EthDenver Day 2 Highlights
The 2nd day of EthDenver was just as exciting as the first with the hackathon in full force and talks from across the Ethereum community providing valuable insights for ways to increase user adoption. The key themes were to implement processes, creating better user experiences and more successful partnerships. These talks are directly applicable to the way uPort is building product and moving forward with partnerships across innovative new blockchain applications.
A talk focused on usability called, “The Impossible Balance Between Usability & Security” by Taylor Monahan of MyCrypto mentioned usability within the decentralized applications that exists today is often seen as a large issue. While that may be due to the state of a technology that is so new in development, we’re seeing the natural progression of moving towards a more customer driven approach from a focus on R&D. The uPort team has been working on usability and is using customer definition, usability testing, and constant iterations to solve for the problem of credential management and sharing, giving the power over data back to the individual. A mobile app redesign is coming soon based on these processes and will only continue to improve as we receive feedback.
In addition to the mobile app redesign, we’re focused on partnerships moving forward that will allow for significant scale. The past two weeks leading up to EthDenver were spent with many members of the uPort team in Europe, meeting with some of the largest blockchain projects within different financial products, cities, and universities in Europe. As we think about partnerships moving forward, Ashleigh Schap from MakerDAO mentioned in a talk entitled, “Biz Dev & Crypto: Breaking Out of the Bubble” it’s important to not “build it and they will come,” but to instead work with partners in a collaborative manner. The process includes understanding the needs of the partner, tailoring the messaging to solve their problem and having commitment of resources from both sides of the project.
As the space matures, there’s process that can truly give focus to previously unstructured development. The hackathon is a perfect example of this with a variety of projects integrating uPort for the identity layer to login to their application and sign transactions. We’re excited for the hackathon judging today and are optimistic that uPort is set up for success as we prepare for an increasing number of users and use cases in 2019.
