The Ryder journey so far
It has been about five months since we submitted our original grant proposal to the Stacks Foundation. We have been publishing steady progress updates via the newsletter and on Twitter, but naturally these are always focused on the project itself. I would like to take a moment to chronicle the Ryder journey from a personal perspective.
It sure has been a trip. The amount of people that have been reaching out to myself and my partner is humbling. I get a lot of thoughtful messages and comments and do take everything to heart. There are people from all over the world who are getting excited about what a device like the Ryder can offer. Some even go so far as to inform us they have quit their job so they can focus on projects like this. I am not kidding. I believe that the community is what makes all of it so great: everyone is or can get involved.
I spent an afternoon programming devices with a prototype firmware and then wrapping them all in padded envelopes. We set up a little production line to program, test initialisation, wrap, and pack them up. The day after, I went to a local post office and spent a few hundred dollars shipping them all across the globe. That instant made it more real: these were actually going places and people would be messing with them. We made a careful selection of key community members that we think will have the biggest impact. It is tough to choose because there are so many great people out there, but alas we only had ten units at this point. As of this writing, about half of them have arrived at their destination.
We created a small Discord community that we just opened up and would like everyone to be a part of. If you are interested in participating in the daily conversation, please join us. (Send me a message if the link stops working.) The Pioneers will provide the first feedback and allow us to reach the next milestone: a crowdfunding campaign. The next big task is to get Ryder up to speed and see how we can fit it into the Stacks 2.0 ecosystem. (For example, getting it to work with Connect, which is the MetaMask of Stacks.) I spent a good amount of time to get the tooling ready for the Pioneers to use.
I really hope Ryder can be more than just another crypto wallet. I briefly touched on some of the ideas I have during the last Stacks Foundation webinar. Identities are inherently social, so the concept of social recovery has been on our minds a lot. Nobody is perfect and you can always lose a proof of identity. In terms of traditional proofs—like an ID card or passport—you have a central entity like a government agency to help you out. Obviously this is not the case with decentralised identities. Managing seed backups is difficult so we are looking at novel approaches to this fundamental issue. Since identities are social, we are thinking about tapping into one’s social graph. On different social media platforms, your immediate combined social circle can serve as your proof of identity in case push comes to shove. We can do this cryptographically for decentralised identities as well. Another point is decentralised app interactions. The Stacks ecosystem and the way its smart contracts function make it perfect for small interactions that you could do right from you device. For example, setting up an escrow smart contract with the person in front of you or increasing your “hodl score”. Finally, stacking your tokens on the go. For the uninitiated: it is a mechanism to stake your STX tokens to receive Bitcoin rewards. (Read more about it here.) Would it not be fantastic if you can do that right from your device?
I can keep going on about such ideas but of course I have to exercise some restraint, we still have a ways to go. In any case, I am grateful for all the people that have gotten us to where we are. Our most imminent task is to finalise the onboarding of a product designer. We hope to formally introduce her very soon.
