At the current stage there might be four different categories in Blockspace coordination that projects should hyper focus on,
1.) dApp-Factories and AppChain transition Innovation hub for innovative ideas to iterate quick and resource efficient. Standard user/DevEx journey would be, start with smart contract, iterate multiple times, find product marketfit, seemlessly migrate to a para{something} if needs arrise.
2.) Hybrid-Chains Hyper focused on the most efficient vertical specific integrations. Built in vertical specific primitives on the para{something} level. Exposing these vertical sepcific features for end-user focused teams to built op on it. Possible user/DevEx journey, team builds unique Dex primitives and exposes them traits to smart contracts. Smart contract teams can utilize the built-in features to compose more retail user focused products.
3.) Blocksapce Agora (Blockspace Marketplaces) Blockspace as utility has a basic cost with basic attributes (size, time, security, etc.), making blockspace available for market intermedaries to enhance the basic blockspace attributes with add-ons. Naive examples could be, adding infrastructure services to the raw-blockspace and charging a premium on top of it.
4.) ??? (there was something else)
Specifically the area of Blockspace-Marketplaces have so far not been really explored. In terms of Parachain composability this would mean, accruing parachains asset value through forwarding protocol guarantees from the parachain to other chains. In more concrete terms, it would mean enhancing the raw-blockspace attributes with additional attributes or increased quantities of certain attributes. For example, access to blockspace, governance primitives when it comes to runtime upgrades for example, and a much wider functionality space could be available that has not yet been investigated. One analogy that might fit into this: datacenters get built, owned, maintained, overhauled etc. by specialised teams/companies (e.g. Invesco), still AWS, GCP, DO etc. selling storage and computational power from these datacenters. Nowadays, none of them really owns a datacenter, still they sell "products" on top of these storage- and computational primitives. All of them in different ways, while AWS tries to be more a full fledged institutional service provider, GCP being more focused on storage and analytics/intelligence and DO on price competitiveness etc.
In this regards, shouldn't Polkadot as the raw-blockspace producer (secure computational power and storage) trying to enable marketplaces which then are trying to find fit for blockspace usage through different services and means on top of the raw-blockspace?
While a smart contract platform-parachain is a very light-touch but restricted tool into this direction already, it is most probably the oldest and most traditional one too. The current assumptions for the opportunity space here could be,
1.) teams will build more service-products around parachains -> drop a standard pallet .rs file and you get a fully hosted setup incl. indexer, rpc-endpoint, light-client integrated front-end framework, etc.
2.) a parachain-marketplace concept will incentivise teams to get big players into the ecosystem as they will have a way to enhance their own platform by doing so -> Astar, if the Sony parachain uses ASTR as the underlying payment method for block conformation (Astar already has paid for it through acquiring a slot) it will be a much bigger incentive for the Astar team to get Sony building a parachain.
- smart contract hypter focused
- cheap, resource inexpensive, fast iterations
- throw on the wall and see what sticks
- bootstrapping
- hyper focus on infrastructure: wallets, indexer, ui-frameworks, (custodian)
- para-channels maintainer
- access to core functionalities; interoperability, bridge
- token pump-support: Web3 marketing, exchange intros/connections,
- AppChain roadmap; if successful and exponential adoption, clear path on how to migrate -> AppChain
- vertical specific primitives
- Dex traits to auto swap multiple tokens
- gasless transactions fees
- Full-infrastructure setup out-of-the-box for any chain level team request
- Vertical specific infrastructure setup
- Flexible access to the amount of blockspace
Questions:
- How to evaluate when AppChain?
- Why should a team rather go for the dApp-Factory then the Hybrid-Chain?