Building Ethereum 2.0 for a new #CryptoLife

Chris Spannos speaks with Status co-founder Jarrad Hope about creating the vision that blockchain can potentially offer.

Status is a mobile first Ethereum client helping advance the Web3 ecosystem by building base infrastructure, conducting education and building developer tools. Its products include React Native Desktop (for Linux, Mac OS and Windows), Status Hardwallet — a crypto card for tap and pay at crypto terminals — , the Nimbus Ethereum 2.0 sharding client, and an Incubate program fostering decentralized applications and projects to help users stay within the crypto ecosystem. Chris and Jarrad spoke at the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) London hackathon in August 2018.

Chris: How would you characterize the development of the Status ecosystem so far?

Jarrad: Paraphrasing Carl Sagan, “If you want to have an apple for pie and make it from scratch, first you have to invent the universe.” That’s very much what it feels like when you’re trying to make a truly decentralized application in this space. A lot of the infrastructure isn’t there or it hasn’t been built out yet. Even though we have this mass adoption, consumer-facing goal at the very front, this is the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you have to actually build out to get to that point. That’s generally what it ends up looking like.

Chris: What are some of the obstacles to mass adoption that you see?

Jarrad: Blockchain scalability is probably the biggest technical hurdle. I also think a well-informed public and education of these systems and how they work is in also an upper bound in terms of the people you can reach. Maybe a little bit closer to home, finding the talent and the resources to build out all of this stuff is also very challenging.

The Venn diagram of people who understand blockchain and have the same skills that you’re trying to hire for and genuinely care about this stuff is very, very small and very competitive to do. We’re becoming more and more reliant on doing training and education.

We actually support Embark now, which is one of the developer tools, a great project. That will evolve into Status Studio, which will be an IDE that will also have a large education component to that. We’ll be building out dApp development tutorials, documentation and education on cryptoeconomics, mechanism design as well as more importantly actually, the ideology in libertarian values and all that sort of thing as well.

Chris: Maybe a little bit more about that last bit. I definitely want to focus on some of the first order questions around the ecosystem, technology and tooling that you’re working on, but I’ve heard people comment that we need to be talking more about the second order questions about how this technology will impact people in society. Could you say a bit more about the vision that Status is offering and working toward?

Jarrad: Yes. Basically, you can build a democracy or a dictatorship or anything like that on top of “libertarian anarchist principles”. If you design for those, you can pretty much build on top of that and create whatever you want. People voluntarily enter it, then that’s fine. If you want to work on decentralized tech, particularly like Web3 stuff, it does require a massive mindset shift. That’s not apparent to many people who are very excited about the space these days.

The community, what it was maybe two years ago, is very, very different to what it is now, but there isn’t enough people helping others understand why things are designed the way they are. You get these private ledgers that are coming up, which may have some thinly-veiled corporate benefits. At the end of the day, they probably should be using MySQL or a relational database on a server instead of using the “blockchain” buzzword. It’s just a matter of what they’re comfortable with at the time, and not fully understanding or appreciating why things are designed the way they are.

The vision, for us, although we want to be targeting your grandma and just the average person on the street, one of the more exciting market segments for me are people who are creating new states or are operating in a hostile environment. Like, say, the independence movement of Catalan are very interested in this. Spain had interfered with their referendum of independence recently and you even have more extreme cases where the Rojavans are trying to create a democratic, uh…

Chris: A confederalist democracy…

Jarrad: That’s it exactly, yes. They’re getting bombed by Turkey and they’re actually on the front lines…

Chris: And fighting ISIS too.

Jarrad: Yes, exactly. They are desperate for the ability to civilly communicate. I think that if you can provide the tooling for people to go ahead and create their own community laws, create their own community money and be able to communicate and organize, we might be better off for it.

Chris: The research I’ve done and the contacts I have working with Rojava and doing some solidarity work with the Rojava experiment suggest that they’re doing a lot of their organizing and trying to build cooperative networking infrastructure through mobile devices. It seems like Status is poised to enable this type of cooperation…

Jarrad: Yes, absolutely.

