My first Web experience was on a Russian social network called My World which had copies of the Zenga games. I was farming digital vegetables with my internet mates, coordinating the development of my little enterprise over ICQ messenger. Experience of being disconnected for a while — just to come home from school with excitement to check my field and pull the weeds off. It was ... nice. Internet was an exploration, full of unknown people you meet while playing games or visiting their handcrafted pages.

The internet started as a decentralized network — everyone could buy a server, plug it in, and share the text with the other hyperspace-wanderers. The content was not interactive — just some gifs, thick borders, and lots of vibes. Things changed when more people started to use the internet — the network evolved from simple file sharing to support rich interaction, opportunities to socialize, blogging, and personal accounts.

Those innovations brought mass adoption, made large-scale distribution possible, and simplified life for billions. Large platforms orchestrate our interaction with the Web today. They own our music collections, images, and friends lists. We rely on them to search, store emails, and message each other. While useful, they are walled gardens — users can not escape them without bearing the disadvantages. They compete for the data — the most data-rich platforms dominate the market. The Web became focused on consumption, large platforms don’t have any incentives to improve user interaction or experiment.

Blockchains influence the way we build applications — projects replace parts with blockchain as the primary data layer enabling composability, unified identity across the apps, and user-controlled governance. People use a shared global computer instead of a server controlled by someone in Silicon Valley. Companies don’t compete for data accumulation anymore — they share the same underlying source.

The interface reflects those changes: on a microscale, we see new blockchain-specific buttons, transaction fee labels, and authentication options enabled by the wallets. On a macroscale, those changes lead to radically different apps and architectures. We get some of the early Web vibes back — ugly NFTs here and there, illegible account hashes, shared language, and presudononymous accounts running companies and funding projects.

Existing articles on blockchain + interface highlight the lack of qualities exhibited by typical consumer platforms — convenience, simplicity, and clear communication. To reach mass adoption, those articles say, we need to remove friction, rethink terminology, and decrease the costs. Those are legitimate considerations, but they are not helpful guiding principles on how to think about an interface for the blockchain app. We do not want to achieve a better experience — we need a different kind of experience. It is too easy to fall into the same problems as the previous generation of applications if you try to achieve “frictionless” at any cost.

Interface in a blockchain world reflects the underlying system more than in a typical app — application logic is bound with the data and often immutable. Blockchain interfaces are somewhat floating — they provide a different view of the single source. They levitate near the same smart contract, a piece of code & the data running on the blockchain, but penetrate various edges of the Web. Those interfaces may function as gatekeepers — hiding certain information or restricting access for targeted individuals. However, they do not control the application logic and data — users engage with an app if the prioritization brings personal advantages.

Those qualities — the openness and the bounding of logic and the data— influence the mindset of the application builders, available funding options, and the interaction within a Web. Blockchain started as the antidote to a government monopoly on the financial system, but its influence has broad implications on our social fabric. In this text, we will consider the politics of the interface, the design of the modern interface, and the changes that the blockchain ecosystem brings to the platform-dominated Web. Emergence (or harmony-seeking as Christopher Alexander would say it) of blockchain-powered applications brings a more nomadic digital experience — continuous movement from the platform to platform is the new norm.

Politics of the interface

We can approach everything as an interface. Our body is an interface (or a medium!) through which our brain interacts with a physical world. The city is an interface through which we make friends and access services. An interface is an abstract place in which any communication happens — human to human, human to machine, or machine to machine. Public discourse on the interface considers mostly digital systems.

Interfaces rarely single-handedly influence politics, but they are political — we develop applications within a specific system and reinforce its values and properties. Interfaces are the places of last resort — available design options shaped by the underlying business logic and the data. The key to understanding the modern interfaces is to understand their relationships to the politics that produce them.

Typical digital application today is built out of 3 different layers — data ↔ logic ↔ interface. Engineers design those applications separating the concerns — those layers should not be mixed. They work separately and each has a specific role. The interface layer is often called a view or presentational layer — it presents the data that was picked and organized by the logic. It’s responsible to supply and capture the data taken from and written back to the server database.

