Design

For years we’ve been hearing the same talking points around how blockchain handles design poorly.

This doesn’t past the Mom Test! Too many clicks to onboard! Wallets are clunky!

And while in the past it seemed like the community was complaining more than doing, this year’s Devcon proved that there is indeed an appetite for progress. From our perspective, it seemed like the conference advanced better design from a few different standpoints.

First, there were notable improvements on the the infrastructural and the institutional layer. An entire design track, scheduled blocks of UX audits (which were so popular that some projects were turned away), and a new design award all illustrated how the powers that be in the Ethereum space are looking to reward those who are taking design seriously.

If you look towards the giant platforms of the tech sector, in recent years the opensourcing of design pattern libraries has begun catch up to speed with the opensourcing of developer frameworks. If we needed more proof that the crypto space is moving at a blazingly fast speeds, we can look towards how design teams a fraction of the size of Airbnb’s have already started creating open source web3 versions of these design libraries. This year at Devcon we saw two notable releases from the Aragon and ConsenSys design teams, with their Lorikeet and Rimble design systems respectively.

While both of these systems represent an increasingly polished web3 interface and resource ecosystem, what sits at the heart of of the better design discussion probably is more of an appeal to User Experience than User Interface or tooling. The three winners of the Devcon design award, Bounties Network, Argent, and Blueshyft were all chosen because of the way they are approaching UX (it was the UX award, after all). We particularly loved Argent’s take on the mobile wallet onboarding and security experience (9:08 in video linked above). You can tell that the team systematically went through each process of the standard crypto wallet creation and exchange process, and thought, “how can we make this as simple as possible while still maintaining the secure, decentralized core of the application?” We can look towards their use of emojis as a method of initial account recovery, as an interesting example of this.

Argent’s emoji-based account recovery

If there are any opsec heads reading this right now, I’m sure you’re probably groaning to yourselves about the tragedy that is using emojis in any part of account security. I think the more important takeaway here is not the merits of this specific onboarding process’ security, but how it pushes forward the conversation around approachable design. If security and user friendliness hypothetically exist on a spectrum (this is obviously debatable), for natural reasons the beginning of crypto’s existence has largely entertained what the territory on the ‘security’ side of this spectrum looked like. But as we advocate for mass adoption, it’s necessary to stretch out this spectrum further in the direction of usability. This is not to advocate for apps that are fundamentally centralized or insecure, but simply to experiment around new approaches as a way to eventually settle back into a best-practice happy medium.

Experimenting with new UX paradigms can reveal an optimal resting point on this spectrum

If there’s anything that the design track at Devcon IV proved, it’s that Ethereum projects are taking this challenge very seriously. While there is still much more work to do, as we begin to establish exciting new paradigms around how decentralized applications work and feel, the happy medium of the Security↔UX spectrum is closer than ever before.

Developer

No conversation about the state of Ethereum is complete without some kind of reference to the state of its scaling approaches. At Devcon IV we saw several preexisting scaling strategies consolidated within a singular objective dubbed “Serenity” or “Eth 2.0”by the Ethereum foundation.

“Ethereum 2.0 is this combination of a bunch of different features that we’ve been talking about for several years, researching for several years, actively building for several years, that are finally going to come together into one coherent whole. And these features include proof-of-stake, Casper, scalability, sharding, virtual machine improvements (EWASM), improvements to cross channel contract logic, and really the list goes on…”

The larger community seemed to appreciate this milestone to point their efforts towards. This might especially seem true relative to the state of Ethereum during past Devcons, where Casper and Proof of Stake were just theoretical, and things were just a little but more chaotic.

For our developer team, eWASM / WASM was a particularly exciting component of Eth 2.0. At FOAM we’re heavily embracing functional programming as a major part of our tech stack. eWASM is a proposed method of being able to write smart contracts in a static typed language (such as Haskell or Rust) instead of using Solidity. If achieved we could use all the power of such languages and compile all smart contract code directly into WASM. It might be a nice performance boost and also a less need of gas, which would benefit our users.

The introduction of eWASM could introduce another functional language to the FOAM stack

eWASM is still early stage though, and will need to be further researched and tested before we would ever start thinking about how it actually fits into our stack. As such, it’s great to see that the eWASM team announced a functional testnet at Devcon this year.

Past eWASM and any other component of Serenity, the other Devcon update that seemed to grab the attention of not just our own team, but many others, was no doubt zkSNARKs. zkSNARKSs (or zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge) are a way to batch process transactions. It’s nothing new, and has been an underlying component of Zcash for a few years, but in the very recent past its relevance as a Ethereum scaling solution has increased. Just back in Sept., Vitalik wrote this blog post hypothesizing zkSNARKs ability to be used to batch process transactions. And at Devcon, one of the most crowded events was Eli Ben-Sasson’s talk on the the subject.

The recent discourse and attention around zkSNARKs seems to be revealing a new paradigm for how scaling is discussed within the Ethereum community. While engineering methodology and specs remain paramount, an increased appetite for solutions that are lean and readily available, also seem to be taking hold. It’s not hard to imagine a near term future where the demands of fledgling DApps necessitates scaling techniques that are not as perfectly packaged as something like Eth 2.0, but, assuming they maintain comparable security, are defined by their ends (quickly achievable raw transactions per second) being greater than their means.

Overall

A nice, bow-on-the-top recap blogpost isn’t needed to make the point that these are interesting times for the Ethereum. On one side of community we have steadfast ‘buidlers’ and on another side we have i̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶c̶r̶o̶w̶d̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶c̶e̶s̶s̶a̶n̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶c̶u̶l̶a̶t̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶b̶a̶s̶e̶l̶i̶n̶e̶ ̶v̶a̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶p̶o̶s̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ twitter. It’s continuously remarkable how well shielded the core Ethereum community has positioned itself relative to those interested in more spurious matters. Devcon IV was in a lot of way a reminder of this resiliency and focus.

And if there was any confirmation of the emergent maturity of Ethereum ecosystem, it was Devcon’s dedication this year to not just DApps and their code and design, but the implications that they have for their greater user base. We saw increased attention on organizational diversity, an appeal to better real world policy, and the continued rise of the ‘Radical Markets’ movement, among other things. It’s for all these reasons that we’re as excited as ever for what’s to come from Ethereum, and looking forward to Devcon V.