December’s PIVX Perspectives Spotlight Shines on JSKitty, Founder and Developer of PIVXLabs.
1) Can you tell us a little about yourself?
I’m what everyone knows as ‘JSKitty’ — the infamous dev cat of Labs (since the SnappySnap days)! Young British dev, a never-ending interest in tech, from crypto to global-finance, game-dev and AI, I’ve pretty much touched every computer-related subject that anyone could think of — and my end interest ended up being with crypto, after I found Bitcoin around early 2014.
Before PIVX, I worked at ZENZO, before ZENZO, I worked on multiple early projects, like the “DeepOnion” privacy coin, or “eXperience Points (XP)” back in the 2017 bullrun!
Before all those, I was a Game Developer, with two published games, and a handful of unpublished ones, mostly solo-built, some with friends, but all of them were built in a home-schooled method, I do not have a single academic grade to my name, and I don’t need one!
2) When and why did you get into cryptocurrency?
In early 2013–2014 I ended up coming across (in a way that is now lost to my memories) a Bitcoin faucet, the ancient “Freebitco.in” site (which is still running today, damn!), at that point, I was just barely a game developer, had zero knowledge (hah) of Bitcoin, crypto, most of programming, and even finance in general — over the years, I collected Bitcoin, I learned about it, got incredibly obsessed over the technology from the newfound of decentralised systems and “programmable money”, I joined the BitcoinTalk forum and engaged, actually got a fairly reputable BitcoinTalk account in those days, back when coins would often do “Banner Campaigns” where BCT users would advertise a coin on their banner, fun times, indeed.
3) When and why did you get into PIVX?
This is an interesting one, around late 2017 roughly, I was effectively a serial-tipbot-dev as a kid, a surprising amount of projects used to have my Tipbots, I built them from scratch, they had various community-building features, and I would bounce from project-to-project hooking them up and watching the communities enjoy them.
In that time, I met Snappy and the original-ish tipbot operator (Buer), in which I poked around for the status of it, and saw that it was effectively dead — so I teamed up with Snappy, who LOVED the idea, and immediately helped me to make the ‘PIVX Tipbot’ a reality — and for those months that it ran, I remember it was a huge success, with a bot-powered Radio and DJ system that members would gather and rock with — Snappy would act as a host — that, that community spirit, is what kept me in PIVX, even if the original idea, was merely to propagate a tipbot.
4) What do you think sets PIVX apart from other cryptocurrencies in the market?
It’s teams (Core and Labs), it’s long-lived testament of surviving the harshest markets, it’s unique blend of Bleeding-Edge tech with PoS, in which a dozen “PIVX-firsts” occurred and continue to occur. — PIVX as a technology, and a currency, is an incredible feat, to say the least, one that is underappreciated by the wider market.
5) Can you tell us about your journey as a developer and engineer that led you to the creation of PIVXLabs; mypivxwallet and PIVCards?
PIVX Labs, or at least the ‘soul’ and idea of it, was born of Snappy — the Catalyst of PIVX Labs as-of-today was back when me, Snappy, Kyeno and various other developers, some long gone now — decided that PIVX needed more than just a Core Wallet, the problem with 2017–2020 PIVX was that there were a severe barrier to entry, as well as a UX that is not up to the modern standards of ‘Web3’.
Labs came to fruition from the demand of Labs being needed — we knew PIVX needed a lighter, faster, easier wallet that anyone in the world, on any device, with any experience level; could setup and use, without compromising on security. MyPIVXWallet was Labs first creation.
We also knew that PIVX needed more than wallets to thrive as a currency — PIVCards enabled using PIV in the real-world, easier than any other platform on the market — What will we build next? I’m not sure yet, but it will be another pillar to PIVX’s real-world adoption and usage — That, is why Labs exists.
6) As a developer, what are some of the technical aspects or challenges you encountered while building mypivxwallet, and how did you overcome them?
In general, there are three-ish ‘pillars’ of MPW’s architecture to decide upon:
- Convenience.
- (De)centralisation and/or Privacy.
- Security.
Increase one, and generally, the other two decrease, how do you build something perfect in all three? Truthfully, you can’t, there are trade-offs to be made somewhere, for something.
My first and foremost priority for MPW has been Security: for example, MPW since even the first day, NEVER allowed saving a wallet to disk without an encryption password — ironically, this is a more secure practice than the Core Wallet, which does not force this measure on first launch.
But for Privacy? This is tough, MPW uses Blockbook explorers to sync your transaction history, which requires the app to send your Public Keys to said Blockbook to retrieve your balance — this is not fun, but the alternative: chain header sync, would lengthen the synchronisation time of MPW MASSIVELY, which is a huge hit to Convenience.
Sure, only a gone-rogue Blockbook can actually collect, store, analyse that data — but it is still a possibility, depending on your threat model, that may already be too much data exposure for someone.
Back to security: many platforms, like Password Managers, will encrypt your password data locally, and then upload your encrypted data to their Cloud storage — this means you can retrieve your data from the internet, or cross-sync things across your devices, which is incredibly convenient: but what if that service gets compromised? It’s a ticking time bomb before your data is decrypted by an attacker, and boom, account gone — MPW could add encrypted cloud-sync for convenience, and to give users the ability to recover their wallet even if their device exploded randomly — sure, but is it worth the risk?
This is our daily challenge, a balancing act of conflicting design philosophies.
7) How does mypivxwallet simplify the onboarding process for new users, particularly those who may be unfamiliar with cryptocurrency wallets?
MPW focuses massively on: “less is more” in a User Experience sense — the default design assumption of MPW is to assume the user is the least knowledgeable in any area of the wallet, as such; complex features are walled off behind “Advanced Mode”, which hides complex things by default — users can create an MPW wallet, jot down their seed on paper, and encrypt their wallet, within just 1–2 minutes!
8) With the recent launch of PIVCards could you share a little about this phenomenal PIVX use case?
PIVCards was, funnily, a completely random whim-idea I had a few months ago and decided to prototype in a single week of spare time — having gotten the ‘itch’ to do something new outside of MPW, PIVCards was a massive technological and logistical challenge, and I am surprised that such a small team managed to build it as well as we did.
PIVCards has processed almost 400 orders, worth a total of ~$17,500, since the initial prototyping, and we HUGELY underestimated the volume we’d be handling, so PIVCards had a full two/three weeks of additional polishing by me, to get it scaling better and with less manual input needed — now, although still imperfect, the service runs entirely autonomously, with near zero manual labour required aside from the occasional logistical ‘edge-case’ we hit.
9) Finally, what advice or encouragement would you give to aspiring developers and entrepreneurs who are looking to make an impact in the cryptocurrency industry?
Find what excites you, fascinates you, what grabs at you with the grasp a black hole has on the cosmos: and dive in to it, trust the process.
Why keep what you love, as a mere side-hobby, rather than a way of life?
Work doesn’t have to be ‘for someone’, nor does it have to be boring, unexciting — break the chains of being a corporate cog, find what you love, master it, and with enough time and energy (and very importantly: networking), you will make a living with it, doing what you love.
Sending gratitude to JSKitty for taking the time to sit down with me and share some insights into his background and experiences.
