Why we built Zerowallet

Zerowallet brought to you by Questbook

Zerowallet has been developed by the team behind Questbook.xyz

Questbook is a grants management tool for enabling maximum decentralization processing grants. All the applicants must apply to the grant program via an onchain transaction. That way their data is stored permanently with censorship resistance, and the community can make decisions on who must get the grant and who must not.

We realized the only way to do this is to have all of the user actions must be on chain.

But there were significant drawbacks

Annoying Confirm Buttons

We expect users to have 10-20 actions per session.

If the user has to press on a confirm button on their wallet app/extension each time they have to do a simple action - results in huge user friction.

Confirm buttons were designed for financial transactions. It doesn't make sense to confirm a transaction for every action of the user that needs to be recorded for downstream use.

Gas fees? Yuck

Who likes paying gas fees? Especially for dapps that are looking to onboard new users to crypto - it is impractical to expect the users to install a wallet app, figure out how to buy some tokens for paying gas, transfer it to their wallet and then do a simple in-app actions.

Gas fees is for the crypto-native. We need to let people onboard into dapps without having to hop through all the hoops even if they've had no experience in crypto before. The UX should be at-par as, if not better than, that of traditional websites and apps. You open the app, and start interacting.

Switch chains - is a huge anti pattern

Switching chains is an anti pattern that is probably Metamask's biggest sin. Why should the end user know what is the underlying chain? Does a user need to know the database (Mysql, Postgres, Mongo) the website is using to interact with it? No. Why should they know the blockchain on which their transactions are stored?

Zerowallet lets the developer decide which chain the transactions will be sent to and the transactions are sent there without asking the user to switch networks on their wallet. Because, the user interacting with a dapp that's using zerowallet, they don't even need to have a browser extension or wallet app installed!

We built Zerowallet to give our users at Questbook a great experience interacting onchain. We have now open sourced the library for broader use.