Struggling to build the best cryptocurrency wallet (part 2)
We are talking to Sergey Burmisov, OWNR’s CTO, about the difficulties of cryptocurrency apps development and the way industry tackles them. The first part of the interview can be found here
Back to the information vacuum which surrounds some major problems in the crypto industry. Sounds logical that companies keep the blockchain secrets close to their chest. Yet there’s quite a number of open source crypto projects, including cryptocurrency wallets.
True, you can find some ‘best practices’ and open source solutions. But they are either low-level or aimed at a limited range of issues. If you look for something more complicated, like cryptocurrency exchange, cryptowallet, backend for a cryptowallet and so on, you’ll see that the info is scarce. Anyone who is nowadays building an enterprise-level cryptocurrency system will have to build lots of things from scratch. Even large companies that have managed to build this stuff don’t bother making these solutions available to the community… possibly don’t have resources to. We aim to share our findings at some stage, at least some of them. So it appears that the whole crypto industry is underdeveloped although cryptocurrencies as such have been here for years.
Still lots of other cryptowallets manage to work, and quite successfully so. Obviously with the help of the workarounds you mentioned. So the big question is — why bother?
The initial goal was (and still is) to develop a cryptocurrency ecosystem. The wallet is just part of it. A good part of the work we do now would not be adequate if you assess it from the viewpoint of simply making a cryptocurrency wallet. But it’s more than adequate if you are building a base for various crypto services.
What part of the technical work takes most time and efforts?
If you take a quick look at some cryptocurrency wallet, you’ll see the work of the frontend team. It’s a mobile app, a desktop app, a website… But most of the work comes unnoticed — at least for someone not immersed in the development. It’s the part that unites the mobile app with the blockchain node (Bitcoin core, for instance). And this part is immense in our case. It looks like backend of any other app at first sight: it’s some layer responsible for users’ authorization, notifications and so on… But that’s not the most resourceful part. The deepest layer is made of the so called ‘core’: parsing the blockchain, retrieving and analyzing its data, processing data so that it can be used for our goals. Analyzing the data in blockchain takes most time and knowledge indeed. It would be the most difficult part for a developer with no related experience.
Generally, does the tech part take more resources and time than managing the team?
I started with OWNR as a backend developer, and I had to communicate with both frontend and parsing teams. I think that’s what allowed me to see the full picture. In my new role, I coordinate the way the teams cooperate. And I keep doing some initial research and coding for the backend part. Unfortunately, most of my time is now devoted to management, task setting, analysis of requirements, documentation and other ‘managerial’ stuff.
