Ethereum
We built what we thought the world needed
We built what we thought the world needed, not what it wanted. That’s why we failed. We wanted organizations that would live in the cloud and only follow hard rules. We built a property ledger that could be used by anyone to manage anything. We wanted an open backend for an open internet. We built a way for people to invest directly into anything. The world wanted penny stocks and ape pictures. They wanted quick money and cassinos that were open 24/7. The other day I was reading the docs to invest in a promising startup and realized my money was going to a fund, structured like an spv, who owned shares in a cayman corp, who had a deal with a Delaware llc who was three levels away from the…
Brazil's Digital Real
SEC, Anticrypto Army, while the US is waging war against crypto, Brazil Central Bank attended Ethereal Rio to show off their plan to put the Real on chain.| It's not China's CDBC, but rather a model I predict that will be copied all over the western world. First, a context: Brazil is fast to adopt new technologies. Everyone already has phones, social media accounts and WhatsApp. Also, Brazil is already a pioneer with digital payments, being the second largest market of digital transactions behind India. Pix, launched in 2020 was adopted much faster than digital payment platforms anywhere else in the world. You can go anywhere with just the phone and assume it will be accepted, even with…
UX Audit: Status
The Dreaded Triple Bar – or when design is outside your control
Status.im is one of the earliest projects on the space and the first to focus on a mobile browser. It starts with a–brilliantly correct–assumption that browsers in mobile are not about being smaller versions of their desktop companions but should be all about messaging. As a messaging app is also far ahead of the competition, being a rare example of an open-source, end to end encrypted, fully anonymous message app. I would say it’s one of the best-designed Ethereum focused wallets out there right now. Still, here’s how a typical Dapp looks in Status: Ok, this is an exaggeration, a composite of many nasty popups, tabs, and other anti-patterns I found while navigating. Here are two real-world…
A security audit of Mist
In 2016-17 the Ethereum Foundation hired @cure53berlin for a security Audit of Mist. The process was eye opening and contributed to the discontinuation of the project. The report was never publicized but it might still be valuable for builders today. Mist was a brainchild of Gavin and Jeff but I took the lead of it when I joined the foundation in 2014. We had grand plans for it being the realization of all web3 technologies we were building and it was planned as the main software release of Metropolis However the first 2 years I worked on Ethereum we were mostly focused on the Wallet app, so it started being released as a beta in 2016 and we started a security audit at the same time. The…
UX Audit: Dark Forest Game
And in general more about how I approach the UX work While I’ve been an ethereum evangelist for the past 6 years (it feels so weird to type this!) I have never tried selling people on the idea of buying any coin., because while I am a believer (and hodler) of many assets, and an avid user of DEFI in general, I’ve been always more excited about other non-financial promises of blockchain general computing. Among them, blockchain games, to the extent I said this back when “games” in ethereum were either casinos or cryptokitties: What I want from blockchain games:1) be a good game first2) explore what makes blockchain unique3) design around the limitations4) persistent always on world 5)…
UX Audit: MetaMask Main Navigation
a UX audit about rethinking metamask menus
Making software—especially on the blockchain—that is both powerful and usable is very hard, I know. And sometimes we plan a lot of our UI but new features get added, some changes are done in the implementation and while we have ideas on how to improve that, they get pushed to our long backlog. So this isn’t intended as anything but praise at what the great work the team at MetaMask has been doing. I hope this analysis could be useful and due to the great utility MetaMask has on my life at the moment, I’d like to share it. So let’s talk about specifically this little bit on the app: Arguably, the most important piece of real estate of the app is the header and menu and it contains the…
Sunsetting Mist
What’s ahead for our team
Personally it feels like yesterday, but I’ve been working on Mist for over four years. While I’m proud of all the accomplishments we achieved in this time advancing the usability of Ethereum and sharing a vision for web3, we feel Mist, the browser has outlived it’s usefulness: the ecosystem has matured so much that now the user has tons of great options of wallets and browsers on both mobile and desktop. At the same time, the message of how crypto can make a better web has reached so far that now great names like Samsung, Opera and Brave are all focused on integrating web3 features on their roadmap. Not all were roses, and in our way we faced some extreme security challenges that forced us…
Paying my whole team with a single click
Today I was able to pay my whole team with a single click. Could have been none but the scheduler service failed. This little tool really shows how much ecosystem evolved that we can solve simple real world problems today by connecting multiple contracts. I spent a half a day and was able to build a contract that keeps DAI in compound, but withdraws when it wants to make specific payments. I added yearly salaries of all team members and spent another half day in making a nice interface so they can request payment at anytime. I recently posted how after being paid in BTC and ETH I was now receiving in DAI. But there's a lot more to the story. In fact my whole team has been receiving in ether…
