We are in the "post-public chain era". The king of public chains, Ethereum, is steadily advancing towards 2.0. During the window period, Layer 2 and "competitive chains" are retelling the old story of "fast, cheap, and easy to use", and through compatible EVM and the development of cross-chain bridges to undertake the overflow value of Ethereum. At the same time, the leading applications in the DeFi and NFT fields also have the same judgment on the future structure of the underlying layer, actively carry out multi-chain deployment, and expand to different ecologies to seize opportunities.
In this context,IC, known as "Internet Computer, Internet Computer" (the more familiar name may be the DFINITY Foundation), has embarked on a differentiated path in ecological construction.Since IC went live on the mainnet in May this year, there have been optimism and doubts about IC. At the same time, a group of developers who were the first to deploy applications on the IC public chain gave better feedback on the development experience, which is also reflected in the current ecological layout of IC. In addition, representatives of some experts in cryptography and computer science also have high evaluation and expectations for IC.
So, can IC's ecological development strategy work and lead IC to win by surprise? For developers, what is the charm of IC? What kind of different scenery will the IC ecology have in the future? Odaily specially interviewed DFINITY Ecological Growth Officer Igor Lilic, developer representatives AstroX co-founders Michael and Bruce, Duke University Professor Zhang Luyao, etc. to discuss the above issues.
1. Changing lanes and overtaking: providing a minimal development environment
IC is not only positioned in the blockchain project, but also the underlying infrastructure of the Internet in the future. The original intention of its design is to greatly reduce the workload and cost of developers, allowing developers to spend more time and energy on the design mechanism and implementation of the project logically.
To do this,IC has launched a powerful WASM virtual machine, which facilitates the adoption of a full-stack architecture for developers, covering front-end, middleware, and back-end, and solves all problems with one click, avoiding the problems generated during the combination of multiple infrastructures and components. conflict.
Such a strategy effectively guarantees the computing power and stability of the entire system, enabling applications in the DFINITY ecosystem to maintain a better user experience. In terms of security, IC's data centers are distributed in different places around the world, which can disperse the policy risks of a certain country or region.
In terms of developer education, the IC official (DFINITY Foundation) is also continuing to conduct guidance and demonstration work, creating model products, so as to attract more participants to join the ecology, as the first step in its ecological expansion.
For the mature stock blockchain development team, IC founder Dominic announced that IC plans to integrate Ethereum, that is, by directly using cryptography, allowing the smart contract of the IC network to send the transaction of the Ethereum network specification, and the contract of the Ethereum End-to-end interaction between nodes. Interoperability between software containers and smart contracts can also be solved by creating special smart contracts in ICs, which can also solve some of the shortcomings of Ethereum.Once the applications on Ethereum can be easily migrated or integrated into the IC ecosystem, then IC can capture this part of the value and further expand the scale of the ecosystem.
In the process of undertaking the Ethereum spillover project, IC gave full play to the advantages of a simplified development environment, supplemented by a series of service measures such as funding, incubating and supporting developers, and provided developers with relatively superior development conditions, thus giving birth to a whole The types of applications in the field, not limited to conventional DeFi and NFT tracks.
according to
according toIC's official website case libraryIt shows that there are currently more than 10 types of Dapps on its chain, including wallets, games, social networking and auctions, etc. According to incomplete statistics, the total number of Dapps on the IC chain has reached 50, and the growth rate is relatively fast. Some of these applications are aimed at key scenarios, such as Dscvr and OpenChat, two encrypted communication software; some are of practical significance, such as Origyn, which focuses on luxury anti-counterfeiting; Developers can even redefine the form of NFT, spawning various NFT types. Developers can store tokenID and dataURL on the IC, and store all NFT-related metadata including graphics, etc., which can convert any web page into an NFT, so that a 3D version of the NFT, or write artificial intelligence The emergence of NFT is not impossible.
So,
So,How can an IC that has been online for less than half a year complete such a rich original accumulation quickly?technology
first of alltechnologyOn the Internet, IC has customized convenient development tools for developers, so that they can easily develop novel applications on the chain according to their personal creativity. For example, IC recently launched a WEB IDE, Motoko Playerd, for those who want to try their hand at writing Motoko code.
