-
The adoption and deployment of blockchain solutions by financial institutions, crypto-enterprises, and world governments is in full swing, addressing long-standing industry problems across traditional finance, commerce and trade. It’s no surprise that most of technology development is still centered around scalability and playing the numbers game— transactions per second, latency, and throughput. But to successfully build consumer-scale experiences, developers must think beyond performance metrics and consider the human factor: Accessibility.
-
Blockchain Accessibility Group
-
Our research is centered on the ability of a blockchain network to be used by a wide array of different entities in a frictionless way, from a functional, economic, and technical perspective. The easier it is for a user to take part in a project’s applications, protocol, or ecosystem, the higher the accessibility of the given blockchain. Accessibility applies not only to end-users, but also to developers, creators, product owners, and any other parties interacting with the network.
-
Functional AccessibilityThe ability of a blockchain and its ecosystem to provide an easy onboarding and user experience, such that user interactions with the protocol or applications can be carried out in a simple and efficient manner.
- Onboarding. First interactions should be as frictionless as possible for users, requiring only a limited number of steps and ideally no technical expertise
- Wallets. The signing of a user’s transactions should be easily achievable with the available wallets of the given blockchain, which should be widely accepted across all kinds of applications in the project’s ecosystem.
-
Fiat Payment On- and Off-Ramps. Mass adoption requires that non-crypto-natives are able to easily transfer crypto earnings to more familiar currencies.
Economic Accessibility
Provides information on the general affordability of the protocol, its application and the digital products built on top of them.
- Transaction Fees. Should be relatively predictable and low enough for everyone to participate, yet high enough to ensure network stability.
- Application Layer Products. Should not be secluded and only accessible to an economic elite, actively hindering real community building and thus diminishing the chances for future mass adoption.
-
Running Network Nodes. Must be feasible in terms of hardware requirements and minimum staking amount so a sufficient number of validators is incentivized to participate in the network.
Technical Accessibility
Describes how easy it is for developers to build applications on the given chain. This concept is also known as developer ergonomics.
- Programming Concepts. Should be understood reasonably quickly and ideally rooted in pre-existing technology to smooth developer onboarding and allow for fast-start building.
-
Tooling. Software development kits (SDKs) should be available for all popular programing languages; extensions for text editors, testing frameworks, and other tools for automation, deployment, and debugging should also be available.