I’ve been to all devcons
I’ve been to all devcons (except Cancun) so here’s a perspective and pics. The first devcon (obviously we start counting at 0) could barely be called a “conference” it was mostly a team retreat. About 50 people, many meeting together for the first time, presenting their work Devcon1 was in London, about 300 people. The whole conference would fit in the main hall at the National House Smíchov which had three more floors of rooms and hosted many satellite events (Cryptolife Hackaton, Philosophers Salon, Magicians council, the ECF alumni show & tell). Devcon2 was in Shanghai and doubled in size to about 700 people. That’s the same headcount as the Prism sidestage, which ran on day 0 at full…
Sponsored Burning for TCR
Creating revenue for token curated registries members If you like reading about novel economic ideas in crypto (and since you’re reading this, I assume you do) then you are probably aware of “Token Curated Registries”, a token incentivization mechanism to help curate lists of stuff. The short version is that a given list (say, “best restaurants in town” or “funniest star wars prequel memes”) is maintained by a community of token holders which add new items by proposing a new entrant and making bets either the majority will accept that as part of the list. The incentive for small token holders is to only propose items they think are likely to be accepted by the majority (otherwise they’ll…
Token-Curating the Truth
Not all original ideas are good. In fact, often unoriginality is a better indication of a good idea. If multiple smart people have independently come up with similar solutions, thought it over and did not reject it outright, that might just one of the best filters for concepts. The glory of suceeding should never go to those who have ideas, but to those who sucessfully executed them, by grinding away at the practical problems, pivoting it in real world scenarios and turning it into a real thing that makes a small impact on other people’s lives. They are like farmers, who carefully tend to small fragile seeds, fight the pests and the elements until they become a real tree. Throwing ideas and…
Was the hard fork worth it?
Knowing everything I know today, I don’t think the hard fork was worth its many downsides. But I wouldn’t know most of that if not for the fork. Firstly, the White Hat hackers have shown to be extremely competent and I feel confident they would have been able to rescue at least 70%-90% of the funds back to dao token holders (as they did). They knew it was a possibility then, but they didn’t want that pressure on them. Also a Fork was sold as the “clean” option, the one that would solve the problem quickly so that everyone could get back to work. Instead the fork created arguments that persist to this day. While ETH/ETC communities have been mostly at peace, that animosity is still brought…
What I want from blockchain games
What I want from blockchain games: be a good game first explore what makes blockchain unique design around the limitations persistent always on world players own the game, the items and experiences allow anyone to design and improve the game embrace bots 1) be a good game first I see too often people just trying to make yet another skin for a cassino or trading card games. Reminds me of slot machine games, all uniquely identical 2) embrace what makes blockchain unique Don’t try to make a shooter or something that requires speed. Think about what sort of experience you can create that you couldn’t in any other platform 3) design around the limitations Only have few moves per second? Then…
Recovering lost ether, past and future
I did not start this intending to write a little trilogy on the Parity Multisig hack and its efforts to recover it: I do however care a lot about the integrity of the ethereum community and I wanted to make an alert on the dangers related to a controversial split, and then I wanted to explore a more general opportunity to use the future reduction in ether issuance to deal with this and other similar issues in the future. Now I want to explore another idea that emerged from the last two ones on how to prevent a chain split. Here are my starting premises: Community splits are bad and should be avoided If a major client gives users the option to fork, then the end result will not be a popular…
Avoid Evil Twins: every ethereum app pays the price of a chain split
Parity has recently proposed an EIP to recover funds lost on the accidental destruction of a multisig library, which held hundreds of millions of dollars at current value by multiple teams. There are many debates rehashing the same arguments of the DAO hard fork, about immutability, precedent and moral hazards. I’d like to present a new side by talking what has changed between now and 2016 in the ethereum platform: a lot of new tokens and a new understanding about forks. If you build it, they will split it The first, most important is that forks are not only possible but can be profitable. Saying this now might be obvious, but there were many people who believed, back in 2016 that once a…
So, about doge and ethereum
