[6] Web3 Technology Stack for Developers
This section introduces:
- Akash Network
- Alchemy
- API3
- Aragon
- Arweave
- Audius
- Band Protocol
- Basic Attention Token
- Chainlink
- Civic Pass
- DeFi Llama
- Drizzle
- Ethereum Name Service
- Filecoin
- Ganache
- Gnosis Safe
- Helium network
- Infura
- IPFS
- Livepeer
- Moralis
- NuCypher
- Ocean Protocol
- Ontology
- OpenZeppelin
- Push Protocol
- Render Network
- Sia
- Steemit
- The Graph
- Theta
- TokenTerminal
- Truffle
1. Akash Network
Akash Network is called the "Airbnb for Cloud Compute". It leverages "85% of underutilized cloud capacity in 8.4 million global data centers, enabling anyone to buy and sell cloud computing". The platform claims to provide cloud computing at 1/3 the cost of providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
2. Alchemy
- Alchemy Supernode is a blockchain engine that ensures scalability, reliability and data accuracy.
- Alchemy Web3 APIs simplify and optimize common request patterns.
- Alchemy enables the sending of real-time notifications to users for critical events like mined and dropped transactions.
- Alchemy Explorer enables searching through millions of historical requests to identify error patterns and optimize performance.
- Alchemy Composer enables prototyping and fixing failing requests or exploring the behavior of new methods, directly from the dashboard.
- Mempool Visualizer enables troubleshooting transactions that may be delayed, stuck or dropped in the mempool.
- You can track requests by method and geo-location, without sacrificing privacy or security.
3. API3
- API3 provides secure and cost-efficient blockchain-native, decentralized APIs (dAPIs).
- Beacons enable connecting Web3 applications to continuously updated streams of off-chain data e.g. latest cryptocurrency, stock and commodities prices.
- Managed Oracle Services - dAPIs are data feeds built entirely on-chain from first-party, API provider-operated oracles with decentralized governance.
- API3 provides Quantum Random Numbers for Smart Contracts for free. You need to pay for the gas.
4. Aragon
- Aragon App is a simple, modular and adaptable DAO platform.
- Aragon Client is a DAO platform for communities to raise funds, pay contributors, and govern together.
- Aragon Voice is a gasless and universally verifiable voting solution for web3.
- Vocdoni is a secure, end-to-end verifiable, and censorship-resistant voting solution for organizations.
5. Arweave
Arweave is "a collectively owned hard drive that never forgets. It allows the permanent storage of data with a single upfront fee.
Arweave is a decentralized storage network for the indefinite storage of data. At its core is "permaweb" - a "permanent, decentralized web with applications and platforms like UI hosting, database writes & queries, and smart contracts.
Miners are paid in Arweave's native cryptocurrency, AR, to indefinitely store information.
6. Audius
Audius is a decentralized music streaming protocol that aims to give "everyone the freedom to distribute, monetize, and stream any audio content". Audius is built on both Ethereum and Solana.
$AUDIO is the native token that enables network security, exclusive feature access, and community-owned governance.
$AUDIO can be staked to run discovery or content nodes. Artists can also stake $AUDIO to unlock artist tokens and badges, and to "receive voting power from fans who want to share in their success".
7. Band Protocol
Band Protocol is a decentralized cross-chain data oracle platform that aggregates and connects real-world data and APIs to smart contracts.
The BandChain Oracle solution is a middle layer operating between dApps and multiple data providers.
8. Basic Attention Token
Basic Attention Token (BAT) is disrupting the $330 billion digital advertising industry.
Here's how the BAT ecosystem works:
- Users can earn BAT for viewing ads while maintaining privacy.
- Content creators earn ad revenue, user contributions, and tips.
- Advertisers get a better return on investment and know their ads' effectiveness without violating the privacy of users.
Brave Browser is at the heart of the BAT ecosystem. Brave blocks ads and trackers. This makes your browsing 3 times faster and very private.
Brave Wallet is the first crypto wallet that is built directly into a browser. This is unlike Metamask which is a browser extension. Because of this, Brave wallet is less vulnerable to faked versions and phishing.
9. Chainlink
Chainlink is a decentralized network of independent oracle node operators. It provides:
- price feeds of financial market data,
- verifiable randomness that is needed for on-chain gaming,
- proof of reserve for asset-backed cryptos such as stablecoins.
How can a smart contract get data from the outside world? That's the problem that Oracles solve. They act as middleware between smart contracts and external sources of data.
Software Oracles handle data that originates from online sources e.g. temperature, prices of commodities and goods, flight delays. Hardware Oracles get data from the physical world (e.g. from IoT devices) and are popular in the supply chain industry.
Inbound Oracles provide data from the external world to the blockchain while Outbound Oracles enable smart contracts to send data to the outside world.
Consensus-based Oracles get their data from human consensus and prediction markets e.g. Augur, Gnosis, etc.
Chainlink is NOT a blockchain.
Each Chainlink oracle network comprises multiple independent oracle nodes. These nodes fetch data from multiple independent data providers. This data is then aggregated into a single data point and delivered "on-chain" for consumption by smart contracts.
LINK is the crypto token that is used for paying Chainlink node operators for providing oracle services.
10. Civic Pass
Civic Pass is an integrated "permissioning tool" that helps businesses control access to their dApps. It is used by crypto-native communities, NFT platforms & marketplaces, and DAOs.
11. DeFi Llama
DefiLlama is a DeFi TVL (Total Value Locked) aggregator.
12. Drizzle
Drizzle is a collection of front-end libraries that make creation of dApp user interfaces easier.
13. Ethereum Name Service
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is a decentralized naming system based on the Ethereum blockchain. It converts human-readable Ethereum addresses like sanya.eth into crypto addresses like 1Mk13r5uu51F5jQ6yGuBPxkuZw91nM4MeY and vice-versa.
14. Filecoin
Filecoin is the Airbnb for data.
It is a decentralized data storage network where excess storage can be bought and sold.
It is also the incentive & security layer for InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). In simple words, it is a marketplace for unused storage - in consumer hardware and data centers.
In the conventional world, cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure provide centralized servers and IP addresses for user data.
In the blockchain world, Filecoin uses hash-addressed content structures to reduce redundancy and increase efficiency.
Filecoin is integrated with Ethereum. This enables developers to access Ethereum blockchain data and interact with Ethereum smart contracts.
Filecoin (FIL) is the native crypto of the Filecoin network. It can be used to pay miners to store/distribute data and to retrieve information. Storage providers guarantee a minimum service level by providing FIL as collateral.
Its consensus mechanism is Proof-of-replication (PoRep) and Proof-of-spacetime (PoSt).
PoRep enables storage miners to prove that they are physically storing a unique copy of client data. PoSt proves that storage miners are continuing to dedicate storage space to client data over time.
15. Ganache
Ganache is a personal blockchain for rapid Ethereum and Corda dApp development.
Ganache can be used across the entire development cycle.
Ganache comes in two flavors - a desktop application supporting Ethereum & Corda, and a command-line tool for Ethereum development.
16. Gnosis Safe
An externally owned account (EOA) is a single key wallet which is commonly used by crypto holders using MetaMask,Trustwallet, etc. An EOA is secured with a "seed phrase" which genertates private keys. If the key is compromised, the crypto can be stolen.
Gnosis Safe is a multisig smart contract wallet that requires a minimum number of people (m-of-n) to approve a transaction before it can take place e.g. 3 out of 5 people.
Gnosis Safe supports Ether (ETH), ERC20 tokens and ERC721 NFTs. You can sign transactions using mobile wallets, browser extensions, and hardware wallets.
Gnosis Safe can be accessed in a browser, on the desktop, and on mobile.
17. Helium network
Internet of Things (IoT) is a multi-trillion dollar industry, with billions of connected devices. For proper functioning, most IoT devices need to be connected to the Internet. The conventional technologies for this (cellular, WiFi, and Bluetooth) are expensive, power-hungry, or have a limited range.
The Helium network is a decentralized wireless network. It enables IoT devices to wirelessly connect to the Internet and geolocate themselves without satellite location hardware or cellular plans.
18. Infura
Infura provides tools & infrastructure for dApp testing and scaling. It provides simple access to Ethereum and IPFS.
Infura supports Ethereum mainnet and testnets (Rinkeby, Ropsten, Kovan, Görli), IPFS, Filecoin (Beta), Eth2 Beacon Chain (Beta), Polygon PoS (Beta), Optimism Ethereum, and Arbitrum Rollup.
Infura is natively supported in the Azure Blockchain Development Kit extension for VS Code.
Infura uses the following clients: Geth (Go Ethereum), OpenEthereum, Hyperledger Besu, Teku, Lotus, Go-IPFS, Bor/Heimdall, l2geth, and Arbitrum.
19. IPFS
InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data.
Traditional URLs & file paths identify a file by where it's located.
Examples:https://www.rohasnagpal.com/web3/web-developer-course.htmlfile:///Users/sanyanagpal/Documents/presentation.pdf
IPFS addresses a file by its content. The content identifier is a cryptographic hash of the content at that address. e.g. bafkreih2jxpb4zewzqug3uk6oak5nzsrc6oz6sjhzonn7bktjde6xks7fm
The hash is unique to the content and enables verification of the data.
