Introduction
Dynamic has quickly established itself as a key player in the Web3 authentication space. In addition to handling auth at scale, Dynamic also provides developers with embedded wallets, allowing them to abstract crypto away from their end-user’s experience. The company has secured both seed and Series A funding from renowned investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Founder’s Fund, Solana Ventures and others
Spearheading the company is Itai Turbahn, CEO and co-founder. With a background deeply rooted in software engineering and a history of building products across multiple startups, Itai leads Dynamic with a wealth of experience. GMGames enjoyed sitting down with Itai to dig deeper and understand how Dynamic and their tech help simplify onboarding new users to the world of wallets.
The Origin of Dynamic
Shuab (GMGames editor-in-chief): Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you came to create Dynamic?
Itai (CEO & Co-founder of Dynamic.xyz): I’ve been building products for a long time across multiple startups. Same with my co-founder, who I met at MIT. We’ve known each other for 18 years. It was clear that we would build something together – and it would be crypto-related. We’re both software engineers and have been building stuff for a long time.
Before Dynamic, I’ve been involved in about five startups in the Bay Area. So, anywhere from a coffee company to an HR tech company to an ad tech company – pretty much the entire spectrum of types of companies.
Dynamic’s Value Proposition
Shuab: A true engineer born out of MIT love that. Let’s talk about Dynamic. Can you give us an overview of Dynamic and its mission?
Itai: We started Dynamic about two and a half years ago. We do inherently a single thing, which is we do everything that happens when you click “login” on a website. We cater for developers – the entire complexity of user management, wallet creation, wallet management, etc.
So when you click login or create your account, if it’s a crypto-native website, you probably see a bunch of wallets. If it’s crypto-powered but running in the website’s background, you’ll see email login, social login, Twitter, etc., and you’ll get a wallet created for you.
It’s based on the very simple thesis that if you fast forward 5 years and you open your phone and look at all your apps, or you go to your website and look at every website, it will have a crypto component to it. You might not know about it as an end user, you might not care about it, but if you open a game on your phone, it’s probably going to have a crypto component to handle how you transfer between game A and game B.
Shuab: Yes, I’d have to agree with that! How does Dynamic simplify Web3 interactions?
Itai: If you think about Stripe, Stripe gives you a very simple tool to charge money anywhere. But behind the scenes, they have to deal with a bunch of ways to transfer money, whether it’s ACH in the US or SWIFT, or whether it’s payment methods like WeChat that are more China-based. They have to deal with a lot of that complexity, and they abstract that away from both the developer and the user.
We do something very similar in crypto. We give you an authentication mechanism, but in the background, we have to deal with key management and different blockchains. We have to make sure it works on Solana, EVM, and new chains that are coming up, and potentially Bitcoin, Cosmos, and others.
The challenge, at the end of the day, is to do all of that without the developer needing to care about any of it. For the developer, it should be a 5-minute task to set up Dynamic and go on their merry way to onboard their users. The technical complexity of making sure it works across chains is abstracted away partially by the blockchain and partially by Dynamic.
Shuab: Can you elaborate on the blockchains’ Dynamic supports?
Itai: We think about blockchains as networks. We integrate with hundreds at this point. We think about EVM or Ethereum Virtual Machine, Solana and the Solana Virtual Machine, and Cosmos, Bitcoin. Within each of those, you could spin up a bunch of chains.
We have companies like Arbitrum and Optimism out there that builders can spin up a new chain within a click. It has some of the same underlying components, it uses the same frameworks, so it’s easy for us to support. It’s the same for Cosmos, and Solana is doing something similar now.
The very basic, extremely long way of saying this is that we support four things: EVM and every chain that spins up there, Solana and every chain that spins up there, Cosmos and every chain there, and Bitcoin.
Dynamic’s Role in Web3 Gaming
Shuab: How do you see the integration of Web3 technologies enhancing the gaming industry?
Itai: Games are magical. Depending on the type, from casual to more deep games, they’re so immersive that they lend themselves to digital or virtual commerce.
Big game studios have historically launched multiple games. There is an opportunity to leverage what you’ve gained in-game A and use it in-game B.
