Origins of 0xplain: MetaMedic

A hackathon team spotted an opportunity: People keep coming to support with questions about their transactions. The team’s idea was a way to navigate transaction history and see common problems associated with these transactions. The team built a product to allow users to navigate their onchain activity themselves, understand what happened, see common problems, and troubleshoot ways to solve those problems.

We built it, launched it, and learned some things

We leveraged our position inside of Consensys to build and release this first iteration of our product, in order to understand if there were a demand for this type of troubleshooting.

• We branded it “MetaMask Activity” 
• As we knew users come to support.metamask.io with problems related to transactions (31% of them), we placed a way into our product from there. 
• We interviewed our technical support and helpdesk agents to understand - what common problems people had with transactions. 
• 6% of users clicked on the help with transactions button from the support experience, giving us an indication that it is something people need support  with. 

The connected wallet application for MetaMask support, built by the 0xplain team and leveraging the 0xplain API

We’re still learning

Having gotten initial confirmation of our concept, we began asking: In what other contexts could this experience be beneficial to users? 

• In order to even put it in another context, we needed to abstract the functionality out of MetaMask Activity.
• Therefore, we created an API, and began working with other teams internally to integrate that API into the MetaMask Support chat app, and the MetaMask Portfolio transactions UI. 
• Adding multi-network support to 0xplain resulted in more engagement with the service, which is in line with the current state of the ecosystem. 

But, there are still open questions

How do we get more people to contribute content beyond our team? How can we enable people to make associations between common problems people have onchain, and the most relevant content to them? If only we could get more people, collaborating openly on this project; that would be great! 

But: how could we be sure of the validity of publicly-sourced content? And how can we enable other web3 projects and communities to utilize this tool? The true potential of this product is in a world where many different on-chain actors can contribute to a shared source of data that explains on-chain events for users in a simple way. 

As a result, we need a brand that goes beyond MetaMask Activity, to communicate and deliver on this potential.

0xplain Vision statement

0xplain is an explanatory layer that describes on-chain events in a user friendly way, and empowers people to achieve their goals through vetted content.

0xplain Mission

To allow communities to contribute content to 0xplain and associate it with onchain events, to enabling blockchain network users to achieve their objectives. We want to create a platform for communities, web3 projects, and content creators to explain blockchain events, and how to achieve objectives using decentralized technologies.