BlockWallet — AMA Recap, Twitter Spaces

8 min readMar 15, 2022

On the 3rd of March, we hosted an AMA on Twitter Spaces with Alex, Iman, Augustas (our new CMO), and Philip. During the AMA, we answered some popular questions submitted by the community. We enjoyed answering your questions and want to thank everyone who participated. Here is a recap of what was said.

Let’s get this recap started with some questions directed to Augustas:

First, how will the current market condition affect BlockWallet’s growth?

With the current market conditions, many people are worried that it might not be the right time to launch BlockWallet. In the business world, it is considered that companies found during the recession are generally more successful. The same principle applies to marketing. The bear market is an opportunity to experiment with different strategies and ideas, forcing us to do our best work. The bear market will help us grow BlockWallet’s armor required to succeed when the time is right.

More importantly, it’s not like we will not be scaling users at all during a bear market. Although the activity is decreased, it’s not non-existent. We can still capture users, and we will do so. Our plans do not change. Considering how every product grows initially, it’s all about getting early adopters on board. We feel that our early adopters are still active in a bear market, as much as in a bull market. Now what concerns me the most at this point is where exactly we can find our early adopters, and this is the main focus.

What is your marketing strategy?

At this point, the primary goal is wallet adoption, so scaling users. However, not all workstreams directly contribute to user acquisition. For instance, we’ve been figuring out what the positioning should be or what makes them actually use BlockWallet. I feel like we did a good job identifying the initial angles, and we started communicating them much more clearly. We are also monitoring the traction and engagement on each of those individually. One example could be BlockWallet Privacy Proxies. I don’t think many people even knew how this feature works before. The tweet that we made about it last month is the tweet that got the most engagements in the past 28 days (excluding the launch announcement tweet). This builds the foundation for further growth, and we will use this information to set up marketing channels that directly contribute to user acquisition.

In addition to the groundwork we’ve been doing, we have already signed multiple influencers for long-term and one-off agreements. Another channel that I wanted to set up early is paid ads. Since it’s a crypto product, there’s a lot of red tape attached to that. However, we already got a green light from Reddit for some countries. This is important because this will be an efficient channel to see what messaging works and what doesn’t, and we will use that information elsewhere. There is more behind the scenes, but let’s keep some things under the wraps.

How concerned is BlockWallet with user growth?

We all care about the numbers, but I am more concerned about the trend at this point.

Imagine a line chart. The ideal scenario would be a very steady and Relatively slow growth for the first period, which then becomes steeper and steeper and then grows exponentially.

The first stage is the early adopters’ stage, and the second stage is the viral growth stage. We want to do the groundwork and set up channels that provide us with a steady flow of users in the first period. However, what you usually see in this period is not explosive growth, but it is something you must do because it lays the foundation for the future. It’s not like you can buy a bunch of influencers and expect a million users.

Ideally, there must be some virtuous cycle that allows viral growth. A virtuous cycle is when events build on each other and reinforce each other. For Metamask in their early days, that was integrations. They basically tapped into developer communities at the right time when DeFi was experiencing ultra growth. Developers started integrating MetaMask because it was the most readily available solution for them. That brought users on board. Then, with more users came more integrations, and the cycle continued. We will undoubtedly test if this mechanism can still give us viral growth as it did for MetaMask, but we will also be experimenting with other ideas. It is hard to say with confidence how long these periods will last, but it’s not like the crypto space has not seen unprecedented growth before 🙂 The fact is that we will be working hard and expanding the marketing team to accelerate the whole process as much as possible, and one way or another, we’ll do it.

Next, we opened up the floor for other general questions to the team:

When is Hardware support coming to BlockWallet?

Implementing hardware support to BlockWallet is our number one focus right now. The design is pretty much ready. It’s just about integrating the actual logic for now. Based on our research and the feedback we received from the community, we decided to integrate Ledger first, Trezor second, the then other hardware wallets.

Could you provide updates on BlockWallet’s staking feature?

We’ve made some good progress on our staking feature. The only thing left to complete from a tech side is implementing slight changes to the contract to allow other tokens to be staked. Some open legal questions might also take some time to resolve.

Since you will only be able to connect to the platform with BlockWallet, we expect that the staking site will help drive users, especially when we expand it to support other tokens.

The staking will be time-locked for a certain amount of time (we haven’t decided this yet), and it’s going to have a predetermined APY with a maximum amount of tokens that can be staked. The specific APY percentage will be determined by market conditions, as well as experiments to balance the number of stakers and amount of rewards they receive

Are there any updates on centralized exchange listings?

We were introduced to multiple tier 1 exchanges when we launched our token last year. Due to legal reasons, some of these exchanges only bring on projects with a working product. With our recent launch, we’re now in a position to discuss a possible listing with larger exchanges.

