An Interview with Plug Wallet’s CEO, Luke Dugdale

Q: Luke, briefly introduce yourself. 
I’m Luke, my expertise comes from the payments industry. My first company was involved in the early days of Open Banking, where we developed both consumer facing and data insight products. I have been working on the Internet Computer since 2021, as I believe the future of computation belongs on the blockchain and that a decentralised cloud infrastructure will drive internet based innovation.

Q: How would you summarize 2024 for the ICP ecosystem? Any standout moments?
2024 has been a year of development all over the ecosystem. There have been many new SNS projects launched with major ambitions and solid teams. The development of chain fusion has been very exciting, and 2024 has seen the beginning of AI on the IC. It has been a really exciting year for developers, and products are quickly gaining in maturity and traction. 

A standout moment has to be the arrival of BOB and on-chain mining. The huge and immediate success of this protocol has shown that value can be created in a very impactful way on the IC, and the translation of that into user growth can be fast and immediate. 

Q: What are your predictions or hopes for ICP in 2025?
I think 2025 will be the year of AI breakout projects on the IC. We have seen the fast maturity in AI development across the ecosystem, from Decide AI with their verifiable credentials smart contract, to the DeVinci app, a 100% on chain verifiable and secure GPT chat bot. 

We’re now putting LLMs on chain, ICGPT is a good example of this, but AI on the IC presents brand new paradigms. Dfinity is manifesting this with the development of Caffeine. This project puts together many exciting elements of the IC to create a truly innovative product. Caffeine is an AI based prompt engineering tool for full stack development of 100% on chain, tamperproof applications. The intersection of the IC and AI enables Caffeine to both build applications and deploy them in minutes. I am really excited to see what kind of opportunities come from this product that embodies the potential of AI on the IC. 

Q: Do you have any advice, suggestions, or thoughts for the DFINITY Foundation as they continue to drive the Internet Computer ecosystem forward.
Keep pushing the limits. 

Q: Why is Plug Wallet such a significant part of your journey, and what role do you believe it plays in the growth of the Internet Computer ecosystem?
Plug wallet is a user based wallet solution on the IC. To get market adoption, the incredible technology built across the IC needs to come together in the form of great user products. Teams should be building for problem solving, to bring the benefits of the IC to as many people as possible with the most engaging and rich user experience. I have been using Plug since my very first day on the IC. I have always thought that it is a fun way to experience ICP technology. As ICP and the ecosystem has developed and expanded, so has Plug Wallet. We have kept up with all ICP innovations and we intend to continue doing that. 

I also believe that Plug Wallet plays the role of engaging with Dapps and their users to create functional benefits. For instance, all tokens can be added to the Plug Wallet list, making price analytics tools, swapping tools and transaction functionality accessible to any token instantly. This allows communities to grow fast and to attract users without having to worry about benefiting from all the wonderful tools that the IC has to offer. We try to provide the full value of the IC in a simple bundle with Plug, for both users and communities. 

Q: What are your thoughts on other wallets in the ecosystem, like Oisy and Identity Kit?
Oisy Wallet has a great value proposition. It offers network custody of private keys. This allows users to feel extra safe, as they are using Internet Identity to authenticate to their wallet. The wallet is hosted 100% on chain and controlled totally by the NNS. It is also open source and verifiable, follows the latest wallet standards and provides enough functionality to be a great wallet. 

Despite this, I believe a wallet like Oisy is well complimented by a wallet like Plug. Users on plug want a quick and simple solution to payments across the IC ecosystem. People can make payments quickly and connect to all Dapps across the ecosystem smoothly and fast, which provides them with the “Day to Day” wallet they need. They can complement this with their NNS and/or Oisy wallets for staking, and long term storage. In this case, seed phrases may not feel safe enough, and users want a different kind of custody solution. Oisy becomes a great solution. 

Identity Kit has been a great piece of development for the IC. The team at NFID has worked really hard to bring this together, and has been active in the wallet standards group to put together standards that will make it easy for Dapps to develop and connect to all wallets. This will dramatically improve the developer experience, and we are happy to have these standards integrated into Plug. This will create a bright future for all wallets. 

Q: What’s the latest at Plug Wallet? Any exciting developments or milestones to share?
Plug Wallet is growing. Our user numbers are expanding fast and we are now integrated into most Dapps on the IC. We continue to expand into chain key technologies, with the introduction of native Bitcoin, ETH and ERC20s. We will soon be adding native SOL to the list. 

I am also very excited for the introduction of our mobile browser. This is something that users have been asking to include in our mobile app for a long time. We attempted to build it before but it works much better today, since dApps do not need to do any custom development. It works with all Dapps on the IC by default. This will go live ASAP.