Traverse the Paraverse with Talisman
“You’ve always known in your heart that people should determine their own future and that freedom should be within the grasp of those who reach out for it.”
The voice speaks with an assumed familiarity, as if it were an old friend.
“Remember to help those whose freedom is out of reach: none are totally hopeless, so show them how to take back the keys.”
You try to orient yourself, but find yourself grasping with nothing, into nothing.
“No one can defeat chaos alone, and those who seek the absolute power to do so do not understand the turning of the world.”
Huh?
“Trust in the permissionless and the composable: we are always better together, but we must retain our right to choose.”
Why is this happening? Why now?
“Listen carefully. Before you set out in search of the Talisman, there are many things you need to know but so little time to learn them. What I fear the most is that you may not recognise it when you see it.”
A wallet for Polkadot, Kusama, and the Parachains
That’s what we believe it is, a wallet for DotSama. A tool that enables anybody to find their way through the Paraverse and to transact with absolute freedom. We can imagine the shape and form of such a thing, we can feel its weight and texture as we turn it over in our hands again and again. But we do not truly know what it looks like. How could we?
Look, if you listen and save your questions to the end, I’ll tell you the whole story. I’ll tell you why we have begun our search, why now, and how we’re planning to find it. If I’m honest, we are going to need all the help that we can get from the curious, the courageous, and the clever ones like yourself. Especially from the wise ones, those who know how to listen to the subtle turning of the world. It’s going to take all of us to truly unite the Parachains. Let’s start from the beginning.
We believe that individuals should be able to determine their own future. This means having the agency to decide where they go, how they spend their time, and who to collaborate with. In our hyper-connected society, it’s easy to see that not many people operate with this freedom, most of us have rules that are imposed upon us by institutions that are restrictive, outdated or less than trustworthy. We, like most who have fallen down the web3 rabbit-hole, believe that wonderland lies ahead. We envision that the combination of web3 tech and ubiquitous access to computers can level the playing field, force outdated institutions to compete, and enable people everywhere to exercise their freedom.
We’ve been working in web3 for some years already. Collectively, we have supported a handful of projects run by our friends to build tech, hire like-minded adventurers, raise money and set sail. In doing so, we have witnessed first-hand the power that decentralised networks and token incentives have to influence people and how they organise. We fundamentally believe that open blockchain networks enable the democratisation of monetary policy and will disrupt the state’s control over the money supply.
Given the seriousness of the situation, we feel the need to be on the tools, building stuff. We could easily sit on the sidelines, JPEG hunting all day, accruing a diverse portfolio of internet-monies, and proclaiming our cleverness to our peers. But there is a great deal of work to do in the name of progress and staving off chaos. Ultimately, in the pursuit of a world of equal opportunities and self-determination, we have decided to focus our attention and energy on the DotSama ecosystem and contribute in ways that leverage our natural strengths.
- We want to make it easier for web application developers to leverage Polkadot and its Parachains to improve composability.
- We want to create the best multi-chain transaction experience possible with XCMP to accelerate adoption.
- We want to build a community full of rich stories that help people understand web3 concepts and take full custody of their assets.
Why DotSama?
We have been building on Ethereum for a while and must say, it’s pretty radical. It’s like a persistent, decentralised punchcard computer powered by unicorns and frogs that anybody can use without permission. Builders on Ethereum have created products that are already 10x better than their web2 equivalents; and there’s no sign that innovation will slow down. That said, the world needs new internet-native institutions that can scale to support billions of humans and replace our crumbling brick and mortar ones. While Ethereum will no doubt be a hotbed of creation where ideas take shape and battle it out for years to come, founders who want to create something generational are already looking to the horizon for technologies that offer scalability, upgradability and granular control. Polkadot and Substrate look well-placed to deliver those things.
There’s not enough blockspace to go around and thus the future is multi-chain. New chains are successfully attracting liquidity, users and applications. But as a result, we are seeing some hairy user-experience problems emerge and our cultural stories are getting muddled. The failure of our narratives is easiest to see among EVM side-chains where projects which have correctly incentivised the twitter base are regarded as viable scaling solutions, but others are marked as hideouts for scammers and bad frogs. In the pursuit of “pumping our bags” we are leading new web3 initiates who are merely seeking a hedge against the traditional system into shark-infested waters.
Wallets are changing to fit the multi-chain world but it’s not easy. Most wallets that identify as multi-chain are mostly static: they only enable users to leverage assets via bespoke integrations and provide no choice as to which underlying protocol is used. Wallets that do provide generalised application support are limited to blockchains with homogenous architectures and have typically been designed with a single-chain context in mind. This forces users to grapple with a fragmented view of their balances, accounts and networks.
