Hydro Update: 8/24/18

The Hydro team provides updates on Hydrogen’s blockchain and decentralization efforts, including the Hydro API and Hydro smart contracts.

Lately, our blockchain team has been focusing wholeheartedly on Snowflake and making sure that it is easy to use and very useful.

Noah and I basically spent all week developing the Snowflake dashboard (and playing spike ball), so I figured this might be a good time to give everyone a little more of a deep dive into what Snowflake is from a developer perspective and why it will be awesome. We are working to build Snowflake as an identity protocol that is valuable to Solidity developers and helps them with some of the more annoying portions of Ethereum dApp development (as devs ourself, we feel your pain). So here are a few of the main things that Snowflake and the Snowflake dashboard will bring to the table which we think will be very valuable to your average Solidity dev:

• Allowing user interaction through Snowflakes instead of Ethereum addresses. This seems like a pretty basic idea, but I actually think it helps to solve some relatively large usability hurdles of many major dApps. Currently, if I have CryptoKitties on my Eth address on desktop and I am going home for the weekend, I would need to export my seed words/private key and import them onto my laptop. This isn’t hard to do, but it’s also pretty insecure. Users should be typing/pasting in their private keys as little as possible. With Snowflake, we allow for users to link multiple addresses with one Hydro ID. So, in the same scenario, instead of importing my keys, I would just add the Eth address on my laptop to my Snowflake. Now I can view and interact with my kitties from my laptop without ever having to risk being phished or compromising my address!
• Easy integration of tokens. As developers know, requiring token transfers can be an extreme pain point when working in smart contracts. It requires all calls to use functions such as approveAndCall and can be very clunky in general. In Snowflake, we worked to remedy this through native token mechanics. Snowflakes are able to hold HYDRO tokens directly, and set allowances for resolvers to withdraw tokens. This allows developers to easily implement mechanisms such as sign-up fees, freemium models, and subscriptions. Typically, contracts that implement fees need to be closed source because someone can just fork the code and remove the fees. With Snowflake — due to the network effect — users are inclined to pay the fees and not fork the code.
• Native sign up and account deletion. Through the Snowflake smart contract, resolvers are able to set up innate sign-up and account deletion logic that is automatically processed when the user sets a contract as a resolver. Below is an example of a sign-up function which automatically withdraws the sign-up fee in HYDRO from a user’s Snowflake balance.

• The Snowflake dashboard. One of the things the dApps just don’t really have yet is a way for a user to easily access multiple dApps. The Snowflake dashboard helps to alleviate this issue with resolvers. As the dashboard continues to be built out, it will include things such as a dApp store of resolvers that users can use. This will help to add publicity to dApps built in the Snowflake ecosystem. Alongside this, developers who create basic dApps can choose to forgo hosting their application entirely. Instead of worrying about setting up an AWS instance or Digital Ocean droplet you can just add a few files to our dashboard Github. You have free reign to customize your interface however you see fit.

In my opinion, these are some of the most exciting parts of Snowflake and we have been focusing on making the developer and user experience as smooth as possible. We will continue to iterate on these things over the coming weeks before Snowflake releases, and add even more features thereafter. We look forward to seeing all the great projects people build with Snowflake!

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