Alchemy Earth: Fall Updates!
Q3-Q4 2019 roadmap for DAOstack’s first DAO interface
⚗️Alchemy, DAOstack’s user interface for organizations, has been seeing a lot of activity lately. As you might imagine, the community has been giving us feedback, and we’ve been listening. This post runs down the roadmap of features and improvements we have planned for Alchemy in the second half of 2019.
We’ve got two main areas of focus in this dev cycle: features and stability. New features will include integrating WalletConnect, clearer language, chat capability inside the app, and a personal feed to help users manage activity in multiple DAOs at once. Stability improvements are coming in the form of speed upgrades, stress testing and monitoring, and, as usual, exterminating some bugs.
Upcoming Features
👜 WalletConnect Integration
“WalletConnect is an open protocol for connecting desktop Dapps to mobile Wallets using end-to-end encryption by scanning a QR code[, o]pening up a whole world of Dapps that were once only available [only] to Metamask. The user can interact with any Dapp without comprising their private keys and will be notified to sign any transaction requests on their mobile.”
We believe in the adoption of this kind of open standard for the ecosystem, and integrating WalletConnect into Alchemy will improve the experience for both users and developers.
Checkout WalletConnect’s video demo.
🔤 Language Overhaul
“Clarify the terms and labels we apply to DAOs inside Alchemy from top to bottom”
“Move fast and break things” has been an unofficial motto of software development for at least the past decade, and in the development sprint to get where we are today, we’ve realized that some of the language inside Alchemy is less than ideal. Over the next few months, we’ll be working to clarify the terms and labels we apply to DAOs inside Alchemy from top to bottom: not everything will change, but by December we should have a much clearer, more friendly application.
🚧 DAO Wall: In-App User Chat
“An in-app chat system for Alchemy users”
At this point, it’s indisputable that functional DAO communities talk to each other. These organizations need ways of communicating that go beyond normal Ethereum network transactions, and thus far that has meant leaving Alchemy to congregate somewhere else on the internet. DAO newbies often have trouble tracing these connections and finding where the real conversations about any given DAO are happening.
So, we’ll be building an in-app chat system for Alchemy users, in order to make the kinds of conversations DAO members are already having easier and to make these conversations more accessible to new users. A simple version of this feature using Disqus is now live.
🥡 Personal Feed
“A page where users can find all their DAO information in one place”
Since the beginnings of DAOstack, we’ve imagined the DAO ecosystem as a sprawling, interconnected, collaborative network. So as the first dozen DAOs have started to take off, we’ve been happy to see many people participating in multiple DAOs, as members, proposers, stakers or any combination of the three. With this broad, ecosystemic participation comes new user needs. Alchemy must make it easier for individual users to keep track of relevant activity, wherever it’s happening in the ecosystem.
To help, we’ll be working on a personal feed for Alchemy: a page users can go to find all their proposal, voting, staking, and chat information, from all their DAOs, in one place. This should significantly speed up the process of participating in multiple DAOs or in a single, highly active DAO.
🏹 Proposal Bounties
“DAO proposals that create bounties on Bounties Network”
Question: What happens when members of a DAO want to start a project, but no one is making a proposal for it? Answer: the DAO posts a bounty for the project! Or more accurately, that’s what the DAO will do once we’ve implemented our new scheme for proposal bounties. This scheme is currently being built and will facilitate user experiences like this:
- A DAO member would like to see the DAO start a great new marketing project, so they submit a new bounty proposal for a marketing project.
- Other DAO members agree, and so the DAO passes and executes the proposal.
- The DAO now automatically posts a bounty on the Bounties Network for someone to submit a proposal to do a “great marketing project” to the DAO.
DAO-submitted bounties will empower DAOs to control and plan their future actions in more detail, and we’re excited to see the feature in action soon.
Upcoming Stability Improvements
🚅 Performance
“Faster Load Times, Stress Testing, and Monitoring”
Alchemy Earth’s release provided major performance upgrades, but we want to improve performance further. That means speeding up initial and between-page load times, as well as stress testing Alchemy up to 1000 concurrent users and implementing some monitoring systems on our end, so we have a better idea if and when any of Alchemy’s capabilities are interrupted.
🐛 Bug Fixes
Bug reports are a natural part of app adoption, and we’ve received our fair share. While not all bugs will be top priorities, we’ll be working through the bugs submitted in Github issues, customer support tickets, and other avenues as part of the Q3-Q4 roadmap.
🤝 Get Involved
Excited about these upcoming changes? Stay up to date by connecting with us:
🔀 Follow DAOstack on Medium, Twitter, or any of the other channels you’ll find on our website.
👑 Interested in joining the Genesis DAO? Start here.
⚗️ Experience Alchemy, DAOstack’s first application, currently live and in use on the Ethereum mainnet.
✈️ Part of an organization interested in creating a pilot DAO or building on DAOstack? Connect with us here.
⌨️ Developer? Check out the DAOstack Github, or jump into the stack with our friendly Hacker’s Kit.
