From Web2 to Web3: How developers can upskill and build with blockchain
SPONSORED BY RIPPLE
Coming off the heels of 2022, it may be difficult to assess where web3 technologies stand in 2023. Bitcoin rose to $47,000 and fell to $16,000. NFT trading volumes peaked at $17B in January 2022 and a year later collapsed to a mere $143M. “Blockchain” and “digital currencies” became everyday terms in the mainstream media. We saw the collapse of FTX and all its cascading consequences.
It was a tumultuous year in the world of web3—full of speculation, crashes, and scandals. But does this mean that web3 is dead and the underlying technologies made obsolete? Hardly.
Though mainstream enthusiasm for NFTs and cryptocurrency has ebbed and flowed, the community is still very much alive and actively invested in not just the technology, but in ensuring the promises of a decentralized internet are realized. The world at large is frustrated with the data collection practices of the tech industry heavyweights. The global reach of eCommerce needs trustworthy payment systems that can operate worldwide. While much of the discussion around NFT collectibles focused on high profile acquisitions and losses, NFTs themselves have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.
Web3 is here to stay
We are still in the early days of blockchain. Keep in mind that we’ve been using the term “web 2.0” since 1999 (24 years ago!) but blockchain quietly entered the market as an underpinning technology for Bitcoin in 2008 (15 years ago). That difference of nine years may sound small, but consider that nine years ago most large companies were just starting to move to the cloud.
Today, blockchain technologies power much more than basic cryptocurrency transactions. Banking and finance applications support cross-border payments that settle in seconds, not days. Multi- and cross-chain transactions via DeFi applications allow for increased crypto liquidity and improved exchanges with fiat currencies. Blockchain developers can build their own customized sidechains (more on those later) to support integration with real-time, low-cost transactions in video games and other use cases. SDKs are available in nearly every popular language, making it easy for today’s web2 developers to take their existing coding capabilities and embrace decentralized technology.
Emerging applications of blockchain and crypto include:
- Cross-border payments
- Real-time tracking of goods in supply chain and logistics
- Electronic health record storage
- Energy supply transaction tracking, including renewable energy certificates
- Citizenship and credential tracking across borders
- Documenting legal agreements, such as real estate and carbon credits
Despite everything that’s been reported in the news about crypto and blockchain this past year, their potential is still largely untapped. Blockchain advances are bringing economic and technical utility to both users and developers. It’s truly an emerging technology with seemingly endless opportunity.
The tech behind the headlines
The technology comprising a blockchain is rather sophisticated. In the most simplistic sense, a blockchain is a database: it stores data in an ordered fashion. However, a blockchain doesn’t act as a simple database with all data on a single server, but rather as a distributed ledger: multiple computers across the world store redundant copies of all the data in the blockchain and share the work of confirming transactions, without needing a central authority or intermediary.
In a blockchain, each node has a copy of the blockchain ledger and participates in the transaction validation process. New transactions are broadcast to the network, and nodes work together to verify the transaction data and add it to the blockchain. This process is known as consensus, and it ensures that all nodes on the network agree on the state of the blockchain and that it remains secure and tamper-proof.
While some blockchains are centralized and managed by a single organization, most are open source and decentralized, meaning they are managed and maintained by a community of developers. For example, the XRP Ledger is a public, permissionless blockchain, meaning anyone on the internet can set up a validator and join the network. The reference implementation of the protocol is open source and any developer can propose amendments to this software. Because of the XRP Ledger’s decentralized nature, no singular authority can make decisions for the network. Instead, network changes are determined by a specific subset of validators, who vote on behalf of the XRP Ledger’s best interest. That being said, in order for amendments to pass, at least 80% of the validator community has to vote “yes” and that minimum threshold must be maintained for at least two weeks. If both of those conditions are met, then amendment proposals can be passed.
Consensus protocols run cryptographic functions to ensure the integrity of the network and its ledger. These usually include:
- Hash functions: Create a unique digital fingerprint of each transaction on the blockchain. They are one-way functions that take an input (e.g. a transaction) and produce a fixed-length, unique output based on that input (SHA-256 is an example of a hash function). Hash functions ensure the integrity of data because any error in transmission or other change results in a totally different hash value. If you get the same output from the hash function, you know you have the same input data.
