Decentralized App Tooling and Services
At Foreground we have a saying:
“To boldly go where no ad has gone before.”
It’s a saying that conveys the simple fact that much of the traditional internet’s tooling (including legacy ad networks) must be rebuilt from the ground up if it’s going to work for decentralized applications. Why? Here are some reasons:
- Dapps can’t utilize tools that rely on dynamic code (for trust reasons)
- Dapps aren’t built on top of the same infrastructure that powers the modern web — they don’t have domain names and physical servers — so they can’t work with tooling specifically designed for applications hosted on a traditional web stack (no self-hosted solutions or compiled code allowed).
- Dapp source code is always visible to anyone on the blockchain, so any tooling that relies on secret keys or secret codes is a non-starter.
- Dapps pay a high price for computation, making some real-time, on-chain calculations impractical (machine learning algorithms, searches, batch jobs, etc…).
The situation might appear hopeless because it seems as if the whole Internet needs to be rebuilt in order for the decentralized application ecosystem to thrive. But it’s not hopeless. With a blank slate comes the opportunity to build things a better way, without the limitations of the centralized infrastructure of the traditional Internet. It’s not often that you’ll have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and build something genuinely new — something that the whole community is starving for. So fire up an IDE and embrace it. We’ll keep an eye out for your git commits.
— Rick Feiner, Founder and CEO of Foreground
