Hi everyone,
Join us for another edition of Coffee With Calyptus, where we bring you captivating perspectives on the ever-changing terrain of web3 development. Get ready to engage in Q&A with industry leaders, test your expertise in Solidity, and explore a curated collection of job openings at promising web3 startups.
This week, we caught up with Auryn Macmillan, Product Manager and Solidity Dev at Gnosis. He offers valuable insights on his journey as a web3 developer, important developments and challenges in web3 industry.
What inspired you to get involved in web3 and become a web3 developer?
The thing that got me actively engaged in web3 was the idea of DAOs. I originally discovered the concept in 2013/14 in some forum posts + articles from Vitalik, and then again in the Ethereum whitepaper, and have been captivated by it ever since.
What got me into development was a yearning to be better able to effect change in the tooling and products that I was contributing to and using. My journey in web3 essentially went from comms, to product management, to developer; progressively getting more and more hands on.
What are some of the most exciting developments in web3 technology that you think are being overlooked?
Not sure that it’s necessarily being overlooked, but ZKPs (Zero-knowledge proofs) are definitely one of the most interesting technologies in the web3 space. The design-space they open for blockchain systems is really incredible, from more credible auction systems, to private transactions, to improved scalability, and receipt-free voting for secret ballots.
I do think the design-space that unlocks for games is really under appreciated. Dark Forest is the best example of some of the mechanics ZKPs can unlock; a blockchain-based multiplayer game with a shared map and a global fog of war. But most importantly, it is just a really fun game.
What are the most significant challenges facing Web3 developers when it comes to user adoption?
Web3 definitely has some UX challenges, but I honestly think that these challenges are overstated. In many cases, I’d argue web3 UX is actually already better than its legacy alternatives.
One notable exception is first-time wallet setup; learning how to secure a seed phrase. This, and the general pattern of one being responsible for one’s own security, is the biggest challenge for web3 developers building apps and tooling for broader user adoption.
After that, authentication, transacting, monitoring, trading, deploying an org, etc... all much easier in web3.
What are the most important protocols that a Web3 engineer should be familiar with, in your opinion?
Really depends on what kind of thing you want to build, and at what layer of the stack.
I mostly find myself working on Solidity and Typescript projects, so familiarity with Solidity, the EVM, and ethers.js is obviously important. I also find The Graph to be really useful, along with tools like Tenderly for monitoring and debugging.
In terms of on-chain protocols, I think it's certainly beneficial to have a good understanding of the various commonly used token standards (ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155), along with a high-level DeFi understanding of things like automated market makers (AMMs), stablecoins, and lending protocols.
I’d also encourage people to approach blockchain development in a way similar to Unix pipes; building products and tools that are small, modular, pieces that share common interfaces so they can easily be configured as part of larger, user-defined, systems. This way of thinking is a large part of what has enabled DeFi to exist; because positions in most DeFi protocols are represented as ERC-20 tokens, it’s much easier to build new and arbitrarily complex combinations of systems.
