Collaborating For a Decentralized World

Thoughts on decentralized apps, open source, collaboration and current state of the ecosystem.

With Winding Tree and #CryptoLife hackathons coming up in October, we had a chance to pick Status team’s brain on all things decentralized. Andy graciously offered his brain. Below we talk about the current state of the decentralized apps and the ecosystem, BUIDL’ing for the future and collaboration between open source communities and engineers.

We’re especially excited about the opportunities to enable, promote and sustain collaborative spirit at events like hackathons where century old wisdom on collaboration still stands true (yes, Mr. Ford didn’t always talk about horses):

“ Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success” — H. Ford

Andy, how are decentralized apps changing the world and what’s your vision for the future?

The honest truth is that, at the moment, they’re not. I think we still have quite a distance to go to offer the same convenience and ease of use that more traditional applications do — not enough proper user testing and other standard best practices across the more traditional tech industry are followed when figuring out how to make products that people will actually use. There also seems to be a fundamental trade-off between convenience and autonomy in this world. It’s possible that DApps may never be as convenient as more centralized offerings. However, I think that great design and a highly critical, open, and transparent approach to writing code can solve a lot of the usability problems we’re currently seeing and that this — combined with education about why you might want more autonomy as governments around the world either begin to crumble or grow more authoritarian in the face of social and economic pressures — will lead more people toward the decentralized light. At Status, we built a simple API and command line tool a year ago and had a whole bunch of people hack away on it, some very successfully. However, we felt that the tools we had created were encouraging people to build what were essentially “Web 2.5” things — basically the same old ideas with a little “blockchain” sprinkled on top. So, we overhauled our tools and have come up with something called Status Extensions, which I am genuinely excited about. It’s different, but it’s going to let people build truly decentralized products and services that can essentially be hosted and accessed from anywhere, and will bring DApps much closer toward a fully native experience on your phone. This means that not only can people access the power of web3 directly from their pockets, but they can do it a smooth, fast, and simple way which feels native and looks great. This is what I hope to see in the future — products and services which live up to the ethos of the networks on which they choose to deploy themselves; which offer real value to people in the sense that they can be used for things “in real life”; and are easy, secure, and simple enough for everyone to understand. I want to see a more open and equitable web, one which is designed from first principles for both privacy and the sort of conversational spaces that define so much of our humanity and contribute to the collective knowledge of our species in constructive and unexpectedly serendipitous ways.

What are some good examples of real world DApps that are already allowing society to live their lives on crypto?

Again, truthfully, there aren’t any that come to mind right now. Winding Tree is doing an awesome job with travel, but it’s still small by any traditional standard. Status is bringing web3 to mobile, but the user experience still isn’t quite as easy and understandable as other chat platforms like WeChat or WhatsApp. Aragon is doing some awesome work, but they too have a long way to go on education and usability. Augur hasn’t been able to keep their user base coming back too often, and the same thing goes for CryptoKitties. Remember though, we are at a very, very early stage in the game. Ethereum itself is just over 3 years old — there’s LOTS of stuff still to come. This is one of the reasons we’re hosting #CryptoLife — there are no DApps out there at the moment which are both genuinely easy to use and useful to ordinary people on a day-to-day basis. It’s time we started to change that.

What needs to happen to enable faster pace of change and innovation across industries?

It’s difficult to say, and I’m not even convinced that aiming for a faster pace of change and innovation is something we should do. Crypto is already the fastest-moving industry I have ever worked in, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. It’s important to remember that we are not building rickety bridges here — we’re building the pyramids, the sort of digital structures that future generations may look back on in wonder at the sort of sacrifices and motivation and collaboration it must have taken to erect something like that. Writing really great code requires a lot of time and thought, and very careful engineering and testing. One has to pay deep attention to the effects of the language you choose to use and — because we are essentially programming crowds with new digital incentives running on shared, decentralized networks — we also need to think very carefully about the ethics of what we choose to do. In short, I actually struggle a lot with the falsification I see in crypto about “moving fast and breaking things” or shooting “for the moon”. By all means, do that, and be disruptive, but remember that the point about breaking things means you need to go back and fix them when it does happen.

What is the role of open source developer communities in this change? What in your opinion shapes the ways in which these communities collaborate?

They are the heart of the change. Without open source software, none of this is possible. Without open source communities capable of collaborating with each other on scales previously impossible (due to coordination costs arising from everyone using different systems that don’t talk to each other), again, none of this is possible. I love a lot of what the Gitcoin team has to say about the importance of open source software and development and they are likely best placed to answer this question.

How do partnerships with companies like Winding Tree help to execute Status’ mission?

Status’ mission is the mass adoption of Ethereum. It really is a simple as that.

So, by building products and services that enable people in their day-to-day lives to get value from actual use, all partners — and even people we don’t know or work with — are helping us achieve our mission. This is what I mean about collaboration at scales never before possible, because we’re all working on this underlying, shared “thing” — the EVM. Our mission bleeds into the work happening at Winding Tree or OmiseGo, FOAM, Peepeth, CryptoStrikers, Pixura, NoBlockNoParty, Aragon, Augur, Airswap, Kyber and a thousand other amazing people, and theirs into ours. By building awesome things that work well together; that can be accessed and used by anyone, anywhere; and — most importantly — by doing it together we can prove to the world that there are different ways of working (and being) available to modern humans which, yes, require more autonomy and self-reliance, but which also allow for a kind of freedom rarely achievable, if history is anything to go by.

What do you see as the best outcome of the #CryptoLife hackathon for the developer community?