Development Update Feb 10th 2023

Had a hard time to decide what to write about in this week’s article, either go for a more technical topic or share some general thoughts about how Kadena ecosystem has been evolving, the good and the bad and also how it impacts us as wallet builders. I chose the latter.

Quick update on Linx

On one hand, we’re working on a few improvements based on feedback we received from our testers in the past week and on the other we’ve been dealing with additional paperwork that Apple Store required from us. Once this is done, we’ll be switching to public beta which we’re very much looking forward to since feedback so far has been really great.

Kadena Ecosystem

I’ll keep this brief and mainly focused on things where we as builders, part of the community, can improve.

A year ago, the ecosystem was barely starting to take shape, fast-forward today, we have multiple teams building high-quality projects, lots of tokens and lots of NFTs. I know we’re still far from where we as a community expected we would be but my intuition says we’ll see an acceleration in the very near future.

So what should we improve…well, first of all we’re sort of playing catch up here against other chains so why not try to work smart and not just hard. By that I mean to follow the few well defined standards that we have so far. It makes life easier on everyone else that wants to interact with your protocol and removes/minimizes the need for additional work to have your project integrated with others. Otherwise, we will end up with an extremely fragmented sea of protocols that can’t easily communicate with each other.

Indexing

Another thing, indexing chainweb transactions and events. No matter what you’re building it’s very likely you’ll need a solution for this. And everyone so far has been building their own or used chainweb-data for basic things. Would be great if someone (we are considering it ) decides to open-source their solution and everyone else contributes to it. It would save so much time and speed-up the development of new projects.

Last thing that I want to say is that I am seeing many builders asking/expecting to get every standard from Kadena core team. This is not how Ethereum or other ecosystems evolved, waiting for Ethereum Foundation to serve them everything on a plate. You have an idea for a standard or you’re missing something from other blockchains, create a KIP, maybe you already have a prototype, builders discuss it, Kadena provides feedback, we help with it and turn it into reality, fast and efficient. It’s one of the things that I believe we’re truly missing at the moment.

To wrap up:

• Think about the entire ecosystem participants as a whole when you decide to build something.
• It’s a permissionless blockchain, build together as a community, don’t wait for core, foundation or others to build everything for you.

Until next time!

Radu