Blockchain – The Adjacent Infrastructure

The Adjacent Infrastructure Movement

Chris Robisons Ethreal summary post really reinforces the feeling I get about Blockchain. He mentions how Joseph Lubin described the tech as an Adjacent Infrastructure. This really rings true to me. He goes on to say that from the ground up a new parallel society is being built and people can opt into it.  Some nice examples are given:

  • Crypto – adjacent financial industry infrastructure
  • Ujo – adjacent music industry infrastructure
  • Hoard – adjacent virtual entertainment infrastructure

It’s my first real experience of a “community”. This community is growing. There are people genuinely enthusiastic about the technology and they are willing to contribute and collaborate to drive things forward. As more and more adjacent infrastructure is built more people are going to opt in. At the same time the building blocks of the Adjacent Infrastructure are still being built. There’s loads of opportunity to get involved and help make this happen. Personally I’m looking forward to getting stuck in to the Consensys Academy in June/July and here are some of the other things that have enthused me lately!

Ideo, Designing for Blockchain: Three Ways to Get Started

Really good article centered around three Blockchain challenges that can be worked on now:

  1. Design secure and user-friendly ways to store private keys.
  2. Design better ways to help users make a decision about transaction costs, or find ways to abstract it away all together.
  3. The challenge: Design ways to display blockchain addresses in a more readable or recognizable format.

The challenges are real. People who are well versed, immersed and interested in the technology sometimes forget how difficult it can be to actually just use it. Solving these challenges would go a long way to getting more adoption and real life use. The article also provides a bit of inspiration to get started and it’s definitely thought provoking.

WalletConnect/Balance

A project I’ve enjoyed reading about lately is WalletConnect from the team at Balance. Their blog posts are great and the code is interesting and well documented. Richard Burton appears to be really open to collaboration with a genuine desire to drive the technology forward.

The WalletConnect concept is an example of something built to solve the usability challenges described in the Ideo article. The solution feels natural to me and I can definitely imagine using it. Balance themselves are in the process of developing a mobile wallet and I think this is something to look forward to.

ETHPrize

I read the introduction post to ETHPrize and it sounds like a great idea. Bounties as a driving force for development seem to be taking off.

The list of key points is really interesting. It shows how early stage this technology and the tools around it is. There’s so much opportunity to get involved and really make a difference.

I found it really weird to be inspired to do something about documentation! Not something I naturally gravitate towards but its something I know can actually make a massive difference and from experience it’s an issue in places. Seems like a great way to get involved and do valuable work for projects.