Refract Investor Update July

This is the first investor update of many!

For the sake of transparency and to keep us accountable I'll be posting our monthly investor updates here.

Enjoy

Hey all,

I hope everyone is doing well!

It has been an uncertain environment in the last few months but I'm as optimistic as ever for Refract. We've set up our own no distractions container in Bali and are heads down learning, building and experimenting.

What do we need help with

Beta Testers: If you know of early adopters who are concerned about scams/security when using web3 send them our way.
- These could range from DeFi users who are moving large amounts of money to NFT holders interacting with airdrops.

What have we accomplished

For the last few weeks the focus was on learning and guided wandering.

I'm on my last week of the Macro Engineering Fellowship on track to graduating with honors.
- I am now confident enough to write up pretty much anything in Solidity but I'm now terribly afraid of the security vulnerabilities that may arise.
Nish has been exploring DeFi, NFTs and Zero Knowledge. He's written up a few one-pagers. These can be found here.

Goals for July

As of a few days ago, we put our guided wandering on hold and have transitioned to building.

The problem we're seeing is users are bombarded by scams. Phishing scams, discord/twitter hacks, DNS compromises etc are popping up daily. Web3 makes these extremely painful since mistakes are typically irreversible. Our goal is to make it so that transacting in web3 does not invoke fear.

To validate the demand for this, we'll be building an web extension that hooks into your regular wallet (e.g. metamask) and provides auxiliary information about your transaction. This will start as simple as simulating the transaction to show exactly what you will lose or gain (i.e. improving the metamask UX). It can get as complex as analyzing the smart contract volume, deployment date, etc to flag suspicious behavior.

Our goal for the month is Launch an MVP.

This is not just shipping to beta testers, but simply having a link that anyone share and install. Expect a link in the next investor update :).

Something fun

We've been trying out different forms of exercise. Over the last month we've done boxing, yoga, tennis, basketball and swimming. We might end up leaving Bali as professional boxers. Only time will tell.

Something learnt

The Solidity optimizer is quite poor. It doesn't leverage LLVM IR so it doesn't get all the optimizations "for free". Simple things like ++i vs i++ end up making a difference!

Kind regards, Justin Phu