We know we can do better, and Polkadot can help because it offers shared security and cross-chain messaging to heterogenous chains. A cohesive user experience can emerge from each parachain’s collective desire to be composable, just like it did between protocols on Ethereum. This user experience will reminiscent of the single-chain Ethereum user experience we all know and love is possible, except implicitly multi-chain, with unparalleled scalability and fewer security trade-offs.
The first leg of the journey
Over the next 18 months DotSama will awaken. Parachains will connect to the Polkadot Relay Chain, teams will start bootstrapping liquidity, and the ecosystem at large will compete for protocol developers to build in different regions of the Paraverse. This is why we’ve decided now is the right time to seek out the Talisman and build our first products. We’re starting with a community-owned wallet for DotSama and the Parachains that can help accelerate composability and adoption.
The word wallet has come to mean many things, including software on your mobile, desktop or even a simple keypair you have saved in your notes app. This wallet will be a web browser extension combined with an asset dashboard to provide separate transaction and asset management experiences. In the same way your internet banking and Apple Pay are different fit-for-purpose products, we are building a simple but abstract transaction-signing device for your browser and a companion app that allows you to see your assets in context.
An extension will benefit the DotSama ecosystem by:
- Providing an improved transaction experience for end users who are currently using Polkadot-JS.
- Providing an API for dapp developers that offers them consolidated chain-state with the ability to interact with multiple Parachains and build composible dapps.
- Allowing us all to explore cross-chain user experience based on XCMP.
The best thing for a wallet extension is to remain sufficiently abstract, it should enable users to perform any transaction possible with maximum comprehension and, as such, it doesn’t really for any one use case. However most blockspace is currently dedicated to only a few use cases. As a result, products like asset dashboards have popped up to support users in their DeFi adventures where wallets are not enough. To enable users to better understand emerging DotSama use cases we’re building a companion application for our extension which will:
- Enable users to understand their assets in context, transaction history, liquidity they’re providing, etc.
- Battletest the API that our extension provides and put ourselves in the shoes of DotSama application developers.
- Participate in emerging DotSama DeFi activities like:
- Parachain crowdloans.
- Bonding assets and nominating validators for staking.
- Swapping assets on on DEXs like Acala.
- Much more…
Mastering web3 and the Paraverse
A world where we can all determine our future needs to address our natural differences in ability. It is especially important that we build tools for interacting with decentralised networks that enhance our competence, not just abstract away complexity. Additionally, having cast aside the advertising model we needn’t keep building software that paralyses users with stimuli and turns them into hungry ghosts. We are capable of building and funding technologies which are assistive, and enable every day people to expand their mastery.
The application layer in DotSama is in its infancy and it is currently much harder than it needs to be to build and participate. We are still missing fit-for-purpose tools that allow web application developers to get a consolidated understanding of what’s happening on the Parachains. And while Polkadot-JS is an amazing dev tool, it doesn’t provide a transaction experience that is suitable for individuals and new internet-native institutions to freely traverse the Paraverse. We believe it’s possible to create software which teaches users to master web3 concepts and intuitively guides them on their journey to unknown lands. That is the Talisman we seek.
Looking for more, Talisman adventure
At scale, wallets get to play kingmaker: they alone can choose how assets are aggregated when users perform basic actions like swapping tokens from the wallet interface. Long term, protocols need manage the risk that popular wallets may aggregate user assets elsewhere and attempt to play a zero-sum game, in such a case, protocols may consider partnering with, building or acquiring their own wallet provider in self-defence.
This is on reason why we’ve decided that Talisman will be a community-owned wallet: our goal is for the DotSama ecosystem at large to be able to influence, contribute to, and eventually, govern the project.
The implementation detail of this community-ownership is still in its infancy, just like our product development, but that means you can help us define it. We invite you to join the conversation in our Discord server and:
- Discuss emerging Polkadot projects that you’re excited to see.
- Tell us how you’re using your existing wallets and participating in DotSama
- Tell us what features you would like to see in Talisman.
- Give us feedback on our product designs and technical architecture.
- Test out the brand new developer libraries we’re creating.
- Post your favourite JPEGs.
The stories that we create as a community are of the utmost importance: they are mnemonic devices that contain knowledge for those who follow us. We should always write them carefully. We want to build a community that leads people toward truth and enables them to master web3 concepts. With this in mind, we’ve defined four values for the Talisman Community to ensure that we maintain a healthy immune system as we grow:
Wisdom — To act without bias and understand the long term consequences of our actions.
Courage — To willingly confront pain, danger, uncertainty, and intimidation.
Encouragement — To give people support, confidence, and hope.
Curiosity — To desire and strive for knowledge.
So there you have it, a world where anybody we can freely traverse the Paraverse is our reason for seeking the Talisman. DotSama is awakening soon and we are left with little time to find it.
Will you help us?
~ Agyle
