Recap from OST LIVE with Mick Hagen, CEO of Mainframe — Building Decentralized Applications
Mick Hagen is an entrepreneur, investor, and advisor in the startup ecosystem. After dropping out of Princeton University’s computer science program, he founded Zinch (acquired by Chegg), an ed-tech company connecting students globally with opportunities in higher education. He is currently the CEO of Mainframe, producer of a new decentralized application protocol. He joined us on Episode 48 of OST LIVE to discuss Web 3 and building decentralized applications resistant to censorship, surveillance, and disruption.
Web 3 Needs Infrastructure
Developers need different functionalities such as identity authentication, computation, storage, payments, and communication solutions to build web applications. Web 2.0 has the infrastructure and tools in place that make it easy for developers to build web apps very quickly. However, in the early days of the internet, there weren’t many tools, frameworks, or libraries to build even the simplest of interactions on a web page.
This is where Web 3 is today. The infrastructure doesn’t exist and it’s incredibly hard to build a decentralized application. There aren’t many tools, frameworks, or libraries for developers to leverage. Service layers computation, identity, and file storage solutions like Swarm and IPFS are still in their infancy. Some service layers aren’t even fully decentralized yet and lack incentivization. There are lot of innovative projects and teams working to solve these issues, but they are still at a very early stage.
Mainframe is making it easier to build decentralized applications with a single SDK and API. Companies and developers that want to leverage decentralization can use Mainframe’s computation, file storage, data services, identity, payments, and communication functionalities to build decentralized applications. Developers building an application can connect with a single SDK or API. Mainframe deals with the underlying technologies and complexities involved so that developers can focus on building applications.
Web 3 Brings Back Privacy
If Web 2.0 has infrastructure and tools, then why are we reinventing the wheel with Web 3? In the past, Hagen says, countries have banned messaging applications, social networking, and media. “Russia banned Telegram,” he says. “Brazil banned Whatsapp. The Chinese government essentially has full access to WeChat.” When privacy is completely compromised, freedom is compromised.
Censorship prevents people from communicating and connecting freely with who they want, where they want, using the applications they want. Web 3 allows people to take control of their privacy.
“We see that a lot of these tech companies are getting hacked or getting compromised, or they just don’t have our best interests at heart. They’re selling our data. They’re using our data to manipulate us. We’re starting to realize that when we’re not paying for the product, we are the product.” — Mick Hagen, CEO of Mainframe
Web 3 gives users more control over their data and identity. In addition, decentralization removes the middlemen: tech corporations, financial institutions, and government bodies alike. A decentralized Web 3 allows people to work together to run essential applications without middlemen taking their cut, corporations selling data to the highest bidder, or governments spying on citizens. “At the heart of it, decentralization is about freedom,” Hagen says. Web 3 enables economic freedom in which people all over the world can participate in the global marketplace, free of the corruption, jurisdictions, regulations, and bureaucracy that local governments often impose.
Decentralized Messaging
Mainframe began with Spatch, a decentralized communications protocol built on top of email. It focused on improving messaging in the workplace. As the decentralized protocol was being built, Hagen realized that the network could be leveraged for more than just messaging. It could be used for things like file storage and social networks. The company then pivoted to allow developers to adopt the protocol for use cases beyond messaging. Spatch was rebranded as Mainframe in 2015.
The decentralized messaging app Onyx will be the first use case for Mainframe. Currently, messaging apps are centralized service that store data in a single place, creating the risk of a single-point-of-failure data breach. They are also in control of the data that moves through their servers. In a decentralized model, nodes all over the world share their computational resources to run the network. Instead of being controlled by a single centralized institution, the app is run by thousands or hundreds of thousands of nodes all over the world. Governments would have no way to ban or shut down applications.
When somebody wants to send a message on Onyx, they pay in MFT for the service to operate.
Nodes on the network are incentivized and rewarded in MFT to relay, deliver, and store messages. This creates a network that is fully decentralized, censorship-resistant, surveillance-resistant, and powerful. People can connect and communicate in a way that’s never been done before. Decentralized messaging is just one of the many distributed apps that can be built on Mainframe.
Web 2.0 → Web 3
Hagen believes blockchain is one of the best technologies we currently have for building Web 3. We are still in the experimentation stages of use cases for blockchain and Web 3. There are many challenges to overcome before the world transitions from Web 2.0 to Web 3. Mainframe even launched a video called “Dawn of the DApps” that showcases the terrible UX for using crypto and blockchain-based products.
Here are some of the high-priority needs on Hagen’s roadmap to a successful transition to Web 3:
- Usability — It must be easy for normal consumers to use decentralized applications. Currently, users need to know how to use MetaMask and sign up on exchanges to make a B2C transaction from fiat to crypto. Converting fiat into tokens needs to be a frictionless process.
- Scalability — The transaction speeds and throughput possible today are very limited. Transactions need to be as fast as Visa.
- Stabilization — Bitcoin was and still is considered digital gold and a store of value by many. But it has been very volatile, losing 80 percent of its value at some points. Hagen believes stable coins can help bridge the gap from fiat to crypto.
- Use Cases — We need to see ambitious applications that are possible only through decentralized technologies, apps that couldn’t exist on Web 2.0. An ambitious application would bring mass adoption to blockchain and major developments to Web 3.
Coming Up Next on OST LIVE: Aidan Hyman
Aidan Hyman is the co-founder and CEO of ChainSafe Systems, a team of developers focused on future-proofing digital systems using blockchain technology. Hyman coordinates several open source projects, including Görli Testnet, a cross-client, Proof-of-Authority testnet for Ethereum developers. Hyman will discuss all things Görli and the challenges of building a consistently available, highly reliable testnet that is usable across all client implementations. Subscribe to our YouTube channel or listen to the audio format on anywhere you listen to podcasts, including iTunes, Stitcher, and Spotify. We’re also now available on Alexa! Simply add “OST LIVE” to your flash briefing.
About OST
OST blockchain infrastructure empowers new economies for mainstream businesses and emerging DApps. OST leads development of the OpenST Protocol, a framework for tokenizing businesses. In September 2018 OST introduced the OpenST Mosaic Protocol for running meta-blockchains to scale Ethereum applications to billions of users. OST KIT is a full-stack suite of developer tools, APIs, and SDKs for managing blockchain economies. OST partners reach more than 300 million users. OST has offices in Berlin, New York, Hong Kong, and Pune. OST is backed by leading institutional equity investors including Tencent, Greycroft, Vectr Ventures, and 500 Startups.
