Developers are a reserved bunch of individuals since they work behind the scenes but in essence, the work they do could make or break a project. A cryptocurrency or blockchain project is a business in itself and developers play a crucial role in distinguishing a business from competitors and helping it become more competitive. Lucid, through their proposal seeks to refurbish the developer ecosystem as they realize that a developer’s efforts help to improve the clients’ experiences, bring more feature-rich and innovative products to market, and make setups more safe, productive, and efficient.

Lucid in a Nutshell

Lucid is an open-source library written in JavaScript, to help you create transactions and off-chain code, for your Plutus contracts, using different platforms, be it a browser, mobile, desktop, or server. Beyond their common scalable framework, Lucid runs a customized version of the cardano-multiplatform-lib from dcSpark that can be used for (de)serializing transactions and calculating fees and costs of scripts.

Their serialization-lib abstracts the complexity that comes with building Cardano transactions like balancing transactions, coin selection, calculating fees and script costs, attaching datums, reference scripts, serialization, and more. This abstraction ensures they can provide a friendlier path, allowing developers to be able to focus purely on the development of the dApp.

We can say that Lucid helps bring value to the developer space by making it friendlier and easier for developers to build transactions, create dApps, and interact with Cardano.

Cardano’s Developer Ecosystem

For some time now, developers have been shying away from Cardano because it lacks a friendly and easy-to-use library for building transactions, interacting with Plutus smart contracts, and building dApps. Learning from past experiences, Cardano will get over this hurdle. Last year developers on the Cardano chain faced concurrency issues where it was difficult for multiple different agents to interact with the same smart contract at the same time. A solution to this was found through aggregating multiple interactions to settle on the same state.

Building dApps on Cardano, light wallets to be specific, is a bit cumbersome because they cannot verify smart contract execution as the network lacks a library for smart contract execution validation that can run in the browser. This makes life hard for developers and users as they are not protected should someone maliciously try to access their light wallets. Hardware wallets too face a design flaw of not running smart contracts since they have a very limited memory and computation capacity. This means that the solution to what ails the Cardano developer ecosystem should come from an approach that helps them develop the easy way.

Lucid provides the much-needed solution by working as a library to help developers build dApps on Cardano using JavaScript. Their solution abstracts the complexity that comes with building Cardano transactions and allowing developers to focus purely on the dApp.

The Lucid Team

The Lucid team is led by Alessandro Konrad whose role is that of the creator and developer for the Lucid library. Looking at Konrad’s Github profile, you can see his previous and current contributions to the Cardano ecosystem including SpaceBudz, Nami Wallet, Berry pool, among others all of which are open-source and widely adopted by the community.

Jenny Brito will be joining the Lucid team as the Administration and Logistics lead.

Funding Budget Breakdown

Developer:

Alessandro Konrad: Lucid library creator, architect, and project developer. Hourly rate: $60/hr.

Total hours: 680

Total in USD: 40800

Breakdown:

Initial library (Research, Coding, Testing, and Implementation) – 380hrs – $22,800

Deno integration (Research, Coding, Testing, and Implementation) – 60hrs – $3,600

Vasil integration (Research, Coding, Testing, and Implementation) – 180hrs – $10,800

Library expansions (Research, Coding, Testing, and Implementation) – 60hrs – $3,600

Total: 680hrs – $40,800

Administration and Logistics:

Jenny Brito:  Continuously assisting Alessandro with administration, communication, logistics, and documentation. Hourly rate: $20/hr.

Total hours: 200

Total in USD: 4000

Breakdown:

Research (Processes and developments) – 80hrs – $1,600

Documentation (Redacting, filing, and proof-reading) – 70hrs – $1,400

Data analysis and feedback (Redacting, filing, and proof-reading) – 40hrs – $800

Project Catalyst related engagements – 10hrs – $200

Total: 200hrs – $4,000

Budget total: $44,800

A Reprieve for Developers

Developers have been using libraries and frameworks for a long time now, not only for saving time but also for reusing the solutions to the problems that other developers have already figured out. Lucid’s proposal provides a reprieve to Cardano developers with their serialization-lib that abstracts the complexity that comes with building Cardano transactions. This allows developers to focus on creating unique features for their dApps without wasting time. The Lucid libraries are designed to assist developers improve the performance and efficiency of their dApp development process.

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