EthCC 2: Antoine Najjarin

and a bunch of other stuff that um that the speckle OS team is working on so give it up for Antoine hey everyone I'm Antoine I'm the founder of speckle also commonly referred to as speckle OS it's a bit awkward at the moment we're kind of in a small going through a small rebranding from speckle to just speckle um but nonetheless we're focused on providing a ux layer on top of polka dot um in particular um this concept of connected decentralized web or web 3 so I think it's no secret that great ux is the Keystone to user adoption unless it's easy for the average user Who currently uses the web to be on boarded uh you know with a wallet and to interact with blockchains uh it's going to be very difficult to get wide uh adoption of of web 3 however great ux is not enough it has to be far more convenient than Web 2.0 offerings uh the the virtues of decentralization are nice and they're good goals to aim for but unfortunately I don't think think I don't think there would be enough to convince uh the user of today to switch from say using services like Facebook or or even Google services to to decentralized offerings and I think it's just purely because convenience is King uh when it comes to us adoption unless we can provide uh services that are more convenient than than centralized offerings then it's going to be very hard to convince users to transition over to to uh you know decentralized applications and and so on and I think this creates kind of a vicious cycle when you when you rely upon the convenience of a you of a of a particular service provider then you become kind of locked into their system so I think it would be good that if we can get users to appreciate the convenience of decentralized offerings and therefore become Reliance on decentralized service providers and I think the the great thing about you know decentralized application is that we do have the capacity to provide more convenient Solutions than uh centralized offerings such as uh removing uh uh data segregation and data silos so we can have interoperable data between applications uh we can have uh un uh Universal logins I think I think is another great example of how we can provide more convenient uh user access to Applications without uh without having to enter a password or having to you know create SE SE logins for each service so the capacity is there we just need to you know make it happen forb three so I'm going to now go into uh the common problems with uxx as it stands now um some of these are quite obvious and we there are many teams working on it at the moment so I don't wish to you know dagate from a lot of the work that's already happening now on that but nonetheless it's good to kind of just reverberate and and you know take an overview of what still needs to be done in the ux space uh the first one really is key pairings and addresses they're very hard to remember from a user point of view if I could provide a you know quite an anecdote from my childhood but me and my friends used to be crazy about you know our Nintendo Wii back in school and I remember that our consoles had specific identifiers that were not human readable not easy to commit to memory and so we had much frustration trying to remember you know a series of of of integers which is much simpler than an address um than a wallet address so I mean we can have kind of we can have really easy solutions on the client side we can have a browser or wallet that Maps address to a username U but nonetheless even having to enter this address once I think is frustration enough for the user and and is an inhibition to to a better user experience I think with the Advent of more blockchains and in particular substrate we're going to have more wallets and browsers pop up that are specific to that particular chain and I think that there's going to be a difficulty in getting the user to want to firstly install One browser extensional one wallet to access one chain let alone you know a suite of them for multiple chains and I think whilst you know projects like polka dot and Cosmos are looking to connect protocols connect blockchains on a protocol level we may still run into the issue of UI still segregating uh blockchains uh from a user point of view so that's something to be aware of and something to you know work towards uh providing a more unified solution data segregation you know while blockchain still try to remove you know this concept of data data solos that exist on centralized offerings there's still segregation between chains because they're they're not they can't easily communicate with each other so that's still a problem um and of course you know we do have projects working on on solving that data discover is an interesting one I don't I don't think enough is really being said about data discovery on blockchains and how we make that more user friendly um in particular you know users discovering daps or or specific types of data on blockchains I mean they could read the block themselves but I think that's that would be quite an uh quite a quite a difficult process for the average user who isn't techsavvy and and even someone who is tech savvy probably wouldn't have the time to to want to do that so there are services that I've been popping up that you know allow that that curate daps that allow you to submit your dap to them they'll process a check if it's not malicious and then publish it on their website for user Discovery I think this isn't a good Approach at all um I think that has the tendency to to recreate things like the Google Play Store um and create uh Reliance upon centralized offerings centralized UI offerings that mask or undermine they're underlying decentralized protocols so we need to be very mindful about you