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Ecosystem
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Thank you for this write-up Nikos.

With the soon-to-come advent of Plaza, an application development module makes a lot of sense. I do think the module(s) needs thought: e.g. what will it consist of?

Two ways I see this:

  1. What are we looking for in terms of decentralized apps that leverage Plaza? What would success on Plaza look like? e.g. I vibrant ecosystem of contracts tapping into Polkadot functionality? If so, how can this module(s) support this?

  2. What kind of decentralized apps are developers building in the wider ecosystem or in need of building, and how can we enable this on smart contract platforms like Plaza and Pop Network, as well as leveraging all of the Polkadot tech stack that is available e.g. specialized parachains, tooling, storage, etc.

At R0GUE, we deeply care about proper education. We have a tool (Pop CLI) that allows for rapid development of appchains and smart contracts. We are also building a runtime-level API that will allow, feature-by-feature for ink! smart contracts to leverage Substrate runtime-level functionality. Our focus has been mainly on backend dApp development. I do believe having an integrated approach to backend dApp development is the way to build powerful Polkadot-enabled Web3 solutions. The easy, recommended path forward, is for devs to start with smart contracts, if needed they can either access or curate functionality on the blockchain level to better suit their Web3 needs.

That being said, a bit of user research cannot hurt. I wrote this post a while back about a friend that wanted to build a Web3 solution, and the constraints he found when he was considering building on the “Polkadot tech stack”.

I like to solve for real-world problems, so on a higher note, what are the essential building blocks that one would need to build a Web3 (or even Web2.5) product on the Polkadot tech stack? Some that I can think of:

  • Smart contract logic (decentralized, permissionless programmability)
  • Ability to use USDT payments on their dApp so this is more than just having USDT available on AssetHub, typically there needs to be programmability around this
  • Wallet compatibility/abstraction (who wants to build a dApp that is only available for Polkadot (wallets) users; either have wider wallet compatibility or abstract the wallet (similar to what Apillon is doing by wrapping accounts under a Kilt DID)

Nice-to-haves

  • A complete token launch solution (minting an asset on AH is not enough, the ability for a dApp business to bootstrap their own token for further development of their dApp and to build a community around their dApp along with governance (decentralized decision-making)
  • Governance (how will the dApp integrate new features? A true decentralized dApp should have this option, it does not need to be there from day one, but I do see this as part of the decentralized roadmap for a mature dApp

Looking forward to further discussions! And I want to say that R0GUE is very much interested in helping on the ink! side of things :pray:

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