Taking Back The Internet
Blockchain has reached a critical turning point.
It’s no longer just the buzzword of the year. There are countless use cases of decentralized technology popping up all over the world from citizens relying on Bitcoin in Venezuela & Zimbabwe to Walmart moving their food supply tracking to the blockchain.
The infrastructure, developers and ideas are there — so why isn’t blockchain a core part of our everyday lives?
Blockchain innovation abounds but no one has figured out a way to help developers build decentralized applications (dApps) that can scale to millions of users.
Until now.
LiquidApps, launching today, is creating a brand new ecosystem of tools, products, & services made for developers, by developers with the sole aim of helping you build better dApps. We have a product from day one, vRAM, that fundamentally shifts the way that blockchain resources are consumed and lowers the cost barrier significantly.
Our ecosystem, the DAPP Network, is ready to usher in the next era of blockchain innovation. And with your help, LiquidApps will take a buzzword and turn it into a game changer.
The Internet As A Collaboration Tool
The story behind decentralized technology starts with the birth of the World Wide Web. The protocols that underpin the Internet were created and distributed to the masses by a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, who open-sourced his code as a way to maximize collaboration in this new frontier. In the early days, the Internet reflected the idealistic nature of its founders as developers all over the world began to tinker with the software and create applications that would expand information sharing. Almost 30 years later and the landscape looks vastly different. According to a recent interview given to Vanity Fair, Berners-Lee feels that the “Web had failed instead of served humanity, as it was supposed to have done, and failed in many places.”
Ultimately, no one can definitively say whether the Internet has served or failed humanity because, in truth, it has done both. But what we’re witnessing today is a very different Internet to the one that Berners-Lee originally conceived of. We’ve entered a new Internet era where, instead of a free-flowing information highway, there is a collection of large corporations monopolizing our data and our attention. Each one of our search queries, post engagements and application downloads contributes to upgrading digital profiles of ourselves that are subsequently sold to advertisers. In many ways, we have shifted from being the builders of the Web to being its most profitable products.
The Blockchain As the Next Gen Collaboration Tool
Blockchain technology has its philosophical origins in reclaiming the Internet for its original purpose and replacing a centralized system with a decentralized one. In the days before cryptographically-secured consensus was introduced, central intermediaries were essential to facilitating trust within a system. What Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, realized is that by designing systems in which it is in everyone’s financial interest to abide by the rules, we can align incentives to encourage humans to cooperate without trusting one another (removing the need for centralized bodies). This novel systems-thinking approach represents the next evolution of information technology design, and it creates the frameworks for wide-scale decentralized collaboration.
Satoshi’s Bitcoin, designed as a digital, peer-to-peer alternative to cash, existed as the sole blockchain for many years, until the creators of Ethereum realized that the blockchain could be re-architectured to support the development of applications. They envisioned a ‘world computer’ powered by smart contract technology that would allow anyone to build and run decentralized applications (dApps). For a while, Ethereum existed as the only smart contract platform upon which dApp projects could be built and tokens could be issued and transferred.
The Genesis of LiquidApps
My friend and partner Tal Muskal and I worked together at Bancor, where the team is developing a liquidity protocol on Ethereum that aims to bring efficiency to the long-tail markets of cryptocurrencies. It wasn’t long before we discovered the innate scalability issues that were constraining Ethereum, so we began to explore EOS as an alternate hub for decentralized applications.
The more we learned, the more we became super bullish on the prospects of EOS. We wanted to take a more active role in the ecosystem, so we decided to create LiquidEOS, an Israeli Block Producer. From there, we started identifying the key elements needed to bring true scalability to blockchain dApps. We saw tons of talented teams struggling to scale their dApps and recognized that the immense potential of EOS was being constrained by the cost and limitations of its network resources. As a response to these problems we founded LiquidApps and are now launching a range of products that aim to enable developers to build and scale dApps far more effectively.
LiquidApp’s first product, vRAM, is our solution for developers facing a limited supply of on-chain memory resources (called RAM on EOS). vRAM serves as a hard drive for the blockchain, enabling dApps to store their data off-chain while maintaining on-chain integrity. vRAM and all of our products are powered by the DAPP Network, an ecosystem of developers, DAPP Service Providers (DSPs) and users committed to making blockchains scale. We believe that vRAM, the DAPP Network, and our suite of other products will be a game changer for unlocking the true potential of EOS.
Taking Back the Internet
In today’s digital economy, data is the new oil and users are the rigs from which this most critical digital resource is extracted. The massive oil companies in this digital universe (ie the Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons) implement sophisticated techniques to keep users glued to their screens and amass enormous amounts of user data. As we’ve realized in recent years, the tech giants’ incentives are not always aligned with the best interests of their users.
If we want to change the balance of power and recreate the spirit of the early days of the World Wide Web, we need to give users complete autonomy over their personal data. An internet of decentralized applications powered by blockchain technology will enable users to own their data and choose who to share it with, and how and when to monetize it. Data independence should be as important for the privacy-conscious digital consumer as oil independence is to the national security agenda of sovereign nations. Once we regain control of our data and become empowered citizens within digital communities, the collaboration and sharing that was at the heart of the original Internet will flourish once more.
Transforming the status quo and overturning decades of entrenched digital habits will require a concentrated effort from a global community. Thankfully, blockchains were created to align incentives and allow a global community of peers to collaborate without knowing or even trusting one another. Together, this army of developers, thinkers, and disruptors spread out in pockets across the globe can reinvigorate the health of our digital universe. Though scalability has proven a rather stubborn barrier to mass adoption, we believe that LiquidApps and the DAPP Network can finally help actualize some of the decentralized movement’s grander ambitions.
The time has come to take back the Internet.
There are no more excuses.
Beni, Tal and the LiquidApps team.
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