know how we approach uh how we abstract uh decentralized protocols on a UI level and ensure that even the UI itself uh approaches this on a in a decentralized manner so data Discovery is a big one and then the next one and you would have heard this quite a bit already from edgear and and Ryan uh is uh government governance uh governance I believe uh is going to take a much more prominent role in blockchains uh uh uh soon uh within this year and the next and the next years and so uh the requirement that users get active in governance and this concept of you know ensuring that there's enough of a voter turnout um to prevent um to prevent a small number of users making decisions on behalf of the rest of the network uh that will be an issue and that would have to be serviced as well on a UI front ensuring that it's accessible to the average user and intelligible to the average user to to participate in these processes I mean there are still many problems I mean things such as token specific protocols having to purchase a specific token to access a specific protocol is a big issue gas costs lost Keys fishing uh you know this absence of resolution mechanisms that you would otherwise have in centralized offerings uh you know the list goes on I mean it's quite messy at the moment but the great thing is we get to control every part of it and we can make it easier uh going forward so although you know these problems do exist we you know there's capacity to make it to make it easier here steps in the concept of web 3 the connected decentralized web project like polka dot projects like Cosmos I believe will make tackling these challenges and issues much easier uh down the track um in particular we're focused on PO polka dot um so that's what I'll be framing our approaches uh in relation to so we are heading towards a multi-chain future I'm 100% convinced there will be no one chain to rule them all and with uh Frameworks like substrate uh this will become much more apparent if I can actually quote a in respect to this first point he wrote in an article um that he published in the polka dot blog that we will see a cambering explosion of innovation following substrate hope I quoted you correctly on that one cool I did so we're going to see more and more chains pop up in the future and ecosystem providers have to be ready to Pro service them in a way that's decentralized and and at the same time unified I think the worst outcome we can have with many chains popping up is that they all have to resort to their own UI specification and therefore separate their their interoperability on a UI front I think we can do better and I think that's what motivates us to be ready to service all these chains and allow the user to interact with them in a in a more unified manner polka dot I think solves also the data segregation problem so instead of having uh data siloed away on particular blockchains now we can allow them to communicate this will uh solve uh the creation of redundant data so if I want to you know use uh my identity on ethereum or I want to use my identity on EOS and I'll have to recreate my identity on both on both on both blockchains um that's that's redundant that's that's a bad user experience and so projects like polka dot will allow say a protocol focused on identity to service identity and allow adapt to then connect to that identity and and use it in a meaningful way so that would be a big uh big benefit to to the user experience uh in the long run and again this is polka dot lays the foundation for a cohesive connected web three experience um which is which is essential for uh for for good uh UI so I mentioned a bit about this already in the previous slide but it does provide much better opportunities for you for better ux interoperable data I discussed that uh the the removal of redundant data uh we're going to see chains designed specifically for particular functionality so there's this phrase called dap chains that's been thrown around quite a bit um in in various uh uh polka dot medium uh and articles media and articles and so we're going to have chains that are specifically curated and specifically designed to service you know a particular application functionality rather than a general purpose uh uh rather than general purpose chains uh the interchain communication again will produce more cohesive uh uh dap experiences we'll have daps one dap protocol relying on another dap protocol relying on another dap protocol and on the UI front this will all be abstracted away from the user they won't know that there were you know five different protocol gos communicating with each other to produce one outcome for them um and and that's why we're focus on the UI front allowing the the user to leverage you know this multitude of protocols all connected together without realizing that they were doing so in the first place and then this is just like another concept I mean you can leverage dexes to access liquidity so we talked about this issue of token specific protocols I'll need token X to access protocol X well with inter intercommunication between protocols and chains we can now have things like U you know uh uh and user interface on the back end swapping their token for the requisite token token specific protocol um that they wish to use without them knowing it in the first place I mean and there there are slew of other opportunities that will become more apparent as we start using uh interchain Communications that said with the Advent of more chains we could potentially run into even more uiux problems if we don't approach it in a sophisticated manner I mentioned earlier this idea of although on a protocol level poka Dot and Cosmos will connect chains we may still run into the issue where user interfaces