Argent

Market position

Positioned as a consumer smart-contract wallet provider that helped establish the Starknet wallet ecosystem, with Argent X described as the first Starknet wallet actively used by dapp developers. Backing from Index Ventures, Creandum, firstminute, Hummingbird, Animoca Brands, Jump Capital, Paradigm, Fabric Ventures, Metaplanet Holdings, StarkWare and Robert Leshner is reported by an aggregator. The sources do not provide market share, user counts or ranking against competitors; the homepage claim is limited to "join thousands of members".

Sources emphasise smart-contract-based wallet architecture that removes the need for a paper seed backup for recovery and adds daily transaction limits and fraudulent-transaction blocking, aiming to combine banking-app usability with self-custody. Argent X is described as the first wallet on Starknet actively used by Starknet dapp developers, and Argent won the inaugural user experience prize at Devcon4. The consumer card proposition is differentiated by directing a share of purchase revenue to a user-selected community or team and by rewards described as experiential (match tickets, player sessions, limited drops, events).

Technology

Smart-contract wallet architecture on Ethereum and on Starknet, a StarkWare-built Ethereum Layer 2 validity/ZK-rollup in which every address is a smart contract. Features include non-custodial design (the company does not hold or access funds), wallet recovery without a paper backup, daily transaction limits, blocking of fraudulent transactions, seed-phrase and offchain recovery flows, standard and smart accounts, email- and SMS-based verification, passcode and biometric protection, two-factor authentication with an escape mechanism, multisig, and zkSync Lite address linking. Argent X source code is public at github.com/argentlabs/argent-x; compatible dapps are listed via Dappland.com.

Go-to-market

Direct-to-consumer app distribution: native apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play, browser extensions in the Chrome Web Store, Microsoft Edge add-ons and Firefox Add-ons, and a web wallet requiring only an email address. Onboarding is positioned as taking minutes. For the Ready card, the funnel is download the app, pick a community, then spend. Argent also planned a developer kit for third parties and said it was exploring partnerships in finance and gaming; the current site carries a "Partner with us" call to action, developer docs and a blog.

Mainstream retail consumers rather than crypto specialists — users described as needing no technical knowledge — plus dapp users and Starknet developers who use Argent X to interact with decentralised applications, trade, play games and hold NFTs. The Ready card targets fans and supporters of sports teams and other communities.

Geography

Headquartered in London, with the team described on the company site as distributed across Europe. A crypto data aggregator lists the company's location as the United Kingdom. Wallet and card products are consumer-facing and described as usable globally ("spend globally with low fees"), but no country-level availability list is given in the sources.

History

TechCrunch reported in November 2018 that Argent, then a smart crypto wallet app presented with the look of a banking app, had raised $4 million in seed funding from Index Ventures, Creandum, firstminute, Hummingbird and Atomico partner Mattias Ljungman; the company had recently won the inaugural user experience prize at Devcon4. Aggregator data places the founding year at 2017 and lists a $12M Series A in March 2020 and a $40M Series B in April 2022, for $52M total. The product line expanded from an Ethereum smart-contract wallet to Starknet products, including Argent X (browser extension), Argent mobile, an email-based Argent web wallet on Starknet, and a multisig wallet, plus zkSync address support. The company subsequently rebranded to Ready, with the argent.xyz domain now presenting the Ready account, card and rewards proposition.

Risks & controversies

No controversies, litigation or regulatory actions are described in the sources. Notable data-quality caveats: aggregator funding figures conflict (one lists $52M total across a $12M Series A and $40M Series B, another shows placeholder amounts of $100 and a $50K valuation for the same Series B), and multiple unrelated companies share the Argent name, including a US direct-to-consumer women's workwear brand. Product documentation notes recovery constraints, such as the web wallet password being resettable only from the original browser, and that cross-importability between the three wallets is still a work in progress.