Argent leverages smart contracts to offer 'decentralized bank accounts'

Argent, a leading Ethereum mobile wallet developer, today launched its MakerDAO integration. Initially offering its users direct access to credit, Argent hopes to become a central venue for access to broader Decentralized Finance offerings, with lending, liquidity pool participation, and active management on the near-term roadmap.   

Argent's approach to wallet design makes it particularly well suited for DeFi services, says co-founder and CEO, Itamar Lesuisse, whose career spans Amazon, Visa, and a previous venture, Peak Labs. Leveraging smart contracts, Argent allows users to avoid the multi-transaction process required to interact with blockchain-based applications by traditional account models. For instance margin trading, enabled through the dYdX platform, requires 12 separate transactions. 

The smart contract wallet design has further advantages related to user experience. “We are more like a decentralized bank account and that was really the starting point,” Lesuisse said, comparing Argent's ambitions with European FinTech giants, Monzo and Revolut. With each account essentially structured as a multi-signature wallet, Argent can offer users recovery, whitelisting, and transfer limit features, helping protect against lost passwords and nefarious behavior, all while retaining non-custodial properties. Argent also currently subsidizes gas fees for its users via meta-transactions, making the wallet particularly amenable to a mass-market audience. 

Despite offering customers access to financial services, Argent's non-custodial nature means that it has so far avoided regulatory difficulties. The recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation law has also had little effect as Argent's user data is primarily stored on the underlying Ethereum blockchain rather than their private servers. Argent's approach to user privacy is exemplified by its recent work on Hopper, an Ethereum-based on-chain mixer leveraging zero knowledge proofs, which allows users to obfuscate transaction history. Hopper will likely be released in the coming months as a separate application from Argent, with Lesuisse suggesting his desire to have the mixer exist as a public, community-driven utility. 

Until today, Argent had operated a waitlist with over 10,000 eager users signing up for early access. Now that the company has started to add utility beyond simple storage and payments it will seek to open up the application to all, accelerating on the decentralized finance front over the remaining summer months. With $4 million raised in a 2018 seed round, Lesuisse notes that the company still has sufficient runway but may seek to raise a Series A depending on the success of the latest rollout. Argent is further targeting integration with fiat-to-crypto on-ramp services while continuing to explore identity services like 3box. "Identity is at the core of what we do," noted Lesuisse, citing Argent's day-one integration with human-readable Ethereum Name Services. 

As for business models, Lesuisse suggests Argent is not particularly concerned about monetization considering the total addressable market size of its application: the primary objective for now is to bring 1 billion users into the cryptocurrency space. Lesuisse wants to avoid trapping customers into their platform, preferring a freemium model like that used by Robinhood. This might include features like an Argent savings account, which automatically rebalances user funds across yielding products in return for some percentage fee, or taking a spread on exchange trades. Having previously run a company with over 1 million subscribers, building creative revenue streams should be no challenge for Lesuisse. 

Matteo Leibowitz contributed to this report