Web platforms are the most popular digital applications. They operate like governments and often take the same functions within the digital space — controlling identity and access, powering the majority of infrastructure, and policing public spaces. Fierce battles among them are for the ownership of data. It’s what keeps users on a platform and generates profits. Governments, similar to the platforms, benefit from the continuous supply of data. They’re the operating systems. Post indexes, permanent addresses, maps, surnames, and passports — are all technologies designed to improve the visibility of people for the state. It then provides an interface — ambulance, pension, identity verification, copyright enforcement, scholarships. Governments' and platforms' strains are not surprising — they compete over the same goals while their internal politics differ.

The politics behind the interface design is the same politics used by a state to run its operations. The end goal is to collect and process as much relevant data as possible. Modern interfaces reflect these goals — they are designed for frictionless consumption to produce more data.

Governmental services in a democracy can’t exchange data without the explicit agreement of citizens. Specific information may be exchanged between the agencies only with permission. That is not the universal case. The Soviet Union operated as a corporation. It didn’t need an API to exchange the citizens’ data. The country’s private interests were “internal market capture, the avoidance of the transaction costs of the capitalist market, and the concentration of power to itself”. Centralization would ensure the best possible outcome for the nation. Only if we learn to follow the directives and supply more data to the center. Directives and reports were a way for the Soviet state to see and control its economic activity. If it wants to win the race, it has to collect more data to make better decisions for the economy.

The interface of the centralized platforms takes the same role as the fill-in reports in the Soviet Union — capturing data and delivering it back to the center. They seek to control and have all available knowledge over user activity. The switching costs arise not from the superior user experience and continuous innovation, but from the lock-in, that interface helps to create.

The latest iteration of the Web was supposed to enable composability through public APIs — fetch data from the website, extend the functionality, create a custom client, or plug it into your blog. You didn’t use Twitter from the official mobile app — you would reach for a Tweetbot for a chronological feed and reduced ads. You just needed to permit to use your account. Once those platforms scaled — benefitting from the virtuous cycle created by public APIs and open access — they’ve restricted, throttled, or removed APIs. You should access Twitter only from the official app. The promise of composability has failed. Most people don’t occasionally download apps anymore — their internet is reduced to a small number of closed networks. In most African countries, Facebook is the internet.

Most of us never pay Google for their services: free search, free personal email with storage, fonts, video hosting, unified account, analytics. The company is optimizing for legibility. Their mission is literally to index all the internet. Website owners who decide to place free Google Analytics to iterate on the product, style their website with Fonts, or enable Sign-In with Google, snooping on their users on behalf of Google. It creates a better model for the company. We pay Google to advertise on Google. It concentrates the power to itself.

While we enjoy free services, companies like Google try to extract more value from the larger audience on the scale. Incentives are not aligned with those of the free plan users — companies constantly change the interface to nudge user behavior towards their needs. We don’t pay directly, but we cover the costs with our data. This model is corrupt — it doesn’t have any incentives to radically change the way people work with an email, collaborate on the document, or search the internet. Google Chrome is a browser designed for you to get lost, search for information at their website, and click on the advertisement. Its interface is a direct result of those needs — to capture as much data as possible, to increase the legibility of an algorithm. The company builds the tools to optimize data collection — either through direct reporting or through incentivizing snooping and punishing wrong-doing.

It’s a win-lose situation — you have to use Google, or otherwise, your business can’t compete. You have to use Facebook services or you isolate yourself from the network. Even though the architecture of the web is decentralized, small companies can’t compete with large platforms to attract enough customers or execute fast. It is not much different from the way governmental services work. Business owners have to submit information about their employees to the government to calculate pensions or enforce taxes. You can’t choose to use a pension fund run by a private company — you have to trust the government with it. The difference is that those structures are public goods — they aren’t free to run, but citizens cover them with taxes. They may be poorly operated, but we have a choice to vote for change.