don't make full use of that that underline communication and we may see this with uh chains you know using their own user interface and therefore segregating the potential for you know protocol collaboration on that that will therefore be accessible by the user so we have to be very careful to ensure that the that user interface is a general purpose enough to allow the user to take advantage of all that connectivity happening on the protocol level we may have the issue with more chains you know relying upon their own native token to uh to fund particular uh uh Ventures or Avenues on on that particular chain um and again that might create even more issues with uh uh cryptocurrency and Native token management than already exists but again I mean there are potential solutions to that nonetheless on a protocol level we may also see that as governance takes a greater and greater uh role in uh the interaction with blockchains that we may have too many governance processes with too many on too many chains happening at once and therefore the user getting too distracted on one or not being able to Wade through the noise of knowing what Pro what governance procedure to participate in when to do it and you know uh and ensuring that they're notified of it in the first place we've spoken about voter turnout being a huge issue with governance protocols and so we have to make sure on the UI front that the user is able to streamline uh their governance participation rather you know this can be through curating with chains that they wish to focus on uh ensuring that they notified that a particular you know referendum has been proposed in relation to that chain and then being able to understand what that referendum is about and how they can participate in that so we may have this cascading effect where with these multitude of chains that they all end up having low voter turnout uh due to due to you know distractions and noise in the in the space uh the difficulty it's it's going to become more difficult to find uh data with you know more chains more connectivity the scope becomes much larger and therefore it may become even harder to find useful data on blockchains at least from a you know from the average user's point of view so we'll need to service that be ready to service um that that you know that growth of data and then because there are so many protocols connecting at the base layer it would may even become even harder to abstract this on the UI front so more problems may arise from this and so we have to be ready to to tackle that in a meaningful way this is where our Focus really steps in we're focus more on the ux S of a connected decentralized web I've mentioned before that we position ourselves with the ux layer on top of polka dot and we're primarily focused on uh on these five on these four things five things sorry there's a double up on that so five things so we will eventually release our own par chain which will allow the user to which will abstract a lot of the onboarding process for the user such as allowing them to create human readable names that that attach or map to their to their wallet address and through that account they can then interact with and communicate with all the different protocols on the on polka dot so instead of having to worry about you know ensuring that they have you know the correct account for this particular protocol the correct account for this particular chain they can do it all on one par chain which is a par chain we will eventually deploy uh later and then they can communicate with the broader Network through that so that that ties into to point number two point number three is that you know through this account they can then participate in you know multiple governance processes on different chains so rather than again having to have that you know one specific account for that for say edgear and having to participate in that governance process and then another account for you know participating in the governance of the relay chain they can do it all through one account um so that'll provide a much more unified cohesive experience for the user we're also looking at decentralizing data Discovery and in particular dap and chain Discovery and I'll get more into that in a moment and then yeah just general protocol abstractions where we can uh in addition to to all these things so this is the stack I mean I won't go too much into this so as I mentioned at the bottom we will release our own par chain and then if you ride it all the way to the top the browser intends to abstract all those processes at the bottom and basically hide it all from the user so they won't know that you know there's a complex web of you know interactivity happening behind the scenes I don't want to get too much into that just yet I mean we did talk about this quite a bit at the web 3 Summit talk about how the user will create their identity through speckle um but I want to get into Data Discovery in particular so perhaps I'll skip this for now so I want to talk a bit about this so on the right is uh a teaser really of um what our browser will look like when the user tries to find dap chains or particular blockchains it looks very reminiscent of the Google Play Store but the key difference here is that all that data is being read off is being read from a power chain so that power chain will have or our power chain will have a token created registry which will index daps and blockchains that will then be curated and uh and uh and managed by by the users on of that chain and so rather than having a process where a user will have to submit their chain or submit their D and then having it you know checked over by an internal team this can all be decentralized we can have decentralized data