How to build the next big social DApp

Cointelegraph is following the evolution of new blockchains from inception to mainnet and beyond with their series Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, by the author Andrew Levine Koinos Group.

People use social apps every day, but despite the hype surrounding so-called “next-generation” blockchains, not any These social applications are decentralized. Let’s unpack why, using two blockchains for reference: Ethereum and Steem.

Ethereum have more developers More than any other general-purpose blockchain, but none of these developers have been able to build a social app for mainstream adoption.Once upon a time, Steem was one of the most widely used blockchains any form in the world, make It is also the most used Global social DApps, whose market capitalization has reached an all-time high of $2 billion.

Steem was able to grow at breakneck speed and attract hundreds of thousands of regular users, but never achieved the same level of developer adoption as Ethereum, ultimately failing to reach its potential.How and why this happens is a valuable lesson about building two DApps and blockchain.

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Ethereum: The Universal Blockchain

When building Steem, Ethereum was the only viable blockchain that developers could use to build their DApps without forking and modifying the code of existing blockchains like Bitcoin.

Thanks to Ethereum, developers don’t have to build a blockchain from scratch in order to support some specific application (like a social network), just write the code needed by their application and upload it to the Ethereum Zone as a “smart contract” blockchain. ” This will allow developers to piggyback on all the hard work that Ethereum blockchain developers have already done and focus on their applications.

Allowing developers to upload code to the blockchain creates endless possibilities, including the possibility of uploading code that exhausts all network resources and renders it useless. Some restrictions must be imposed on this “infinity”. To solve this problem, Vitalik Buterin invented “gas” – a decentralized system for charging fees for executing code on the blockchain (Ethereum).

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blockchain fees

Ethereum’s fee design was excellent and set a decade of direction for general blockchain design, with almost all subsequent blockchains implementing some gas variant.

The genius of Ethereum is that it gives developers access to an infinite (“Turing-complete”) programming language. The genius of gas is that it creates decentralized restrictions on what developers can do with the language. It is this potential conflict (infinite vs finite) that explains why there are still no mainstream social DApps on Ethereum.

free blockchain

Steem developers took a completely different approach than Ethereum. They built a very basic blockchain (“framework”), called Graphene, that they could easily turn into a social-specific blockchain (an “application-specific” blockchain).

In addition to social features, Steem developers experimented with a fundamentally different system for regulating network usage than gas. In short, it’s free.

When Steem was first launched, many people said it was a scam, precisely because of its free “bandwidth” system. They argue that since Bitcoin and Ethereum are fee-based, blockchains without fees are bound to fail.

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While the bandwidth system that Steem introduced was far from perfect, by providing social features and allowing users to transact for free, Steem quickly became one of the most valuable blockchains in the world, and by far the most used…but it eventually Never really competed with Ethereum.

Smart Contract Rules

To the surprise of many, the reason Steem can’t compete with Ethereum has nothing to do with its no-fee model, which the core developers have perfected over the years and still work today.

Steem has never competed with Ethereum for the simple reason that graphene (the blockchain framework it is based on) lacks smart contracts. Graphene makes it easier to start a blockchain with specific features, but it’s by no means “easy”, changing those features or adding new ones is very difficult, unlike Ethereum, which allows any developer to upload anytime and anywhere they want any code you want.

From this point of view, the solution becomes obvious. If we can combine the free system we developed for Steem with the flexibility of blockchain with smart contracts like Ethereum, we can give developers the best of both worlds, allowing them to create applications that are free to use and freely add new features at any time anywhere! Simple, right?

Stay tuned for the next article in the series to learn more!

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