AMA with Xen Baynham-Herd
Top launch of the week AMA:
Welcome, @xenbh.eth, who launched /roam, last week!
Reply below with your questions.
- @xenbh.eth Roam is one of the most beautiful consumer crypto apps. Where do you and the team get inspiration from?That’s nice of you to say. We’ve all been working in crypto on consumer products for quite a while. So we’ve learnt a lot from building products at Coinbase and Blockchain.com. Today there are also some great crypto consumer products - like Zora, Warpcast for example.
- From @samantha: What's next for Roam?We’ll be improving the core experience of social discovery (via the feed) and making the onchain browser more useful and performant. We’re also getting lots of helpful feedback from people here on Farcaster which is helping us prioritize new features.
I assume the next big browser/search engine has a good chance of being AI focussed, what was the main reason for focussing on crypto instead?We think that both of these platform changes will be critical for the next generation of browsers! But right now a big part of our mission is getting more people able to connect to the onchain web from mobile, because it's an underserved area.- Browsers are a massive product category dominated by trillion dollar companies What makes you optimistic that Roam can compete?There are several technology platform changes happening at the moment, and not many of the incumbents are interested in entering the crypto world (at least for now). We think this creates a huge opportunity for a team to serve the users who want the best mobile onchain browsing experience.
- What's the #1 problem you wanted to solve with version 1 of Roam?For a user to be able to go from social discovery (via the feed) to transacting, in a few clicks.
- Origin of logo?We see crypto as adding a new dimension to the web - onchain. The logo is a flattened view of a 3d axis, where you have the x axis, the y axis and also the z axis. It represents the idea of expanding the internet.
- Browser tabs feels like a top-down view of pulling a drawer full of files, was it intended like that? If yes, why?It was intended to feel 3d and tactile. You may notice it’s designed in a similar way to the old school Safari tabs - when they used to be arranged like a deck of cards. A lot of people really loved that design and were upset when Apple changed it!
- What were some of the biggest technical challenges on the iOS app? How did the team overcome it?Building a highly secure browser and a highly secure wallet natively that work together and exist outside of the javascript ecosystem was challenging. Our core devs were previously responsible for building the hot/cold wallets at Coinbase, so they bring lot's of experience. We’re publishing a blog post on this soon.
How do you explain Roam to your 70 y/o parents in 1 sentence?Well, they now understand what crypto is, so I tell them we’re building a browser for using crypto websites.- Read the QAs but: Is Roam possible for android in the near future? How cool would it be for Roam to have a token of its own ($ROAM) and users could gain roam-points while using the browser?! (I'm not a dev obviously my questions are so basic) Can we expect completely free access to roam freely for all users? @xenbh.ethOn Android: not yet but not never! We want to collect feedback and iterate on the iOS app before expanding onto other platforms.