Discovery and we can make that meaningful to the user um without them having to you know rely on you know Google choosing which apps to you know approve on the Play Store and having a you know a political process around that so I think that's that's something I'm really excited about you know enabling a a Google Play Store type experience with a decentralized backend to to to to to fuel all that um to fuel interactivity the next thing that I'm I'm really excited about is how we can make governance simpler how we can make governance processes more accessible to the user and much more intelligible to the user so on the right is what again is another teaser from our browser where the user will be able to select the chains they wish to focus on and then access it from a dashboard so on the right you have that the users already picked uh roughly seven chains that they that they wish to focus on and interact with and let's assume Ed was there let's say it's eight chains uh the user can then be notified when a particular you know when a particular proposal has been made on a particular chain such as say edgear they can then follow that notification and it'll take them to a governance screen relating to that particular chain there that they'll be able to view uh an overview of what that proposal is about they can vote yes or no on it commit tokens to that vote uh and uh and and and they can basically interact with it on on a UI front the the one thing we're really interested in is providing a much more complex Suite of governance interactivity so Dylan mentioned earlier uh about Anonymous voting and secret voting and and that's something we're going to discuss with him in particular about how we can facilitate that from a UI perspective so if we can imagine that there are multiple chains all connected to this browser uh this browser will dynamically adjust the the the um the uh governance UI to suit that particular chain and so that chain can basically checkbox which governance tools they wish to use for that chain and uh and and the browser will dynamically update that so governance ux and governance UI is something that we're we're really interested and really keen on on working towards um and I think it'll get more uh more robust uh as we integrate more and more chains down down the track this is kind of a very general overview of how the power chain and browser will kind of interact so the speckle par chain will sit amongst the polka dot Network and it will be able to communicate with all the different Power chains that are sitting uh on that Network uh as you can see there are modules for identity modules for uh token created Registries modules for account management data management and then the browser will abstract all these processes from the user and allow streamlined uh user onboarding uh streamlined governance interactions and uh and and D interactions so that's basically it I mean if you're if if if you know being involved in a multi-chain browser is something that interests you where you're looking to you know get involved or release your own chain then it'd be great if you came and speak with spoke with us um where we're very keen in particular uh on projects that are that are interested in governance and how we can service that on a ux UI uh front um and uh and and yeah and hopefully grow uh the suite of services we can provide to chains that we'll build on substrate in the future thank [Applause] you oh questions yes go for so does your wallet have a capability of like d browser like for example trust wallet or status has a browser embedd is that what you going to do as well so this that's a great question so this is a browser extension at first it operates very similar to metamask okay um but eventually down the track we do want to release a mobile app that will have that function it built into it much like status and uh and Toshi I'm not sure if you've used Toshi before so they do have a buil-in de browser um and our idea is that whether the users on their phone or on their you know desktop that their accounts will be automatically synced between them so down the track yes for the mobile app uh can I ask one more question so I went to EST stver and I experienced a Barner wallet and you know like a XD and all that stuff sorry could you sorry I missed that so I went to the S dember yep e Denver and where they had a bner wallet which does a cross chain between the main net and the xpa network yeah and their approach was the whole application embedded wallet inside rather than relying on S party like for example Aragon if they wants to have a power chain whatever stuff I wonder whether what approach Pro and cons of approach of embedding wallet inside the D as compared to rely on to some s party like your Solution that's a really good question I think from our point of view we want to make this as general purpose as possible so I don't think there's going to be one UI to rule them all I think there'll be you know particular offerings that service particular needs and so perhaps having it embedded in a Dap will be able to service that particular DAP in particular uh you know specifically but I think there is still room for General UI where the user kind of you know wants to just generally interact with the network maybe just participating you know manage their particip their governance participation across the network manage their assets across the network then I think there's still room for you know these general purpose multi-chain browsers but that's not to say that you know having you know UI specifically embedded to a particular de will not be used I think that also has its use cases as well y anyone else nope thank you guys thank you very much thanks Antoine so next we're having uh redo