The Soviet Union centralized the data, but it didn’t help in the long rung. During the Cold War, the capitalist model ensured better outcomes for the population. It aggregated “the poorly codified knowledge that implicitly guides the behavior of market participants”. Local and context-specific data was more beneficial than the often noisy and unrelated data from the larger pool.

The autocratic nature of Web platforms is a result of underlying structures. They are designed to collect as much data as possible, to lock users inside the platform. Once all your friends and family are there — you can’t just painlessly leave them. There is no exit. It has to be a whole social layer that moves — as young adults moved to Snapchat once their parents came to Facebook — we have to move elsewhere together. Those should not be the new alternatives like Tiktok or Clubhouse, but platforms with a radically different organization and user interaction.

Design as legibility making

The design itself is an act of legibility-making: designers organize the objects, Web pages, or fashion around needs or tasks. Successful design is legible for the intended user. The majority of kettles, perhaps, are similar in their technological components. The difference is how those kettles organize those components around the needs. A cheap plastic kettle is easy to clean — it is more suitable for the office environment. A durable steel kettle fits personal use — it provides tactility and a better look. The context of the kettle influences the form. Christopher Alexander, the architect & writer, describes an example above in his “Notes on Synthesis of the Form”. The book talks about the importance of context to define the design problem. The object takes the form derived from the forces within the context. Alexander's consideration of the context assumes that we design for the people — how they live, think and interact with the world around them. Modern tools aren’t designed around the user — their design powers the algorithm. The quality of the model that delivers results to the user depends on the amount of supplied data — it is clever to optimize the interface around those needs. User-centric design still exists in the industries where the fast feedback loop is rare — when designing Apple products or manufacturing cars. Tesla designs cars with its self-driving algorithm in mind: it constantly receives updates over the internet. The algorithm is a first-class citizen in modern design — its needs are the top priority. Phenomen is better visible in the physical world. Post-Anthropocene architecture, as defined by Liam Young, signifies the end of human-centered design: “the movement towards hard-drive-centered design, LIDAR-centered design, and autonomous-car-centered design”. Examples are Tesla gigafactories and Amazon sorting facilities. Their design is for machines to be productive, not humans.

Picture from Strelka Mag. “LANDSCAPES OF THE POST-ANTHROPOCENE: LIAM YOUNG ON ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT PEOPLE” by Timur Zolotoev

In Seeing like an algorithm, Eugene Wei performs an analysis and the rise of Tiktok. Its design is perfectly made for an algorithm to see the actions of the users. You only see one video at a time and quickly express an opinion by swapping it up or down. Compare it to Youtube, where the user has a handful of options to pick from. Users can even explore and watch the video in parallel. Tiktok interface makes it easy to train the algorithm, to show the videos that have a higher likelihood of not being swiped, but watched 😎, liked 😍, or commented 😗💬.

We don’t try to expand human consciousness with computers anymore — platforms designed around consumption, not creation. Instead of empowering people to find interesting content for themselves, we provision the algorithms to do that job for us. Instead of supporting rich social interactions and communal discovery, we outsourced curation to the machines.

In the mentioned above example of the Soviet Union, a larger corpus of data available to the center didn’t lead to better outcomes — the country was flooded under the ever-growing bureaucracy. More than 40% of the population was involved in the bureaucratic processes. To handle and perform the directives, people had to write accounts of their work. Workers often received orders and quotes in a specialized format that they could not understand. Most of the employees didn’t have any higher education, and some of them could not read. Factories had to hire extra personnel to interpret those orders and maintain relationships with Moscow. Viktor Glushkov, a Soviet cyberneticist, estimated in 1960 that growing bureaucracy within the union would rise fortyfold by 1980. It would have taken the entire adult population to manage all the paperwork.

If we look at Google as a state, its “algorithm” created a whole class of people that only job is to follow the directives of algorithms. SEO managers’ job is to optimize websites for algorithmic legibility — to ensure that PageRank™️, Google’s search algorithm, finds the websites. Their routine consists of bad practices — adding keywords, and repeating the same word multiple times. They have no incentive to improve Google Search results — their job is dependent on the limitations of the algorithm. As David Graber would put it, we live in a world full of “bullshit jobs” whose work matters only within the context. Modern capitalism faces some of the challenges of the late Soviet Union.

