I often see mention of All-in-One Interface as an exclusive feature of AirDAO. And its really cool but only at first glance. Some projects think about it but after all they pass it weighing the all pros and cons. While you get some conveniences that may be interest when you start interact with the ecosystem you also get a single point of failure for the entire ecosystem. This all also leads to some kind of ecosystem centralisation and takes it away from true DeFi.
Lets try to answer just one simple question - What if tomorrow website https://airdao.io will be crashed and returns 404 Not Found or DNS ERROR Unresolvable? Yes, “we have a good tech department”, “we always work on stability and availability”, etc… common responses in such cases. But what if it will be really crashed with few days downtime - it will be big shotgun slug in the head of whole project. Unfortunately. I really hope that even now backends of swap/bridge/stake/etc are located on different Cloud accounts, different billings, etc… and can not be affected by one accident.
The quickest things that comes to mind:
- Problems with cloud providers which lead to downtime.
- Problems with your cloud billing which lead to server shutdowns from Cloud.
- Cloud provider decide to go against Crypto/DeFi and shut all down.
- Search Engines might ban your site from search results (globally or locally for some countries).
- Site or cloud accounds can be hacked, Domains may be stolen.
- DNS problems like Facebook has gone through when did mistake in configuration.
- Any other issue which breaks normal functionality.
I saw all these events in the wild with various projects last years.
And this is only one side of problem puzzle. Another big issue that All-in-One thing gives the Team opportunity to make exit scam whole project in the future just by shutting down central site. This statement needs to be clarified - I am NOT saying the Team is planning this, I am saying its a possibility and its alarming. Its uncomfortable to read but this an obvious thought in the mind of a thinking crypto guy. When news of hacks and scams are regularly reported in crypto field. We cant speak about Decentralization with these problems behind.
One more unpleasant example which can confuse users who are taking their first steps in the AirDAO ecosystem - FirepotSwap. “Developed by Firepot Finance https://www.firepot.finance” this text you can see when you start to interact with it and swap something. But when you visit their site you will not find even a single mention of AMB Swap or any kind of cooperation with AirDAO (maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough). With same luck you could write that it was made by Binance/Uniswap/ElonMusk themselves exclusively for AirDAO. Without confirmation on the opposite side it looks weird.
Do NOT think I am hitting on AirDAO. I really like this project. I have been using it for a long time and I have no doubts about its reliability. These just a couple of uncomfortable questions which are also development points for a great future of AirDAO. What I am getting at is that AirDAO need to transform the project towards decentralization not only in management but also rework it from all sides.
As a DeFi Enthusiast I was in touch with crypto not only by BTC/ETC. I believe in successful future of whole Crypto, Web3, DeFi. I worked with and have mates who do investments, trading, arbitrage, making multi-step exchanges, hunting airdrops, looking for nodes rewards and lots of other crypto activities. And all of the above is really what users pay attention to and what can turn them away from a project.
I do NOT propose to go away from All-in-One Interface. This is still a great thing but it needs to be improved. I propose few changes. All dApps should also have its own Project. Its own GitHub, its own website. The Legendary achievment is its own Team behind and its own Socials/Telegram/Discord. It will look more solid and more trustfully. And it look more reliable in the eyes of the users. Even if main site down they still can interact with ecosystem. This also makes whole ecosystem looks more wider more extensive and expansive when Google leads you not to only one site but to different ones.
Today when hundreds of projects are born and die every day it becomes harder and harder to fight for the attention of the user especially for the attention of experienced users. It is very easy to walk by and never come back because of some wariness or lack of transparency in the project you are analysing. Reputation and trust are hard to gain and very easy to lose. It is possible to have several years of uninterrupted work but after just one suspicious issue lose the trust of users.
What do you think about it? How comfortable are you interacting with AirDAO right now? What was the key reasons for this interface appearance?