Inside the blockchain developers’ mind: Building a free-to-use social DApp
Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.
In my first article in this series, I explained why Ethereum and Steem haven’t been able to deliver a mainstream social decentralized application (DApp). In my second article, I explained how EOS attempted to combine features of both chains but it did so in a way that still required users to buy high-priced random-access memory (RAM) for accounts and smart contracts.
In this article, I want to take a different approach to this problem, not based on comparisons to existing platforms but based on first principles. Instead of constraining our imaginations based on the limitations of the earliest attempts at general-purpose blockchains, let’s, instead, look at the problem from the developer’s perspective. What do they need in order to deliver the user experience that mainstream users require? In my previous article, I described this as “fee-less without exceptions.” In other words, they want totally free-to-use applications.
The very first thing that a user will need to use an application of any kind is an account, so introducing a fee here would immediately create a negative user experience. We want to minimize friction for the user so that we can maximize virality — we certainly don’t want to force them to buy an account. But, we don’t want to solve this problem by simply forcing the developer to pay that account creation cost because this will increase their costs.
Related: Gas-free transactions will revolutionize Web3
This problem is an easy one because it has already been solved by Bitcoin and Ethereum, both of
Read more on cointelegraph.com
