Engineered to be Useable - The Daily Pink Pill #4
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
Who is Alex Van de Sande or @avsa.eth, and why is it interesting that he has been announced as a judge for LUKSO’s BUILD UP#1 hackathon?
Well, Alex Van de Sande was a member of the Ethereum Foundation from 2014-2018 and worked closely with Fabian Vogelsteller during his time there. The focus of their work together was to design how the end user interacts with the blockchain.
Alex and Fabian envisioned a world that took the blockchain user experience beyond just using a command line user interface into a future where people could “play” with the blockchain in a beautiful and intuitive way..
Linked below is an interview from 2015 where we hear Alex and Fabian sharing their excitement for what they are building. What were they building? Well they were focused on building the MIST browser for the early ethereum ecosystem.
Although the MIST browser was sunset in 2019 due to some unforseen/unavoidable security issues, the blockchain experience that was envisioned by the MIST team has not gone away and may actually be coming into view in the present moment.
In the 3+ years that have elapsed since the MIST browser was deprecated the ethereum ecosystem has seen a proliferation of experiments dealing with: token systems, financial derivatives and stable coins, and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO’s).
The MIST team was trying to make each of these use cases, and many more, explorable as application based experiences through the browser. To quote Alex Van de Sande from his medium post entitled Sunsetting Mist published on March 22nd of 2019,
“During the early prototypes (for MIST) we had designs for dashboards, appstores, integrated code audit checks, identity as first class citizens, personal tokens, DAOs, prediction markets, and many other things that are only now started to see the light. One should not see this as “being too early” but as a sober reminder of how long projects take to mature. We couldn’t built most of these tools then, and we could only build a few of them today, because they depend on a more broad ecosystem. You can’t build it all in one day, in one team, and you should beware of anyone that promises you otherwise.”
Today, in July of 2022, what we have yet to see are meaningful experiments that leverage the other, extremely interesting use cases for smart contract platforms as outlined in the Ethereum Whitepaper: namely identity and reputation systems, but also the power of layering tiered permissions for key based accounts with segmented vaults for assets that can be controlled granularly with the same tiered key system.
These core use cases and more are now being unlocked by the standards ecosystem that is being delivered by the LUKSO team. This brings us back to the BUILD UP #1. Now is the time to explore the really interesting use cases that the ecosystem couldn’t support in the past. It’s time to stand on the shoulders of these two giants and build out the next great generation of dApps engineered to be usable by our society as we transition into an increasingly phygital future.
Thanks again for taking the time to visit the office and I will see you again tomorrow the “week”daily dose of Pink Pills.
Today’s Pink Pill Prescription:
Take the Pink Pill and watch the original presentation at Devcon #1 for the MIST Browser. Do you see how LUKSO might enable some of it’s promise?
