Why dApps are Leaving MetaMask
The current flow for onboarding new users into decentralized applications goes completely against previously established standards and is consequently hurting user adoption. While using a dApp browser may be the norm to existing members of the Ethereum community, this seemingly small ask from external individuals can cause them to completely abandon signing up. Do you think that your friends outside of crypto would continue signing up for a dApp after seeing this?
This sort of user experience only serves to impede the adoption of this technology amongst the majority. When do you think was the last time that they had to install an external piece of software to be able to use a website or webapp? Excluding dApps, the last time for me was over a decade ago when I was still playing flash games.
The fact is that we live in a time where websites / webapps ask you for your email and a password or offer you the ability to sign in with existing credentials (e.g. Facebook, Google, etc…). To do anything else only serves as a means of potentially confusing the user or pushing them away from your product / service.
So, it’s no surprise to see the decentralized applications gaining the most traction (per DappRadar) moving away from the dApp browser and instead opting for traditional user signup / login. Developers taking such measures additionally free themselves of the tech debt, bugs, and compatibility issues faced by the majority still reliant on their dApp browser.
Now, this isn’t to say that dApp browsers are bad — the MetaMask team has done an immense amount of work over the past few years to craft a great user experience and provide a single piece of software for users within the community to use across decentralized applications. The fact of the matter is that it has grown so big that many decentralized applications are now running into compatibility issues between versions of it and internal dependencies (we, ourselves, ran into issues between web3js and Metamask versions).
Compatibility issues have historically been the bane of many an engineering team — and to the degree where most are now electing to instead completely ignore users on specific platforms and instead urge them to use one which is supported. And in the same light, teams building decentralized applications are beginning to internalize their external MetaMask dependency in the form of their own wallet or are adopting one which is API-Based.
Bitski and Portis’ Sidechain Support
Until recently, developers were only accessing SKALE through MetaMask. But with Bitski’s recent release and SKALE’s updates, we are excited to inform our community that anyone building on SKALE can now use both Bitski and Portis’ API-Based wallets!
For those of you who don’t know Bitski or Portis, they both provide wallet hosting services for users as well as an API to access those wallets. Bitski is a custodial, and Portis — a non-custodial wallet. Everything is encrypted (much like LastPass, but for web3) so that you can trust that nobody (aside from you) can view your passcodes. And given that everything is hosted in one place, users can easily migrate between devices.
We believe that the combination of SKALE’s speed with the usability of these wallets will serve to further accelerate the adoption of decentralized applications amongst individuals outside of the blockchain community. We look forward to continued development of technologies focused on improving the user experience for decentralized applications and the bright future that they bring with them.
Learn More
If you or someone you know is working on software focused on improving user experience, we’d love to see it integrated with SKALE! Feel free to reach out in Discord with any questions.
For those interested in SKALE’s ‘Elastic Sidechains’ and their ability to scale decentralized applications, make sure to check out the Developer Documentation! Also, feel free to also check out SKALE’s Technical Overview and Consensus Overview for a deeper dive into how SKALE works and is able to provide 20,000 TPS.
SKALE’s mission is to make it quick and easy to set up a cost-effective, high-performance sidechain that runs full-state smart contracts. We aim to deliver a performant experience to developers that offers speed and functionality without giving up security or decentralization. Follow us here on Telegram, Twitter, Discord, and sign up for updates via this form on the SKALE website.
Originally published at skalelabs.com on June 13, 2019.
