious project…

Now, Lace as a product is starting to come out into the market. It’s one of our first commercial B2C (business-to-consumer) products, and so it’s not a reference client. It’s not like Daedalus, which is a neutral playground, but rather, this is IOG’s view of how crypto ought to be done, and our hope is that it’s going to kind of push along the standards for our entire ecosystem.”

Hoskinson says that not only is Lace a cross-chain wallet compatible with other digital assets like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum, it also has a browser-based interface that will eventually come over to smartphones.

According to Hoskinson, Lace was conceived as an idea to get a billion users on the Cardano blockchain.

“So I thought a lot about how we get Cardano to a billion users. How do we get the ecosystem to become the world financial operating system?

And some of that is just good old fashioned hardcore protocol design where you do the science, you do the engineering, you build great protocols and get those protocols into market. Other parts of that is, ‘What is the consumer interface?

What is the portal upon which a billion people will do stuff, whether they’re playing with NFTs, issuing assets, doing DeFi things, or playing video games?’”

Cardano is trading for $0.35 at time of writing, flat on the day.

 

 

 

 

 

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