Solvo pivots from crypto investment app to Web3 gaming wallet

London-based custodial crypto investment app Solvo announced that it is pivoting to Qubit, a new venture aimed at making Web3 more accessible to gamers.

Qubit’s first product, the Qubit wallet, is a smart contract wallet designed for gamers to seamlessly play Web3 games, hold self-custody of their digital assets, and make in-game purchases. Qubit’s founders believe that the Qubit wallet is the missing piece to bring new gamers and game studios into Web3.

The gamer-friendly wallet comes with gaming and security-oriented features, including an onboarding process, an “intuitive user interface,” and the ability to sign up and recover your account with phone or email. It offers a social login, account recovery, and easy self-custody to help web3 games onboard users. Users can request an invite here.

The company’s founders, Ayelen Denovitzer and Shailendra Sason, both former executives at Revolut, founded Solvo to address the lack of a user-friendly, trustworthy investment platform.

They recognized that new entrants to Web3 and “OG” crypto gamers have to face complicated technical requirements, risk losing their seed phrases/passwords, and a difficult onboarding process to new platforms. And now the founders are evolving Solvo’s technology to solve these issues by creating the Qubit wallet.

How it works

With the Qubit wallet, gamers will be able to focus on playing their favorite games while still having the highest security and control over their assets, Denovitzer said. The wallet will come with gaming and security-oriented features, including a multi-sig transaction onboarding process.

When users are looking at their wallets, they will see it can be cross-game and cross-chain. They can see all their gaming assets for each game, regardless of the blockchain. It’s a more intuitive way to manage assets compared to options available today, Denovitzer said. Since it’s a smart contract wallet, you can approve multiple transactions with just a click.

“Web3 is more known than ever, but managing your crypto wallet is still difficult for even the most experienced Web3 user,” said Denovitzer. “Gamers want to play games but need easier onboarding and friendlier wallet management options. This will give gamers the ownership they deserve over their assets and help them fully participate in the blockchain gaming space, a market expected to reach $65 billion by 2027. Our user-friendly wallet will let the gamers focus on having fun. We believe qubit wallet is the missing piece to bring new gamers into Web3.”

Designed to be the default wallet of Web3 gamers, the Qubit wallet allows players to get a wallet and start playing with a single click. In August, it will be available as a web browser extension (similar to MetaMask) with desktop and mobile coming soon.

The wallet leverages account abstraction to improve the overall experience for gamers, allowing smart contracts to function as wallets, eliminating the need (and hassle) of seed-phrase while keeping it non-custodial.

“Digital assets in games are nothing new, but being able to control them entirely and even monetize them is the next revolution in gaming,” said Sason, in a statement. “Easy purchasing of and secure self-storage of these assets is crucial. This is what the qubit wallet is designed for.”

Denovitzer hails from Argentina. She majored in economics and went on to work in strategic management consulting. She moved to London to join Revolut and got into crypto in early 2020. To go deeper into crypto, she left with cofounder Sason and started Solvo in January 2022. They raised $3.5 million in funding and Denovitzer said the company is in a good cash position.

Of course, the crypto market has been difficult, going from one crash to another. Denovitzer said she realizes that there are a lot of scams and security breaches in the crypto business, and they’re still happening. That makes it a big responsibility to be in charge of a wallet for users. There is less activity now that crypto prices have been unstable, but it’s definitely an area of focus for the company.

As it made sense, the company decided to pivot to Qubit.

“We started with custodial solutions as the entry point for people who want to get into crypto,” Denovitzer said. “That was no longer true because of technological developments. So, we started focusing on noncustodial solutions.”

Custodial wallet services hold onto private keys for you and are responsible for securing your money. But a non-custodial wallet gives you full control over your private keys. You are responsible for securing your own assets.

Non-custodial cryptocurrency wallets are based on smart contracts, and they are programmable and flexible. They eliminate the need for a seed phrase, a long string of characters that you use to recover a wallet should you ever need to do so. Seed phrases are troublesome as people often lose them.

“It allows for the gamer to just use social credentials, like Gmail or a phone number, and get a non-custodial Wallet. So it has multi-SIG, which means that when the key is created, you have three pieces of it,” Denovitzer said.

It’s akin to multi-factor authentication for the transaction onboarding process. You have to put together two or three of the parameters to do a transaction. If one of them is compromised, you have an encrypted backup to regain access to your wallet. So, if you forget your seed phrase, you can still recover access to your funds.

The company has 10 people, with a number of them based in London. The company is working with Layer 2 blockchains such as Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism. Qubit will keep adding chains. Denovitzer said the company is also talking to game companies now.

Qubit’s team hails from major Web2 and Web3 companies, including Revolut, Amazon, Bitpanda and The Sandbox. Their combined experience in fintech, encryption, and web3 gaming positions Qubit as one of the most qualified startups building for web3 gaming.

The wallet leverages groundbreaking account abstraction to improve the overall experience for gamers. Account abstraction allows smart contracts to function as wallets, eliminating the need (and hassle) of seed-phrase while keeping it non-custodial. Because of its multi-sig approval process, if the user loses access to the wallet, a recovery mode can be triggered for the gamer to recover access while keeping funds safe.

The Qubit wallet also has its own “gas station” that gamers can use to pay transaction fees in currencies of their choice (not just ETH). This is particularly valuable for games that involve frequent microtransactions.

The wallet’s social login feature allows gamers to create a wallet by using a phone number or Gmail — zero advanced Web3 knowledge is required.

The Qubit wallet also empowers gamers to self-custody their virtual assets. Gamers can buy, mint and sell virtual assets with cryptocurrencies (the Qubit wallet can hold all major cryptocurrencies and EVM-compatible tokens). All gamers can easily see and feature their game assets in their wallet, regardless of the hosted blockchain or game source.

The Qubit wallet browser extension will be available for installation from both the Qubit website and via games integrated with the qubit wallet via Qubit’s SDK. Qubit’s first partnerships will be announced soon.

Qubit is a member of the Blockchain Game Alliance (BGA) and is backed by CoinFund, Index Ventures, and FJ Labs.

The next big thing that Qubit will create is its software development kit, which will make it easier to integrate into games. Traditional wallets will wind up being competition, and there are other competitors like Sequence and Metamask.