Nathan James Interview — Scatter Founder

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Foton Technologies

For new users, using blockchain sometimes may feel like a not so natural experience, like it is with other non-blockchain services

Nathan James, the Founder of Scatter

For new users, using blockchain sometimes may feel like a not so natural experience, like it is with other non-blockchain services.

To solve this problem Nathan James founded Scatter, a platform that helps to make the use of blockchain services easy and comfortable.

We’ve also got very curious about this issue, so this week we’ve had a conversation with him, so we can get to know Scatter better and how they are working to improve general user experience on the blockchain.

What Is Scatter?

There’s a lot of very intricate technology under the hood, but put simply; Scatter is a way to use blockchain accounts and applications safely.

In some ways, it is similar to using Facebook or Google login along with something like a built-in ApplePay or PayPal, but all of a user’s information is only owned by that user and never by any central company
that can restrict your access or mine your data.

Why Did You Create Scatter and Which Opportunity You Saw to Start It?

Really, I wanted to make blockchain applications and just couldn’t because something like Scatter didn’t exist.

Scatter took on a life of its own once developers starting working with it and it turned into a passionate primary focus for me and our team instead of just a stepping stone. The problems surrounding user-experience in blockchain aren’t a myth, and we’re constantly working on easier ways for new users who don’t understand blockchain to feel just as comfortable and safe as they do with other non-blockchain services.

How Is Your Business Model? Do You Charge for Every Transaction?

For the most part, using Scatter is 100% free. We don’t charge any fees if you send tokens or use applications. Instead of making our wallet be something that takes from the user, we try to make it into something that gives back to the user and allows them (or the apps they are using) to support us in good faith.

The services that end up making us revenues are always optional services like the built-in token exchange and referrals from applications inside our explorer.

In the cases of fees (for exchange for instance), we try to keep the fees as low as possible (bancor exchanges, for instance, don’t have any fees at all) so that it doesn’t hinder both user experience and expectations. For referrals, it’s never the user who incurs a cost but rather the app. We also have our RIDL (Reputation and Identity Layer) system which has paid elements to it, but again are completely optional.

What’s the Technology Behind Scatter?

At this point, this is a rather long-tailed question. A lot of the components that make up Scatter are proprietary elements such as our socket layers, login mechanisms, and whitelisting systems; which other larger wallets are starting to integrate as well. We’ve been leading the charge in terms of security and privacy-centric wallet advancements for a while and since we’re open source it allows easy access for other wallets to benefit from our hard work and help the blockchain space as a whole. As far as our stack goes; we are using JavaScript, VueJS, and Electron as the language/frameworks of choice which has both benefits (instant multi-platform support) as well as drawbacks (large file-sizes and CPU/RAM consumption).

Could You Remind Which Was the Biggest Technical Challenge Related to Scatter Development?

Though we focus a large percentage of our time on the security elements of Scatter, It’s always user-experience which is the biggest challenge.

Security is more often than not a rather binary outcome. Either something is secure or it isn’t and if it isn’t patches are usually very straight forward to implement.

User-experience, on the other hand, is something that evolves over time based on our interactions with our users and our increasing understanding of their needs. The hardest thing about creating simple interfaces is that at this point a lot of us on the team understand blockchain in a way that most people never will and that leaves us in a very hard position to make choices
about even simple things like naming conventions or what to parts of account management and blockchain usage to automate. It further complicates things when we have power users that use Scatter and want access to some of the things we try to automate (like gas fees, or account permissions). There’s a never-ending supply of things to do in blockchain… and we couldn’t be happier about that!

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