A centralized future built by a decentralized community
One of the cornerstones of blockchain technology is decentralization. But if we were to design a system where the technology is 100% decentralized, it would likely be so hard to use that no one would adopt it. All of the things we take for granted that make it easier to interact with the blockchain are actually centralized solutions that help abstract complexities away from the user Exchanges like Coinbase enable users to easily purchase crypto (previously you had to mine your own or buy directly from someone). MetaMask and other wallets make it easier to transact with smart contracts, application front-ends display blockchain state in a user-friendly way, etc. Even the official Consensys documentation implores developers to only use the blockchain for parts of the system that need to be decentralized.
As Taylor Monahan (formerly MyEtherWallet, now MyCrypto) suggests in her recent post entitled, “The Decentralized Future is People”, rather than thinking of decentralization as a tech problem, think of it as a people problem. If a centralized technology solution from the end user’s perspective is built and managed by the community, is it still centralized? Her recent blog post also includes a great graphic serving as a reminder that even though blockchain technology has been around for several years, we’re still in the early adopters phase of the bell curve.
Building upon Taylor’s thinking, I believe that the key to moving up towards the majority phases in the bell curve is to focus our efforts as a decentralized community on providing centralized technology solutions built with the end user in mind.
Centralization in practice
CryptoKitties is arguably the most successful dapp to date. They have over a million users, some of their digital collectables have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they recently raised $12m from Andreessen Horowitz, one of the best known VC firms out there. Yet, despite an enormous amount of positive media coverage, the CryptoKitties launch drew a lot of criticism from members of the blockchain community citing that their platform wasn’t truly a decentralized system. The CryptoKitties team responded with a blog post that explained which parts of the system are centralized (the front-end), which parts of the system are in fact decentralized (ownership of the kitties), and the reasoning behind their design choices.
But even after having centralized a large portion of their system, for those new to cryptocurrency, it’s still incredibly challenging to buy your first digital kitty. Here’s an overview of the steps you have to go through:
- The first thing you need is a secure wallet to store some currency (and later) your digital kitty. We can cheat a bit here because we know CryptoKitties requires MetaMask to use, so let’s assume you install the MetaMask plugin which creates a private key for you in a sandboxed environment. The creation of this private key already introduces a few things you have to keep track of: where their wallet is stored, the mnemonic used to create the wallet, and the passphrase used to unlock it. Losing any of these or storing the mnemonic unsafely is game over.
- Next, you need ether so you can actually play the game. MetaMask conveniently provides two options directly within their plugin to purchase ether. The first one is a Shapeshift.io integration which requires you to have another form of cryptocurrency to convert into ether which makes it unusable for our purposes. The second one is a Coinbase integration, which at first seems lightweight, but based on the country you’re in, you’ll quickly find there’s a ton of information that Coinbase needs from you in order to comply with Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) laws. After handing over copious amounts of information, time, and a little bit of money, at the end of the flow your MetaMask account should have a small amount of ether.
- Assuming you’ve stuck it out this far, you’re now ready to play CryptoKitties. You can login to their website, browse the marketplace, and submit a transaction via MetaMask to purchase a kitty. Most of the hard work is done at this point, but there are still a lot of nuances to watch out for. What if the gas limit you set on your transaction is too low and the transaction fails? What if the gas price is too low and your transaction is stuck in a pending state? What if you don’t even know what gas is? These are just some of the problems that are surfaced to the user that make the whole experience suboptimal.
When was the last time you signed up for a website that required you to install a browser plugin, safely store multiple passwords, hand over lots of information about yourself, and make a payment — all before registering? Not to mention that if you happen to make any mistakes along the way, there’s no customer support line to help you get out of trouble. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the chances are slim. And remember, this is the gold standard for decentralized applications.
Coinbase is another player in the blockchain space that gets a lot of criticism for being centralized. They go a step further down the centralization path than CryptoKitties by abstracting even more blockchain technology away from the user. Rather than require users to create and manage their own private keys, Coinbase creates and manages them for their users. There’s obviously a lot of risk with this approach that has burned exchanges in the past (search for Mt. Gox, Bitfinex hacks), but from a user experience perspective, it makes the software much easier to use and allows Coinbase to provide functionality that most consumers take for granted like account recovery and customer support.
How are we tackling these UX challenges at Codex Protocol?
At Codex Protocol, we face all of the same challenges associated with designing a product that is simultaneously user-friendly, but doesn’t depart from the core vision of a truly decentralized system. The fact remains that the art world needs a universal title registry to bring trust and efficiency to an opaque market. Although we believe that bringing provenance onto the blockchain is the ideal solution, success in any endeavor is dependent on providing value to the end user, and user experience is essential to this success.
Despite our best efforts, our first version may not be any better than the status quo of user experience. We’re still planning to use MetaMask for authentication and transaction signing, users will have to manage their own keys, and users will still have to use a separate service to purchase ether. But we are constantly thinking about where we can improve.
Looking further ahead, we have plans to centralize as much of the infrastructure as possible to lower the barriers of entry to using our service, all while open-sourcing the technology that our platform runs on to decentralize its innovation. We want to enable the use of our technology to all users, whether or they are technically savvy or not. The bar for using an application shouldn’t be buying ether or knowing what MetaMask is and how it operates. We want artists and auction houses alike using our platform and creating a richer art ecosystem through the proliferation of Codex Titles. And through the use of our community fund, we will encourage developers to build on top of our platform and drive the future of blockchain technology in the arts & collectables industry.
Imagine a central location built by a community of art and technology enthusiasts where intermediaries like auction houses and galleries can go to manage their inventory of Codex Titles, artists can go to track how their artwork has moved from owner to owner, and collectors can login and get instant valuations of their entire catalog. The use cases are endless. We’re in active talks with many players in the space to collaborate with us on this vision of a centralized technology solution, where title ownership is decentralized and the software is built and owned by a decentralized community. We invite you to join us and help build the future.
