Abridged 2020
To our supportive community, here’s a little summary of where we came from, what we’re building, why we’re building it, and the road ahead for this 2020.
TLDR: In the first 9 months of founding Abridged, we developed an epic toolkit, launched with 9 different applications, and engaged heavy with DAOs. Our energy remains focused on user onboarding. Taking in learnings from the past 9 months, our bet lies on rapid iteration via no-code and distribution via existing social networks.
(pst. check our new website!)
In April 2019, Eric Chung gave me a call describing a product James Young and Stanislaw Glogowski were building.
The MVP version of the Abridged SDK, codenamed “Archanova”, demonstrated:
- the first counterfactually instantiated account contracts
- multiple device key generation for ease of recovery + Universal Login style access
- a second-layer solution to make multiplayer games like tic-tac-toe playable with zero latency
I had just spent 10 days in silence at a Vipassana retreat, and came back down to planet Earth to find the most impressive product I’ve seen after a year of managing the grants program during my time at the Ethereum Foundation.
The MVP blew my mind, literally.
I asked how I could help. Soon after we formed Abridged.
The initial goal
Create the best framework for rapid blockchain application development.
Our hypothesis:
If we built an app development framework providing Web 3 integrations with just a few lines of code, it will spur on an explosion of Ethereum applications.
Essentially, our platform could help people move from No-Coiner to OG faster and easier than anything else out there.
The real need
While understanding the critical principle of decentralization, we also appreciated the need for fluid product experience via Incremental Decentralization.
How to optimize
To optimize for this, we blended the most functional, hybrid solutions of web3 technologies with existing applications and networks.“Abridged allows us to focus on what we’re really good at it, which is UX. And giving people what they want. And not having to deal with that complicated blockchain nonsense.” — Tom Nash
“Abridged allows us to focus on what we’re really good at it, which is UX. And giving people what they want. And not having to deal with that complicated blockchain nonsense.” — Tom Nash
Our first three months
We thought we had built the best SDK that the Web 3 community has seen yet. We put our heads down and worked hard to get as many demos and product integrations as possible. During this time Abridged contributed greatly to the MetaCartel as well, holding many conversations ideating about the potential for DAOs built for products and communities. James Young led the technical launch of the community later that month. We began building with Odyssy, who created a more robust Moloch DAO interface.We also focused on understanding the legal restrictions necessary to keep compliant with the SEC. All of this work added to our knowledge base to challenge the original hypothesis.
The feature set
Web2-like Onboarding
SDK Playground
AWS Example
Off-chain Transactions
Virtual Payments
Partial payments
Batch Transaction (V2 Sneak Peak)
In July and August 9 different applications integrated the Abridged SDK.
This nearly killed us managing so many projects across 7 different time zones, but it also provided valuable feedback from some of the best devs in the ecosystem. We began to realize the challenge ahead of us. Documentation, tutorials, and educational material require significant time, effort, and patience BUT even harder than those things was distribution and getting end users to interact with Abridged.
We fell victim to the idea, “if you build it, they will come”.
The V2
Armed with all the learnings from our previous mistakes, development on the next iteration of the Abridged framework began in September. We simplified the way our account contracts are counterfactually instantiated so it went from taking 3 transactions down to just 1.
Stanislaw Glogowski, invented a radical way to easily manage an infinite number of unique counterfactual addresses by mapping a device key to the associated account contracts.
This shift in contract architecture makes our account contracts even more robust and cheaper to deploy and manage. We anticipate new dev partners to find it extremely accessible to use Abridged.
No Code
Even better than our V2 updates — we’re the most excited about this! — is the no-code visual interface we’ve built to interact with Abridged SDK & contract functions. We’ll be releasing more information about this in the coming week — below is a sneak preview of what you can do with it.
Right on time to ring in the new year!
From tooling to distribution
After this journey of empowering others to create epic applications, we’ve decided to build some ourselves.
We knew the tools within the Abridged toolkit offered the most flexible available architecture for dapp development. We’ve built it over and over again with tens of product integrations and two versions of the SDK. The focus of our application development aims to target existing distribution channels, allowing people to use crypto inside of Web2 networks (think Facebook messenger, Telegram, and Whatsapp).
Our flagship initiative, DAOops, focuses on making DAO functionality accessible via existing distribution channels. We’re currently building an MVP that allows for Moloch contract function access in Telegram, and will soon have Aragon and DAOStack integrated as well.
We see DAO organizations as the human coordination layer for web3. Our focus lies in building for humans in order to unlock evolutionary pathways for new forms of global coordination. These technologies and potentials mean very little in a silo without users.
We believe these systems will quickly become the most efficient international organizations in the world and envision a future built by product DAO’s that are both coordinating and incentivizing project development via cryptonative organizations.
The Future
While DAOops is the lead product, we envision a truly UniversalLogin-style future network of crypto apps (DeFi, DAOs, and Games). This will allow for quick and immediate onboarding via text links that offer the user a familiar interface to interact with (messenger, whatsapp, telegram, discord, slack…). As opposed to the popular strategy of building out hundreds of siloed dapps, we’re creating an ecosystem intermingling with existing infrastructure.
We want to build a robust network that feels extremely lightweight. No downloading required.
Please reach out if you’d like to get involved. We’re open to feedback and are excited to collaborate with like minded people!
Want more?
We want to talk to anyone and everyone who is interested in what we’re building and wants to collab on ideas. Please reach out & engage with us!
Gitcoin grant: https://gitcoin.co/grants/274/abridged-2
Abridged website: https://www.abridged.io
Abridged Twitter: https://twitter.com/abridged_io
Abridged Telegram community: https://t.me/joinchat/GzdYLUQYAN5ALnGTXmqUcg
Abridged Substack: https://abridged.substack.com