Users perceive a continuous reduction of Google Search quality. The company prioritizes short-term revenue from advertising over quality. Misalignment of incentives doesn’t produce good results — platform strategy is radically different from the users’ wants.

Google is designed around its advertisement algorithm — it also made the whole Web designed around it. It’s not the only one — companies like Airbnb have a weirder effect on the physical world — making touristic places around the world look the same — so they create a feeling of trust on the Airbnb website. Their inner economies aren’t much different from the Soviet Union which made the whole population work on its human-run algorithm. We are all working for an apparatchik.

When Instagram chooses to prioritize shopping instead of other features, it declares that this is what “users want”. How do they know what people want? They track and analyze patterns of behavior. Then they optimize the interface to increase the company’s metrics. This model is the opposite of “technological determinism”. Its assumption is based on the idea that the public produces technology, not that technology produces the public. It’s hard to argue with the argument — platforms usage is growing, which means people are happy. Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t just want you to make “metafriends” 🤑, your data showed that you want it!

The majority of the articles that include the topic of blockchain and interface focus on designing frictionless experiences and reducing complexity. The same way that incumbent platforms do. We should not take friction as the top priority. Take an example from urban planning: if we design frictionless experiences for transportation, we build car-centric infrastructure with high-speed roads that prioritize individual experience from the start. Eventually, we face problems — the drivers don’t respect the speed limit, they damage the lives of others, and most people spend hours every day in traffic. We then try to solve the problems by policing the drivers with speed-limit cameras and fines, paywalling highways and building more roads or tunnels. The solution, perhaps, would be not to build highways in the first place, prioritizing common experience over an individual. Curvy roads in the cities create friction for the drivers but incentivize them to respect the speed limit. Driving a bike isn’t as comfortable as driving a car, but it creates positive externalities for society and efficient transportation for all. The web was designed as the highway, but we need a different approach for the blockchain-powered internet.

Curvy roads in The Netherlands. The photo was taken from “The city for the humans” (translated from Russian) Telegram public channel

If we want to create better public systems with the blockchain, we should develop new patterns and step away from previous assumptions about user interaction. We should move away from the algorithm-centric interface design and prioritize coordination, ownership, and continuous movement from the platform to the platform. We should be careful when reducing friction for the individuals and focus on communal experience and accessibility.

Open Networks

Blockchain provides an alternative to the traditional data↔logic↔interface paradigm with a single actor in charge. Network effects are born around the chain rather than the corporation or the state. Sign in with Google benefits users but through the sacrifice of control. Sign-in with Blockchain, in contrast, is available for everyone and shared as a vital infrastructure. Its networks effects benefit everyone. The network is a public good. Data and logic are bounded — everyone can build an interface on top. From the best of two worlds, shared and important data accumulates on the chain while the access is permissionless and available for everyone to process.

Networks should not be private — if my credit score or friends list are essential parts of my digital living — we should have them publicly available for everyone to build on. You have to be in control and give permission to the platforms to access your list, not the other way around. It has to be centered around me, not around the corporation or the state. It wasn’t possible in a traditional model — there had to be some form of enforcement of trust either through the government or the platform that stores your data.

Closed networks tend to become public once they become critical for the well-being of society. Previously one had to be from a higher social class or pay for access to enjoy the greenery. Parks in Shanghai ruled by the Brits during colonization welcomed Europeans exclusively — only a small number of Chinese people were honored to access them. Society figured that access to greenery should be a common good, owned and shared by the public. Free park access within the city is unquestionable today.

Blockchain applications have stronger network effects than incumbent platforms. The supplied data is coming from countless places at the same time — it can be freely processed and analyzed. It may result in better AI models that benefit the graph, and a variety of interfaces that serve different needs. If you want to build a social network, you don’t need to convince your friends to move their activities to a new platform. Their data is already there. When you interact with a blockchain app, you may not realize that the other users interacted with it from a different context.

