What is the Ethereum Foundation doing and what will happen in the future?

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, by Alex Van de Sande, a UX designer and front-end developer for Ethereum; reprinted with permission by Odaily.

From a developer's point of view, the Ethereum Foundation and the changes in the ecosystem.

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Amsterdam office, Zug "dock" and the first Berlin office, where the team used to work early

While a high degree of centralization may have been critical to Ethereum’s development and market launch in the foundation’s early days, it also received a lot of criticism because it was the antithesis of decentralization.

At Devcon4, Aya Miyaguchi, the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, gave an excellent talk about her Zen Buddhism-influenced management style.

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Aya Miyaguchi, the new executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, speaks at Devcon4

Aya Miyaguchi believes that subtraction creates more value than addition. The Ethereum Foundation's goal is to become smaller, have less power, take up fewer resources, and fund projects to achieve these goals.

Instead of an "official" internal team vs. external contributors, the Ethereum Foundation will be the common funder for all internal and external contributors, and internal teams will have to compete for these resources just like everyone else.

If someone asked me a few years ago how the Ethereum Foundation should develop and manage the resources they have, I would also suggest this model to them. I know because they did come and ask. Before Aya Miyaguchi became executive director, we had many conversations about the future development of the foundation, including official channels, or informal conversations in the corridors when we met at other meetings, and the answer It's often the same: Development teams want more autonomy over their own budgets, can experiment more, and don't have to ask for permission for every new hire or meeting plan. That's what they want.

Of course, there are two sides to this story: if you have more autonomy, you also take more risks. If resources are directed to more teams, it means there will be more competition among them.

Actually, these can be nice side effects, but not so easy to do in practice. For example, a few years ago, I led the team at Mist, a browser that ties together a set of Ethereum technologies to realize our vision for Web3. While it was used by a handful of ethereum enthusiasts, it couldn't attract mainstream users (depending on your definition of "mainstream" of course, nobody really managed to do that), and eventually Mist was crushed by a serious security flaw up.

The Mist team realized that while the greatest security risk resided in the browser component, there was still a lot of value in being able to connect and manage all Ethereum components in one app (now called Grid). At the same time, I started exploring what was holding me back from mass mainstream adoption, and I discovered a solution path that I call "universal logins". Then I realized that if I didn't factor my personal expenses into the team budget, the Grid team would be more likely to get their full budget, so I did.

In this way, I withdraw from the funding budget of all development teams of the Ethereum Foundation. No one asked me to do this, and I didn't tell anyone except the accounting department (and Twitter).

The foundation is unique in that for many years I didn't have a "boss" in the traditional sense. You do your job, you send an invoice to the accountant, and while it often involves many different people and sometimes even different companies in different jurisdictions, you end up getting paid. There is a debrief every year, and they want you to tell the world what you did at Devcon. Then once a year, a different person talks to you about your team budget and what you're working on. In fact, it is difficult to distinguish who is "in" or "not in" the foundation? Who has an official Ethereum email address (ie, one ending in .org)? Those who got tickets to Devcon, or those who got access to Devcon?

From this perspective, the new funding model is better. It doesn't matter how many people are working on the project, because the pattern is: when the money comes in, the code will be sent out. If the work effect is not good, you can stop paying wages.

In short: The Ethereum Foundation is transitioning into a grant-making organization. I discontinued my previous project and I didn't want to lower my chances of getting funding for my new project just because I was still within their budget. This will allow me to devote more time to solving what I believe is the biggest problem in the ecosystem: user login.

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Why is it so troublesome to log in to Ethereum?

A year ago, Metamask was pretty much the only desktop ethereum wallet option. Although there are more than a dozen mobile apps, each seems to be following in Metamask's footsteps: with each new app, a new private key is created, the seed phrase is backed up, and ETH is transferred into it. Do these repetitive operations each time.

Not only is the login process quite lengthy and complicated, but there is also the need to transfer ETH, which often requires a credit card or an account at an exchange, official documentation and days of waiting. What's even more frustrating is that you need to repeat this operation every time you install a new app! If you already own ETH (or even BTC), the process is usually a little shorter, but there are still private keys, backups, etc. to consider.

The landscape has changed dramatically since I spoke about so-called meta-transactions in an interview in Toronto last year, and we're seeing more and more wallets getting serious about solving this problem. Even though the current wallet still creates a private key for each user, it will delay displaying the "Backup Private Key" interface to the user until the user has some practical experience and valuables are stored in the wallet. Prompt the user to back up the private key.

(#block rhythm BlockBeats Note: Meta-transaction, meta-transaction, aims to solve the problem of repeated operations and poor experience of Ethereum dapp login. The working principle of Meta Transaction is: the user signs some data with its private key, and puts These data are sent to replayer, a contract with special authority to forward user data, and then Replayer will pay gas for this transaction, and send the data to the network through the user's dedicated proxy contract.)

But we still have an important problem: each app repeats the same login process. Trying a new app often means starting everything over. Once users are logged into Ethereum, we need to enable them to experience using the new app without transferring money or sharing their private keys.

When developing Mist, our challenge was: to develop something for geeks who would only install Firefox on their mother's computer, because IE is really bad (I hope this metaphor doesn't betray my age). We are not aimed at novice users, but those who are least technically ignorant, but have greater curiosity about technology, and they are the users we hope to reach.

I believe that now with the help of these tools, we can reach a larger and larger audience: people outside of the crypto space who want to try and experience something truly amazing for their money. Now the new challenge is here: universallogin.io.

I hope you will join me on this new adventure. If you are in Berlin from August 19th to 23rd, I will conduct at least four interviews in Berlin:

• Monday, August 19: Metacartel Demo day

• Tuesday, August 20: #BuildBetter