Exodus’ mission is to empower users to control their own wealth. As one of the earliest crypto wallets and web3 platforms, they have a long history of building and delivering on an experience that makes cryptocurrency easier and more accessible for everyone.
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Being natively multi-chain is a major part of Exodus’ value proposition, ensuring the product evolves with user preferences, while also staying ahead of market trends (and developer activity). Exodus supports more than 1 million different assets, covering essentially all relevant ecosystems. More broadly, Exodus aims to support and simplify nearly any use case a crypto user might require.
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If there’s one constant in crypto however, it’s change: the number of crypto primitives and categories has massively proliferated during the past two cycles, with DeFi, NFTs, and other kinds of tokens all rising to the forefront, along with new L1, L2 and L3 networks. Exodus has been one of the fastest moving players to help address the new set of needs and expectations that come along with these developments. Specifically, Exodus offers its Web3 Wallet platform, which allows users to interface with DeFi applications, perform swaps, manage NFTs, all across multiple chains in a single, unified, and user-friendly interface.
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As might be expected, building a world-class experience, one which can appeal to both enthusiasts and newcomers takes an obsessive amount of effort and work. Girding this is Exodus’ particular emphasis on design and UX. Ask their team, and they’ll emphasize the importance of design in everything they do. In fact, one of the Exodus co-founders, Daniel Castagnoli, has a long history of design expertise and projects for iconic brands across multiple industries, including Apple, BMW, Disney, Nike, and Louis Vuitton.

“At Exodus we pour our hearts into every detail, from pixel-perfect icons to subtle sounds, creating a cryptocurrency experience that works for everyone.” – -- Bryce Dehring, Senior Product Manager, Exodus Exodus Wallet

Naturally, Exodus supported NFTs from early on, right as the initial excitement and experimentation with art, PFP and gaming collections took off. Over time this has required a significant engineering and product effort. 

Much of this effort stems from NFTs being a complex crypto primitive for wallets to handle:
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• First, each token usually involves multiple elements of on- and off- chain data, which introduces additional latency, format handling, and synchronization
  
  
• Second, the sheer number of standards and edge cases relative to other kinds of token data means keeping up with the latest formats, across multiple chains, is difficult
  
  
• Third, correctly handling media for a variety of different device types and formats requires a full decoding / transformation pipeline
  
  
• Finally, the rich metadata and media of NFTs means that they’re more susceptible to abuse in the form of mass spam campaigns

Solving these challenges for NFTs, while still meeting the high bar Exodus places on both a fluid multi-chain experience, and world-class design and UX was a challenge - made all the more urgent by two recent trends:
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• First was the diversification of NFT activity across multiple chains during 2022 and into ‘23 and ‘24. Most notable has been the rise of the Solana NFT ecosystem, the explosion of Bitcoin Ordinals, which combined now rival Ethereum mainnet for NFT activity. Add on the proliferation of EVM activity on to the various L2s and L3s, and you can see why any wallet experience that seeks to emphasize cross-chain capabilities also needs to have a corresponding NFT experience.

• The second trend is downstream of the first – as NFTs have shifted on to higher throughput (and less expensive) networks, it has become even easier for scammers and spammers to send out airdrop campaigns, flooding wallets with NFTs that range from merely annoying, to outright dangerous (i.e., incorporating wallet draining links).

Overcoming these challenges involved meeting several requirements:
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• Being able to quickly and reliably ingest the NFTs of all users, from multiple chains, without incurring the complexity of a different integration for every chain
  
  
• Accurately handling NFT media, no matter the original source, and have it properly rendered in an attractive format, in line with Exodus' strong design ethos
  
  
• Flagging and removing spam tokens from the Web3 Wallet, to protect users, and improve overall UX

SimpleHash got connected with Exodus, and quickly got to work helping the team on solving these challenges as they were in the midst of a roll out of NFTs to more chains.

“the timing worked out great – SimpleHash was there right as we were amping up our multi chain (NFT) focus” -- Bryce Dehring, Senior Product Manager, Exodus

Beginning with an initial set of test chains, Exodus has integrated SimpleHash for NFT data across multiple EVMs, plus Solana. Initial integration took less than a few days, followed by a short test and QA cycle, with ongoing technical support provided by the SimpleHash team in a VIP Slack channel.

As you might expect for a wallet application, Exodus makes use of SimpleHash’s core NFTs by Wallet(s) endpoints, along with others to pull the details on individual tokens, and the full transfer and sale history of a wallet. Through making use of these endpoints, Exodus is able to abstract away all of the complexity of dealing with multiple standards (e.g., ERC721 and 1155 on EVM, and compression on Solana), and handling the media rendering and resizing themselves.

Because SimpleHash provides convenient preview formats for the media, does error checking, and conversion of challenging formats on mobile (e.g., SVGs), Exodus is able to deliver an improved NFT UX for the end user, without having to handle or maintain this themselves.

Beyond just querying the NFT data itself, Exodus also utilizes SimpleHash for weeding out NFT spam in the Web3 Wallet. SimpleHash’s spam scoring system provides a numeric score (from 0 to 100, where 0 means likely not spam, and 100 means likely spam), powered by over a dozen different signals, including a fine tuned LLM, market activity, and the contents of the NFT imagery itself. In doing so, this helps provide a safe, more enjoyable experience for all of their users, in line with their overall ethos.
 

“implementing the spam scores was easy – we checked with the SimpleHash team on the recommended score threshold we should use to get started, and that was basically it” -- Bryce Dehring, Senior Product Manager, Exodus

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Working with SimpleHash, the Exodus team has also derived additional benefits beyond the improvements in UX and multi-chain capability. Through utilizing the API, the team has also saved on the engineering time, cost, and compute that would have been involved building this out themselves, and continuing to maintain it.
 

“based on the amount of time / effort we otherwise estimated, using the SimpleHash API has probably saved us on the order of $90K per year – and the added benefit of us not needing to constantly keep this piece of infra up. Instead, we can focus on the core end user experience -- Bryce Dehring, Senior Product Manager, Exodus
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Moving forward, Exodus is continuing to deliver on its vision of the best and most user friendly crypto experience, no matter the format or application. SimpleHash is excited to be part of this journey, and help deliver a comprehensive token solution as the team makes that a reality.