Interoperability: A 2020 Vision and Beyond
TL;DR
- At the start of 2019, the DAPP Network was merely an idea. Today, we look back at its evolution into a thriving multichain middleware that is empowering builders across the globe to create scalable, interoperable & decentralized applications on any platform.
- Looking forward to 2020, we believe that by interoperating with one another, individual networks can create win-win scenarios amongst themselves while driving meaningful transformation on a global scale.
- We are proud to play our role as part of a community that is building the technology and crafting the culture that can usher in an interoperable future, today.
Blockchain-enabled interoperability is expected to change the way companies do business during the second decade of the 21st century.
Traditionally, companies pit themselves against each other — each trying to outdo the other by building a superior product range, a more devoted community, and a stickier brand identity. Competitors are locked in a zero-sum game, constantly trying to increase their market share at the expense of their rivals. Think Google vs. Apple, fighting for mobile supremacy with their respective operating systems (Android vs. iOS). Or the fierce competition playing out between Amazon, Alibaba, Google, and Microsoft for dominance in the cloud computing market.
Yes, these tech giants also collaborate with each other in certain areas and contribute their fair share to open source projects. However, the primary dynamic that governs their relationship with each other is one of zero-sum competition.
Blockchain interoperability inverts the order between collaboration and competition.
Fragmented networks confine value within isolated silos. They place a ceiling on the growth of individual chains and technology as a whole. Interoperability, on the other hand, enables projects to play positive-sum games by focusing on their core competencies and striking up synergies with one another. While healthy competition is natural, only by working together can projects maximize both their individual potential and the potential of blockchain technology as a whole.
As we put the finishing touches on what has turned out to be an incredible, fast-paced first year of building at LiquidApps, we wanted to do some reflecting on our role in helping shape an interoperable future.
Join us as we explore the exciting evolution of the DAPP Network from a mere idea into the thriving multichain middleware it is today.
From the Many, One Will Emerge
While the world we live in is more interconnected than ever before, much of our technological infrastructure is a holdover from a bygone era where physical borders restrained the movement of information across the globe. Financial messaging systems, for example, are often constrained to a single locality, making cross-border commerce and collaboration costly and inefficient. Migrating from one cloud provider to another is similarly challenging, with each major provider cultivating their own style of vendor lock-in to ensure that customers become dependent on their technology.
Despite setting out to transform technology in a more inclusive, transparent and resilient direction, early blockchains were disconnected from each other and the outside world. In addition, the increasing number of various crypto networks, each with its own unique token and an army of financially-motivated supporters, gave rise to crypto maximalism — a divisive, counter-productive point of view that sees no value in any chain but one’s own.
The DAPP Network community is made up of many individuals and companies intent on changing the maximalist narrative. Empowering builders across the globe to create scalable, interoperable dApps on any platform could benefit the entire blockchain ecosystem, as it journeys towards a shared future of decentralized technologies.
As 2019 progressed, it became clear that we are finally entering an era of interoperability.
- Cosmos and Polkadot, two of the most talked-about smart contract platforms in 2019, have prioritized interoperability as a critical component of their blockchain design. Their architecture is based on the ‘hub-and-spoke’ system whereby a series of ‘spoke’ chains connect to a ‘central’ hub by means of inter-blockchain communication.
- Another hub setup is Loom Network, which uses its DPoS blockchain Basechain to connect and transfer value among several blockchains, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance — with Cosmos and EOS in development.
- EOSIO is closer to realizing a similar vision of multiple EOSIO-based chains, running in parallel and interoperating seamlessly, with more EOSIO sister chains joining the EOS mainnet as a viable base-layer for dApps.
- Solutions such as Blockstream’s Liquid are focused on driving scalability and interoperability and adding features — ‘spokes,’ in a number of cases — to the Bitcoin ecosystem, including support for the creation of new assets.
The DAPP Network’s first foray into interoperability solutions was LiquidLink, a trustless two-way communication protocol that currently connects EOS and Ethereum and allows read-only connections to many blockchains from an EOSIO chain. With interoperability as a North Star, the DAPP Network functions as a universal middleware that enables developers to not only communicate data and value trustlessly between chains, but to also access powerful scaling services regardless of their preferred base-layer network.
