Polymer developer personas
Due to its mission of becoming the interoperability hub of Ethereum, the Polymer ecosystem consists of different user personas. Here we'll focus on the developer/engineer/operator personas specifically.
The aim is to provide an overview of the main technical user personas, how they can interact with or build with Polymer and where to go next in the documentation.
Polymer, Ethereum's IBC hub
Polymer is bringing the Inter-Blockchain communication protocol (IBC) to Ethereum rollups. IBC is a blockchain interoperability protocol enabling secure, permissionless, and feature-rich cross-chain interactions. It is a layered protocol with a clear separation between application, transport and state layers. This creates a great developer experience because it separates the concerns of application developers from those of core developers (consisting of transport and state layers).
Polymer as an IBC Hub takes care of the IBC transport layer, providing a straightforward and permissionless integration path, starting with OP stack rollups. Rollup chain devs or rollup framework devs are then potential users to integrate their rollups or frameworks with Polymer.
Not only on the application layer, we expect a variety of builders to build. Also on the state layer, we expect a thriving market in IBC clients to arise by developers specializing in state verification along the security/latency/cost trade-off space.
As Polymer grows, it will become more decentralized and an additional user group will be part of the Polymer ecosystem: infrastructure operators. They will run relayers and verifier nodes for Polymer.
Polymer L2 node operators and relayer operators are a significantly different user group and will, when they can be onboarded, have a dedicated section for "infrastructure operators".
To conclude:
Given this background, we can identify the following developer personas for Polymer:
- Application or dApp developers
- Chain/rollup core developers or rollup framework developers
- IBC client developers
- Polymer L2 node operators
- Relayer operators
The following sections will give a description of the workflow for all of the above developer personas, starting with application developers... .