A Sneak Peek Under the Hood
EthSign 3.0 officially launched in June 2021. Over the course of 8 months we have gathered more than 12k signatures all made possible by you, our incredible community. We thank you for your continued support and would like to give you a sneak peek of what’s under the hood.
Renewed, Rebuilt
When EthSign 3.0 was initially conceived, our team only consisted of 5 members. We were still new to building a product from scratch and trying to find our product market fit. Although 3.0 is a usable product with over 10k signatures, it’s more of an experiment for us to find what works and what doesn’t. We have dabbled with different sorts of functionalities and continuously added new features as development went on. We will be the first ones to admit that EthSign 3.0 isn’t the most mature, nor the best designed, nor the most technically optimized product out there. However, in the process of developing and fixing 3.0, we gained invaluable insights that enabled us to narrow our product scope and work more efficiently.
As a result of lessons learned building and maintaining 3.0, the next version of EthSign is razor-sharp:
- Design-wise, we have identified various pain-points and extraneous features through our continued user interviews and UX research. The next evolution of EthSign comes with a redesigned user interface and a streamlined features list, making it simultaneously the most intuitive and powerful EthSign yet.
- EthSign 3.0’s tech stack is constrained by echoes of the past — namely EthSign 1.0 and 2.0. Because we kept building on top of legacy code, everything has gotten difficult to manage and maintain. This time, we are wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch. The smart contract rewrite is massively simplified and optimized, reducing gas used by 10x. Our frontend is now rebuilt from the ground up in TypeScript React keeping reusability, composability, and testing in mind from the beginning. Features are locked before development to ensure a coherent codebase. All of the above condenses into a faster development cycle and fewer bugs.
TLDR: The next version of EthSign is cleaner, faster, and more intuitive than ever.
Product Stability
While developing EthSign 3.0, we strived for maximum decentralization because we believed in the spirit of Web 3, which translated into a massively decentralized tech stack. However, this also meant our product became technically over-fragmented and any hiccups from any of our providers translated into a big impact on our end. To put bluntly, we decentralized too much. We have had numerous instances of our product partially ceasing to function or becoming inaccessible due to our providers having service interruptions yet unable to do anything about it because the infrastructure is largely out of our hands. While our efforts were idealistic, we must now act more realistically to guarantee the stability and usability of EthSign.
In the next version of EthSign, we will be taking back control of parts of our tech stack. For example, currently EthSign is statically hosted on IPFS. While this sounds quite good on paper, many of our users outside of North America have had issues maintaining a reliable connection with the site. Thus, in our next version, we will be looking into other alternative hosting and CDN solutions to improve accessibility. More changes to ensure product stability are coming to the new version but worry not, we are still very much decentralized in spirit.
The Game Has Changed
Through EthSign 3.0, we have gained a great deal of ordinary as well as institutional and DAO users. Leveraging EthSign’s core e-signing capabilities, we plan to roll out a suite of secondary products that accomplish previously off-chain tasks on the blockchain. The game has changed — a new era of on-chain smart agreements is upon us, powered by EthSign.
