Thoughts on Tooling
Every industry I can think of has increased its rate of expansion and growth as tooling has become better. Cars were rarities until the assembly line was developed. Media didn’t exist without the printing press. SaaS (Software as a Service) has boomed with cloud infrastructure. It’s not that transportation, or information distribution, or SaaS weren’t possible without these innovations. It was that the supportive tooling and subsequent ecosystems catapulted them forward into the mainstream and made them viable at scale.
Web3 does not have this yet. Retail use of cryptocurrency, decentralized institutional finance, and tokenized assets will remain in their infancy until it becomes more efficient to incept, develop, and deploy solutions. For every project and initiative we see in the crypto space, we see a team starting from scratch in a vacuum, responsible for creating their technology and all of the tools that support it.
If I wanted to create an non-fungible token that represented home ownership (imagine a deed to a house, tokenized), I could probably whip up the ERC 721 contract in under an hour. It would store the address, maybe some information on its appraisal history, and details of the square footage and features. But now that I have the tokens, what do I do? How do I:
- Make it easy for a local governing authority to interact with the contract? (Do local governments have ERC721 compliant wallets?)
- Develop a webpage for the management of these assets?
- Integrate with Zillow and Trulia to auto-update their listings?
What If I wanted to do the same thing in Web2? Well I wouldn’t have to teach local government how to submit a web form. There are drag and drop website creators that I can use to connect with a simple database of homeowners. And Zillow and Trulia offer an API that lets me sync my data with theirs.
Why would I build with Web3 if doing it in Web2 is so much easier? The truth is: I wouldn’t. It’s not worth the trouble… yet.
It will be worth it when the tooling catches up. It will be worth it when local government has a multi-sig wallet that’s as easy to use as their password manager. It will be worth it when we have drag and drop tools for interfacing with Web3. And it will be worth it when Zillow and Trulia add support for ERC721 tokens (or at least support for a data-layer in between).
Web3 is extremely nascent. And early adopters, enthusiasts, passionate developers… We have the responsibility of maturing it. We need to make it easy to use.
That’s why I’ve decided to focus on the tooling that makes these grand visions possible. I want to develop fundamental technologies that support crypto’s ease of access. And I’ve started with my first (public) product: GYSR.
The problem I set out to solve was: How do new projects fulfill the initial distribution of their minted assets? When a new project launches how do investors, the community, and users gain access to the token that was created?
We see projects launch every day and each of them is building their own distribution strategy… Airdrops, yield farming, IEOs, presales… It’s an entire project in and of itself and complete sidequest to the core project. It requires time, resources, and hopefully an audit. And every project has been recreating this wheel over and over again.
I set out to solve this: One platform, one contract, one set of tools to solve distribution for new tokens. It’s configurable, it’s decentralized, it’s transparent, and it’s secure. GYSR (and it’s supporting token, $GYSR) are the first in a line of things I want to build to make the creation of new Web3 technologies easier. Because without better tooling to expedite our growth, we’ll be stuck riding the train, hearing our news from the town crier, and dialing up for hours to ask Google, “What is Bitcoin?”