Developers building on the DAPP Network can leverage more extensibility, more flexibility, and more compatibility when building their dApps.
Feature-Rich, Trustless Functionality for Blockchain Applications
It’s not enough to merely connect blockchains.
Even if chains could pass messages seamlessly between one another without compromising on trustlessness, the constraints of various network resources — such as storage, computation and access to external data feeds — would place a limit on the scaling potential of dApps.
In order to unleash the power of dApps, developers need access to a range of trustless services that make it significantly more efficient and cost-effective to build feature-rich applications on blockchain.
With the DAPP Network, developers can access the services they need to build feature-rich applications, without having to compromise on decentralization. Services are provided on a free market, and built on transparency, accountability and decentralization. While the DAPP Network began on the EOS mainnet, the release of LiquidX, a powerful new functionality, set the stage for DSPs to begin offering services natively on multiple chains, allowing every smart contract chain to potentially connect to the DAPP Network.
The first product to go live on the DAPP Network was vRAM, an alternative memory solution for EOS dApps which drastically reduces their cost of storing smart contract data on-chain. vRAM, which went live on day one, was followed by releases of a slate of powerful products, each addressing a thorny technical problem impacting blockchain applications’ ability to scale.
Services released by the whole DAPP Network community in 2019 include:
- vRAM — unrestricted decentralized memory
- LiquidOracles — decentralized and trustless web oracles
- LiquidAccount — seamless and free end-user onboarding
- vCPU — decentralized and affordable on-chain memory
- LiquidScheduler — task scheduler and automated task services
- LiquidStorage — an incentivized decentralized storage network
- LiquidDNS — designed to prevent DNS hijacking
- LiquidHarmony: a transformative upgrade to LiquidOracles that enables all kinds of easy, powerful plugins: vCPU computation, LiquidSQL decentralized relational databases, LiquidLink oracles and multisig for complete interoperability, web oracles, random numbers, and more.
- DAPP Leasing — enabling dApps to access DAPP Network services on a pay-as-you-go basis
- LiquidEscrow — an escrow service for scalable smart contract resolution
- LiquidCrypto — advanced cryptographic primitives as a service
To make these services simple to implement, and to streamline development for all dApps, we released the Zeus Software Development Kit (SDK). This powerful, cross-blockchain SDK enables easy dApp development, testing, and deployment — even immortal deployment, creating dApps that cannot be maliciously or accidentally shut down. With its easy single-command operations, its flexible extensibility, its IPFS functionality, and its recently released user-friendly web Integrated Development Environment (IDE), the Zeus SDK is a major step towards the creation of efficient, easy to build, immortal dApps on blockchain platforms.
While we were hard at work releasing product after product during 2019, the DAPP Network has also been growing stronger on its own. Developers, users, and DSPs from around the world played a massive role in evolving the DAPP Network from a mere concept into the thriving ecosystem it is today. The DAPP Network is transforming middleware by allowing anyone to become a supplier of crucial products and services that traditionally fell under the domain of centralized cloud providers.
A Vibrant, Free Market-Based Ecosystem of Developers, Users and Service Providers
Cloud computing ushered in the virtualization of resources and services — transforming the way we work and enabling collaboration on a mass scale.
However, traditional cloud services are provided by a handful of large corporations that together exert near-total control of the multi-billion dollar cloud market. These corporations introduce a centralized, single point of failure into the system, making it less than ideal for developers building applications with censorship-resistance, transparency, and integrity.
One of the unique characteristics of the DAPP Network is the free market upon which the entire ecosystem is based. DSPs can be individuals, entities, small startups or large companies. They get to choose which service they want to offer, at what rate and with which specifications.
The combination of a staking-based free market for DSPs and an on-chain service provisioning layer makes it simple and effective for DAPP Network users and developers to hold their chosen service providers accountable. By comparing a DSP’s actual performance on chain to their advertised performance (SLAs), and by using multiple DSPs for redundancy and cross-checking, developers can choose to simply unstake their DAPP tokens from DSPs that do not meet their expectations. Devs can even set up their dApps to do so automatically.
