ICF UX Working Group Meeting Recap

Meeting 1 — Meeting 6

The ICF UX Working Group’s goal is to highlight the emerging challenges that must be addressed to ensure high-quality user experiences (UX) and developer experiences (DX) on an IBC connected Internet of Blockchains. We want to build standards and applications to improve UX/DX through a collaborative, open dialogue.

One of those challenges is multichain assets:

If any asset can be transferred to and from any zone, then a wallet trying to keep track of the asset must be able to query the state of zones. To access a zone’s state requires either running node software or having an API endpoint available for querying. Providing these endpoints for all the different Cosmos zones is a big undertaking both in technical maintenance and cost. A wallet might also be required to continually query all the relevant endpoints — adding complexity and overhead.

So far, the ICF UX Working Group has been trying to formulate standards that will resolve these challenges during our meetings.

Summaries

In our first meeting, we reviewed existing Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals CAIP, which touch on multi-chain assets. In particular, we talked about CAIP-2, CAIP-2, CAIP-10, and CAIP-19.

When generated automatically, unique IDs are typically hard to remember (see IP addresses <-> domain names). These mappings from ID to name need to be stored somewhere.

In our second meeting, we discussed using GitHub as a quick MVP implementation to store all the required metadata (e.g., block hashes, API endpoints for each chain, etc.). We used a simple daemon to query blockchain nodes from the different Cosmos networks and then saved the processed information in a repository (called registry).

After an MVP for the GitHub registry was written, we used our third meeting to summarize some of our initial learnings and hold an in-depth discussion about the technicalities of using the stored data to crawl the connected blockchains.

In the second half of this meeting, CAIP issue 27 was discussed to address amending asset IDs and types with information of whether they have been moved to different chains.

The final topics of discussion were different infrastructure issues, such as incentivizing node operators.

In our fourth meeting, we had an in-depth discussion of CAIP issue 27, focusing on possible edge-cases and risk scenarios for tracking assets across multiple different chains (e.g., what happens during a chain fork? Can asset names change?).

Having the registry on a centralized service like GitHub is suboptimal. Therefore, we discussed using the main Cosmos hub to store information about the different chains during the fifth meeting. Using the Cosmos hub as the center of the Cosmos universe would make sense as a registry. However, adding new features is a time-intensive and slow process.

Afterward, we updated the GitHub registry and discussed the possibility of adding modules to the registry as well (most features are contained in their own modules, so having a registry of the modules available would allow people to inspect the features of any given blockchain).

In our sixth meeting, we updated the registry again and held a quick conversation about adding a health/reliability score to the nodes for each zone saved in the registry.

Because the scope of work on the registry is vast and consumes too much of the UX working group’s time (focused mainly on UX blockchain interoperability), we decided to spin out this registry work into its own working group.

Through the ICF UX working group, we want to build standards and applications for a better UX/DX through a collaborative, open dialogue. To learn more about our work, explore our site.

To participate in the UX Working Group, please join our Telegram group! We’re excited for your contributions!