Blockchain Apps We’re Loving Right Now
As blockchain and cryptocurrency become more mainstream, we’re seeing a lot of creative uses for decentralized ledger technology. It’s no longer just for Bitcoin, but has developed into a complete network with a wide variety of uses in all industries. Major organizations and even governments are starting to join in on the trend as it ascends, and we’re intrigued to see what they come up with, but right now many startups have developed some pretty awesome software. Here are the ones we find most interesting lately:
“We believe that everyone has the right to control their own digital identity — how it’s shaped, shared and sustained.”
uPort is an open-identity infrastructure for the Ethereum community. It allows users to register their own identity (personal data is stored with the users) and securely manage keys and data, credential verification, and more. The goal is to build a web of trust for users, letting them choose exactly what they share, as concerns about personal-data protection continue to rise online. In Switzerland, uPort users are even able to securely access services from government institutions and other organizations.
The notion of self-sovereign identity is very powerful. It will allow us as individuals to take control over our own data — i.e. what information we share with third parties, what we revoke from them, etc. We won’t be beholden to centralized tech companies and other large institutions that misappropriate personal data. Facebook is a good example, having been on the wrong side of this, regularly making news for unethically sharing user data in pursuit of growth.
As we specialize in developing testing and deploying smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, we look to Chainlink for its decentralized oracle network, which helps maintain high security, reliability, and trustworthiness in the external data from the web that’s sent to smart contracts operating on the Ethereum blockchain.
Because smart contracts can’t support native communication with external systems to retrieve data, they need multiple Chainlink nodes to automatically reach consensus on the data received before the data becomes a trigger. Conversely, solutions like Oracalize are single points of failure and subject to DDoS attacks
Augur is a free, open source peer-to-peer network and prediction market protocol. The software is written in Solidity and can be deployed to the Ethereum blockchain. The way it works is that you can choose an event to predict (from presidential elections to sports games, and more), create or join an open market for the event, then trade its outcome by buying and selling shares in its market. After the outcome, the market contract automatically pays out users with winning shares. And there are no third-party fees — any trading fees go directly to market creators and reporters.
Minds is an open source and decentralized social networking alternative to the giant platforms currently shrinking our internet freedoms, as the company says. This network aims to take that freedom back, allowing content creators better social reach and a better chance at revenue. Minds users who contribute to the network are rewarded with Ethereum-based ERC-20 utility tokens. Those contributions can include “generating high-quality content, account setup and verification, referring new users, maintaining an active channel, finding bugs, successfully submitting code and more.”
Since its launch in 2015, as more and more people are defecting from the popular social networks in favor of those with stronger values around data protection, Minds has grown to over 73 million unique users. It has a ways to go considering that Facebook has 2.38 billion monthly active users, but it’s making waves that centralized, monolithic companies aren’t able to.
What blockchain apps do you love that are making interesting use of blockchain? Let us know on Twitter.
