In May our Co-Founder Chris Swenor had the privilege of being a judge during Boston Blockchain Week BUIDLBoston. This two-day hackathon was aimed to help “entrepreneurs, students and professionals from around Massachusetts connect, learn, and develop new ways to address problems that could transform the way in which we use blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT).”
There were so many breakthrough projects that really will impact the way the world does some everyday things in a more secure, decentralized way. There were 130 participants who spent 48 hours creating solutions via blockchain to solve real world problems from medication tracking services to solutions for empowering indigenous craft makers around the world. It was an energizing environment that gave proof blockchain solutions are more real than hypothetical; that those in the space were in fact creating better methods, than forcing them. The common theme of the hackathon was, “Wow, I can’t believe all the things the blockchain will make better…..oh shit, blockchain is hard.”
In the words of Chris after the weekend was over, “We need to make it easier. If a team of hackers spend all weekend hacking and can’t do more than send a payment, that’s a problem.” While a colossal thumbs up to our mission in creating an operating system for the blockchain, it reminded us, also, of where we started and the exact reason we are developing the platform we are today.
In 2018, our company started out like many blockchain solutions projects, a way to make payments fast and secure. Before there was LegiLogic, before there was Alacris and our operating system, we were LegiCash. More specifically LegiCash FaCTS (Fast Cryptocurrency Transactions, Securely): Our solution, which was set to use repudiable facilitators to bring about the speed of central managers, i.e. central banks, without sacrificing trustlessness. The key to our solution was the understanding of the Consensus as a court whose focus is settling disputes, not clearing everyday transactions.
Check out our alphanet version of Legicash on GitHub: https://github.com/AlacrisIO/legicash-facts
We were out to solve what has since become known as the “Blockchain Trilemma,” coined by Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, which means “address(ing) the problem of how to develop a blockchain technology that offers scalability, decentralization and security, without compromising either one.” We were primed, white paper “in hand,” to be the feature blockchain-agnostic, non-custodial, atomic settlement, payment channel solution. But then something happened…we realized in speaking with countless developers and from well publicized stories of bugs and errors that blockchain is hard, really hard for those that do not have specialized skills and can equate to steep learning curves that require much time invested to learn. In fact, since then, that is something we have said time and time again. Our chief architect has even written a series of articles titled “Why developing on blockchain is hard” (links below). In essence, it does not matter how technically elegant your solution is, the complexity of blockchain development is a considerable challenge to overcome.
What we also realized was the perception of “hype” and grandiose embellishment by projects of blockchain is not from the lack of interest by those that could benefit, but because in reality, no one is using blockchain. This is because there are only a few Distributed Applications, or DApps, in development today. According to App Developer Magazine, 2019, “The DApp industry is still very small when we look at two key figures from our 2018 Dapp Market Report — 1,423 active DApps and 3% usage (1,799,918 dapp users from 54,814,617 accounts) on Ethereum, EOS, Steem, and Tron blockchain. We could easily compare with the number of more than 65,000 apps launched in Apple App Store in its first year.” There are about 2.1 million different downloadable apps, currently.
It looks like developers agree, as they did this past week. Creating killer, usable apps on blockchain IS hard. So in essence, Vitalik’s problems with blockchain has become a “quadrilemma” adding abstraction, usability, adoption.. However you want to shape it, basically making blockchain easier to develop on.
So, we refined our mission. We decided we really wanted to make blockchain work, give it a fair shake at making the impact we all know it will. The solution is an operating system and formalize not just smart contracts, but the entire DApp! In its entirety, Alacris Operating System will provide end-to-end DApp development, which will go from Alacrity, our Domain Specific Language (DSL), to outputting a decentralized application with automatic formal verification of code for any protocol or platform. Included will be easy-to-use primitives as modular, flexible starting blocks that any developer will be able to apply.
We are working to abstract away all the technical challenges so our users do not have to deal with them, so they cannot get them wrong, we are working on getting them right. We want developers, all developers to be able to concentrate on what will make their application great, not on how to make it fit on blockchain. As an open-source system, we want to build Alacrity through community collaboration and we want people to add to it through projects. We need base layer partners, we need layer 2 partners, with all of that, together we will be able to do so much more than what is “hyped” so far.