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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
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nft.storage
😋 NFT.Storage Classic (classic.nft.storage) offers free decentralized storage and bandwidth for NFTs on IPFS and Filecoin. April 2024 Update: Existing NFT.Storage Classic account holders can add data through their Classic accounts. New account holders can transition to the new version at NFT.Storage that preserves data in Filecoin for a small fee.
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ens
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InfluxDB
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It is powerful. The contracts run 24/7 with 100% uptime. Hayden Adams created Uniswap with about 1000 lines of code using an elegant xy=k formula to create the first good automated market maker, Uniswap. It essentially replaces much of the functionality of an order book on a stock exchange, except it's decentralized, global and permissionless. Plenty of other good examples in web3.
https://app.uniswap.org/
The "app" (Distributed App / DApp) is some arbitrary thing written by a developer, running in a sandbox in a tab in your browser.
The "wallet" (Metamask) is a browser extension containing a set of pairs of (RPC gateway URI for a given blockchain, cryptographic private key for an account on said blockchain.) It can also proxy through to other such "wallets", e.g. "hardware wallets" (smart cards.)
"web3" is an API (like any DOM API) that the browser extension exposes to app, allowing the app to ask the wallet to do things (where the wallet then asks the user to confirm that they want to do those things); and, through the wallet's connection to blockchains, to watch for things to happen on a blockchain.
Together, these additional APIs allow web3 "DApps" to transact on blockchains, and to observe what happens in response to their transactions.
Example DApps:
- Gnosis Safe (https://gnosis-safe.io/) — an interface for deploying and managing multi-signature smart contracts (i.e. trusts whose assets are controlled by M-of-N voting)
- Sushiswap (https://www.sushi.com/swap) — an interface for creating and managing Automated Market Maker liquidity pools
- OpenSea (https://opensea.io/) — a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs
On all of these websites, you'll notice that instead of registering an account, there is a button that CTAs you to "Connect a Wallet." This is requesting permission to communicate with the web3 agent installed as an extension in your browser.
Of course there's no requirement to put all the data on the blockchain. Why would there be? I even consider torrent networks to be "web3" and they're not blockchains.
It is not prohibitively expensive to store data on a blockchain, however. Arweave and Filecoin are the largest storage-centric blockchains. They each have multiple exabytes of data stored on them. Currently, you can store on Filecoin for free: https://nft.storage/ as a promotional thing, but even for larger data stores (https://web3.storage/) it's $10 / month for 120GiB and 8 cents per GiB after that.
OpenSea itself is a marketplace with some centralized elements. That's fine. The core listing, selling and transfer logic is written as a series of smart contracts, however.
They also compete with other marketplaces, some which are fully decentralized. They do not control or own the important data, which is the NFT itself.
Some NFTs store all the metadata on chain, you can implement an NFT contract metadata as base64 encoded JSON (as you can see in a recent project https://etherscan.io/address/0x6f4388602c5dd6c593bf7c9cf3128..., plug in tokenId 2 into tokenURI to see). Some store them on IPFS with a hash based reference to the content. Some use centralized storage in a private database. All are valid use cases with varying applications. If you only want to own fully native-chain NFTs, feel free to filter based on that criteria.
One piece that is for some reason insanely undervalued right now is: a global key sharing system with a baked-in reputation mechanism (you can burn cash to prove to the world you care about your public key). Combined with a human-readable naming system (like https://ens.domains/ or https://www.lens.xyz/), you've got the world's simplest and most useful auth system. SIWE (https://login.xyz/) is going to be the de-facto auth standard for all new web applications at some point in the near-ish future.
The "app" (Distributed App / DApp) is some arbitrary thing written by a developer, running in a sandbox in a tab in your browser.
The "wallet" (Metamask) is a browser extension containing a set of pairs of (RPC gateway URI for a given blockchain, cryptographic private key for an account on said blockchain.) It can also proxy through to other such "wallets", e.g. "hardware wallets" (smart cards.)
"web3" is an API (like any DOM API) that the browser extension exposes to app, allowing the app to ask the wallet to do things (where the wallet then asks the user to confirm that they want to do those things); and, through the wallet's connection to blockchains, to watch for things to happen on a blockchain.
Together, these additional APIs allow web3 "DApps" to transact on blockchains, and to observe what happens in response to their transactions.
