Seems like Spark wallets are everywhere now and Ark and Arkade are popping up more frequently too. All these new wallet providers are like little shops: if you their customer, you can only choose among the products offered:

@Stripe gives developers stablecoin payment APIs and hosted compliance infrastructure. @privy_io gives apps embedded wallets, key management, and policy controls. @turnkeyhq gives teams programmable signing infrastructure with policy primitives built in. @lightspark, provides Lightning connectivity.

When integrating a hosted wallet stack, the provider decides which destinations are available, which assets are supported, which policies apply.

You can ride the rails, but your reach becomes permissionned

It seems like we'd much prefer a world where your wallet is something you bring to a market where there are loads of little merchants, all offering different products, and your wallet can pick and choose which options suit your needs.

I think this is what Bergeron is getting at in this little article.

The missing alternative is an open execution market where instructions are routed to specialized providers, with settlement anchored to a neutral layer that belongs to no one.

The wallet keeps one coherent surface. Providers compete as routes underneath it. The settlement sits outside the execution market.

The way I understand this is that if a normie comes to SN, it'd be cool if they could attach whatever wallet they happen to have (paypal, metamask, zeus) and the wallet knows how to find a gateway that pays sats to other stackers.

Applications express what the user wants to do. Providers connect to routes and Bitcoin remains the core settlement and exit boundary.

Why would such a thing be cool? I suppose it's because I like how I can show up to SN with a lightning wallet and it's relatively easy to pay an invoice to zap someone or post. If it was at least this easy for any normie to to do the same, we could really start to introduce pay to post everywhere.

It's an interesting way of thinking about it, but Bergeron doesn't have much to say about how such a thing is actually going to be realized in arkade -- or anywhere else.