Boardwalk V2 Consensus

Recently the entire dev team convened in Switzerland to attend several crypto meetups, as well as to work together in person. It’s important to bring everyone to the same location at regular intervals, because it allows for extended and immersive sessions that lead to consensus.

What Swarm City is building has never been done before, so often the path forward has many acceptable options, and deciding which option is most prudent impacts the project forever. Because of that, it’s normal to question each decision, and see the merits of opposing solutions, with only a nominal difference in benefit between them. This can lead to indecision, and it’s easier for teams divided by time zones to remain undecided. When teams come together in physical proximity, it takes less effort to bond around the philosophical foundation of a project, and choose the paths that best support the project vision. This is what happened in Switzerland.

Foundational Efforts

There are great expectations surrounding the Release of Boardwalk V2, and for good reason. V1, while a monumental step forward that proves decentralized commerce works using the combination of blockchain technology and smart contracts, it’s admittedly clunky. From a dev standpoint, V1 is a huge victory because it’s a completely unique technology, one that required a tremendous amount of creativity and problem solving to make. It has flaws though. From a user standpoint, it’s missing some key capabilities, like deal cancel, and dispute resolution.

But while the user experience is of vital importance, the main issue is actually something different. With Boardwalk, the dev team is building the infrastructure of the entire ecosystem, for every conceivable use case. Future devs will be interacting with it, and building on top of it. That means the development has to be extremely organized, audited, and documented. This is the foundation of the platform; the sewer lines, roads, and power grid of Swarm City, with a map to decipher it. And that map is a new, comprehensive wiki that provides great transparency to anyone looking to interact with the protocol.

What Boardwalk V2 Is Not

V2 will add some small capabilities initially, like deal cancel, but it will not be the full Swarm City ecosystem. The dev team will release it when it’s done, because it will function much better than V1, but the work is not complete. From a user perspective, it will be similar to V1, but work a lot better. Once it has been released, incremental changes can then take place at a more rapid pace.

For instance, dispute resolution, the rideshare marketplace (with accompanying storefront), the ability for anyone to create a marketplace (hashtag), and communities (hives) are still to come, along with other wonderful surprises. The difference is now they will be affixed to a stable environment.

Consensus Details

The dev team is committed to creating a censorship resistant ecosystem. This has been explained before, but what censorship resistance means is the ability to withstand threat of being shut down. The most effective way to achieve this is by making sure there is no central point of failure — decentralization.

If an app is only available on an app store, for example, it is not censorship resistant. If the app store ever decides to remove that app, that app has been censored. If an app only takes credit cards, it’s not censorship resistant because if ever the payment processor decides to stop allowing credit card payments through the app, the app will be rendered incapacitated. Decentralization is the key for censorship-resistance.

However, the dev team knows the app needs to work as well as, or better than any centralized app, which causes a problem. Some of the decentralized components they were using to build the Swarm City ecosystem had not proven efficient enough for a production quality app. For this reason, in the interest of performance, the dev team reluctantly decided to use Firebase — a Google database software. But no one felt great about it.

Even though the long term goal was to swap these components out when decentralized options became more responsive, the idea of using a censorable solution was not ideal. Still, the devs decided to proceed with Firebase, which seemed the best option at the time.

But the issue was never really settled, which ended up delaying production somewhat. Without consensus around this foundational topic, the devs individually weren’t satisfied continuing to add value to the ecosystem when there was a chance their decision on Firebase might be reversed. This is why spending time together in Switzerland was so crucial. It gave the dev team an extended, in-person opportunity to get on the same page. And the result was very positive.

By reaffirming their commitment to decentralized, censorship resistance, the dev team was able to create a way forward without Firebase, using nodes instead. This is one of several topics the dev team tackled while together, and because of this development progress on Boardwalk V2 is quite rapid. These types of decisions have to be very well discussed so that future users and contributors have the best possible environment to work with.

Connect With The Dev Team

The Dev Team is always on the lookout for other developers who want to get involved. If you have Polymer or Solidity experience feel free to reach out to #devhive on the Swarm City Slack. You can get a peek at the project by reviewing Github, here.

More to come soon. Cheers!