Julien Niset: Argent, building on StarkNet, and a primer on account abstraction

Here is my conversation with Julien Niset: intothebytecode.xyz/julien-niset-argent

Julien is the cofounder and Chief Science Officer at Argent, a crypto wallet that's used and loved by many people in the crypto ecosystem.

In this conversation, we talk about how Argent has evolved to get to where it is today. How Julien sees user experience evolving broadly in the ecosystem, and what the flow of a new person interacting with a crypto application for the first time might look like in the future.

Another topic we get into deeply is L2s, how Julien and Argent have thought about the topic of EVM equivalence and compatibility, and why they ultimately chose to build on ZK Rollups like ZkSync and StarkNet.

And lastly, we dive into what has been like to build on StarkNet, what the early community feels like today, what it's been like to write code in Cairo, and as a bit of a snapshot into this experience we do a deep dive into what account abstraction looks like on StarkNet.

Timestamps:
0:00 intro
1:56 leaning into zk rollups and account abstraction
7:29 scaling the self-custody experience
13:20 what onboarding users to crypto will look like in 3 years
20:24 some of the friction points that still need to be abstracted
33:52 L2s and the trade-offs between different rollups
39:45 is breaking EVM-equivalency worth it?
48:01 Julien’s experience in the StarkNet ecosystem
58:24 a primer on account abstraction
1:15:38 session keys
1:28:17 starting a sensible wallet set up from scratch

Relevant links:
Julien Niset: https://twitter.com/jniset
Argent - https://www.argent.xyz/
StarkNet - https://starkware.co/starknet/
zkSync - https://zksync.io/
Topology - https://www.topology.gg/