Fortmatic. Powering The BuffiDAO and 1MillionDevs Quest Experiment.

The Team Powering the EthDenver Hackathon

Published in

1MillionDevs

7 min readFeb 15, 2020

Are you ready for the EthDenver hackathon!

EthDenver — the premier hackathon of the year!
1,000’s of people.
10,000’s of new ideas.
Infinite amount of possibilities.

Connecting With Fortmatic

This year #OneMillionDevs had a chance to catch up with Sean Li the CEO of Fortmatic and primary sponsor of the EthDenver hackathon. The One Million Devs stewards had our first chance to chat with the Fortmatic team at the EthWaterloo. We learned a lot!

Fortmatic is such a unique Ethereum wallet experience.

Simple. Approachable. Usable.

It’s obvious why EthDenver chose to partner with the Fortmatic Team.

Interview

1) What first inspired the Fortmatic team to come together? Was it a shared mission? A desire to build a great product? Something else?

The Fortmatic team came together based on trust, shared vision, and achieving balance. We were all University of Waterloo grads and friends for a long time, and were deeply intrigued by the world of blockchain and eager to help show its capabilities to the rest of the world. We bring different expertise, perspective, and personalities to build a balanced team.

My past experience at Docker gave me the ammunition to build quality, well-crafted developer tools that touch millions of developers. My co-founder Arthur brings in his infrastructure prowess from Yelp, shipping critical data platforms for partners that requires availability, privacy, and security. My co-founder Jaemin brings in his expertise working at Uber business payment platform and fraud prevention.

In mid-2018, our source of conviction to start Fortmatic came deeply ingrained after realizing that the user experience problem in the space is actually a key management challenge, where mainstream users are severely underserved compared to institutions and tech-savvy users. We validated our idea by prototyping an initial solution with our key management model and shared them with developers and advisors we knew, the response was very positive, so we went ahead and raised venture capital from top firms in the valley to bring this to market.

Since then, we’ve grown to a team of over ten people, with experience working at top companies such as Docker, Google, Amazon, Apple, Yelp, Uber, OKEx, and Accenture.

2) It’s obvious Fortmatic cares deeply about a delightful user experience. What drives that mission? And how do you maintain that focus?

Some people view design as a feature that’s not a strong moat for companies — I couldn’t disagree more. Great design is not a feature you can just “slap on” afterward, it’s a carefully choreographed dance between engineers, designers, product people, business developers, and marketers.

Product with beautiful designs consistent with the goals and constraints among various disciplines is a testament to a team’s ability to execute.

Our team adopts a design-first craftsmanship mentality and we should feel proud of every bit of product and service we put out there into the hands of developers and users. The best product should be delightful, purposeful, and stay out of the way of our developers and users. We’ve done over thousands of hours of designing and user research to make sure we nail the onboarding experience, chiseling every single flow and animation, and make sure Fortmatic UI stays as integrated as possible amongst dApps (with custom themes), without taking away from dApps’ native user experience and brand.

3) At EthWaterloo2 you mentioned helping developers reach the next 7 Billion* users. How is Fortmatic helping achieve that vision? How can the larger Ethereum community support that mission?

We all want Ethereum to reach the next billions of users. But mass adoption will not happen when we only build and stay in our own walled garden of ideals, and hope adoption will come. Instead, we should bring the best parts of Web 3 to the users of Web 2, in a form factor that’s accessible, forgiving, and most importantly familiar to mainstream users.

Our team is sticking to these principles, staying pragmatic, and constantly making our product more approachable to mainstream Web 2 users by eliminating friction points and doubts by improving design and security. The Ethereum community has already been doing an absolutely fantastic job of encouraging its members to be more aware of UX.

4) Decentralized autonomous organizations are slowly beginning to emerge across many verticals (Venture, Marketing, Staking, Community, etc…) — and demonstrated perhaps most evidently by the EthDenverDAO. As the primary sponsor of EthDenver, plus integrated closely into new Aragon’s DAO Court, how will Fortmatic continue to play a part in decentralized autonomous organizations in the future?

We are excited by DAOs ourselves, the top priority for us is to be the enabler of DAOs for the mainstream audience, so users can at least get onboarded and interact the product for themselves in a familiar way. We are also avid experimenters and will be staying closely updated with different types of DAOs and are open to experimenting with them when time is right.

5) While we are on the topic of decentralized autonomous organizations, what excites the Fortmatic team most about DAOs?

Our team is fascinated by DAOs’ ability to efficiently align stakeholder incentives and turning participants of an organization into partial owners via issuing tokens/shares. The concept of blockchain and cryptocurrency gave birth to self-sovereign individuals who have control over their assets without having to trust intermediaries. DAOs are the next logical evolution, enabling self-sovereign communities and aligning their incentives towards a common goal by balancing economic incentives amongst participants and organizations. The implication of DAOs is huge and there has been so much innovation on the mechanisms and use cases of DAOs, such as Continuous Organizations.

6) Will decentralized autonomous organizations play a role in reaching the next 7 Billion users? If so, how?

I do think there are a couple more hurdles to overcome before DAOs can be a major propellant for the next billions of users:

The legality and regulations of DAOs and their mechanisms need to become clearer, e.g. Continuous Organizations may be amazing for smaller cash flow business funding, but DATs are likely securities, some legal framework still needs to exist to enable companies to actually start adopting this
More users would need to own crypto to get started participating in some DAOs, we need more widely adopted and accessible fiat on-ramp options to help new users acquire their first crypto
More time may be needed for mainstream users to get educated and familiarized with various mechanisms and types of DAOs.

7) Fortmatic is creating a seamless onboarding experience for users. What are other technologies does Fortmatic think will be required to onboard everyday users into blockchain ecosystem?

To name a few… fiat on-ramps and off-ramps, tech to abstract gas away from users, faster and cheaper on-chain transactions, and wider adoption of stable currencies (more ways of spending them).

8) Regularly we see updates about Fortmatic integrating with others in the Ethereum ecosystem. For example, it’s possible to manage a 3Box Decentralized Identity using a Fortmatic account. Can we expect closer integrations in the future with such important parts of the Web3 movement?

We’ve been actively working with the 3Box team on ways we could integrate. We want to do this right since we are targeting mainstream users who have much higher expectations for user experience and app performance. There are still many hurdles to overcome related to the performance of IPFS for the use cases we are looking into.

9) Any other exciting Fortmaic product updates we should be watching out for? What’s the best places to stay up-to-date? Where should we subscribe and who should we be following?

We’ve recently announced our enterprise plan which will include services to help dApps integrate with smart contract wallets, as well as a fully white-labeled SDK for customers to completely own their user onboarding and interaction experience. These dApps will no longer be relying on the Fortmatic UI while leveraging our key management architecture. Fortmatic is also coming to multiple blockchains and multiple platforms such as iOS, Android, and Unity!

The best place to stay up-to-date is to follow us on Twitter @fortmatic, our Medium blog, Telegram group, or sign up for our developer newsletter!

EthDenver Sneak Preview

The BuffiDAO. A Gamified Experience

Wondering how you’ll be able to earn influence, reputation points, create a custom Bufficorn avatar and more in the BuffiDAO? Our exclusive sneak peek offers a taste of the fun you’ll get to experience as an ETHDenver attendee next month.