Transcend is shaping up!

With submission deadline nearing the end, we are rushing to set up the pitch deck and a video.

Michael, our lead designer on Transcend has been neck-deep into figuring out various app functionality details.

Overview 🤔

Transcend acts as a central hub for your asset discovery and inheritance plan creation. Once your assets are discovered voluntarily, you have the option of pre-signing transactions to automatically distribute your funds to your heirs (their pre-determined addresses), or by providing instructions via a deadman switch.

A key part of the app is education. Users will be able to learn about Bitcoin and how to handle it properly before, during or after their inheritance plan is executed.

Progress 💪

Michael was able to flesh out the bulk of the app based on an earlier version we submitted (and won 1st prize) at the Bitcoin Designathon. Here is what we have so far:

1. An onboarding sequence which will probably be expanded a bit and given a design lift at some point. This allows people to set a pin and get to the starting point of asset discovery and plan creation.

2. Asset Discovery - Once the user gets through onboarding, they will be able to export their public key and let Transcend "discover" the assets and tally them up. This will give the Bitcoiner an overview of their asset and allow them to set up a plan to distribute some or all of their bitcoin when the dead man switch is activated.

3. Plan Creation - perhaps one of the more critical aspects of this app, this is where the Bitcoiner can set up as many heirs as they like, with custom distribution methods. One inheritor might get an automatic payment, another might get instructional messages - this is all up to the user to set up and has a lot of built-in flexibility, including failsafes and overrides.

4. Education - What good is a newly minted bitcoiner if he/she doesn't know anything about bitcoin? Transcend will contain an educational portion which consists of content and quizzes. Each quiz progresses the user to a new level, busting myths in the process and building up their HODL level. We plan on gamifying the process, and the early version you see in the file is just an idea of how it might look. This will be a large undertaking as we have to determine which information should be included and which shouldn't. We all know Bitcoin is a never-ending rabbit hole that can take up a decade of your time and you'd still discover new things - obviously we need to narrow that time period down to a few days or a week at max.

Challenges 😓

The concept of bitcoin inheritance is a challenging one. There is no one-fits-all solution. Having looked into this subject for a number of months now, it is clear that tradeoffs must be made and scope must be narrowed to a particular use case.

Our goal is to continue thinking through the app, getting more people involved and considering all of the nuances. Keeping the experience simple (UX) is going to be the biggest challenge as the topic of multi-device handling can get complicated fast.

The education component is also a very time-intensive and requires a lot of thinking through what kind of information should be presented and what should be left out. Gamification of the process won't come easy either as there is little incentive to learn. We'll have to think of ways to tie in proper incentives to get people to learn about their (would be) holdings.

If you are curious to learn more or to participate, feel free to join us in the Bitcoin Design Slack in the #transcend channel 🙏