Building Modular Smart Account Infrastructure, with Kurt Larsen (Rhinestone)

Kurt Larsen is Co-Founder of Rhinestone (https://www.rhinestone.wtf), a platform revolutionizing Web3 by building modular smart account infrastructure to enhance interoperability, security, and developer accessibility. Kurt shares his journey from a banker to launching markets for Deliveroo and leading a machine learning product division, to co-founding Rhinestone, which recently raised $5 million in a seed round led by 1kx, with support from CoinFund, Lattice, Heartcore, Circle Ventures, among others. He discusses how his early fascination with crypto in 2017, coupled with insights from building Deliveroo’s marketplace algorithms, exposed the flaws of centralized networks and fueled Rhinestone’s mission to create user-friendly, self-sovereign tools that rival Web2 simplicity. Kurt dives into Rhinestone’s platform for developers to build and monetize smart account modules, the challenges of improving Web3 UX, and his vision for smart accounts as the dominant interface for users, AI agents, and blockchain-integrated systems in the next three to five years.