The Avalanche community is at the heart of everything we do. In this Builder Spotlight series, we’re shining a light on some of our favorite projects and the builders who created them. We hope their stories inspire you to join us in building the future of Web3 on Avalanche.

The average person has 168 passwords just for personal accounts and 225 total.

Accordingly, the move to password management software has been a bit of a no-brainer, allowing us to keep track of passwords without actually keeping track of them. 

These apps serve a critical function, allowing us to make a diverse password list that doesn’t repeat, without having to remember endless strings of alphanumeric gibberish. 

Many people, though, rely on centralized password managers to store their sensitive data. But these can be costly, insecure, or leave you vulnerable to bans, breaches, or lockouts. For your most important information, a better, more dependable solution is needed.

Enter BitNote. The builders at BitNote are taking this problem on with a decentralized, permissionless, trustless, open-source solution. BitNote uses the Avalanche C-Chain and a browser-based app to provide private, permanent, highly secure storage for your most important data.

We sat with Rockwell Shah to hear about his experience creating this project. You can listen to the whole discussion here and read on for highlights.

How it Started

Shah’s inspiration for this product evolved from conversations with friends who struggled to manage their private keys and seedphrases.

They would often resort to highly insecure methods to keep their data safe, because the “normal advice” was too daunting to follow.

“The typical crypto answer is to etch your seedphrase into steel and put it into a fireproof safe that is bolted down to a secret place in your house” says Shah. “Like, that’s great if you’re Batman, but if you’re a normal human being, you’re not going to do that.”

Designing the Solution

In recent years, users have found out the hard way what can go wrong with centralized password managers. Beyond the constant threat of going out of business, they have gained dubious headlines for data breaches, hacks, and unexpectedly limiting account access.

To overcome these challenges, it was essential to build a system with no single points of failure which would last for many years — a "forever machine."

Using a simple architecture of a client side app that communicates directly to a blockchain to store encrypted data, users could be fully in control of their experience. 

But the system would only be as robust as the blockchain storing the data. A fast, decentralized chain was needed that could fully power a consumer level application. That’s where the Avalanche network came in. 

The Avalanche Experience

When deciding what blockchain to build on, Shah needed to balance a variety of factors, including decentralization, cost, speed, compatibility and community.

Since BitNote was envisioned as an EVM-compatible application, it immediately narrowed the focus to EVM chains.

“So, when looking at EVM chains and levels of decentralization, you have Ethereum, you have Avalanche… and then what?” Shah says. “You start looking around, and Near has 200 validators, the Cosmos ecosystem is capped at 300 validators… but Avalanche has over 1,500 validators, it’s a highly decentralized network with low fees.”

And then there is, of course, the time-to-finality factor, but Shah puts this metric in perspective: 

“Time-to-finality obscures why it matters—really, it’s ‘when you do something in the interface, how long does it take to save that to the blockchain?’ So, when you’re creating a note in BitNote, if you’re on ETH mainnet, it can take 12-15 seconds. On Avalanche, it’s more like 1-2 seconds. This is a real edge for building consumer applications that are actually responsive.”

Finally, Shah also calls out the Avalanche community as a major asset for developers. 

“We might be the harshest critics of ourselves, but we’re also our biggest supporters. We want to build things that actually matter, solving real problems. If you’re a builder, there are so many supportive people in the Avalanche community.”

Words of Wisdom

When we asked what a new developer on Avalanche needs to know, Shah reinforced the idea of putting the user first. “Understand the problem you are solving and WHO you’re solving it for,” he said. When you build solutions for imaginary users you’ve never talked to, you’re more likely to end up building something without an audience.

Learn more about the launch of BitNote on Avalanche: https://www.avax.network/blog/bitnote-launches-encrypted-notes-on-avalanche

For more on BitNote or to try it out, visit their website.  

About Avalanche Blockchain Network

Avalanche is a high-performance blockchain platform designed for builders who need to scale. Engineered with a revolutionary three-part Layer 1 (L1) architecture, Avalanche is anchored by its Avalanche Consensus Mechanism, ensuring near-instant finality for transactions. The platform also features an open-source Layer 0 (L0) framework, enabling the seamless creation of interoperable Layer 1 blockchains with high throughput on both public and private networks.

Supported by a global community of developers and validators, Avalanche offers a fast, low-cost environment for building the next generation of decentralized applications (dApps). With its unique blend of speed, flexibility, and scalability, Avalanche is the preferred choice for innovators pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology.

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