- Public-key cryptography: Used for enabling secure communication between nodes on the network. Each node on the blockchain has a public key and a private key. The public key can be shared with anyone, while the private key is kept secret. Digital signatures are for ensuring the authenticity and integrity of transactions on the blockchain. Each transaction on the blockchain is signed using the sender’s private key, which creates a digital signature that can be verified using the sender’s public key.
Validator nodes execute the consensus protocol and can often run on commodity hardware (depending on the energy and computation requirements for the specific blockchain). Different blockchains use different consensus protocols to compute the final state of a transaction on the ledger.
Because the XRP Ledger is open source, anyone can learn how it works, contribute to the code base, and report issues. Or they can simply write and consume apps; mint, manage and otherwise interact with NFTs; and much more.
Consensus algorithms, energy consumption, and transaction times
The two most popular consensus algorithms have long been Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS).
In PoW algorithms, every node on the network competes to solve cryptography problems in order to validate a transaction. That’s fine for small networks of a few dozen computers, but multiply this computational cost over 100,000+ nodes and it adds up very quickly. This is compounded by the fact that the fastest nodes to validate transactions often receive financial rewards, hence a competitive arms race to deploy thousands of powerful, electricity-hungry GPUs to solve these cryptographic puzzles faster than other nodes in the network.
PoW methods are what led China to ban cryptocurrency mining altogether, the White House to issue a press release about energy concerns, and the Ethereum community to push for and switch to the more energy-efficient PoS methodology in 2022.
In PoS algorithms, instead of solving a cryptographic puzzle on every node, nodes that hold a larger stake in the network (i.e. the greater the number of tokens, the greater the stake in the blockchain) are the ones to validate transactions. They still perform a cryptographic validation process, but it’s only a fraction of the nodes on the network with the biggest stake. The algorithms are no less complex and the validation mechanisms are similar to PoW, which is why PoS transactions can also take minutes or hours to be validated.
Ethereum moved to PoS “because it is more secure, less energy-intensive, and better for implementing new scaling solutions compared to the previous proof-of-work architecture.” It was a tremendous shift in how that chain operated and resulted in more than 99.9% reduction in electricity consumption. So tremendous, in fact, that they termed it The Merge. According to CoinTelegraph, Ethereum on PoW was using 112 TWh per year and on PoS is now using 0.01 TWh per year. For reference, Bitcoin is still using tremendous energy—more than many countries on earth.
There are many alternatives to PoS and PoW algorithms, with various tradeoffs to speed, centralization, and efficiency. Chains such as the XRP Ledger and Stellar use “federated consensus” or “proof of association” algorithms where a subset of nodes collectively build and agree on the next block of transactions. Other chains, such as Ignite, use hybrid systems that combine elements of federation and PoS. These systems are far more efficient than PoW and faster than both PoW and PoS because they eschew the wasteful work of competing to solve cryptographic puzzles. For example, transactions on the XRPL take 3-5 seconds to be validated, rather than minutes or hours.
Additionally, both PoW and PoS typically let the winning validator build a block however they like—which leads to miners and validators gaming the system to get the maximum extractable value (MEV) from each block. Federated consensus algorithms are typically less susceptible to these problems because they always arrange each block of transactions in a canonical order.
Making developers’ lives easier with abstractions, dApps, and smart contracts
Web2 brought us rich application experiences, cloud computing, asynchronous communication, and plenty of centralization. It’s practically impossible to develop a web2 app without paying corporations and being subject to their privacy policies, terms and conditions, and fiduciary responsibility. Web3 gives developers the ability to write and run apps that are fully-independent, widely-available, and decentralized. No limits and no corporate dependencies.
To make this a reality, most major blockchains are working hard to attract and onboard developers to their platforms with easy-to-use SDKs and high-quality documentation (e.g. Solana, Cardano, XRPL). Open-source blockchains are widely available and provide fertile ground for innovation. Each has built-in support for financial transactions using their native tokens (e.g. SOL, ADA, XRP), ensuring that people can pay and be paid.
