When people mention the public chain, they often first think of ETH, a "general smart contract type", or a platform-type public chain, rather than a public chain like BTC, LTC, such as "one coin, one public chain". These, in our hearts They are all defined as "Coin".
At that time, every platform-type public chain was released, which attracted much attention. From the earliest NEO, to the later EOS, and then to the later Solana, each of them attracted enough attention and rose to the sky. After all, "the world suffers from ETH It's been a long time" (it was too slow at the time...).
But now, public chains are exploding or even flooding. Like LTC and Monero, the old one-coin-one-public-chain style has long been ignored. The new one-coin-one-public chain basically refers to the type of Cosmos Appchain. up. The platform-type public chain is also dozens of random counting, and it is estimated that the rhythm of three digits can be counted seriously.
Has it become so easy to build a public chain? Yes, not right.
That’s right, it’s because it’s really fast to open a public chain now. As early as Gavin Wood took Substrate to set up a chain in 15 minutes, and now Avax took the command line to set up a subnet in 42 seconds... in various chain launch tools With the support of the public chain, the difficulty of building a public chain has been greatly reduced compared to before
But is building a public chain just to let him run and be done?
Of course not, there are still a lot of things waiting for you, and the public chain is just the beginning.
Let's talk hard first
1) wallet
Everything is difficult at the beginning. If you want a public chain used by others, the first step is to have a wallet.
The current public chain and wallet are completely polarized. EVM-compatible ones like various OP series L2, Fantom, Polygon, etc., just add a network to the little fox, but non-EVM-compatible ones are not so simple , must have its own "wallet ecology", or "leading wallet", and the experience must be done well.
At this point, Solana and Cosmos are undoubtedly the two best. The experience of Phantom and Kelpr is not very good.
Negative textbooks, but there are too many, the earliest NEO, later EOS, and now Polkadot and ICP, or the wallet is extremely difficult to use, or various anti-human settings, or there is no standard or killing Not a leader... In short, the experience of the wallet sometimes directly affects the prosperity of a public chain ecology.
2) RPC node
The first batch of Bitcoin and ETH players needed to set up a full node when they used their wallets.
Now that the blockchain is gradually becoming popular, naturally few people do this anymore, so everyone's operation requests on the wallet are directly forwarded to the RPC node (RPC refers to services related to the interaction with EVM-compatible public chains), and this One piece is actually relatively centralized.
The vast majority of public chains are using RPC nodes provided by Infra or Alchemy, two node service providers, so once the servers of these two service providers have problems, the public chain itself will often be greatly affected. There are also centralized ones, such as Pocket Network, but unfortunately it is still in a very early stage. It is a bit like the EtherDelta era of the earliest Dex!
RPC nodes belong to the infrastructure that is usually invisible to everyone, but once something goes wrong, it will be fatal. If the performance is not good, it will directly affect the user experience. The most famous one may be the Harmony chain, because RPC node garbage is on Discord and Twitter every day. Being scolded by users...
3) Block explorer
I think it is impossible for every user who plays Defi to have never used Etherscan.
Compared with the feeling behind the RPC scene, the block browser is real and oriented to DAPP and users at the same time, and its use experience also greatly affects the user's experience of the entire chain.
After all, blockchain is a thing that focuses on trustlessness, transparency, and the ability to query these features, and these things have to be presented to you by the block browser.
So after a new public chain comes out, I often look at two points when testing and experiencing it. One is the wallet, but I often don’t see anything on the EVM compatible chain, because it’s all Metamask. Therefore, what can better reflect the technical capabilities of a chain is how well the block browser is doing. This is also the second point I look at.
4) Computing power equipment (Optional)
Well, basically the new generation of public chains don’t need this kind of thing anymore, but a few years ago, various POW chains were very popular, and various computing power equipment were sold with great joy.
The new generation of public chains still insist on POW. The only ones I know are Nervos and Kadena, and even ETH has been converted to POS. Enough to see the general trend.
Of course, you can still see some POW veterans on Twitter or various Chinese media taking the trouble to explain the advantages of POW over POS in terms of decentralization and technology. In my opinion, what they said is likely to be true, but it doesn't matter. Just like when the MP3 player was born, you can discuss the sound quality of the CD to kill MP3 from various angles, but in this market, it took MP3 just a few years to completely kick the CD out, and then MP3 was replaced by the 4G era. replaced by mobile cloud music. The market has never been a technological determinist. If you can see the trend clearly, you can avoid many pitfalls.
In the long run, we have and should only have one POW chain, and that is BTC.
Besides, soft
1) Token standard
You may first think of Defi suits, Dex, lending, stable coins and the like.
These are of course important, but they still only rank second.
The first one should be the Token standard, this is the most important thing!
You don’t issue tokens on a public chain, or the above ecological projects don’t issue tokens, what else are you playing? Just go play the alliance chain.
The reason why ETH is so powerful is the contribution of many ERC standards. The two most famous ones, ERC20 and ERC721, directly set off two big waves of 2017 ICO and 2021 NFT.
Therefore, when a new public chain is launched, a relatively unified Token standard is indispensable if the ecosystem is to prosper.
The negative teaching material of this point is undoubtedly ICP. The mainnet has been online for more than a year, but there is still no official Token standard, which has caused the entire ecology to basically be in a state of "no Token available". Perhaps the earliest official idea was to hand over the standard to Developers and users fought freely in the "jianghu" to create a set of standards, but later found that the road was blocked. Finally, in August this year, there was a "quasi-official" homogeneous Token standard of ICPC-1.
2) The five major components of Defi - Dex, lending, stable currency, oracle, bridge
It used to be three big pieces, but now the basic oracle and bridge are also standard configurations, so I put together five big pieces.
Dex
The most important one is that almost all new public chains have to have a Swap even if they have nothing. Of course, it is basically either Fork Uni or Sushi. This is equivalent to the trading platform of this public chain, which is naturally the top priority.
Metonymy
This is equivalent to a commercial bank, which ranks second in importance and cannot keep up with Dex. First, the value capture is not as good as Dex, so the income is not compared with Dex. Second, it is a new chain, and the demand for borrowing is often not high. Just like Cosmos until now, Osmosis is hot Don’t want it anymore, but almost no one cares about borrowing. Whether it’s the old Kava or the new generation Umee, it’s a rhythm that no one cares about.
stable currency
It is best to have a native stable currency, but usually you have to become bigger and stronger to attract the attention of Tether or Circle and introduce USDT or USDC into the ecology. Before that, you can only use the bridge from ETH "borrowed" some points. UST was an exception at the beginning, but unfortunately it collapsed later...
Oracle
In the early days, many public chains still wanted to work hard or struggle on their own, but now they have basically given up struggling. Isn’t it good to have a ready-made Chainlink there?
bridge
The import and export of various stablecoins and mainstream assets, the super-hardest hit area of hacking incidents, but it really cannot be absent. The Cosmos ecology has a lot of advantages in this regard, because there is no need for bridges in the ecology, IBC transfers directly, and only when ETH or other chains are involved, the intervention of the bridge is required.
3) NFT and domain name
This trend was not seen last year, and it has almost become a standard configuration for all public chains this year.
Each chain now basically has its own NFT similar to Punk or monkey. Of course, the price is not comparable to that of real Punk and monkey. The only thing worth noting should be the Solana NFT ecology, which has a high price like Degod NFT, and the MagicEden NFT market that is trying to catch up with Opensea.
In addition to NFT, domain names have gradually become standard infrastructure this year, led by ENS.
Now we have .eth .sol .bit .bnb .etc .icp .dot .evmos... I believe that in the near future, each public chain will have its own corresponding domain name suffix to facilitate user management and use of addresses.
Author: Master Wu Huoqiu
Original text: "The seven-piece set of public chain ecology "absorbing gold", one is indispensable"