Instead of solving the flaws of the Web from the top — enforcing user data laws through GDPR and regulation — blockchains are solving problems from basic principles. What if platforms like Instagram would never have power over the user data? What if the user would be the one that gives and takes permissions back? The change is not just about the ownership and the data — it’s about the embodiment that blockchain enables. Instead of reducing our interaction to a restricted set of activities to feed the algorithm, we embed the data with the value.

Rather than saying “this is what users want” as Mark Zukerberg does, people are empowered to choose based on their identity, inner motivation, and agency. Movement within the blockchain-powered services is painless — the network is open for everyone. People actively participate in protocol governance, vote for upgrades, and collectively decide the allocation of the funds. Some of them build skate parks in San Francisco. Others collectively train AI artists and organize exhibitions. From passive consumers, crypto adopters become participants in a rich public life. We don’t need to optimize for consumption anymore to collect as much as possible — the data is publicly available for everyone to build on top of it. Those changes require us to design around a different kind of user and behavior.

What does constitute the “chain”? In Ethereum blockchain, for example, “smartcontracts” form the network. They are the interface & the data storage at the same time. You don’t need Google to store your data. Protocol standardization makes it easy to distinguish specific content. NFT is an example of such — they have a simple structure representing ownership and metadata. Together those NFT contracts form the network of protocols.

Those new public networks are “Hyperstructures” (Jacob, the co-creator of the Zora protocol, introduced the term). The difference between Hyperstructures and platforms is in the immutability of their logic. There are no admins that can single-handedly upgrade the code of the protocol, no proxies or intermediaries.

Hyperstructures are free to use. They don’t belong to anyone. They don’t require a corporation or the government to run or maintain it. Entities are working to improve the protocols, expand the utility, and write better code, but they are funded and run by the protocol itself. Hyperstructures don’t degrade over time like traditional infrastructure — those protocols will run forever, as long as the chain exists.

India has its version of the social graph (Aadhaar) as a public property — your information and reputation are available to the business, but people have limited control. The government enforces trust and security. Blockchain allows us to build those public networks independent from the government and reduce the operational costs to zero. Blockchains’ inbound data storage and interface encourage systems that don’t need anyone to run them. The greater scale of those algorithms creates more positive externalities for everyone who participates in those networks.

This new public infrastructure accommodates new citizens. Together they built new independent systems that run outside of traditional platforms. They often self-fund their operations, they don’t have “shares” or boards of directors. Most of their logic is autonomous.

Life onchain

Communities soon will hang out in a place that does not exist yet, but it will not be a platform as we know it. It will not be a specific place, but a more digitally native, hyperconnected collection of places eternally living on the blockchain. For some, it is a crazy fantasy on the outskirts of the internet. For others, it is a reality they live in today. "It's crawling out of the dark forest", as pointed out in this article.

Blockchain makes it easy for the whole social layer to move from one platform to the other. Communities do not live on a specific platform — like Facebook Groups or Discord — they live on a public chain. As a group, they utilize a variety of tools for governance, gatherings, and communication. Platforms have no incentives to close up into walled gardens anymore — unhappy communities or specific users may easily find alternatives and access their network from elsewhere.

The core of those emerging communities is bonded by collective ownership or participation in the same network — they may together own small pieces of artwork, share pieces from a collection, or run a project collectively. They are formed around the arbitrary point of connection. They differ from a typical fanfiction community — those groups do not solely exist in a private chat — they may recognize each other on different platforms using a shared credentials system. Even when they interact with an anonymous personality from one platform, they can verify that it’s the same person on the other.

Those communities are the places to run experiments in human coordination, governance, and value production. They create internal recognition systems, buy physical properties, and establish frameworks to govern and vote collectively. They are the “moving castles” — Trust group describes them as “a nomadic patchwork of different spaces of mutating and incoherent scale”. They work on the common narrative — collectively work to establish a lexicon and rituals. The inhabitants of “moving castles” are digital nomads — they seasonally move from one place to the other without losing the touch with each other. They have mechanisms to make decisions together and codify the rules. They try to achieve financial sustainability, collectively approve the grants, and sponsor projects. They were born onchain. Their activity eternally lives there.

