“We are building the first mainstream usable payment wallet out there,” says Andy Bromberg, CEO of the Eco App and Beam, which has launched the company’s second product today: Beam wallet.
Beam wallet is built akin to a simple Web2 interface, but has years of Web3 technology running under the hood.
It operates atop the Ethereum-based layer-2 rollup Optimism and will also tap into Coinbase’s Base network, which is set to launch next month.
The talk of the town at the moment, which underscores Beam, has been so-called account abstraction–something that’s also been implemented on Ethereum via EIP-4337– that aims to make sending crypto transactions as easy as email.
Bromberg, who's also a contributor to the Eco Protocol, specifically touted the upgrade, predicting it will “open the door for the next order of magnitude for crypto,” as a quintessential part of the wallet, along with another upgrade in the pipeline: proto-danksharding.
He told Decrypt that despite Bitcoin being around for nearly 15 years, the crypto industry still “has never seen anything as easy as cash.”
“We have married Web2 with Web3,” he said, explaining that with Beam the company has made something “totally mainstream, without sacrificing everything that is critical,” such as the core tenets of the industry, like decentralization, censorship resistance, and self-custody.
Beam wallet, as Bromberg told Decrypt, looks to “abstract the confusion,” pointing to addresses being one of crypto’s main pain points.
Their answer? Emoji-based usernames, which he said had a lot of success in their testing phase.
During testing, he explained, the crypto-native crowd asked a bundle of questions trying to understand; whereas no-coiners simply reacted with “so this just works.”
Eco’s ‘onramp for the truly mainstream
Backed by some big-name industry players such as Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase Ventures, and Pantera, Eco also counts the support of A-list celebrities, including Diddy, Kevin Durant, and Carmelo Anthony.
According to Bromberg, they want to leverage their celebrity-investor base because the product is built to be the “onramp for the truly mainstream.”
The move also comes at a time when users are beginning to “question all things centralized” in the wake of FTX’s spectacular collapse late last year, said Bromberg, adding that many people are starting to think “maybe self-custody is important.”
While the Eco Chief thinks the majority of wallets do too much, calling them “generalized,” Beam focuses on simplicity: allowing for easy and quick payments.
The wallet is focused on stablecoins (launching with USDC and their native token Eco), and a fixed fee regime for all transactions.