So, about doge and ethereum... Both coins share some long common friendship. When Ethereum was running its presale, doge was at the top of the game, sponsoring race cars and overall having a lot of fun. I think it was the first coin to really get that a community, not only tech, was the most important thing. The ethereum community was formed, in part from people that didn't like the bitterness that overtook Bitcoin, so we always tried to be light hearted and fun. Devcons accepted dogecoin. I mean, look at this guy, does he want you to take him seriously? Doge was excited about ethereum too and they posted a thread asking if it was possible to be integrated in ethereum. So a few days later,…
So, about the Petro
So, about the Petro.. Venezuela released a white paper. And it’s sooo good. First of all it was inspired by Chavez, the first person in history to think that currencies should be backed by things. Screw capitalist pig Satoshi, Chavez basically invented crypto. I mean really crypto: Diffie-Helman plagiarized him. He probably invented all currencies too. It’s super innovative. Can you imagine the consequences if the Venezuelan people had access to a currency that could be used for investment, savings or means of exchange? Why didn’t anyone think of this before? ‘The Venezuelan state will not be able to make new emissions”. Except the “superintendency of currency of Venezuela” reserves the…
Thanks Ming
When Ming took the job at the Foundation, she was told that we were a few months away from running out of funds. The situation was dire: there were 3-4 different entities, with different accounting and legal costs in 4 jurisdictions (🇨🇭🇩🇪 🇬🇧&🇳🇱), and mgmt infighting Bitcoin price fell from 600 to 300 just after the presale, before we could touch most of it so right there half of the money we had raised was gone. The other half was spent developing the clients and launching the network, by August. The network was live, but we still needed years of development and the money was running out. We had ether, but it was still under $1. They asked Geth devs (and therefore Mist) to take a 10%…
The Truth about the Fork
I respect Ethereum’s Classic philosophical position, in fact I was among the first to be publically against the hard fork, and helped in all other ways to avoid it. Once I felt there was an overwhelming majority support for it (and after having helped build tools to try to measure these supports), and long debates to try to understand both arguments, I accepted — and still do, the majority decision as a good one. In fact, if the fork was merely a dogmatic schism I would be able to appreciate the beauty of the free market figuring out on two philosophical and political positions and no further words were needed. Except, that I care deeply about the truth. There is a common narrative in some…
How to build server less applications for Mist
Ethereum is not meant to be a platform to build esoteric smart contract applications that require a STEM degree to understand, but it aims to be one pillar of a different architecture for applications on the world wide web. With this post we will try to elucidate how this can be done and give some basic examples on how to start building a decentralized app. Who is this for? This text is intended at those who have a basic understanding of web technology and how to build a simple javascript and html app, and want to convert these skills into building apps for the Ethereum ecosystem. How can apps run without servers? Currently servers in web apps do much more than what they were originally…
Ethereum in practice part 3: how to build your own transparent bank on the blockchain
This is the third and final post on a series on how to use the Ethereum Wallet to create your own autonomous organisations. On the first post we detailed how to create a token, and on the second we shown how to generate a digital democracy controlled by these tokens. Now we will do the full circle and create a token controlled by the Organisation! We are going to modify the token contract to allow it to be minted by your DAO. So save the address of your current DAO in a note pad (pay attention to the icon) and grab this source code and you know the drill: contracts > deploy new contract > solidity source code > pick contract You can fill the parameters any way you want (yes, emojis are…
Ethereum in practice part 2: how to build a better democracy in under a 100 lines of code
This is a second post on a series on how to use the current Ethereum tools to build smart contracts without needing programming experience. Download the latest version of the Ethereum Wallet, read the first part and let's have fun! Creating a token is fun, but what is the value of a token that doesn't do anything new? We are now going to create a new contract that uses the tokens we just created. The contract will be a Democratic organization that lives on the blockchain and that anyone holding a share token will be able to vote on proposals. So let's go back to " Contracts " and then " Deploy Contract " and paste the DAO source code on the "Solidity Source" field. Choose the contract…
Ethereum in practice part 1: how to build your own cryptocurrency without touching a line of code
A lot of things have happened in the past few weeks in the Ethereum ecosystem, so many that it might be hard for a casual observer to understand where we are and what's available out there. So I would like to use my first post here to give you an overview of the tools we've built and how you can use them to build interesting things right now. But first a short introduction: I am Alex Van de Sande and I am the lead designer on the Ethereum foundation. At DevconOne I gave a talk entitled "The Blockchain Versus The Average User" where I went into more details on the challenges to bringing the Ethereum ecosystem to the aforementioned "Average User", one of which is the difficulty of defining…