Q22021 Recap
Since we started Ryder, there was no question that our utmost priority is open building. If you join us since our ideation stage, you know that we are a big advocate of transparency and openness. We firmly believe it is a catalyst for innovation. These values are what we resonate with the most in the space. No more walled gardens, they say. From software to hardware, each maker is always involved in our process. We are proud to say that our entire maker community helped achieve our M1 last quarter and aid in unlocking our next fundable milestone. Let’s see the breakdown of our wins, big or small.
We started Q2 by publishing our genesis blog, which details our origin story, how Ryder came to be, our mission, story, and who we are trying to serve. It was followed by our second maker meetup, where we went over the protocol, product, and growth plan.
Genesis: The Birth of Ryder
After sharing our origin story, Kiki Grammatopoulos, Ryder’s Head of Product, kicked off with the primary research phase for Ryder’s initial design. She conducted a User Product Journey Research: a simple but essential process to gather ideas from our maker community that will be incorporated into Ryder V03’s final form for the upcoming crowdfunding campaign. Kiki will release more details about this process in our next blog post.
In terms of engineering, Marvin wanted to accelerate code contribution in our repos but instantly recognized not having the prototypes was such a big blocker for other makers. Without hesitation, we quickly build and released a Ryder Simulator that enabled all Makers to contribute without the prototypes. In combination, we published the Maker Bounty Program that goes along with it to reward all makers and make everything community-driven at this early stage.
Since we’re a big fan of Syvita and their high-impact contribution within the Stacks ecosystem, we announced a community partnership with the infamous DAO developer guild to help knock out our maker bounties.
Hack away, Makers
Special thanks to @chaz_kiker, @niwim, @oiclid, @simone_squad, @hodlstx, @fmdroid , @janreinhard, and @toms_lucans for their contribution.
Chaz claimed his spot as an all-star Maker within the Ryder community by formalizing the types in ryderserial-proto into TypeScript. You can check his merged PR for the initial refactor of this package into TypeScript. He then followed this with Phase 1 for full implementation of connect with New Maker Bridge. Now, Chaz is closely working with Marvin to fully implement this one. You can check all his merged PRs for this bounty.
Niclas and Oiclid showed their documentation skills by finishing all the Ryder Simulator tutorial bounties. At the same time, @simoneaballard, @hodlstx, @fmdroid,@janreinhard helped Kiki shaped the initial product design for Ryder through their input in the User Product Journey.
Toms Lucans is a new addition to the Maker crew. He is a multi-disciplinary industrial designer with a specific interest in natural materials and sophisticated techniques of engineering and modern manufacturing. Toms is working closely with Kiki to help shape Ryder’s Product Design.
With everyone’s contribution, we were able to complete the following:
Formalize the Ryder Protocol 0.0.2 – is a minimal serial protocol that allows a single application to communicate with the Ryder at a time. The client will have to be aware of the progression of inputs depending on the initial command. The protocol is sufficient for the current stage of development and will be upgraded over time.
Phase 1 for full implementation of connect with New Maker Bridge – This a new Ryder bridge that exposes the Ryder via a WebSocket (similar to that of Trezor Bridge), for use with the Web Extension and other desktop apps.
Concept Design Phase – A closer research on the aspects of human-centred was applied to Ryder with the aid of our maker community and their views and vision on how this generation of hardware wallets could look like for them.
Our maker community is slowly growing. Currently, we have 100 dedicated members in Discord, 341 subscribers in the newsletter, and 407 followers on Twitter. See the figure below for our Community Breakdown.
So, what’s next?
We are slowly expanding our team, focusing on technical design – one that goes alongside the product. We plan to onboard a technical consultant to ensure the highest security similar to that of Ledger and Trezor. We need to achieve a lot of things for Q3, such as our whitepaper, tokenomics, the upcoming structure of our crowdfunding campaign, all of which you can find in our M2 milestones.
Lastly, we are happy to welcome Jack and his team at Square in the hardware arena. We’re glad to see more teams realise our space's UX dilemma and how various hardware approaches can solve it. With that, we want to say it’s a great time to get involved and bring crypto to the first 100 million users. If you’re interested in helping us out, whether in product, growth, or engineering, come and join our Maker community.