Can you tell us a bit more about the swap functionality in BlockWallet?

We already have a working prototype of the swap feature and its design. This feature will be of higher prioritization after we’ve finished the hardware integration.

We still have some final touches that need to be put in place for the feature but are excited about launching this since we believe we have an improved solution to this compared to many other wallets.

When will the Citadel NFTs be released?

We’re looking to launch the collection very soon, and you will see more news and more info about this on our socials.

The NFTs will be free (you’ll only need to pay gas minting fees). 10% of the supply will be allocated towards marketing and BlockWallet team members. We’ve started some soft marketing around this already, and more will come.

Reminder: Citadel members holding over 10,000 $BLANK tokens will be prioritized and get minting access first.

When is the BlockWallet mobile version going to be released?

To be clear, we’re a browser-first wallet, and currently, we’re trying to capture as much of that market as possible. The mobile wallet is definitely on our radar, but right now, we’re laser-focused on capturing the browser wallet audience.

When will BlockWallet create its own privacy pools?

Eventually, we would like to have our own privacy pools, and move away from dependence on Tornado Cash.

With that being said, we believe it’s more strategic to focus on completing certain wallet features right now. Inventing a proprietary privacy technology is a big task that requires more dev resources and users. Tornado cash is the most private on Ethereum and Binance Smart Chain right now and is still the most established, time-proven privacy pool solution in the space.

How is this a privacy wallet if there’s no support for your RPC endpoint or Tor network anonymity?

Adding RPC endpoints is high up on our priority list. Similar to how you can add custom networks to your wallet, users will be able to add custom RPC endpoints to existing networks. This allows users to run their own node or connect to a node they trust more than the BlockWallet nodes.

Based on our research, most users didn’t care for running their own node or connecting to a different node, so we instead focused on creating BlockWallet nodes.

We explored Tor network anonymity early on when we started building BlockWallet. However, we realized that with BlockWallet’s current state, this integration isn’t feasible for us, while network anonymity can be achieved by the user simply using a VPN.

In the future, we definitely want to support Tor privacy or directly integrate a VPN to the wallet without the user needing to take any extra steps.

Do you plan to add 2-Factor Authentication to BlockWallet?

It’s not really possible to add a 2FA to a non-custodial wallet because you would need a centralized backend to make this work properly. And with a non-custodial wallet, you do not want to have a centralized backend in place.

Hardware wallet support is coming to add a layer of security that you’re looking for!

As an NFT trader, how can I achieve privacy?

You want to create a fresh wallet inside BlockWallet, fund the privacy pool, and withdraw funds from the privacy pool into your fresh wallet that you will use to purchase your NFTs.

A general rule of thumb is to make sure you never connect two wallet addresses to each other. This can be accomplished through the method mentioned above, where users would mix each transaction in the privacy pool before sending the funds to your other wallet.

How is BlockWallet approaching business development?

First off, congratulations to Philip Manokhin on a successful transition from the head of Community to the head of Business Development!

Philip brings a unique perspective on BD through his thorough understanding of the BlockWallet community. His firm grasp of the community’s opinions gives him a clear direction for partnerships.

He’s currently focusing on increasing our native wallet connections with DApps and has already won many potential partners. These efforts will allow BlockWallet to exchange audiences with other popular projects and help BlockWallet build solid relationships within the industry.

About BlockWallet

BlockWallet is the most private, non-custodial browser extension wallet, where users can store funds and interact with their favorite blockchain applications privately.

As crypto sees mainstream adoption, blockchain’s lack of privacy poses real security risks for newcomers and enthusiasts alike. BlockWallet is here to ensure that on-chain privacy does not lag behind. The wallet provides a set of advanced privacy tools wrapped in a familiar and user-friendly wallet experience, eliminating the friction faced by millions of users and making privacy accessible for everyone, everywhere.

Blockwallet uses battle-tested privacy-enhancing technology to protect your financial data. When you make transactions or interact with blockchain applications, the requests are sent through Privacy Proxies by default, concealing the IP address and other metadata, which can be used to identify the user. You can also use the Privacy Pools feature, powered by zk-SNARKs technology, to deposit and mix funds in a smart contract. This allows transferring funds without links to your history and identity on the blockchain, effectively rendering them untraceable.

Anyone can easily install BlockWallet and start reaping the benefits. Besides full privacy functionality, BlockWallet comes packed with an array of features that go beyond privacy for a seamless user experience. With full Web 3.0 support, the wallet allows you to connect to any dApp and harness the power of the decentralized web.

Reclaim your financial privacy on blockchain. Get BlockWallet.