Devcon4: The Push for Better UX
EDIT: We are hiring, reach out to us at hello@tor.us!
Talks, workshops, escape rooms and Stewart Brand… with Devcon 4 ending it feels good to get a rest after the excitement that has been going on the past few days.
Given the low adoption of dApps in the blockchain ecosystem, user experience has become an important concern within the crypto-community. In particular, end-user experience for dApps has become a popular topic of discussion at several developer conferences.
User experience was also a big theme at Devcon4; there were rooms dedicated to UX audits, breakouts hosted by professionals in the industry including Beltran Berrocal and Hadassah Damien, and talks on how to improve the UX for new users.
An approach to improving UX private key management was Universal Logins presented by Alex Van de Sande. The proposed EIP standard leverages on a user’s behaviour of using multiple accounts/devices to secure a single proxy identity, with keys with varying levels of permissions. Another interesting proposal presented by Austin Griffith is Gasless/Meta transactions. By allowing contracts to accept gas fees from third-party relayers, gas fees for new users can be paid for by others, greatly reducing the initial hurdle of acquiring ETH for sending transactions.
Torus also targets the issue of UX and adoption by allowing users to use their present login solutions (eg. Google) to derive private keys in a trustless manner, making it easy for new users to seamlessly use existing blockchain applications. Improving on Metamask, Torus does not require users to download a Chrome extension or keep their private key in their browser’s local storage (where it is susceptible to access via other Chrome extensions). Instead, users of Torus combine pieces of their keys drawn when they authenticate their login with a distributed set of nodes via a Distributed Key Generation scheme.
Most of these projects are integrable with one another — meta transactions to reduce the initial barriers for new users, Torus as a user’s first sign-on solution and Universal Identities as a long-term high-security solution. By making use of incremental approaches towards improving the end user experience, hopefully, dApps in the blockchain ecosystem can become more approachable for mainstream users.
