GECO Community Spotlight:
Giving you the inside scoop on the minds behind the Tasit SDK
Last week, GECO kicked off its first live pitch event! We heard from a lot of talented teams and look forward to working closely with them to expand and shape the Gnosis ecosystem. Look out for a post announcing GECO Round 2 winners soon!
In order to spotlight all of the incredible GECO funded teams, we decided to launch a community blog series — a monthly update that will give our readers the inside scoop on the teams behind GECO, what they are building, and most importantly how their project will impact the space!
This month, we’ll meet the team behind the Tasit SDK — a JavaScript SDK for making standalone native mobile Ethereum dapps using React Native. It integrates seamlessly with the Gnosis Safe and will be crucial for widespread adoption of the Gnosis Safe and mobile dapps.
Who are you?
We’re the team behind the Tasit SDK — Paul Cowgill and Marcelo Morgado. Both of us have backgrounds as software engineers and entrepreneurs. Paul is based in Chicago, IL, and Marcelo is based in Braga, Portugal.
How did you become involved in the Ethereum ecosystem?
Paul’s interest in Ethereum was sparked in 2017 after moving to Chicago from the SF Bay Area to decide on his next career move. As a software engineer interested in social justice, he liked the way blockchain removes platform risk from developing on top of APIs, provides users with the “right to exit” by enabling the unbundling of front and backends, and redistributes opportunity more equitably at a global scale.
He spent 2017 and 2018 working as a smart contract auditor and full-stack crypto engineer. Over the past 12 months, he’s been active in the community, attending conferences like DappCon, TruffleCon, Devcon4, and ETHDenver.
Marcelo has been following crypto technologies for 4 years now. He is passionate about cryptocurrencies, decentralization, and open source. He was a blockchain developer on a stablecoin project in 2017 and received 2nd prize at the Status Hackathon in 2018. He recently took a course on Digital Currencies (DFIN-511) at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus.
Why did you choose this project?
Young people use mobile devices way more than laptops, and the same is true in general for people worldwide — it feels very “centralized” of the Ethereum community to focus primarily on web-based dapp experiences on a laptop. We think that in order to achieve widespread adoption, Ethereum developers should focus on building mobile dapps for Ethereum. The Tasit SDK will make mobile dapp development and use easier and more efficient.
“Developers shouldn’t need to worry about how to build a wallet in order to build a standalone native mobile dapp.”
We think that it’s unnecessary to ask users to stop using single-purpose mobile apps. Additionally, much of the complexity involving private keys and gas can happen behind the scenes without sacrificing self-custody by using ephemeral accounts, deep-linking, meta-transactions, and contract-based accounts.
From a developer perspective, the API used to interact with Ethereum should not be more complicated than using a web 2.0 backend service like Firebase. Developers shouldn’t need to worry about how to build a wallet in order to build a standalone native mobile dapp.
We created an SDK that addresses these issues and allows developers around the world to make alternative mobile clients for existing dapps, which will promote adoption and demonstrate the power of smart contracts built on Ethereum.
Fun fact, the two of us met when Marcelo reached out to the Tasit project because he was experiencing the issues described above and was looking for a solution.
What might be the biggest obstacles of your project?
Censorship by Apple and Google. However, because the users own their funds and assets, the experience can still downgrade gracefully to a web dapp, so the user isn’t truly censored even if the app is removed from the App Store or Play Store. Over time, an increasing wave of dapp submissions should help convince Apple and Google to censor less and embrace permissionlessness (especially when users can get the same functionality and experience worse UX inside of a web 3 dapp browser app).
Apple and Google are accepting most crypto apps as long as the teams submitting them are not trying to scam users. But this is certainly a potential obstacle.
Why are you interested in Gnosis?
Paul first became interested in Gnosis through his interest in dapps more broadly, which led him to attend DappCon in 2018. He was very impressed by the event and the Gnosis Safe product in particular.
We think contract-based accounts are the future, so we were interested in working with Gnosis to help mainstream users benefit from contract-based accounts as soon as possible. The Gnosis Safe in particular is a very well-engineered smart contract-based wallet, and we were impressed with Gnosis’ efforts to ensure the formal verification of their contracts and their prior experience building an extremely secure multsig wallet.
How do you think your project will contribute to the Gnosis ecosystem?
The Tasit SDK integrates seamlessly with the Gnosis Safe. I think most mainstream users will be first exposed to crypto by a few popular viral dapps.
We hope that one day most decentralized mobile apps will be powered by Tasit SDK. This means that dapp users will be encouraged to move their funds to a secure, Tasit-supported wallet app like the Gnosis Safe. This could lead to a massive influx of new users for the Gnosis Safe.
What is your team motto?
Clarity, inclusion, and integrity. And jokes, even though you wouldn’t guess that from the first part of this motto.
Stay tuned for our next spotlight on the people behind the Flyingcarpet Network and how they are democratizing the world’s geospatial data.
Many thanks to Mareen Glaeske, Kei Kreutler, and the Tasit SDK team!