How do those communities recognize each other? In the blockchain-powered internet, the chain takes the role that was typically run by the governments or centralized platforms. Blockchain is a new source of truth. It replaces the functions that are typical for governments or centralized platforms — identity, ownership enforcement, copyright, and monetary policy.

NFT is the essential protocol within the blockchain. They are the records on the smart contract that specify the ownership of digital items following the protocol. Some say they are the new medium, while others argue that they are the envelopes to “wrap around the medium”. Either way works. Critiques mistakenly think that the NFTs enforce the uniqueness of the items. Thus they don’t understand why to adopt crypto to solve that problem — prove uniqueness with the image hash, disable screenshots, paywall. Restrict-prevent-disable!!! It is missing the point.

There is nothing about your house that says that it’s yours. You may have a door-lock, train an angry dog, dig a ditch around it, but there is still nothing inherently about it that proves your ownership. If you don’t live in your house, it may be squatted. The state makes ownership possible — if someone approaches to enter your property, you call the police.

It is the logic behind NFT — the blockchain app can see the value of your NFT and approve collateral for your loan. Ownership may open events run by the community. You can’t do that if you “copy-paste” the image. You can’t do that if Twitter operates the system. It doesn’t have enough legibility to prove that the owner is legitimate. It’s too focused on itself. Wherever the author created their NFT, the network may find the owner and see all the actions that ever happened to it.

The power of NFTs is that it’s recognized by the network, not the state-enforced copyright, not by Twitter or other private corporations. The “unrecognition” by the state is not a liability unless you buy a physical property as NFT. Communities utilize NFTs to belong, reward each other, to embed value.

People are used to the internet — they judge NFTs from the perspective of the information — if I can easily copy the image, why would I want it? Value and information are bonded into NFTs. They are digital objects. Similar to physical items, they accumulate history and information over time. Once a community of holders decides to gather together and build projects with them, underlying NFTs accumulate value.

NFTs are inevitably unique — sometimes not visually or from the beginning, but through the history that they accumulate. “NFTs as objects” metaphor is helpful for the design — every verb that applies to the real object applies to the NFTs. They can be divided into pieces, transferred, exchanged, staked, and rented. They can age, adapt to conditions or display useful information. They are the artifacts. Unlike anything else on the internet, they get more valuable when they age gracefully. Don’t dismiss them.

Together with the tokens for internal currency, NFTs are the essential primitives for the communities to find each other across the platforms, exchange value, and prove ownership. Once we understand how blockchain native communities live, share, and work digitally, we can grasp how to build interfaces and utility for them.

Towards floating interfaces

In reality, most of the end-user applications run their logic on top of the model. But they are restricted by capabilities on underlying blockchain smart-contract.

Smart contracts bond data with logic. Anyone can create a model for it — you can train AI on top of the data, run another contract that interacts with it, or directly build an app. The community can run their filters — curating the relevant content that is appropriate for the context. The interface is way more important than the possession of the data.

I call interfaces built on top of smart contracts “floating” — they live across countless websites. If the traditional web interface reflects the underlying database and business logic, the blockchain interface represents the underlying public network.

Floating interfaces have to keep the ever-changing conditions in mind — the state of the network changes from anywhere at any time. Once you add a transaction to the blockchain, you submit it to the rest of the world. Instead of hanging over the responsibility to the centralized platform, you share responsibility for the network with others. When you add the content, you change its state for everyone who relies on the structure.

You can submit data directly to the blockchain without any interface at all. The blockchain-native game, DarkForest, provides a glimpse into that future. Winners are often gamers who developed their plugins or other clever ways to interact with the game. They optimize routines and develop tools for coordination with other players. Anyone can run their community round — you do not need a centralized server or any other infrastructure after the contract deployment. Anyone can create the interface for the core logic to gain the edge.

