LiquidX Released! Blockchain Interoperability is Here with the DAPP Network
On January 13, 2020, the WAX blockchain announced collaboration with LiquidApps, recognizing that the DAPP Network’s powerful suite of services could boost the usability and flexibility of the WAX blockchain. How exactly this might be implemented was left unsaid — until today.
With LiquidX, standardized and fully interoperable services such as oracles, storage, computation, authentication, SQL databases, and community-created services are available for all EOSIO blockchains, and potentially non-EOSIO Smart Contract blockchains such as Ethereum, as well.
Now, after work by the LiquidApps team adding features, testing, and bug fixing, the latest release has arrived, and that functionality is ready to deploy.
You can read more about the basics of LiquidX in the first LiquidX post. Here, we’ll focus on why dApp developers everywhere and on every chain should want their stack to include LiquidX.
It’s been getting easier by the week to learn about the DAPP Network, with more experienced developers, more documentation and more sample code available to developers everywhere.
But learning a new technology is always a time investment. EOSIO developers learn the same basic smart contract coding techniques regardless of the EOSIO chain they’re building for. With DAPP Network services, this uniformity extends to numerous services used in smart contracts and dApp frontends.
Each EOSIO blockchain has its own unique takes on consensus, from Telos’ inclusion of a Worker Proposal System to LynxChain’s implementation of a dApp whitelist maintained by the Block Producers.
Regardless of the details of a dApp’s particular chain, developers can customize the trustlessness of their dApps from front to back. This includes storing frontends on IPFS, failover and child chains, web oracles, vCPU computation, and more.
Flexibility means that dApps don’t have to bind their whole stack’s consensus model to the same model used for their smart contracts.
Blockchains are generally free of congestion — until they’re not. Just as the public eye and popular dApps brought more activity and pressure to other blockchains, any EOSIO sister chain that gains large amounts of attention may face the same challenges.
DAPP Network services provide resources that are resistant to crunch and congestion, helping dApps keep businesses running smoothly when their chains face the trails brought by their own success. As always, our mission is to make life easier and smoother for developers — and by extension, for dApp users.
The DAPP Network’s economics rely on staking the DAPP token on EOS mainnet to DAPP Service Providers, who are paid for their services by the token’s inflation. Settlement and service provisioning remains on the EOS mainnet.
But the community has rallied to offer additional models and flexibility for developers, such as the rental markets offered first by BlockStart and later by Chintai — allowing developers to choose between staking up front and renting DAPP Network resources on demand. Likewise, the community could offer new models as the DAPP Network expands to new blockchains. In some cases, these models may even allow fully abstracted use of the DAPP Network, with the details orchestrated behind the scenes.
Here, as elsewhere, one of the core goals of the whole DAPP Network community is ease-of-use and flexibility for developers.
Theoretical decentralization means little on its own, if obstacles keep it out of the realm of practice.
One of the reasons we have promoted full-stack decentralization, from frontend to backend, is that while the important part of a dApp is its business logic — as many Ethereum community members argue — the mere fact that someone could spin up a replacement frontend for your dApp if your frontend is hacked or censored doesn’t mean they will. Or at least it doesn’t mean they will do so quickly. Your users could move on or grow to doubt the dApp’s safety in the meantime.
Choice of blockchain is a critical component of a dApp’s stack. The threat of dApps migrating away should, in theory, incentivize the network to take actions beneficial for dApps. But as migration becomes more difficult, that threat loses force.
The presence of familiar services with identical syntax across chains eases migration considerably.
In addition, LiquidApps has announced LiquidChains, a Blockchain-as-a-Service function where DAPP Service Providers can be used to spin up fully customizable blockchains — permissioned or permissionless, decentralized or centralized, permanent or temporary — easily and cost-effectively.
Published at Sat, 01 Feb 2020 18:48:18 +0000
{flickr|100|campaign}
