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Civil aims to use blockchain and “cryptoeconomics” to provide a sustainable business model for journalism. But its grand plan reminds me a bit too much of the politicking in the Star Wars prequels. Do we need a written constitution, voted on by cryptocurrency holders, to decide what’s ethical in journalism? Does freedom of the press…
Read More Civil wants to be the Jedi Council for journalism
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Dapps, a.k.a. decentralized apps, have up till now been hard to find on the Web. But the blockchain browser company Blockstack aims to change that with its new directory, Universal Dapp Store. This could be a turning point for dapps, because Blockstack has the heavyweight backing to popularise the use of distributed apps. The company counts Fred Wilson’s Union…
Read More Blockstack’s Dapp Store: today’s version of the Yahoo! directory
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It’s currently a barren landscape for DApps, with CryptoKitties still the most high profile decentralized app to have been built on a blockchain. As Chris McCann from the VC firm Greylock Partners put it, “we are orders of magnitudes away from consumer adoption of DApps.” He went on to say that “no killer app (outside…
Read More Peepeth launches a decentralized Twitter
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In my post yesterday bemoaning the slow progress of Ethereum’s scaling solution, Pete Abilla tweeted this response at me: Richard – I dig you, ever since your @RWW days. But bro, how can you miss the only – THE ONLY – blockchain project with a working sharding solution: @zilliqa. DM me and I’ll get you…
Read More Zilliqa one-ups Ethereum by implementing sharding
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After Facebook’s sudden fall in popularity this month, people have begun to talk more seriously about creating decentralized versions of various Web 2.0 mainstays. Matteo Gianpietro Zago, whose company Essentia runs a decentralized developer platform, went so far as to create a large map of “Web 3.0” startups. Here, for example, is how he compares…
Read More Blockchain search engines challenge Google
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Loom Network, a startup from the TechStars incubator, has just launched a new development platform for DApps (distributed apps). When the company reached out to me, it described the platform as “new tech that allows developers to easily build highly scalable blockchain applications, with a focus on games and social — think World of Warcraft…
Read More Developers take note: here’s a new Ethereum DApp platform
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Part of the reason I started Blocksplain this year was to experiment with new ways of earning revenue from blogging. Perhaps cryptocurrencies will finally make micropayments a reality, I thought, or maybe the token business model will enable content creators to get a slice of platform revenues at long last. Indeed there are blockchain experiments…
Read More Brave browser protects users & rewards publishers
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In part 3 of our ongoing series about blockchain infrastructure trends, we’ll focus on storage. In particular, how one ICO aims to be the blockchain equivalent of Amazon’s giant cloud storage platform, S3. Let’s firstly put this in context. A major part of the appeal of blockchain is that it will enable decentralized apps. The example I…
Read More Filecoin: Amazon S3 for Web 3
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When I first wrote about Status in mid-2017, it had just completed a $100 million ICO. At the time I described it as “a kind of next-generation Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp.” But in reality, there was no way to tell for sure since there was no actual product. Since the ICO, Status has obviously spent…
Read More The status of Status after its $100m ICOBeaker is a new, decentralized web browser. Ah, I hear you say, so it’s a Mozilla for blockchain? A Chrome for crypto? Actually, no. That’s because Beaker doesn’t use blockchain. It uses a peer-to-peer network model, similar to BitTorrent. You may ask why I am profiling a non-blockchain app on Blocksplain. Well, I started this…
Read More Beaker’s decentralized browser, sans blockchain