Darkforest interface. From https://blog.zkga.me/

Stephen Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack and Flickr, once said that most websites are simple forms on top of the database. Their design is often the reflection of that underlying source.

To send a message in chat = to write to a private database.

“Organizations design systems that mirror their communication structure.” (Conway’s law). Similarly, the website interface is just a reflection of its underlying source of data. If it does not exist in a database, the interface will not reflect it. Emergent blockchain interfaces mirror the communication of “smart contracts” mixed with the logic of the interface provider. Relationships between the database and the interface aren’t that direct.

If you ever interacted with Ethereum, you probably had to sign the transactions several times and pay the fees to achieve your goal. For example, to buy NFT, you first sign a transaction to allow the marketplace to use your funds. After that, you can proceed to pay for the asset. Following the Conway law, those problems are good to have. They reflect the inner workings of the system. It highlights the user agency over the process and ensures explicit agreement with every action on-chain.

Museum of Pompidou

In high-tech architecture (example above), the structure of the building is the design of the building. This approach is either criticized for the reduction of design to its technological aspects or praised for the contextualization of conditions that produced the building. This way, the problems of design form are highlighted. The experience of reading the code of the blockchain’s smart contract is like looking at high-tech architecture.

Coding a "smart contract" is to map relationships. There is no separation of application logic and the database. You begin with an idea of interaction in mind. Building an app interface on top of it is like building a facade, but the contract itself is the ultimate building you interact with. Similar to high-tech architecture, this contract could be a piece of art by itself once presented as the code without any facade.

The form of this Ukrainian town is an interface for the citizens in which they perform their collective orders. It is a direct representation of the hierarchy and social responsibilities within the city. There is no need to have formal governance and decision-making over who is working next — it's a minimal example of a self-governing system where “data” (who suppose to work and when) is inseparable from the application. Its form is a code.

In this context, you can consider floating interfaces as filters or gatekeepers. The latter is in tension with its underlying source of the data. Specific interfaces or APIs may decide not to show the unsuitable content. OpenSea maintains the most popular NFT API — once it removes an image for a copyright violation or some other reason — it disappears from all the subscribers. However, the data is still available and can be accessed from other APIs or directly from the chain.

This presents a challenge and an opportunity. How do we design an interface that has to adapt and display thousands of tokens? Spam is inevitable. Uniswap, the most popular smart contract & decentralized currency exchange, successfully deals with that problem. They’ve introduced community-powered lists to curate tokens. Users can create their lists or subscribe to the popular ones run by their friends or someone they trust. While the rest of the tokens are available to us, we are free to select our filters.

Uniswap is largely successful because the interface is a direct representation of the underlying smart contract*. When interacting with such an interface, users have a sense of direct manipulation of the data in the smart contract. Users have better confidence in the results of their actions than in many other blockchain applications.

Etherscan, the other essential service in the Ethereum blockchain ecosystem, helps users to track all their actions with the blockchain. It provides a simple interface for every smart contract — you can directly write and look up the information from the chain. It maps all the functions to simple forms, buttons, and inputs. You can interact with a blockchain without leaving Etherscan whatsoever. This approach opens up new exciting opportunities for interface design.

Blockchain's rapid creation of protocols and "data-logic bond" create the conditions for the new type of apps. You do not need an access key to the API. You do not need to authorize the app through Google, Facebook, or Apple to build anything. You do not need to go through numerous developer documentation.

Interfaces can adapt to the user needs conditionally — it is possible to create generative apps. You can render different interfaces based on the protocol:

NFT contract → shows the image, unique properties, and history.

Contract with the tokens → number, price on the market, recent fluctuation.

To simplify rendering, we can have a registry of community filters. We can use existing languages or have a templating language of our own similar to CSS. This way, applications can be easy to fork and manipulate while preserving logic and transparency.

We know that smart contracts are immutable — it ensures that the generative app works without the need to update it. It will not change when a corporation wants you to watch more ads or try a new feature. Spotify’s promise to shareholders to increase podcast adoption will not affect your music library. You use the app on your terms. You are in the center of that universe.

