What you should learn about prominent blockchain ecosystems for dApps

As an organization with a goal of developing a horizontal open source technological community, we decided to investigate some well-known examples of blockchain ecosystems suitable for this purpose. For the study, we chose the technological communities of Ethereum and EOS, which position themselves as open platforms for the development of new decentralized applications on the blockchain.

First, let’s figure out what the technological community is and why people are trying to join it. Basically, this is a environment for learning, since, together with the community, it is much faster to master new technologies and start implementing them in life without having to study technical documentation in depth. There simply isn’t enough time for that in our dynamic world.

The technological community is a self-organized and well-motivated group of developers that distributes important roles that are necessary to accelerate and facilitate the core supportive tech infrastructure. Some teams are involved in the testing environment, others are working on important support tools, and others are directly involved in the maintaining or development of the technology itself.

EOS blockchain platform

EOSIO is an open source software that has developed under an MIT software license. The software being developed for EOS uses the asynchronous communication of smart contracts and parallel processing in order to support thousands of applications and millions of transactions on the blockchain simultaneously. The software is also being designed to enable applications that do not require blockchain users to pay for every transaction, making it possible to create freemium applications.

EOSIO adopts a free-market approach to allocating scarce resources to their highest purpose. To facilitate this market, the eosio system contract allows users to buy RAM from the system and sell RAM back to the system in exchange for the blockchain’s native tokens (e.g EOS). This provides liquidity in the RAM market while facilitating price discovery.

Some of the most interesting dApps based on EOS are Everipedia, a for-profit, wiki-based online encyclopedia, Oraclechain that provides cross-blockchain communication and real-world data to the blockchain, and ONO, a Chinese social network based on blockchain technology founded in 2017 by Ke Xu, founder of ERA and CryptoDogs.

At the moment EOS has 8,400 subscribers in its tech Telegram chat.

Ethereum blockchain platform

Before the creation of Ethereum, blockchain applications were designed to perform a very limited set of operations. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, for example, were developed exclusively to operate as peer-to-peer digital currencies.

Ethereum’s core innovation, the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), is a Turing-complete software that runs on the Ethereum network. It enables anyone to run any program, regardless of the programming language, given enough time and memory. The Ethereum Virtual Machine makes the process of creating blockchain applications much easier and efficient than ever before. Instead of having to build an entirely original blockchain for each new application, Ethereum enables the development of potentially thousands of different applications, all on one platform.

There are a lot of useful dApps on Ethereum like Ethlance, similar to Upwork, i.e a decentralized marketplace for job postings and hiring freelancers, uPort, an identity management platform, Augur and Gnosis, platforms are designed to work as prediction markets, Status, an open source mobile dApp browser and messenger, and many others cool applications.

There were 16,500 users on Ethereum’s official forum by the end of 2017, and this number is now much bigger. There are 1,675 dapps on the Ethereum blockchain. According to State of the Dapps, their category distribution is as follows:

Motivators to be part of the community

According to a short bio from one of the EOS conferences, Stephane Bisson, Social Media Coordinator of EOS Nation, became interested in crypto assets after having a basic understanding of psychology, behavioral-economics, incentives and game theory as a background. Decentralized economies inspired him as a ideology, as well as efficiency and investment attractiveness. Now Stephane is focusing his efforts on growing the EOS Nation through education and community engagement and helping build free market solutions to secure life, liberty and property for all.

Ethereum co-founder and CTO Gavin Wood thinks it’s quite reasonable that its community will end up seeing an ecosystem perhaps similar to Linux, where we have a number of vendors that are sponsoring the continued development, either through donations to a single body like the Linux Foundation, or through actually paying core developers to work on very particular parts — perhaps optimisation, or maybe adding features.

EOS and Ethereum hackathons

The EOS Hackathon consists of four events leading up to the fifth and final grand finale event. At each event, teams are competing to come up with the best EOS dApp. Those with the best dApps are invited to compete in a final pitch competition. Contest entrants explain their concept in a video. The top 10 finalists will be chosen based on the number of likes their pitch video receives.

ETHGlobal is an international platform which provides the Ethereum community with tools and support to hackathons as well as an international community of judges and sponsors to aid them in their projects. The ETHGlobal team previously arranged the hugely successful ETHWaterloo event, which still holds the record as being the world’s largest hackathon.

Ever since ETHWaterloo, the ETHGlobal team has been flooded with requests from more passionate developers from all over the world to host similar events in their own hometown.

Conclusion

The technical community around the various projects detailed here is united through strong cryptocurrency, comfortable support tools for developers, and flexible basic protocol. EOS has democratic mechanisms of permanent voting for block producers and financing of innovations. In its turn, Ethereum is a pioneer in dApp development, building a really decentralized and stable ecosystem that empowers ICOs to build communities around innovative ideas.

The hackathon system allows EOS to focus the energy of the community on new ideas and gradually transform them into new decentralized applications through a two-layer structure. Ethereum managed to build a very reliable link between technology and business, thanks to smart contracts and the possibility to get financing on crypto exchanges using ERC20 tokens, so its hackathons are gathering investors and inventors together. The biggest Ethereum hackathon is ETHWaterloo that united over 400 participant from 32 countries.

Comparing these two dApp development ecosystems, we should remark that Ethereum does not scale to support mainstream development or performance requirements; it is constrained by sequential throughput, transaction fees, and unsustainable network costs. EOS solves this problem by simplifying the complexity and reducing the time requirements related to building, deploying, and governing blockchain applications.

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