We are excited to announce that Forum is the recipient of our third grant. Congratulations to the team!

Web3 Challenges Today

The biggest challenge facing web3 is the way in which web2 has shaped consumer behavior and expectations.

The mobile and social gold rush was spearheaded by businesses that focus on generating revenue by keeping consumers on their platforms. In doing so, they created apps that we spend hours on, but with minimal privacy and no true ownership of our activity on their platforms.

When addressing the flaws of this model, we risk affecting the experience we have all come to love. Due to this, wallets and seed phrases can be overwhelming for the average consumer. The strong precedent set by web2 applications only makes consumers more reluctant to try new things.

Introducing Forum…

Instead of creating a platform that requires investment clubs to come together in a group chat, Forum enables group chats to become investment clubs.

Any friend group wanting to invest together only needs to download the Forum application, without the need for multiple applications that have become standard for investment clubs or investment DAOs.

The folks at Forum are also aware of the UX imperative, and have made their app extremely simple to use. They have even done away with the tedious requirements of managing seed phrases and private keys altogether.

A Novel Approach

The Forum application uses ERC-4337, which allows for wallet setup using Face ID instead of a seed phrase. This does not imply weaker security or diluted decentralization.

The wallet setup uses Face ID (which is stored only on the device), providing the same level of security as any consumer-grade mobile banking application. This can even be more secure than conventional wallets. Face ID is used to create a passkey, a new type of credential encrypted and stored in the device, used to create signatures verified on-chain on the ERC-4337 contract.

This method eradicates the possibility of phishing attacks since there is no way to give away your seed phrase. The passkey is designed to work only with specific applications, and there is a guardian-based recovery method that allows account access recovery from a fresh device.

Consumer: The Final Frontier

Forum has made strong progress, championing the cause of account abstraction with their work on ERC-4337, contributing to the broader Ethereum ecosystem. They have an iOS application with a simple portfolio tracker and the ability to create groups and add friends.

They aim to ship the chat and in-built trade execution commands soon, along with Android and a web application later this year.

The Symmetrical is excited to partner with Decentralised.co for this grant, and we can’t wait to see the impact Forum will have in onboarding the next wave of web3 users.

Forum is actively fundraising right now. If you or anyone you know is interested in funding promising web3 projects, we urge you to reach out to them on Twitter.

Our mission at The Symmetrical is to find and support the projects that will fulfill our vision of connecting web3 to 1 million GenZ. Follow us on Twitter for regular updates, and apply here to receive a grant.