Mainstream adoption was a hot topic at the recent Devcon1 conference, with many contributing to the open, honest discussions about how to attract a mainstream audience, one who doesn’t want, or need to understand how the underlying technology works.
In the opening panel, wallet designer, Alex van de Sande explained the i
mportance of appealing to more than just developers and attracting the “elusive mythical creature” known as the average user, someone Van De Sande recognises as being a person, or group of people who have varying different levels of experience and subsequently different needs
“I know for a fact, the average user is not a developer and that is what Ethereum has been so far, a tool for developers
The purpose of the the wallet is actually to breach the gap between the developer and the power user so that if you want to learn more you can, if you want to develop you can, but I hope you don’t need it.”
Last night, Ethereum took a step closer to achieving that realisation with the public launch of the Ethereum wallet, which allows users to hold and send Ether and any cryptocurrency based on Ethereum and create and interact with smart contracts without needing to use the command line.
George Hallam, External relations director explained how the wallet will improve accesibility
“What we’re doing with the wallet is making Ethereum accessible to everyone. With the new graphical user interface and some very clever design decisions, we hope to give any user, regardless of their technical ability, the chance to create value with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain.”
You can find out more about what you can do with the Ethereum wallet in their latest series of posts:
How to build your own cryptocurrency without touching a line of code
How to build a better democracy in under a 100 lines of code