The Distributed Download – Build Party
3Box Community Update v13: March 26–April 11
It’s been two and a half weeks since we published our last community update, Distributed Download v12. Since then, the core 3Box team has been heads-down executing on lots of important engineering and building efforts. We have many exciting new features in the near-term pipeline and will begin shipping them as early as next Monday. This post includes a preview of the things we’ve been building, and what you can expect from us in the coming weeks.
If you’re new to the community, 3Box provides easy APIs (profiles, messaging, storage) that make it simple to add more social, interactive features to your distributed app.
Open for integrations!
Interested in adding decentralized profiles, comments, or storage to your app, game, wallet, browser, or protocol? Visit our Github and get in touch by joining our community discord.
Focus on community partnerships and integrations
We’ve been working with many community projects to add decentralized profiles, comments, and storage to their products. We previously wrote about recent 3Box integrations into the FOAM leaderboard and ConsenSys MeshHub, but that’s not all! We’re holding back on sharing too much publicly until these projects go live (don’t want to spoil their surprise!), but here are a few of the things we’re seeing devs build with the 3Box APIs:
- Profiles API: Universal address book shared between devices, browsers, wallets, and apps. Contact list is saved in a user’s public profile.
- Spaces API: Private application data and wallet settings, backup, and multi-device sync stored in app-specific spaces.
- Threads API: Comments (with social profiles) on DAOs, prediction markets, and other defi platforms; Comments and reviews for games.
Try 3Box-powered comments on Socialite
Kames, one of our most active community members and the guy behind MeshHub DAO, has quickly put together a Socialite, a demo application for 3Box comment threads. We released the first version of our Threads API last sprint and have already received an overwhelming amount of interest from projects looking to integrate everything from comment capabilities, to group chats, and DMs.
Give Socialite a try here: https://kamescg.github.io/socialite-lite/#/
Our network architecture is getting an upgrade
We’re working on upgrading the internal 3Box architecture to be more stable and scalable. We’re refactoring much of the system to support multiple read nodes, and making the underlying network capable of scaling up if needed. Developers and users won’t notice a change here, this is all internal optimization. We are currently testing the new infrastructure, and aim to have a public release within the next week.
Users can soon manage all data stored in 3Box
As the number of projects saving data to users’ 3Boxes increased through integrations, it became increasingly evident that our users needed a logical, intuitive interface to manage the data saved in their personal 3Box cloud. With this realization, we have been working on adding new functionality to the 3Box App that allows users to view all of their data saved by every app in one place, where they can control it. Not only does this view enable users to rationalize a more complete image of their identity online, but it also allows them to delete data from their profile when they want it wiped from the web. We’re excited to share what we’ve been developing with you — here’s a sneak peek! We hope to release this to the public next week.
We’re refreshing design and copy on 3box.io
Back in August of 2018 when we first started working on 3Box we needed a webpage for our project, so we quickly threw up the current version of 3Box.io. We didn’t have much time to dedicate to a fancy marketing site, and we were laser-focused on building the core product. Over time though, our landing page began causing more work for us. Since it doesn’t fully reflect our focus (dev tools) nor does it convey everything we are currently doing, recently we’ve been spending too much time educating developers on what 3Box is. This is going to change soon, and you can expect a website much more dedicated to helping developers use 3Box!
About 3Box
3Box provides a suite of developer APIs that make it easy to build better dapps with distributed user data storage. Our APIs allow devs to build more fun, engaging, and social web3 applications. Give decentralized user profiles, storage, and commenting a try!
