Alfred: How do you plan to make it as frictionless as possible to use?

Zack: My basic philosophy to accessibility and user interfaces is like this.

What matters is to have a good development cycle, and to do loops of the cycle as quickly as possible.

One loop of the cycle has these steps:

We need to talk to users about what they want, and their experiences using the product. Then we need to make improvements, and put a new version in front of the users.

On a good day we can do more than one cycle.

This strategy of software development allows us to continuously verify that users actually want the stuff that we are building. So we waste less time building stuff that won’t get used.

As for more specific UX improvements, we recently activated a hard update so that now we can have oracle questions off-chain, similar to how state-channel smart contracts are off-chain, but still enforceable on-chain if necessary. So we don’t have to wait any block confirmations when making new oracle topics. We can create new oracle topics and bet on them all in the same second.

This allows for a much better UX.

It will take time for us to fully take advantage of this new feature in our interfaces. We are exploring a plan to allow for the creation of channels off-chain inside of other channels. It is a kind of sharding that is important for scalability, and it should also enable UX improvements.

Currently your channel is with one particular partner, and if they disappear or lose their private key, it can take days or weeks to get your money out of the contract.

Sortition chains improves on this because you are not tied to any particular partner. No one can prevent you from re-selling your side of the contract to whoever you want. This should allow for a much more consistent UX, the user will never have to think about who they are making a contract with, and whether they are a reliable partner.

With channels, sometimes the user has to take actions to enforce the rules of the contract. Like if your partner published bad evidence to end the channel at the wrong state. Requiring users to understand complicated enforcement rules leads to bad UX.

With sortition chains the user never has to think about enforcement, or channels or anything complicated like that. It just works how they expect it to. This will be a much better UX.

You can learn more about sortition chains here: