I’ve read part of the whitepaper, this is a great project, I wish you all the luck and success. I’m also building an ambitious social app on the blockchain.
I have a question regarding the blockchain or SC platform you’ll use as a back end. Which one is it ? Is a blockchain platform that your are building in addition to the CSNP interactions and smart contracts ?
It is highly probable that a 100+, 10.000+, 1.000.000+ users is simply a no-go on Ethereum or other 2nd gen smart contract platform. Large scale applications on the blockchain necessarily encounter enormous scalability issues today.
I warmly invite you to check RChain platform, I’m not directly part of the team, but I’m building on it for my project that is similar/related to yours. Basically RChain embraces a model of computation that is concurrent-first, and therefore allows for gigantic scalability, on a single shard.
I’m in close relation with the leader Greg Meredith, feel free to hit me anytime if you want him to expose the benefits you’ll have with building on RChain patform.
There is a great deal to love about RChain – especially that it is a cooperative venture first! I keep looking for a project to dive into with them. <3
The team did mention having a testnet here https://www.dsnp.org/testnet – not sure of the status beyond that? It is mentioned in an update post here too Developer Update - May 2021. Hopefully someone in the know can chime in. I also believe a protocol is best developed in the open and assumptions tested against working code.
The current plan is to launch what we call a Betanet on our own PoA Ethereum network. Testnet will be launched a bit earlier than that but it will be the same as Betanet, just less stable. Likely we will also launch the contracts on the standard Ethereum testnets (Rinkeby and Ropsten) as our Betanet is effectively the same as those.
So what is Betanet that testnet isn’t? Betanet is designed to be stable and the data to be migrated to Mainnet. So people can launch applications and create accounts on Betanet and we will do all we can to migrate the data and make it so that the application migration path is as clear and easy as possible.
So to be clear: Betanet is NOT the final home of DSNP. Nor do we want to build yet another chain.
What chain will we end up on? The short answer is we don’t know.
Betanet is critical to understanding how the needs of the system differ from the traditionally financial focused blockchain and what tradeoffs we can make. The choice to build Betanet on Ethereum nodes was simply because Ethereum is the most common reference point. (Every other chain out there has a blog post on “How to Migrate your Smart Contracts from Ethereum” for example).
We do have our eye on a few chains, and will add RChain to the list. “Multichain” support is also being looked at although likely would not be supported when Mainnet first launches.
tl;dr: We are using PoA Ethereum for initial beta of the protocol and don’t currently know what chain the protocol will use when we hit Mainnet.
RChain does not have a "“How to Migrate your Smart Contracts from Ethereum” guide yet because it’s quite early, we’ve not hit big exchanges either. Also note that RChain does not use solidity, but rholang, which has been built precisely as a scalability-enabling/concurrent langage for SC platforms.
Ok good that RChain is on your watch list, feel free to hit me anytime, or join the coop directly, Greg will have time to give you a technical perspective better than me.
I would definitely pick an EVM blockchain for the strong developer ecosystem, but even better would be Ethermint (https://sisu.network/ is also an alternative) which is based on Cosmos, and will have IBC support out of the box very soon. This way the social graph can be programmable & interoperable with different blockchains which also supports IBC.
I’ve been in contact with Polygon, they are also based on Tendermint so they are also working on adding IBC support but not sure how soon they will have it.
Lukso Network is another good alternative which is a blockchain focused on more than DeFi, it has profile standards integrated by default, will probably the most decentralized Network out of all the mentioned ones with still cheap and fast transactions.
I asked the founder if IBC would be added but it’s not a priority for them, but they will beat ETH 2.0 in integrating the Casper PoS when they go on mainnet this year!
Every time I dig into the “which chain should we live on” question, I am more and more convinced that multichain support is so important. Similarly, each time I am also more and more convinced that multichain is difficult in ways I can’t even fully grok yet.
There’s the interchain foundation, which has an “ICS-20” standard already:
I also don’t know too much about it, and this is all very early, no NFT standards etc yet; but once there is both an ICS-20 and ICS-721 standard out, a social graph should be able to be build of top of as I don’t see how any of the other ERC standards will help extra.