There are 2 things we like at Keyko:
- Building Web3 solutions at scale
- Clients who create products with real impact.
Masa firmly ticks both of those boxes, so we wanted to share a few stories about the work we did (and are still doing) for them.
Please, meet Masa
What we like about Masa is that they tackle a fundamental issue: identity in Web3. Existing solutions, such as Verifiable Credentials (VCs) and Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) have limitations. So the Masa Protocol fixes this by using Soulbound Tokens to represent users’ attributes in Web3 and in the real world.
In short, Masa is the identity infrastructure for developers building Web3 communities.
Since launch, the adoption has been stunning. It has generated over 1,200,000 identifiers for more than 500,000 individuals. Plus, Masa has been selected by Binance Labs for their incubator program. It’s nice to be part of this type of 1%.
We helped them ship
When the Masa team reached out to Keyko 12 months ago, they’d spent 18 months building the software. But they felt they needed help to add scale and industrial strength to their code.
That’s not strange in Web3 land. As our CTO sometimes says: “Building Web3 solutions at scale is like climbing up a mountain. Daunting. Difficult. But like sherpas, we’ve climbed a few mountains before.”
Initially, we dropped a team of 3 Keyko sensei into the Masa team:
- a software delivery expert
- an architect
- and a smart contract developer
Brendan, the CEO, gave us the trust to start pretty much from scratch. Together with the product team, we managed to get to an MVP in 8 weeks. Now, a mere 12 months later, we’ve deployed the Masa protocol on 5 EVM-compatible chains.
We like shipping.
We helped them streamline
To come back to the sherpa analogy from our CTO: sherpas don’t just run up a mountain. Over the years, they have figured out a way to conquer this challenge efficiently.
We’d like to think that part of the success of Masa is that we didn’t just build blindly. Instead, we installed best practices for Web3 development, in 2 ways: architecture and concept.
Initially, Masa was built on enthusiasm. Again: very Web3.
Enthusiasm can get you far, but it’s impossible to scale. Masa tasked us to give their architecture a thorough analysis and upgrade. So we embedded a DevOps person in the team and we created a coherent architecture, streamlined some code bases and spent a good chunk of time on documentation. The result: Masa now has a fully automated architecture, infrastructure as code.
Photo by Lucas Clara on Unsplash
We’ll be honest: it wasn’t always easy. Our first launch for instance could have gone a lot better. But again: we knew what could be improved and the Masa team gave us the chance to take a step back and re-design a few foundational components. So, in 12 weeks time, we developed a protocol SDK.
Apart from streamlining the delivery process, we also had an impact on the product itself. To avoid being driven by shiny tech features and not by user needs, we installed the habit of defining ‘user stories’. It’s a proven methodology and simple to implement. This allowed us to better align the product, tech and business team and focus on building a product that actually gets traction.
With all this in place, we now have the team in ‘constant delivery mode’, shipping features on a weekly basis.
We like processes.
We have an engineer for that
The benefit of being close to the client is that we can spot exciting new technology opportunities.
Obviously, privacy is the cornerstone of building identity solutions in Web3. But at some point it became clear that the tech available to us was a bit meh. Not quite what we needed.
So again, we dropped a Keyko sensei into the Masa team to develop a bespoke solution. That became Masa zkSBT (Zero-Knowledge Soulbound Token), a brand-new token design that provides privacy-preserving and secure storage of private data on any EVM blockchain.
You can read more technical details in this Masa blogpost. But we like a technical challenge.
We brought in talent
Underpinning all this coding wizardry, process management and architecture design is one key element: talent sourcing. Not only do we understand what the client needs, we can drop the right people into your teams, at short notice. And with ‘right people’ we mean: talented, focused on results and nice (karma is a bitch).
At some point in the development of Masa, we realized the front end needed work as well. So our Talent team worked their magic and sourced a front end developer, who understood Web3.
So from an initial set up of 3 fixers, we’ve now embedded a team of 5 into the Masa setup.
Masa CEO, Brendan Playford sums it up:
Keyko has been instrumental in the development, design, delivery and success of Masa, and the game-changing technology we continue to ship to the market at a rapid pace.
We have big plans for 2023, and are excited to be working with Keyko on continuing to build the premier web3 identity and soulbound protocol.
TLDR: You say ‘jump’, … we don’t say ‘how high’
We’re very proud of our partnership with Masa. And we hope it shows our core values: we don’t build blindly.
When a client says ‘jump’, we don’t say ‘how high’.
Instead, we bring in a ‘jumping team’: athletes, but also thinkers and trainers.
We understand the final business and tech goals.
We make a plan.
We share our expertise.
Then we jump higher than you thought we would.
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