Introducing Silicon Craftsmen: The Product and UX Guild on NEAR Protocol

After today, nothing will ever be the same. Today we are launching the Silicon Craftsmen Guild: a community-led working group supported and funded by the NEAR Foundation, whose sole focus is to develop and advance the Web 3.0 Product Design and User Experience (UX) standards.
Great builders know that an excellent product is both an Art and a Science. Silicon Craftsmen founding team is made up of early crypto adopters – OGs with experience with a wide range of protocols, Product Designers – obsessed about the user and building magical experiences, and Builders – creative problem solvers who hustle to make things happen. Now we are uniting under one banner, joining forces under one guild to leverage each others’ knowledge and experience, and, most importantly recruit others like us to help us design the dApps that will onboard the next million users to de decentralised Web 3.0.

The Decoupling

The Flippening is exciting, but have you ever heard of The Decoupling?
The Flippening is the term used to describe the moment when the market cap of Ethereum ‘flips’ (overtakes, becomes larger than) the market cap of Bitcoin. While a fair chunk of the focus is merely given to price action and extrapolating trends, there are increasingly accepted theories around Ethereum becoming more valuable as Ether (ETH) has real use. But, what about the users?

Up until now, developers have had technical constraints at a systems level that largely shaped the User Experience of their products. The sub-par experience has not been an impediment for early growth as the users, builders and investors are often the same people, meaning that they are willing to endure slow and expensive processes full of friction to validate their ideas. 

We define ‘The Decoupling’ as the moment when Users, Builders and Investors start to diverge, entering into cycles of adoption and growth that resemble mainstream tech. For this new stage, good UX will be vital.

Infratructure for Innovation

We have decided to focus all our time and energy advocating for better products and user experiences on the NEAR Protocol blockchain as we believe that Near has solved most of the technical hurdles that were limiting growth while focusing on ease of use. The result is an extremely fast, cheap, secure and composable network that we believe will be the breeding ground for a Cambrian explosion of new decentralised applications. 

Product Demos & Tutorials

We were all noobies once. Frightened by some of the more knowledgeable crypto guys and confused about how to get involved. We are carefully thinking through the Customer Journey of new users and creating a wide range of content to help onboard them, enabling seamless experiences across the Near ecosystem.
As a community we have spent countless hours onboarding people individually, now we are scaling to ensure the information, tips and insights of the most knowledgeable members of our community is available to anyone, anytime. 

Community of Designers and Developers

We want to narrow the gap that exists now between the traditional Product and Design world and the Blockchain Developers ecosystem. We are working towards:

– Creating onboarding experiences for Product Design, UX/UI and creatives, in general, to enter the Blockchain space through Introductory Workshops, networking with existing designers within crypto, collaboration with real projects, among others.

– Content to share the best practices in Product Design for Builders. We want to facilitate the up-skilling of existing teams and facilitate the constant review and improvement of products.

– Creation of content that highlights the key features and developments of the Near blockchain to help attract and onboard new developers.

If you are a creative problem solver and get excited at the thought of being able to contribute the future of the decentralised web, get in touch.