Example DApps:
- Gnosis Safe (https://gnosis-safe.io/) — an interface for deploying and managing multi-signature smart contracts (i.e. trusts whose assets are controlled by M-of-N voting)
- Sushiswap (https://www.sushi.com/swap) — an interface for creating and managing Automated Market Maker liquidity pools
- OpenSea (https://opensea.io/) — a marketplace for buying and selling NFTs
On all of these websites, you'll notice that instead of registering an account, there is a button that CTAs you to "Connect a Wallet." This is requesting permission to communicate with the web3 agent installed as an extension in your browser.
Of course there's no requirement to put all the data on the blockchain. Why would there be? I even consider torrent networks to be "web3" and they're not blockchains.
It is not prohibitively expensive to store data on a blockchain, however. Arweave and Filecoin are the largest storage-centric blockchains. They each have multiple exabytes of data stored on them. Currently, you can store on Filecoin for free: https://nft.storage/ as a promotional thing, but even for larger data stores (https://web3.storage/) it's $10 / month for 120GiB and 8 cents per GiB after that.
OpenSea itself is a marketplace with some centralized elements. That's fine. The core listing, selling and transfer logic is written as a series of smart contracts, however.
They also compete with other marketplaces, some which are fully decentralized. They do not control or own the important data, which is the NFT itself.
Some NFTs store all the metadata on chain, you can implement an NFT contract metadata as base64 encoded JSON (as you can see in a recent project https://etherscan.io/address/0x6f4388602c5dd6c593bf7c9cf3128..., plug in tokenId 2 into tokenURI to see). Some store them on IPFS with a hash based reference to the content. Some use centralized storage in a private database. All are valid use cases with varying applications. If you only want to own fully native-chain NFTs, feel free to filter based on that criteria.
The Internet Computer[0] hosts whatever kind of service you can cram in a smart contract form-factor. In exchange for having to deal with things like oracles to retrieve information from the outside world, it costs absolute peanuts[1]. I tend to use it whenever I want to PoC a web app frontend because it's usually lower-friction than a VM. Unfortunately there aren't that many things to show as an example that aren't just NFT silliness, but one big one is OpenChat[2], which also shows off the basically zero-friction single-sign-on[3] that can't be tracked across services.
Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try.
[0]: https://internetcomputer.org
[1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep...
[2]: https://oc.app
[3]: https://identity.ic0.app
The Internet Computer[0] hosts whatever kind of service you can cram in a smart contract form-factor. In exchange for having to deal with things like oracles to retrieve information from the outside world, it costs absolute peanuts[1]. I tend to use it whenever I want to PoC a web app frontend because it's usually lower-friction than a VM. Unfortunately there aren't that many things to show as an example that aren't just NFT silliness, but one big one is OpenChat[2], which also shows off the basically zero-friction single-sign-on[3] that can't be tracked across services.
Will it pan out? I have no earthly idea. But it's cool enough to try.
[0]: https://internetcomputer.org
[1]: https://internetcomputer.org/docs/current/developer-docs/dep...
[2]: https://oc.app
[3]: https://identity.ic0.app
This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a smattering of some of the bigger projects doing neat things.
The graph protocol - decentralized blockchain indexing feeding a network of graphQL servers hosting the data powering dapps https://thegraph.com/en/
Chainlink - decentralized on-chain oracles for basically any piece of data from the real world - https://chain.link/
MakerDAO - creator of the first “soft pegged” stablecoin, it is a series of smart contracts that allow people to lock up crypto as collateral and mint DAI, uses a number of neat and novel mechanisms to keep peg by adjusting interest rates and incentivizing economic behavior https://makerdao.com/en/
Compound - a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol with no centralized authority handling liquidations/collateral pricing/etc. https://compound.finance/
Uniswap - a decentralized exchange for swapping assets in a trustless way, has neat features like flash loans where you can borrow a large amount of money (millions of dollars) for the length of one transaction, as long as the money is returned with a fee. This allows anyone to do things like capture arbitrage opportunities, liquidate large positions, or whatever else can be done in one transaction. https://uniswap.org/faq
A lot of these are DAOs using smart contracts to propose and vote on binding proposals on chain and adjust parameters within the protocol or paying contributors and whatnot. You can see an example here https://compound.finance/governance
Beyond that there’s other blockchains focused on specific use cases like GameFi, bridges connecting together different blockchains and moving liquidity between them in a mostly seamless way, massive research attention being paid to zero knowledge proofs (which have a lot of potential implications in the real world), and multi-sig contracts for only doing things when a quorum of key holders come together and signal their intent.
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