Show HN: Meemaw – Trustless and grandma-friendly wallet as a service

[marceaul]

Hey HN,

Marceau here, founder of Meemaw. I was working on a different project (communities with better aligned incentives) for which I needed users to have access to a crypto wallet. I couldn't afford users to have to deal with private keys and what not, and I did not feel comfortable being locked to a non-transparent third-party provider for something as important. So I built an internal "wallet-as-a-service" around audited librairies. I dropped the original project since then and that service evolved into Meemaw.

Many "web3 projects" would be better off without any web3 component. But if you do need your users to have a wallet, there are a few good reasons to use something like Meemaw:

- great UX (no faffing around with private keys or seed phrases, easily customisable)

- great DX (get up and running quickly, integrate with your existing system easily)

- more secure (MPC, trustless)

- low dependency risk (you've always got the option to self-host or export existing wallets)

If you'd like a refresher on MPC wallets or Wallet-as-a-Service, I did my best to explain it without BS industry jargon: https://getmeemaw.com/blog/mpc-wallet

If you have Docker and Node installed on your machine, you can have a full example running in less than 5 minutes: https://getmeemaw.com/docs/getting-started

You can already self-host Meemaw, and there will soon be cloud hosting as well, with the option to easily switch from one to the other at any time.

The closed-source competitors are all (very) well-funded, but I think we can provide a better developer experience with higher security and reduced dependency risks. Right now, Meemaw is probably not ready for production, but we'll get there sooner rather than later. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated to continue moving in the right direction :)

[Atotalnoob]

I love the logo and name. Top notch!!

Your pricing page needs work. “Enterprise features” is kind of meaningless and doesn’t tell me what I actually get?

I get why you have a discord, but I wouldn’t feature it so prominently. I, personally, find it to detract from your brand. Enterprise companies aren’t going to allow their employees to access your discord and it just, to me, makes you seem “less serious”.

[marceaul]

Hey Atotalnoob, thank you very much! Those are completely valid points, thanks for your feedback.

[wheelerwj]

I have a genuine question. As someone who has been a member of the crypto community for a long time, Ive seen wallets come and go. They are notoriously hard to maintain and generate revenue from.

Why would you choose to get into this space now?

And why should I believe your service will be around long enough to make it worth integrating?

[marceaul]

Hey wheelerwj,

Thanks for your question, this is completely valid.

I think there are two axis to this :

1. Typical wallets, as in end-user “tools”, are B2C in essence and most crypto users are used to not pay a penny for a wallet. Meemaw is a “wallet-as-a-service”, meaning that it helps companies deploy wallets for their users. It’s a B2B service. I think you got that but just wanted to make extra sure. For a company with the right use case, having a way for mainstream users to own digital assets without struggling to understand how this all works is really valuable. Think banks letting their users own some crypto, Starbucks with their loyalty program, Reddit with their NFTs, etc.

2. Why now? Well, to be honest, it’s just because I did not find any alternative that I trusted for the long term, when building that first project I mentioned. I was really looking for an open-source and easily self-hostable project to give me the confidence that, worst case scenario, I could make it work even if company XYZ disappears or raises their prices or removes features... I probably felt the same as you do. I ended up building what is now Meemaw, trying to find ways to make it more resilient for everyone involved: if Meemaw disappears, companies using it should not be at risk; if those companies disappear, their users should not be at risk. It’s never perfect of course, but I think Meemaw will be vastly superior on that front.

I hope this was clear enough, let me know if it wasn't :)

[RileyJames]

I’m no longer involved in crypto. But this is exactly the tool we were looking for at my previous employer.

They were sold firebase as the solution to all their problems. But what you’re pitching here is much closer to what they actually needed to enable their vision.

[marceaul]

Hey RileyJames, Thanks a lot for your message! Any chance we could plan a short remote coffee chat? I would love to learn about that use case :) my email address is in my profile.

[DerekRodriguez]

So a lesser version of Gridlock without any frontend?

[dang]

Please see the guidelines for Show HN comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

Also, please see the site guidelines here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They include:

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

[marceaul]

Hey Derek, thanks for your message. Well, as far as I understand, there are at least two massive differences:

- Gridlock is a wallet for end-users directly. Meemaw is a so-called "wallet-as-a-service", allowing developers to deploy wallets for their users, within their app. The experience is for each developer to define.

- Meemaw is open-source and designed to reduce risks on many counts: going from cloud to self-hosting and vice versa will be super easy, there will be open-sourced tools for end users to recover their wallet even if the company (whether Meemaw or developers using it) goes down, etc

Happy to discuss further if you feel like I misunderstood what Gridlock does!

[DerekRodriguez]

The problem is that all the effort is still on the developer to actually build a user interface, while Gridlock already has it built. Additionally, any company can build on the Gridlock storage network using the SDK. It's secure MPC without the work of bringing that to the user and explaining it. In a clear way.

[RileyJames]

But that’s exactly what some developers / products want to do. And thus this tool enables them to do so.

It’s a different tool for a different use case.