- To try it out, create a free acount at: https://nft.storage
- Upload a file and copy the ipfsHash or CID (content identifier for the file) e.g.
bafkreih2jxpb4zewzqug3uk6oak5nzsrc6oz6sjhzonn7bktjde6xks7fm - To download the file, add
https://to the beginning and.ipfs.w3s.linkto the end of the CID or ipfsHash. Example:https://bafkreih2jxpb4zewzqug3uk6oak5nzsrc6oz6sjhzonn7bktjde6xks7fm.ipfs.w3s.link
20. Livepeer
Video streaming, especially live streaming, is very expensive because video has to be transcoded first. That's the process of reformatting a raw video file so that it can be viewed well on all devices and bandwidths.
Livepeer is a protocol for reducing transcoding costs up to 50x. This is achieved by peer-to-peer infrastructure which interacts through an Ethereum-based marketplace.
Orchestrators can earn fees by contributing CPU, GPU, and bandwidth for transcoding and distributing video. The Livepeer token (LPT) is required for this. The more LPT you hold, the more work you can perform and the more fees you earn.
LPT holders can also earn fees by staking their tokens towards orchestrators.
21. Moralis
Moralis Web3 API enables quickfetching block info, transaction info, NFT metadata, token prices, user balances, owner list of a particular NFT and other EVM blockchain data.
22. NuCypher
NuCypher is a decentralized encryption, access control, and key management system for public blockchains. NuCypher offers end-to-end encrypted data sharing on public blockchains and decentralized storage solutions.
23. Ocean Protocol
Ocean Protocol enables individuals and businesses to monetize their data through ERC-20 based datatokens. Datasets can be discovered and traded on the Ocean Market.
24. Ontology
Ontology is a high-speed, low-cost public blockchain for bringing decentralized identity and data solutions to Web3.
25. OpenZeppelin
OpenZeppelin Contracts minimize risk by using battle-tested libraries of smart contracts for most used implementations of ERC standards.
OpenZeppelin Defender manages smart contract administration including access controls, upgrades, and pausing. It Works with popular multi-sigs including Gnosis Safe.
OpenZeppelin Contracts Wizard is an interactive generator to bootstrap smart contracts.
26. Push Protocol
Push Protocol is a decentralized blockchain-agnostic communication protocol providing notifications for on-chain & off-chain activity.
Push notifications can be triggered via smart contract, backend, and dApps. These come from an open communication network (push nodes) and are tied to wallet addresses..
27. Render Network
Render Network is a distributed graphics processing unit (GPU) rendering network built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. It connects artists and studios in need of GPU compute power with mining partners willing to rent their GPU capabilities.
28. Sia
Sia is a decentralized cloud storage platform and a data storage marketplace.
It encrypts and distributes files across a decentralized network. Users control their private encryption keys and own their data. This is unlike traditional cloud storage providers.
Sia's storage can cost upto 90% less than leading traditional cloud storage providers. These charges are paid using the native token Siacoin (SC). According to the project website, storing 1TB of files on Sia costs about $1-2 per month, compared with $23 on Amazon S3.
Here's how it works:
- Step 1: Files are divided into 30 segments - The Sia software divides each file into 30 segments using "Reed-Solomon erasure coding" which is also used in CDs and DVDs. The data can be recovered fully using just 10 of the 30 segments. This means that even if 20 of the 30 hosts go down, the data can be recovered.
- Step 2: Each file segment is encrypted and then distributed - Each file segment is encrypted using the open-source Threefish algorithm before it is distributed to hosts across the world.
- Step 3: Files are sent to hosts using smart contracts - Storage renters enter into file contracts (smart contracts) with hosts for pricing, uptime commitments, etc. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are stored on the Sia blockchain and automatically enforced by the network.
Renters and hosts use Siacoin (SC) for payments. File contracts are usually for 90 days and hosts provide proof of storage using Merkle trees.
29. Steemit
Steemit is a blockchain-based blogging and social media platform. Users earn crypto for publishing and curating content.
30. The Graph
The Graph is a decentralized protocol for indexing and querying data from blockchains. Developers can build and publish open APIs (subgraphs) that make data easily accessible. The Graph is currently used by many projects including Uniswap, Synthetix, and Decentraland.
31. Theta
Theta is like Airbnb for video streaming - viewers earn rewards for sharing excess bandwidth and computing resources.
Theta’s benefits are:
- Users earn rewards for sharing excess bandwidth & computing resources.
- Viewers get better quality streaming services.
- Content creators improve their earnings.
- Video platforms don't have to build expensive infrastructure.
- Video platforms can increase revenues.
Theta also has smart contract capability for fully digitized item ownership, payment-consumption models, transparent royalty distributions, etc. Theta Enterprise Validators include Google, Binance, Sony Europe, and Samsung.
The Theta blockchain has two native tokens:
- Theta (THETA) for governance, and
- Theta Fuel (TFUEL) for powering transactions.
32. TokenTerminal
Token Terminal is a platform that aggregates financial data on the leading blockchains and dApps.
33. Truffle
Truffle is a development environment, testing framework and asset pipeline for EVM blockchains.