Chris: …a democratic, autonomous sovereign state of existence in these regions.

Jarrad: Exactly. When we get this, we get Meshnets that are reliable, then their job becomes a lot easier.

Chris: That’s interesting. You mentioned that there is this difference in the community over the past two years and there’s not enough people communicating why the technology is organized and produced the way it is. What about the state of Ethereum software development so far, how would you characterize it generally?

Jarrad: It’s definitely very strong. The developer tooling that we’re seeing now is a lot, lot better now. Both Truffle and Embark are doing great. There’s great communities around that. You go to things like DappCon and there’s a lot of new enthusiasm for that and a lot of new people coming in. That’s really cool. I can’t remember what survey it was but it was showing that the political inclinations of the people coming into the space now are becoming more diverse as well as opposed to being a bit more libertarian-leaning which is also very interesting.

Chris: Yeah…

Jarrad: It’s definitely thriving. Even in this [ENS hackathon], we saw some new wallets coming up and they’re solving some usability challenges or at least they’re trying to. I had raised a couple of questions in that there are some concerns there because you are making design decisions on behalf of the user which may have a negative impact on them further down the line because once it’s on chain, it’s very, very difficult to remove it.

Collecting that kind of information and enforcing the user to go down a particular path where they’re giving up some of their privacy immediately on chain without educating them properly first, could be a potential issue. Even though it is a more smoother and streamlined experience there at the beginning.

Chris: In terms of scaling Ethereum and achieving mass adoption, what are your thoughts about the gap between research and production? Should they be more closely tied or should there be no relationship in terms of keeping them close? What are your thoughts?

Jarrad: What’s happening on the research side is great. A lot of people don’t understand what progress looks like when it comes to research. When you are talking to engineers, the idea that somebody is researching about stuff and then they throw the baby out with the bathwater because they come up with an insight that allows them to create a more elegant design. What’s being called lovingly “shasper” is an example of that.

Now, we have a RANDAO beacon chain, and it may even change itself because we haven’t got to the point where we’re creating specifications, but if you are of the engineering mindset and you look at that, you feel uncertainty quite strongly. It’s very important to keep this hacker-like ethic or this applied research ethic, where it’s like you are willing to create these things knowing that the proof of concept that you create maybe thrown out.

When that comes to the main chain, a lot of the developers are doing maintenance for the existing chain, so they don’t have the bandwidth to do a lot of this experimentation which is why we’re trying to help out with Nimbus to help a lot of that communication between engineering and implementation efforts versus research. What’s happening on research side, it’s a much smaller community, but it’s also out of necessity. There’s a lot of background knowledge you need to understand to be able to converse and really contribute meaningfully in that area.

Chris: In this environment that moves very fast and there’s a lot of innovation, what qualities do you think make for good teams and what roles on teams do you think are necessary?

Jarrad: Status has grown. We were a team of seven, just before our contribution period last year and now we’re about a hundred. We’ve grown quite aggressively and there’s definitely things that I’ve learned along the way. Through those lessons, the qualities that I’ve noticed that probably matter more is that they genuinely believe in this stuff. There’s a lot of people out there now who are excited about it, but if they don’t understand the core principles behind these things, they come up with solutions that might not be fully ideal for whatever reason. You end up having a lot of discussions or dialogue in trying to do education before getting back to execution. Also, the more people you have, the higher coordination costs go up, especially when you’re trying to be a decentralized organization.

You don’t want to impose too much directional will onto them. That’s, in the case that you’re trying to move into a DAO later on. You can see the root cause in all of this is inherent in the salary-based model regardless. Hopefully, a DAO where you’re showing “proof of work” for a particular task is probably a lot more interesting and a lot more in line with the gig economy and people becoming individual businesses and that sort of thing. This whole fourth industrial revolution movement that’s happening at the same time.

Chris: Thank you very much for speaking with me Jarrad.

Jarrad: Thank you very much.