I think one of the core things about crypto is that you can use that as a shared infrastructure for creating multi-player or multi-game experiences where the things you do on game A impact you in game B.
We’re seeing a bunch of these ecosystems being built that let you connect multiple games and have interactions at a higher level. You can exchange money that you created in game A and use it in game B, or take assets from game A and use them in game B.
I think of crypto gaming as games that are amazing on their own, but with Web3 tech, they get a financial layer that lets them become more interconnected or lets gamers carry their journey from a single game to an ecosystem of games.
Shuab: How does Dynamic position itself to influence these trends?
Itai: We have this benefit, a really cool thing, which is logging in. Authentication is one of the first things you choose when you start a company or when you build a game. It’s a way for us to talk to very early-stage teams that are thinking about adding crypto components to existing games. We get to hear pain points, what people are working on.
So, we can influence these trends by listening and addressing the tools that developers don’t want to build themselves.
We find ourselves building specific things that’s too painful for developers to build themselves. When we do this, developers end up using it. No developer wakes up in the morning and says, “Let me spend my entire day rebuilding wallet integration.” They want to spend time on games or on building the things they need to build.
User Experience and Security
Shuab: What are the main challenges in new user onboarding for Web3, and how does Dynamic address them?
Itai: New user onboarding has two problems. The first is reducing the friction to onboarding – don’t make someone install a wallet, just have them log in the way they’re used to and start playing a game. The second problem is introducing them to the ecosystem, introducing them to gaming beyond that first game.
We have focused on the first problem: How do we reduce complexity upon onboarding as much as possible?
Now, we are focusing on the second part, which is great. If a user plays the first game and has a crypto wallet, we ask ourselves how to expose them to the next ten games. How can we help developers expose them to the next games within their ecosystem? That’s going to be a lot of where we focus.
Shuab: How does Dynamic ensure users’ security and privacy?
Itai: When you log into a game for the first time, and you have zero assets in your wallet, and you want to play, how do we get out of your way? But then, if you return to that game and now have $10,000 in your wallet, you need more security. Our tools do not treat all users the same. We differentiate between users who are just getting started and optimize for ease of experience versus users who’ve been on the platform for a while and have assets in the wallet, where we optimize for security.
In terms of security, we consider the tools we provide to folks versus internal security and key management security. For tools we provide, we have a suite around multi-factor authentication, so passkeys, authenticator apps, and one-time passwords. We also have a suite of tools around captchas and how we block bots.
Behind the scenes, we also think about security daily. For instance, for key management, we use trusted execution environments. We essentially use secure enclaves to ensure we cannot access a key and that a Dynamic developer can’t wake up in the morning and grab your key. It’s not accessible to us. For a user to log in and get access to a key, they either need something secret that they have, like a passkey, which we don’t have, or there’s some secure approaches when creating a session.
Awareness and Player Acquisition
Shuab: What organic techniques have you seen work best for creating awareness or getting new players into a game’s ecosystem?
Itai: It’s a little bit outside my realm of expertise. I’ve learned that my ability to predict which games do well is zero. But again, there’s not necessarily a change between regular and more crypto-focused games. From what we’ve seen, in casual gaming, it has to be very easy to start and make the casual game extremely accessible. For serious games, create a very immersive experience.
It depends on the game. For example, I have been waiting for the next GTA to come out for the last few years. I don’t need to be advertised about GTA. I’m buying that the day it’s out. But then, games like Roblox are all about discovery. Going to Roblox is just an act of discovery.
It depends on whether you have a community and whether you have an existing IP. For new IPs, it’s about discovery platforms and making it easy to start.
Managing Scale
Shuab: How does Dynamic handle scalability, especially considering the potential growth of blockchain transactions?
Itai: We handle pretty massive scales. We have big customers like Magic Eden, Starkware, Dapper Labs, Doodles, and Pudgy Penguins. So we see really large scales, and our systems scale to that.
Blockchain itself historically had scale issues, but with the introduction of Layer 2 solutions, today it’s a little less of a discussion topic. It’s still a discussion topic, but it’s not on my mind. The same is true for gas—it was a discussion topic, but now, with Layer 2 solutions, it’s no longer a big discussion topic. It’s pretty much a solved problem—you move to a Layer 2 solution, and you’re good to go.