Blockchain started with the idea to decentralize money — in the public consciousness is still just that. It is like the monetization of every relationship, is not something that can be shared, co-owned, and cultivated for the public good. Crypto has a specific heritage — to create digital non-institutionalized money. Thus the interaction and available metaphors are derived from that heritage. All interactions with the chain happen through the applications knowns as wallets. They help us cryptographically sign transactions, send funds to each other, and enter the applications. They also render our items — such as NFTs and various tokens.

Your relationships with the chain are centered inside those apps. The term wallet does not comprehend all the richness and importance of interactions. It may contradict our values or intentions from those interactions. The wallets are like spaces — they are similar to our rooms where we keep the shelves with books or posters on the walls. Some are private and personal. We welcome friends and guests in others. When we interact with the blockchain, we do not go to an external website or an app anymore. We can interact with the chain from our little space.

The term doesn’t capture, however, the interactions with the outside world. Kei Kreutler proposed the term “avatars” along with “inventories”. They are the representation of our identities in the digital world. We carry our baggage, our communities, and our belongings along with ourselves.

I think about this kind of app as the browser for the blockchain. In its essence, it is similar to Apple’s HyperCard, which allowed non-coders to write apps. Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, mentioned: “I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I would grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser”.

The invention of the Web browser is, perhaps, singlehandedly responsible for the mass adoption of the internet. On a surface, it’s a renderer of the content — transcluded images, links, and markup. Its design resembles a window into someone’s private server — it handles the bidirectional interaction and allows to read/write to the database. Browser innovations are often limit and extend the possibilities of the web in general — the interface that developers can produce is limited by browser abilities to render them.

How a blockchain browser, designed for collectorship and exploration, look like?

Conclusions

Blockchain enthusiasts are often technologically deterministic. The common thesis is that blockchain is flattening social hierarchies; it’s optimized for the common good while preserving individual sovereignty, right to the exit, and anonymity. Blockchain makes it impossible for people to trick the system, for corruption and unfairness to remain unrecognized. We will reach the state of “Nash equilibrium”, a perfect balance when no one has incentives or enough information to cheat. That is yet to be proven.

At some point, the Soviet Union have decided to fix its data processing problems. OGAS project, famously known as an attempt to create a Soviet Internet, had addressed the question of bureaucracy. Soviet cyberneticists had a clear goal in mind: the purpose of the state-wide network was not solely information sharing, but decentralization of economic activity. They wanted to send directives over the wire. You might be surprised that the Soviet Union, reminiscent of state-wide corruption and abuse of power, even attempted to deploy a decentralized network. In the book “How Not To Network a Nation”, Benjamin Peters writes: “Cybernetic economists quickly learned a point that network theorist Alex Galloway has subsequently clarified: control does not necessarily dissipate with decentralized or distributed networks. It exists in the protocols and the (network) administrators and their rulings, and planning protocols were periodically scrambled. Instead of accounting for production by volume, piecemeal targets were set after decentralized planning decisions. Instead of empowering and streamlining the local economy, the decentralizing reforms enraged the old guard in Moscow against its reformer and enlarged the nation’s economic administrative apparatus”.

A small group of people controls the majority of blockchain protocols. It’s too early to judge the results — adoption always starts within a circle of technologically fluent populations. It requires a massive effort to make it work for the rest, to empower the next generation of communities to inhabit and govern those systems. Technologies are both artifacts and agents of change. While it’s beneficial to imagine the possibilities of publicly available blockchain data, we first need to build those systems and applications.

Blockchain interfaces should satisfy the needs of those new communities that seek collaboration, communal digital experience, and value ownership and integrity. We have to design floating interfaces — flexible spaces to help the communities customize and adapt their experience with contextual knowledge. We shouldn't lock them into the platforms. By designing for a communal experience, we should design with friction rather than eliminating it. Internet once was decentralized and fun — we should not let it slip once again.