Some Thoughts on DApps

Opens March 21st 2021 from snowy Colorado to counter intellectual dishonesty from Ethereum maximalists calling Cardano dapps a ghost chain, during its upgrade to Goguen in three stages of metadata, tokens, then Plutus smart contracts.

Despite no base-layer programmability yet, Coinbase just listed ADA and apps already run on metadata like New Balance shoe authentication and BeefChain cattle, so asking where the apps are is like asking why an unopened nightclub is empty.

The company is oversubscribed and turns away deal flow it cannot handle, while Catalyst already has six NFT marketplaces, stablecoins some already deployed on Ergo, oracles, and DEXes seeking funding before smart contracts even ship.

Launching smart contracts would be trivial since they were Ethereum core developers with the Ethereum Classic client, but that path leads to 60 to 100 dollar fees, useless yield farming, and meaningless NFTs, which is why Vitalik Buterin is moving from ETH1 to ETH2.

Calls the dapp ecosystem unhealthy: mostly off-chain, centralized, and controlled by a few, since of roughly 3800 Ethereum apps most are ghost apps and only a few hundred carry the majority of transaction volume, a Pareto principle.

Only 31 percent of new dapps in 2020 were built on Ethereum, and if the goal is speculation and Ponzi schemes he wants no part, but if it is scaling to billions with sustainable economics, sign him up, though no one has built that yet.

The nature of gas must be revisited, since it is hard to be a store of value with a deflationary volatile staking policy while offering predictable application pricing the way Amazon does.

Bitcoin has no dapps yet is the most valuable real estate, proving there is no correlation between dapp utility and asset pricing in speculation land, while he is proud of Plutus, extended UTXO, and being number one in GitHub commits.

The Mary hard fork already brought 1300 tokens with 10000 to 20000 expected by year-end tied to real projects, with metadata use visible on CardanoWall.com, all before the Prism identity and Plutus smart contract infrastructure.

Cardano already moves as much economic value as Ethereum despite a five-times-smaller cap and fees in the thousands not 25 million dollars, and when smart contracts launch, value moved will surge while fees stay low.

The criticism is not about vision or progress but fanboyism and financial incentives for everyone else to fail, and if that is the whole industry it will fail, so rational people must drop maximalism and actually listen.

Points to the month-end Cardano 360 and Catalyst Fund 3 with Fund 4 coming to fund hundreds of dapps, inviting developers to join Plutus Pioneers, use the EVM devnet or Yella devnet, or await mainstream-language paths.

Dozens or hundreds of high-utility apps and tokens will deploy in 2021, but the industry will keep moving the goalposts to new vanity metrics, as when people falsely claimed a Cardano double-spend on March 20th 2021.

The community has grown large enough to handle FUD and answer questions itself, and soon Plutus code will bring a Stack Exchange, books, and tutorials as people leave the Ethereum dumpster fire for a viable business model.

Rushing to extract value in a greater-fool scenario is immoral and should be illegal, which is why a Homer Pepe sells for 300000 and some NFTs for 6 to 7 million, a boiler-room bidding game of whales trading among themselves.

60 dollar peer-to-peer fees and stablecoins costing more than their value to send are not sustainable, so this proof of concept, more than four years late, opens the door to Avalanche, Algorand, Tezos, and Polkadot taking market share.

Cardano's approach broadens the market to bring new people in as their first ecosystem rather than fighting over a zero-sum pie, pursuing performance, use, and a path to correctness they call the Island.

Backward compatibility is the Pond and onboarding the other 25 million non-blockchain developers is the Ocean, pursued in parallel, with Yella and the KEVM built from formal methods and Plutus given an Agda specification, unlike Solidity.

In a year the ghost-chain critics will vanish like those who said Shelley would never ship, and in 10 days d equals zero means 100 percent of blocks are made by Ouroboros Praos, a true proof of stake beating Ethereum's.

No project executes like they do, building a new network stack and a formal-specification approach to designing cryptocurrencies, even improving Haskell itself and joining the Haskell Foundation for Windows, JavaScript, and WebAssembly support.

No other crypto has the hard-fork combinator upgrade mechanism, extended UTXO except Ergo whose version is bettered here, a sane path to mainstream languages, or Ethereum backward compatibility via a side-chain model.

No one built a decentralized governance stack as fast, with Catalyst growing from 50 to over 20000 members in six months before the UI even launched, plus peer-reviewed research, working with 12-plus companies like Quviq, Runtime Verification, Well-Typed, Tweag, and Vacuum Labs.

The deal pipeline is so saturated that cutting it off now would take a year or two to service amid daily cold calls from NFT marketplaces to Fortune 500 companies, yet critics still call it a ghost chain.

Says if Cardano fails crypto should fail, since they maximize egalitarianism and prevent cults of personality with a decentralized treasury, governance, and upgrade path, versus a centralized system or chaos.

A latent broken protocol like Bitcoin can never reach consensus to improve, forcing painful overlay protocols, which is exactly why Ethereum exists after his own Mastercoin and Colored Coins work failed.

The community sends tattoos, t-shirts, and even underwear with his face, humbling and relentless, and people with the logo tattooed are here for life and use features instantly, as with Mary's 1300 tokens.

Says engagement rivals Bitcoin in 2013 and 2014 and early Ethereum, with 10000 to 15000 concurrently watching Cardano 360 for hours, and predicts future meetups of thousands in Kampala, Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Tbilisi as much as Denver and Seattle.

Things change fast, pointing to BlackBerry, Yahoo, Netscape, and MySpace, but protocols like TCP/IP stick once used by billions, and even Ethereum is abandoning unsustainable ground.

DeFi is not loyal to its underlying chain and exists to serve, not to make Joe Lubin or Vitalik Buterin money, so it migrates to whatever is better, faster, and cheaper out of self-interest, like abandoning Windows for Apple then Google.

Calls the Ocean, Island, and Pond a Zen mantra for decades, with base layers designed for secure correct code, predictable costs, and ever-easier migration as the pie grows and Cardano is the first point of entry.

At 33 he can march through his 30s to 50s, keeping churn low and morale high so emotionally connected members each bring in 10 or 100 more, making viral scale to a billion then two then three billion inevitable over decades.

Closes that he does not care about market cap, pet rocks, or beanie babies, only accomplishing the mission among over 8000 cryptocurrencies, planning in years to decades, and if you disagree there are other options.