The Distributed Download
In this edition of the Distributed Download, we recap everything that happened throughout the 3Box community from June 8 to July 18, 2019. It’s been a very exciting month!
We’re still hiring!
At 3Box, we take pride in our culture and teamwork is extremely important to us. We’re looking to immediately bring on two new hires: an experienced JavaScript Distributed Systems Engineer, and an Open-Source Developer Relations Lead. If either of these roles sound like the ideal career opportunity to you or someone you know, we invite you to apply here.
Contents
3Box.js 1.9: Threads: A Chat System for Dapps3Box.js 1.10: Improved Account Functions3Box Hub: Personalized Profile Link Previews- Announcing our Seed Round
- 3 Questions for Calibra
- July Community Call
- Product Hunt Launch
- Berlin Blockchain Week Prep
- Coming Soon
Threads: A Chat System for Decentralized Apps
In mid-June we released 3Box.js 1.9, which implemented a new version of our threads messaging system, now with support for moderation and members-only threads.
If you’re building a distributed application — whether a DAO, DeFi platform, marketplace, game, social app, or anything else — you likely need some decentralized way for users to message, communicate, or interact with each other. 3Box Threads are the easiest way to add decentralized chat functionality to your Ethereum dapp. 💬 You can read more about Threads v2, here.
3Box.js 1.10: Improved Account Functions
On July 17 we released 3Box.js 1.10, which contains fairly significant upgrades to how user identities and accounts are managed on the 3Box network. Beyond improving how users’ Ethereum addresses are mapped to their 3Box account internally, we now also support linking multiple Ethereum addresses to a single 3Box account. This feature is especially useful in supporting contract wallets which may have many Ethereum keys for a single wallet account. 🆔 You can read more about the release here.
npm i 3box3Box Hub: Personalized Profile Link Previews
Earlier this week, we quietly released a new version of 3Box Hub that improves the way profile link previews are displayed. Before the update when a user shared their profile URL, the image displayed would be a screenshot of the 3Box.io landing page with generic metadata. Now when a user shares their profile URL, their personal image, name, and shortened address are displayed. We will be announcing this feature more publicly when we launch Ethereum Followers. More on that in the Coming Soon section at the bottom of this post. ✨ You can explore the profile of Danny here, and see his personalized link preview below.
Announcing our Seed Round
On June 26, we announced that we closed a $2.5M seed financing round led by Placeholder Ventures to reinvent user data storage. Venrock, Northzone, and CoinFund also participated in the round. As a result, Brad Burnham of Placeholder (formerly of USV) will be joining the 3Box Board of Directors. We couldn’t be more excited to welcome our new partners to the 3Box family. 🎉You can read more about our official announcement, here:
Placeholder Ventures: 3Box investment thesis from Brad Burnham
CoinFund: 3Box Investment Thesis
CoinDesk: ConsenSys Spin-Out 3Box Raises $2.5 to Build ID Tools for Dapp Devs
TechCrunch: Web3 platform 3Box raises seed to bring back control of user data
3 Questions for Calibra
By now you may have seen the US Congressional hearings that questioned David Marcus and Facebook about their intentions. A few weeks back we dissected the relationship between Libra and Calibra and asked, “Does Facebook have ambitions of continuing to own the user and their identity or will they embrace an open, self-sovereign model enabled by crypto technology?” 🤔 Read the blog post here.
July Community Call
On Tuesday July 9, we hosted another 3Box Community Call on Zoom. We had a great time catching up with everyone that was able to attend. During the call, we shared our progress and answered questions from the community. We also saw an amazing demo of how teams are integrating 3Box into Aragon Profiles, FOAM Tools, and the Portis interface.
We’re sorry if you couldn’t make it, but here’s a link to the recording. See you at the next call in August!
Product Hunt Launch
On July 1, a member of the Product Hunt community hunted and posted 3Box on the product curation site. While we weren’t anticipating the launch announcement (see outdated UI video he posted below), we made the best of the post and still made it to the top few products of the day. You can see our Product Hunt profile here.
Berlin Blockchain Week Prep
In just another month, we’ll be in Berlin for Blockchain Week. We’re planning to attend Web3 Summit, MetaCartel Demo Day, DappCon, and ETH Berlin.
- We’re sponsoring
ETH Berlin, where we will have a sponsor booth and will be offering a various bounties to hackers - We’re hosting a workshop at
DappCon, where we will help developers build a topic-based, community discussion app using 3Box.js Threads - We’re speaking at
MetaCartel Demo Dayon how we provide bottoms-up identity systems for consumer dapps - We’re hosting a
meetupin Berlin that will include a panel discussion on all the ways that web3 applications are better than their web2 counterparts - Following Berlin Blockchain Week, the 3Box team is headed to Warsaw for a
team retreatfor a few days
More details to come and see you there! 👋
Coming Soon
Web3Connect in 3Box Hub
We’ve updated the way users log in to the 3Box Hub by adding support for the Web3Connect provider, which required that we completely overhaul how we handled the web3 object inside our dapp. With Web3Connect, users will soon be able to access 3Box through their MetaMask, Dapper, Portis, Fortmatic, and WalletConnect wallets.
Ethereum Followers
3Box profiles will soon be able to publicly follow other profiles. Other applications will be able to use this list to provide 3Box users with social reputation and trust signals, as well as other things like relevant product recommendations. We built this feature with Personal Threads, a new version of threads enabled by the latest 3Box.js 1.9 messaging release.
Identity Wallet SDK
3Box identity-wallet-js is a JavaScript SDK that allows Ethereum JavaScript wallet developers to natively support 3Box identity and authentication functionalities, including: creating 3Box accounts, adding authentication methods (Ethereum keys), and requesting authentication for 3Box accounts as well as spaces. Identity Wallet will be used by 3Box.js for identity and keyring functionality.
Integrations with Giveth, Portis, MetaMask, Livepeer
We’re expecting a few big integrations to go live any day now, including with Giveth, Portis, MetaMask, and Livepeer. You can read more on the Livepeer integration in the latest Livepeer development update, found here.
