It all started with Bitcoin — the so called Blockchain 1.0 gave the world its first cryptocurrency and introduced the use of ledgers, public, private keys and signatures to keep track of transactions. Then, Etherium came along — the Blockchain 2.0. Smart contracts came to life which pretty much created a whole new dimension in the crypto world and what it was capable of. So what is Blockchain 3.0? DApps. Decentralized Apps are open sourced and fueled by selfgenerated crypto-tokens with an inbuilt consensus mechanism. They have a wide range of capabilities and have to potential to further disrupt the blockchain technology.
The problem is, however, it is still very hard for DApps to be successful. The blockchain is very complicated on its own and that puts off a huge number of users from the very beginning. There is a dire need of simplification of the entry level requirements, that will open it up a whole new wave of users. There are problems on the development side too — the bottleneck there are the low amount of possible transactions per second, as well as their high prices. In other words, blockchain 3.0 must strive for simplicity and a way to allow certain services to run fast and cheap in order to foster growth and mainstream adoption.
This is where ArcBlock comes in with their goal to solve all the issues listed above, by providing a product that is both a platform and an ecosystem for building and deploying decentralized blockchain applications. For those of you that follow the DApps projects closely, ArcBlock’s value proposition might sound a lot like what EOS is already trying to do. Although you will be correct, there is one key point, which shows how different these two projects are. While EOS is attempting to solve all existing blockchain issues by creating its very own blockchain, ArcBlock wants to create its ecosystem around the already existing blockchains such as Etherium and Hyperledger, instead of creating a new one.
There are four major pieces that when combined together form the ArcBlock ecosystem — the Open Chain Access Protocol, Blocklets, The Decentralized PUB/SUB Gateway and the Token Economy Service.
Open Chain Access Protocol
An open source protocol that provides DApps devolopers with an abstract layer for accessing underlying blockchains. This would enable apps to run on different blockchains without the need for revamping their business models. Developers can build an app for one chain, switch to another at any given point in time and later on even come back to their original one if they find the need to do so. This provides a lot of flexibility for developers, which can utilize it in order to deliver higher quality apps.
Blocklets
Blocklets represent a serverless computing architecture that runs various types of applications. Each of them can be used for smart contracts, oracle, resource and asset handling as well as off-chain business logic. Blocklets communicate with the different blockhains that its apps are built upon via the Open Chain Access Protocol discussed above. Each blocklet is orchestrated with ArcBlock’s Algorand-based consensus algorithm.
Decentralized Pub/Sub Gateway
A distributed messaging system that supports publish/subscribe and acts as an API gateway for Blocklets. This pattern provides much greater network scalability and more dynamic network typology. In other words, future DApps built for the ecosystem will be able to run on both web browsers and mobile apps, which presents the user with reactive, real-time experiences.
Token Economy Service
The platform will present future DApps built on it with a fully customizable token economy manager. This way, a decision rely on the ArcBlock networks is not only an cost but also time-effective, saving future developers a lot of troubles with designing their own blockchain and token economy.
So far, this sounds like a truly revolutionary technology which has the potential to become a major player in Blockchain 3.0. But let’s not forget that this project is still in development. So although a lot is promised and the platform launch has been set for sometime in 2018, the road is still quite long before we the ecosystem is released. Therefore, an important question must be asked — do ArcBlock has the engineering, managing and leadership talent needed to achieve its goals?
In order to answer that question, let’s look at the front line of ArcBlock’s team — Robert Mao and Flavien Charlton. Looking back at their careers, it looks like they met each other while working at Microsoft Dublin. Robert started there in 2007 and spent two years working on AdCenter Analytics, before moving over to a much bigger project — the Bing Search engine. A year an a half later he moved to the project he dedicated almost 4 years — Windows Azure. In 2014, Robert Mao ended his time in Microsoft and started working on cryptocurrency two cryptocurrency projects he started — Predictious (a Bitcoin market predictions service) and Coinprism (allowing people to trade real-world assests like commodies, stocks and bonds on the Bitcoin blockchain). Both services are stull up and running and Mao is still the CEO of both. Flavien also spent 6 years at Microsoft where he worked on AdCenter Analytic among other projects. In 2010 he moved on to co-found Seattle Entrepreneurship Club where the was a chairman board and director. in 2013 he left and co-founded another company in Seattle — PixoMobile of which he is still a CEO. Evidently both Robert Mao and Flavien have a great track record of both working for renowned companies as well as having entrepreneurial experience, and the fact that they worked together on the same project before is a good indicator for their synergy.
In conclusion, the project is a very ambitious one, but all the signs are there for it to be a successful one — the technology is promising, the team is an experienced one and following the 2018 roadmap will tell us if the project can truly live up to its potential to revolutionize the DApps market.
You can check more about the project on their website or join their telegram channel.