Anton Suprunchuk on Platform development
What is the most anticipated thing about Dash? Platform, correct! We talked to Dash Platform’s principle developer Anton Suprunchuk and one of the oldest DGC members about Platform’s future, certain decisions and plans. Here’s the full interview below.
You work for DCG for so long but it looks like you never show up publicly. Tell more about yourself. How did you start here? What is your current position? What are your plans here?
I was on a few podcasts with Joel before, so some people in the community might already know me. I’m very nervous around people and generally introverted, so communicating with an audience is quite a challenge for me :) I’ve been around crypto for a long time — almost 10 years now. For perspective, I had a mining rig of Radeon HD7000 back when you still could mine Bitcoin on GPUs. I’m one of the oldest DCG devs — I’ve joined DCG in 2017 and worked on almost every part of the project since then. Right now I’m heading an effort to port protocol parts written in JS into Rust.
You’re the Rust Port guy. Tell more about it. Why do we need to port the platform to Rust? Why not another language? What benefits does it haveб and when are you planning to finish this port?
We are not porting the whole Platform to Rust just yet, only the protocol part so far. We actually finished porting the protocol itself and now working on the integration into the rest of the Platform as of now. To explain why it is needed and what the benefits are, I need to dive a bit deeper into the technical part and what technical challenges we are facing. Initial protocol implementation, or DPP as we call it, was written in JavaScript. It was a direct successor to the first Platform prototype, which was written in JS for the sake of browser compatibility. JS has three main problems:
1. With Rust, it’s possible to use the same exact consensus library on any platform, be it a native iOS or Android app, Web, or a classic desktop app written in almost any other language. We can be sure that the consensus logic of any app out there is exactly the same as in the rest of the network. Also, this greatly reduces the amount of work we need to do on different platforms.
2. It’s hard to write code in JS that has to follow a very strict set of rules. Rust, on the other hand, is one of the strictest languages out there and helps manage that a lot.
3. As Rust and Go are de-facto became the standard in the blockchain it is easier to find talented developers to work on the protocol. Due to what I’ve described above, JS is rarely used to write consensus logic, and finding people to work on the protocol is very difficult.
There are a lot of other languages that can be used for the task, but what I’ve written above makes Rust the most versatile option for writing blockchain applications.
We’ve been developing the platform for over 5 years. In your opinion, why has it taken for so long? What’s the blindspot?
That is a very ambitious project for a team of our size. Some of our competitors have taken hundreds of millions of dollars from VS firms and ICOs to bootstrap the development. Their monthly budgets count in millions. We want to keep our development fully independent from the influence of VCs and big firms. Being independent often means being limited in resources. But in turn, we create something that is free of the influence of VCs, the old money. A true system built for everybody to use.
What are the best case scenarios of the platform use?
Our primary internal use case would be the payment app user experience. We build a social payment platform where you can add people by their usernames and instantly pay by those usernames, but without revealing the addresses to third parties. Unlike some other username payment solutions where the username is tied to a crypto address, in DashPay it’s impossible to tell what transactions did occur between two usernames, and only those two people would be able to keep track of payments between them. This solution, however, requires storage to keep all the metadata to make it work. Based on that I would say that the best applications for the platform would be various social experiences — payments, social networks, etc. As the platform provides easy and robust HTTP query API it would be easy to build such applications.
The platform MVP release is coming. How do you think we should get new developers to testnet now, before the MVP is released? And what should we do to get them involved once it’s released?
We have an incubator program, and it was a great success when we first launched the testnet. It was a bit early, since only just now are we getting close to the final release candidate. Most of the time apps don’t need to be incubated for that long. As soon as the first mainnet release candidate will land on a testnet, I hope this effort will shine with new colors, as we will be on a finish line likely with a date set by that point, and it will be a lot easier to work on something with a concrete release date in mind.
Let’s say, the platform is out. What’s next? What do you think we need to do to make it popular? How is it gonna replace existing databases? How can we make developers switch to Platform?
We are not to replace traditional databases, but complement the experience with things only the Platform can do — tracking and proving all changes to all documents stored on the platform so no one can tamper with the data. No need to rely on a centralized solution, extreme availability, and uptime, and no need to maintain your own infrastructure. We want developers to build an ecosystem around DashPay and what it provides — decentralized versions of social networks, subscription services like Patreon, etc.
To your opinion, what’s the platform’s unique selling proposition?
No other platform right now has a fully decentralized HTTP API that allows one to perform sort of complex queries and search through data and provide cryptographic proofs at the same time. For example, if we have a twitter-like social network, you can run a query like “get all tweets from user John Doe for the last week sorted by date”, and get proof back that those documents are indeed stored on the platform and are indeed authored by the user with the handle “John Doe”.
What’s the role of the community in platform’s promotion?
Community is crucial to the success of the product. If people use DashPay and show how simple it is to the people they know, they will attract more people into the ecosystem. The larger ecosystem is, the more developers want to build apps for the said ecosystem. It’s a positive feedback loop. We start by developing some amazing apps in-house to give it a start, and then people can attract more people into the Dash ecosystem.