(Note: Motoko is a high-level language designed specifically for Internet computers. AstroX co-founder Michael, who focuses on building applications for WEB3.0, added to Odaily that Motoko is a new language, which is a bit like Rust and Javascript, and Solidity Not too similar, from the perspective of personal and team development experience, it is not difficult to learn and easier to use.)
In addition, IC also uses WebAssembly (WASM for short, which is a binary instruction set designed for stacked virtual machines. Polkadot founder Gavin Wood once said that WebAssembly is the future of smart contracts). Developers can use many of the off-the-shelf tools they are familiar with. This ease of use and convenience is attractive to encryption technology enthusiasts.
mechanismmechanismAbove all, IC is committed to helping developers accomplish their deployment goals, especially on the funding side. Currently, IC has established a close working relationship with Polychain Capital's Beacon Fund, where development teams can seek equity financing for their entrepreneurial ideas. At the same time, teams that are in urgent need of fundraising can also apply to the DFINITY Developer Grant program in order to obtain funds to build products. Igor Lilic introduced to Odaily that IC's friends in Fleek helped create a faucet for Internet computers, and the team can get a cycle worth $100 for deploying applications on IC. This is the least frictional way for teams to start deploying code to the IC network.
For the applications that have begun to take shape on the IC chain, Igor Lilic said that through the high degree of community collaboration and development completion, IC developers have spontaneously formed apositive community spirit, Under the infection of this atmosphere, new developers will form a benign positive feedback loop in the chain ecology.
When it comes to IC's user growth strategy, Igor Lilic's judgment is more optimistic. He believes that although IC is still in its early stage, the penetration rate of Web3.0 development in the global software engineering market is less than 2%, and the market prospect is huge. Among them, part of the IC growth strategy is to let another 98% of engineers try to use the development language of IC, so as to directly convert into blockchain engineers.
"Of course, the growth team is currently more focused on the number of wallets, the number of Internet identities created, the number of containers deployed, etc., which are the indicators that most intuitively reflect the ecology."
3. The touchstone of IC ecology - feedback from developers
The official plan for the ecological design on the chain is not to be comprehensive at the beginning, but to accurately match the needs of developers and continuously optimize the experience of developers. Getting positive reviews and feedback from developers is crucial. In this regard, the AstroX team has a lot of experience and insights in the process of contacting and adapting to the IC public chain.
AstroX co-founders Michael and Bruce told Odaily that the team was skeptical about IC at the beginning, because although the project has long been famous, the concept and vision are too grand, and it is difficult for the team to judge its true reliability. It was not until the mainnet of the IC public chain was launched in May and experienced the one-stop full-stack on-chain function that the team really convinced IC.
The AstroX team believes that for a traditional Internet developer, there is almost no knowledge threshold to enter the IC public chain, and there is no need to understand a lot of blockchain knowledge and cryptography. For Dapp developers on Ethereum, they may have to change their development paradigm, that is, re-adapt to the development language of blockchain technology. This process will incur a certain conversion cost.
From the perspective of developers, the Astrox team believes that the impact of ICs on the industry can be divided into two different stages.
In the first stage, the IC will directly affect the developers. On the IC public chain, using tool stack development does not need to think about trifles such as how to synchronize blocks, how to deal with node environment and tool chain, and only needs to focus on core business and interaction issues. In addition, during the deployment phase, developers do not need to spend energy to purchase software facilities such as cloud servers, virtual machines, domain names, and certificates.
This huge change is more friendly to traditional Internet application developers. Taking the Astrox team as an example, front-end engineers who had no blockchain technology foundation before can basically write contracts and do front-end business in just one hour. What surprised the team even more was that the deployment of the first test product on the IC public chain took only a few minutes of compiling and uploading to complete the release, while it took a whole day to complete on traditional cloud servers such as Amazon Cloud. configuration.
After the mainnet was launched, the Astrox team communicated with developers of other public chains such as Ethereum and Polkadot and found that everyone has a high degree of consensus on the convenience of the IC public chain, and it is recognized that it will drive more traditional developers into the circle.
