Crosschain UX, Why does it suck?<> 0xJim

Jim's background is in Crypto from the early days, and he's been in the game for about five years. He's worked in various roles in the Crypto space, most recently as a product manager at AAVE. Catalyst is a protocol built on Ethereum that solves some of the challenges surrounding the integration of new blockchain ecosystems into the Ethereum layer. Follow Dee on Twitter (@dthinksweb3) Follow Jim on Twitter (@0xJim)

Transcript

Dee 0:01

Welcome to this episode of designer dalla. We talk about everything web three and design. I'm your host, D. Lee's.

Hello.

And welcome back to designer Tao. I know we've been out for a while but doesn't matter, we get some good stuff coming. So today I am with Jim who is a crypto OG. It's been a game for five years, I've been to places like Ivan, things like that. But I don't want to put your thoughts your intro, because I always do that. I'll have you introduce yourself.

Yeah, happy to happy to be on. So tell me. I mean, we already talked about this, but like, tell me a little bit about your background and like the audience with record so they understand like, your area of expertise, and we start talking about crypto stuff.

Jim 0:58

Yeah, sure. So it's like what you mentioned, I've been in crypto full time for about five years. But I've actually known about it for like a little bit over 10 years. I guess like My story started was like, freshman year university, I just like, was in the same dorm room is this dude who was like, incredibly into crypto, or Bitcoin rather, specifically at the time. And like, he was kind of like your typical Bitcoin lover and like 2013 It's like super libertarian.

Like for like, like a tinfoil hat where for like, a lot of like the government conspiracies, but I was definitely, like, really interested in kind of like, the core concepts that Bitcoin was was was was kind of still holding up for and was like, interested enough to read the white paper and kind of like pay attention to it and buy like Bitcoin on Mount Gox, which eventually became nothing, which was sad.

But yeah, so like, I was always kind of like, you know, tangentially aware of it, and somewhat financially invested, or at least as invested as you can be when you're like a poor college kid. But yeah, and so that's kind of like my intro to crypto. And then, you know, was just kind of following it following up into ICO decided I want to join, you know, kind of full time. And so my first role in crypto was actually that of like a researcher. And so I worked at a consulting firm in San Francisco and was essentially doing a lot of research for crypto and in kind of packaging up for for a lot of like, institutional clients like banks and payment companies and what have you. And then very quickly, I realized I didn't want to do that anymore. And so I wanted to be a builder. And so I joined ripple as a product manager, who was there for about two years, kind of building their their core blockchain kind of work, and also tangentially helping out with their payments product to send kind of like cross border payments. And then defy summer happened in 2020. And I was like, Yeah, I don't really want to do that anymore. I want to like build in in defy or rather, I want to build on Aetherium and build kind of with smart contracts. Because ripple was kind of just pure, pure payment payment based blockchain. And so I joined as a pm for an NFC company and called unstoppable domains, which was, you know, I think a step in the right direction, I was definitely predicting the the buzz of of NF T's, but not necessarily the right category. Right. I was picking names, which are important right in the form of a username in the metaverse, and that was kind of my thesis. But, you know, obviously, it wasn't as big as like art and community and PFP projects or what have you. And so I've kind of got jaded a little bit and left to join Ave, and kind of go back to my financial roots. And so is that Ave, as the head of new products and experiments. And so did a lot of kind of work around core infrastructure work as it pertains to have a lot of ideation around new products that could complement the of a product suite. And that was there up until November of last year, or else was there for a year and a half, and then eventually decided to start my own thing. And so now I'm one of the two co founders of a project called catalysts, which is a cross chain liquidity protocol.

Dee 4:14

I guess. I've been around Twitter like talking a lot about inoperability. And, like, I guess I'm curious, why is that so important? And like how does that like help the end user because I feel like in crypto a lot of times we talk really heavily about technology, and to non technical folks are like y'all just want to nerd talk about a bunch of stuff we don't care about. So like, I guess that's so important in terms of like, the greater you know, sustainability of this ecosystem.

Jim 4:51

Yeah, I'm glad you gave that caveat or else I was gonna give you a nerdy answer. But I would say like this as it pertains to, why is it, you know, relevant and important to the end user, I think like when a lot of people talk about the UX limitations of blockchains, it's kind of, you know, inherent into some of the systems that have been created, right. And so it's like something like, having a wallet, right, and like having to like sign transactions with a private key, and people lose private keys, or people get their private keys stolen, and then they get their assets stolen, right, or the report dates or what have you. And like, that's, that's like, obviously a very, very terrible kind of user experience for the vast majority of people. But that's something that's just kind of baked into kind of the underlying blockchains, right, especially when you think about Aetherium as the most popular, like smart contract platform where people are interacting with a lot like, you can't really change the theorems like, like whole underlying account level infrastructure, right, or at least you can't do it in like the matter of even like a year, it will take a matter of like, you know, like four or five years in order to do so. Because that's just like, how complicated the Areum is at this point. But you couldn't make a new blockchain, even a new blockchain that's built from scratch. And it could have kind of infrastructure that's built to allow for things like oh, like, maybe you can just log in with your