In addition to maintaining their nodes and providing services, DSPs have proven to be crucial growth engines for the DAPP Network thanks to their professionalism, experience and technical expertise. DSPs are joined on the network by developers, entrepreneurs, product designers, marketers and enthusiasts, all of whom have vital roles to play in helping to make the DAPP Network more powerful.
A Year of Groundbreaking Community Initiatives
Throughout 2019, various initiatives have spurred innovation and growth on the DAPP Network. The DAPP Network Grant programs kicked off with the DSP Portal Challenge, an invitation to teams and individuals to enhance the DAPP Network by designing and developing a functional, user-friendly DSP Portal. These portals serve as a sleek user interface to the DSP marketplace and provide users and developers with a one-stop-shop for the DAPP Network.
While the DSP Portal Challenge was particularly exciting for developers, the DAPP Token Air-HODL was a groundbreaking initiative that appealed to most of the EOS ecosystem. A token airdrop that included a vesting mechanism, the Air-HODL was launched as a way of both rewarding the EOS community and accelerating the growth of the DAPP Network.
Finally, the cherry on the top of an incredible year of community growth was the DAPP Network Hackathon, a unique global and online hackathon that brought together developers, entrepreneurs, product specialists, and marketers from around the world to showcase their skills by building on the DAPP Network.
234 participants from across 12 time zones participated, with 20 projects being submitted by the submission deadline! Teams were challenged to build a product on EOSIO within at least one of the following three themes:
- Decentralized Gaming
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
- New DAPP Network Service
Taking home first prize at the DAPP Network Hackathon — $15,000 and 500,000 DAPP — was Team Onessus. They combined all three themes — gaming, DeFi, and the creation of a new DAPP Network service — into a working product that thoroughly impressed the judges.
With top-quality developers and entrepreneurs serving as dedicated mentors, an elite judging panel, two exciting on-site events, and hundreds of developers that are now familiar with DAPP Network technologies, the hackathon was a success of global proportions.
Tackling Tomorrow, Together
2019 has now come to a close, marking the end of the first decade in the life of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. If you had to turn back the clock 10 years and fast-forward to the present moment, you would witness a fringe experiment rapidly evolve into an industry consisting of millions of talented, idealistic individuals coming together in an attempt to solve some of the most pressing challenges of our generation.
We envision a decentralized future, where the internet — which has become monopolized by a collection of large corporations that control our data and our attention — will be realigned with the spirit of equal collaboration and sharing upon which it was founded.
With a new global financial system, that puts the power in the hands of the people by realigning incentivizes between market participants and being more inclusive, transparent and resilient than the current system.
Where new models of organizing productive activity through smart contracts and tokenomic design are created.
For an industry that has been around for less time than AirBNB, we sure are ambitious. And we have been making amazing progress.
Indeed, the seedlings of the blockchain revolution are beginning to sprout around the world across both consumer and enterprise technologies:
- Almost half a billion dollars are locked up in the two largest DeFi lending platforms, Maker on Ethereum and REX on EOS.
- Serious efforts are being made by both incumbents such as Twitter and upstarts like Block.one, to decentralize social media and introduce non-exploitative business models into a corner of the internet that has seen its fair share of abuse.
- Meanwhile in the world of enterprise, blockchain technology has been successfully tested as a way to issue and settle bonds, facilitate trade finance and even issue digital representations of collectible sneakers.
But blockchain has yet to affect a transformation on a global scale. While each blockchain community is showcasing some incredible innovations and reclaiming the spirit of open source, interoperability is necessary for decentralized innovations to sail beyond the early adopter phase and into the sea of mass adoption.
Interoperability compounds the pace of progress. By enabling teams to harness the relative strengths of various chains when building their solutions.
Using the DAPP Network suite of products across chains provides win-win scenarios for individual communities and integrated networks as a whole. We invite you all, developers and non-developers alike, to join us in building the technology and crafting the culture that can usher in an interoperable future, today.
