I’ve been building the last two years to improve Ethereum UX

Hey everyone,

Some of you may know me as a mod here on r/ethereum, I have been active in the sub for some years and a mod now for 2. During that same time, I've been building!

Why?

First off, I love Ethereum. I originally got into Ethereum in 2016 and loved it so much I found a job and worked for a company called BlockApps in 2017 for a few years.

During all these years, I've personally onboarded many friends and family to Ethereum, and due to this and my moderation, I've seen every onboarding and UX complaint in the book. And so I decided to take matters into my own hands and build a solution.

Without further ado, I present to you: Pistachio.

What originally started out as a better smart wallet has become an onchain neobank. A mobile-first platform to make crypto feel like a modern checking account.

We offer elite security, think hardware wallet-grade protection built into your phone, with encrypted key storage, biometric + MFA recovery, and compliance powered by Circle. Every user will receive (not live) a virtual ACH, IBAN, and SPEI account for fiat on/off ramps through Bridge (Stripe). Pistachio is also the premier mobile wallet for Plume’s RWA network (coming soon).

We onboard the user directly to smart accounts provided by Pimlico and ZeroDev. We use the Pimlico paymaster to provide gas abstraction on key user interactions (free in-network P2P transactions, as well as deposits and withdrawals to the yield vaults we provide; only on L2s though, can't really afford to pay any L1 gas fees for you). We have integrated with LI.FI to provide quality cross-chain swaps. We also use them for zaps, to directly deposit any token from any chain to our earning vaults. All without token approvals and gas as we leverage 4337 (Why not 7702? It was only released recently and we decided to build our product around released tech).

Soon we will have debit cards and auto-rebalancing portfolios (powered by Glider.fi).

The future vision is to further abstract chains entirely and have a unified balance across all supported L1/L2 networks. Meaning you can receive direct fiat deposits using our Bridge integration (~40 bps fee) and immediately have funds liquid for deployment across the entire EVM.

We’re live in production with 600+ users, $30K in TVL, a 93% retention rate, and over 70% onboarding conversion. iOS is live; Android is coming soon.

I announced our go-live on X last week to a warm reception!

94K impressions, 528 likes, 514 link clicks. That day we generated over 130 new accounts.

It's been a long journey to get here. We are a 2 man unfunded (mostly bootstrapped with some light angel funding) team, and we recently just onboarded our third employee (senior web3/RN engineer, former CTO for a YC company). We're scrappy, we ship fast, and we listen to user feedback to fix what's broken and move in a direction to make an application that people will actually want to use.

This Friday (tomorrow) I will be jumping on the EVM Mavericks podcast with our own u/jtnichol to talk shop and future vision. I encourage all to attend!

And now, my humble ask — If you have an iPhone I would greatly appreciate it if you download Pistachio and check out our onboarding and earning vaults! Even better if you're willing to leave us a review / feedback. As it goes, some stuff is broken and we can't test every edge case (there are so many of them because of our gas logic).

The current goal is to increase MAU and TVL to better improve our leverage for a small seed raise to scale this thing.

I appreciate your attention if you've read up to this point. We're dedicated to improving the UX of the Ethereum ecosystem to better onboard the masses.

Thanks,

Brian