We think about scalability every day, and an entire team works to ensure that things scale well.
Community and Developer Engagement
Shuab: How does Dynamic cultivate a community around its technology and what role does the community play in your development process?
Itai: It comes back to our unique position. One of my favorite things is that I wake up in the morning, and today, I’ll talk to a consumer team, followed by an NFT marketplace, followed by a gaming company, followed by a company doing oil and gas on-chain. Those all happen within a day.
We have a Slack community channel. We don’t use Discord; we use Slack because our community is a little bit more of developers than end users. It’s pretty active. Questions are asked daily, and people help each other, which is pretty cool.
We get to brainstorm daily with customers about new things they want to build. When it comes to pain points, new opportunities, or building things differently, it’s the developers who are either asked by the business to do XYZ or want to break something or adopt something that hasn’t been done yet.
Future Outlook
Shuab: Where do you see the evolution of Web3 authentication and wallet management heading in the next five years?
Itai: The vast majority of us have smartphones. Smartphones have a couple of key features. First, they have biometrics. Second, they also have their own trusted execution environments that could allow them to do complex cryptography calculations. And they have passkeys that Apple and Google use—you use your Face ID, but it really acts as a private key.
If we fast forward a couple of years, the main things that are missing are… the elliptic curve of how these passkeys or these signatures, private/public keys are done on the phone is different than the Ethereum curve. Over time, they might match. Ethereum might change which elliptic curves are being used. And so every phone becomes a native wallet. Like every phone, it really becomes a crypto wallet.
If we get to that, it’s a holy grail because you’ve inherently onboarded every user as a Web3 user by virtue of every phone in the world. When you secure wallets, they are inherently what is called a private key to a public key. Private key is something that I keep stored with me, I don’t share with anyone. Public key is what I can give to the world and present it as mine, and people can use it.
Proudest Moments
Shuab: What are some of your proudest moments in Dynamic’s journey so far?
Itai: I get excited seeing customers build interesting use cases where they end up. That is the coolest thing. Just honestly seeing things that I didn’t think could exist a day ago, now seeing them exist. Or someone showing up to a conversation with me and showing me a demo of how they use Dynamic – that’s the coolest thing. That is, I guess, my proudest moment.
In startups, you can’t really have high moments for a single reason: the ups and downs are hourly. You wake up in the morning, you’re like, “This is amazing,” and then an hour later, you see a thing, or you lose a deal, and you’re super sad.
Final Thoughts
Itai Turbahn’s vision for Dynamic offers a glimpse into a future where Web3 technologies integrate into everyday digital experiences. By simplifying authentication and wallet management, Dynamic is lowering barriers to entry for both developers and users in the crypto space. The company’s focus on scalability, security, and user experience positions it well to address the evolving needs of the greater Web3 community.
As blockchain technology continues to mature, Dynamic’s role in bridging traditional and crypto-powered applications becomes increasingly significant. With its growing community and impressive client roster, Dynamic is not just adapting to the changing digital landscape – it’s actively shaping it. As we look ahead, Itai’s insights suggest that the lines between Web2 and Web3 will continue to blur, with Dynamic at the forefront of this transformation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Dynamic’s core offering? Dynamic handles everything that happens when a user clicks login on a website, managing user accounts, wallet creation, and wallet management across multiple blockchains.</p>
Which blockchains does Dynamic support? Dynamic supports EVM-compatible chains, Solana, Cosmos, Bitcoin, and their associated ecosystems.
How does Dynamic address user onboarding challenges? Dynamic reduces friction by allowing users to log in using familiar methods while creating wallets in the background, and then gradually introduces users to the broader crypto ecosystem.
How does Dynamic ensure user security? Dynamic uses multi-factor authentication, captchas, and trusted execution environments for key management. It also adapts security measures based on user activity and wallet value.
What is Itai’s vision for the future of Web3 authentication? Itai envisions a future where every smartphone becomes a native crypto wallet, potentially using standardized elliptic curves for seamless integration with blockchain networks.