In the second stage, the IC public chain may directly affect users. For example, users who have experienced the Internet Identity Dapp on the IC public chain will find that they do not need to rely on browser plug-ins such as the Metamask wallet, which is a big change. At the same time, if the interaction between the user and the contract does not require the transfer of Token, it will no longer need to consume the user's Gas. This change in the cost paradigm makes the contract interaction no longer centered on the expensive Token interaction, and distinguishes between on-chain and on-chain Under the circumstances, the use boundary of the contract is greatly enriched and expanded.
In addition to the Astrox team, other partners of the IC public chain also gave it a high evaluation. Punk, the co-founder of ICPL, said in an interview that compared to developing on public chains such as Ethereum, IC is very flexible and efficient in code implementation. The smart contract on the public chain is a "dead" thing and needs external triggering; but the container on the IC is always in an active state, and the written program can be triggered actively through a communication protocol.
Most importantly, Punk believes that the IC public chain can be seamlessly connected. On IC, developers can build programs and applications directly on the Internet ontology without cloud services, databases or payment interfaces. Developers can build applications seamlessly because they don't need to consider a lot of middleware.
Punk talked about such a detail: "A few days ago, Metamask was updated, and its interface has also changed. Because my front and back ends are separated, I need to repair it. It took a long time. As an independent developer , if I want to develop very complex applications, such things will take up most of my time, so I can basically do nothing. And on the front-end and back-end integrated IC, there is no need to buy a front-end server, or deal with the intermediate The 'dirty work' of connecting."
Punk further added that it is difficult to avoid the centralization of such connection points when building applications on Ethereum. In order to facilitate the use of ordinary users, most applications currently need to build a Dapp front-end, which requires purchasing a server or hosting it on IPFS, and building a "bridge" in the middle to connect. For developers, it will take time and effort to build; more importantly, if you want to develop social applications, the user experience will be very poor. If it's DeFi mining, it's okay to delay for a while; if it's chatting, many users can't stand it.
In addition, a post-2000 developer Jerry (pseudonym) who built a Dapp on the IC chain told Odaily that he and his classmates, who were born in a computer major in a 985 prestigious school, care more about whether the response speed on the chain can reach the level of Internet applications.
Through the comparison after use, Jerry found that the IC public chain is better than similar competing products, because when building Dapps, developers can use minimal code to complete the functions that can only be realized by complex codes on the traditional Internet, and the speed of these applications is also faster. Comparable to the traditional Internet. The underlying logic behind this is that IC provides Internet application-level smart contract services through innovations in cutting-edge cryptography and smart contract models.
4. The out-of-circle effect will become more prominent in the later stage
Although the DFINITY ecology is still small and isolated from other public chain ecology from a static standpoint, DFINITY is not limited by its current achievements and only focuses on stock developers, but on mature technology, development communities and other rigid conditions. At the same time, let incremental developers from the wider world see the business support potential of the blockchain, and take the blockchain out of the small world of "public chains and applications hunting stock users".
Of course, on the basis of a simplified and convenient underlying technical architecture, the IC public chain also pays attention to the project and provides specific ecological support, especially financial assistance. On May 25th, the DFINITY Foundation announced the DFINITY Developer Funding Program to promote the development of the Internet computing ecosystem and support the construction of Dapps, tools and infrastructure on the network.
To date, the Developer Grants Program has awarded more than $2 million to over 100 teams of developers and entrepreneurs building on Internet computers, adding them to an ecosystem of hundreds of projects running on Internet computers middle.
The two-pronged approach of technical support + ecological incubation will effectively boost the ecological construction of the IC public chain. The ecological layout of the line for half a year has already proved this point, and the IC public chain can allow traditional developers to quickly grasp the characteristics of blockchain technology. With a significant circle-breaking effect, this leap-forward iteration may set off all-round changes in the future. As Professor Zhang Luyao from Duke University commented:
IC public chain is the pioneer of decentralized web applications. On the one hand, the Internet computer allows us to deploy both front-end and back-end software as containers on the blockchain; on the other hand, the Internet computer blockchain is fast enough to support Dapps other than DeFi services.
The above two items are important breakthroughs of Internet computers to early blockchain and centralized platforms. Additionally, developers can deploy autonomous containers for on-chain governance. The transparency and certainty that Internet computers bring to blockchain governance will encourage trust and liberate productivity.
