An Introduction to Trust Wallet by Founder Viktor Radchenko
Adrian Sandiford interviewed Trust Wallet Founder and CEO, Viktor Radchenko, to provide you with more insight into the popular crypto wallet.
How would you introduce Trust Wallet to someone who’s never heard of it?
The simplest way to explain it is it’s a crypto wallet that allows you to store and send bitcoin. That’s my explanation to people that have never really heard of crypto before. If I try to go into the technology or talk about DApps, then it already becomes too complicated for people new to crypto. But the answer also depends on how knowledgeable the person is.
If people want more detail then I’ll explain that this is a non-custodial wallet — a decentralized wallet that allows you to actually own the keys to the bitcoin itself, and then we’ll draw the line between centralized and decentralized.
And then the next step would be to explain what DApps are, and then this is what gives you an idea of what’s actually possible to do with Trust Wallet. That it’s not just a wallet for storing crypto, but it’s also a way for people to earn interest on the crypto they own, and then all the rest. But the simplest explanation is that it’s a crypto wallet to store your bitcoin.
What differentiates Trust Wallet from the other multi-currency wallets out there?
One of the big benefits of using Trust Wallet over other products is that it’s the simplest to use. Others make it too complicated. Trust Wallet is simple to use.
The second thing is the large coverage of the blockchains that we support. Most of the other products out there are limited in terms of what they can support.
We currently support over 33 blockchains, which contain, in total, around 250,000 different assets. So we have pretty good coverage in terms of the different digital assets that we support across different worlds.
Third, we allow DApp browser support. That’s what most wallets don’t have. Having all of those pieces together makes this a universal wallet for accessing crypto.
Mainstream users often have trouble with DApps because of accessibility. Trust Wallet’s exciting because the onboarding into that world is seamless. What’s your view on that?
There are people who come in and they don’t know much about DApps, and this is where the challenge comes in. How do you explain to someone what they are? The best way to do it is if you actually show the benefits of using them. So you can say: “Oh, you can earn interest, or you can earn yield”, and this is where people start getting excited, and then they go and try different applications. Then you can say, “Oh, that was a DApp”, and they’re like “Oh, that’s cool”.
DApps are basically the way we’re going to explore all the tools out there for crypto — earning, insurance, different games, NFTs, marketplaces.
You could be paying salaries to people, you could be trading different things, so that’s going to give you a lot of different things. To that point, Trust Wallet has good coverage in terms of buying crypto. So we allow people to buy crypto inside the app, which uses different providers. So buying crypto is actually a really good use case for us. Having that ability to allow people to buy crypto is very important.
Another thing to mention is that we allow decentralized access to the exchanges. So whenever you try to swap any token inside Trust Wallet, say Chainlink, we’re using Uniswap behind the scenes to abstract away all the complexities by using DApps, but now you have this interface to do it all natively. It makes it much simpler. We abstract it all away into one single interface that looks exactly the same, no matter what protocol you’re using behind the scenes, whether it’s Uniswap for Ethereum or PancakeSwap on Binance Smart Chain, or whatever.