Many chains support the development of dApps—decentralized applications. They can be written in a variety of programming languages, depending on what the chains support. Generally speaking, the larger the developer community of a given chain, the more languages it supports. For example, Ethereum supports .NET, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Rust, Dart, and Delphi. The XRPL supports Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, C++, Java, React.js and Ruby.
Some blockchain apps are backed by or written as smart contracts. Smart contracts are tamper-proof, immutable pieces of code that live on the blockchain and facilitate interactions or agreements between the app, the user, and the chain. Blockchains offer simple abstractions and SDKs so developers can get up and running quickly with app development. For example, Ethereum offers a variety of application development tools to help people experiment, build front ends, and test their dApps and smart contract implementations. The downside to smart contracts is that, since they’re immutable and shared online, if anyone finds a bug in the contract’s code, they can exploit it to their advantage, and the developer can’t easily patch the vulnerability away. This makes developing smart contracts a delicate task with higher stakes than many other projects.
The XRP Ledger supports programmability through a number of protocols and standards. It includes native transactors that provide out-of-the-box functions which are already battle-tested and standardized. The Hooks proposal would further extend programmability on the Ledger. Hooks are small, efficient pieces of code that allow for the quick and easy execution of logic before and after a transaction — all native to the Ledger. This is important because standard smart contracts can be complex and difficult to navigate, especially for developers that are new to web3.
Unlike other protocols, the XRPL also has native support for NFTs, which means developers don’t need to build or maintain a smart contract in order to bring their NFT projects to life. This lowers the barrier to entry for developers, creators, and anyone else who wants to interact with NFTs on the XRPL. Additionally, automatic royalties are enforced at the protocol level which helps ensure maximum value for creators and developers. Core operations such as minting and burning are native to the Ledger to promote ease-of-use regardless of experience level.
An upcoming amendment, XLS-30d, proposes a native Automated Market Maker (AMM) on the XRPL. The proposal will include bid and vote features, allow for simple token swaps, and should create deep liquidity between token and currency pairs. The AMM’s functionality allows application developers to create interfaces for traders and liquidity providers (LPs) and introduces a novel auction mechanism that incentivizes arbitrageurs while reducing the impact of impermanent loss faced by LPs.
Developers make the chain better—for everyone
The XRPL community is also currently testing sidechains. Sidechains allow developers to build and experiment with customized features in a sandbox-like environment—connected to, yet distinct from the mainnet—enabling innovation without disrupting or compromising the mainnet. Sidechain features could eventually be proposed as amendments and be merged into mainnet if voted on by the community. There is also ongoing development and testing of an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) sidechain to bring Ethereum’s native Solidity-based smart contracts to the XRPL ecosystem.
As developers do more work on blockchains, we’ll inevitably see improvements in utility, security, scalability, cost and sustainability. The more adoption, the greater the improvements, and the greater the likelihood that more developers (and users) will further adopt this technology. The network effect and a fast-growing list of innovative features are already appealing to developers who want to move on from web2 conventions.
How developers can upskill and start building
The innovations underpinned by blockchain and advantages over web2 are getting hard to ignore. Web3 protocols are making it easier than ever to build on decentralized technologies. Web3 tech isn’t just “an upgrade” or “a step up” from web2—it’s a whole new paradigm of working on applications. They’re decentralized, permissionless, scalable, and stable. Developers can use what they already know and upskill to web3 technologies. For once, they can have skin in the game with full ownership of their assets and intellectual property. Using the programming languages they already know, they can increase their domain expertise and take advantage of decentralization.
When choosing a chain to start on, developers should consider:
- Adoption: Do you want to build on a prime-time chain with lots of users, an up-and-coming chain with a growing user base, or get in early on something brand new?
- Ease of development: Is there sufficient documentation, fully-featured and supported SDKs, an ecosystem of existing dApps to explore, and low-friction onboarding?
- Ledger functionality and transaction time: How does consensus work? Is it efficient and quick?
- Environmental impact: Are energy consumption and sustainability priorities for the blockchain?
- Time to first dApp: How long does it take to build an app? Minutes? Hours? Weeks?
- Community: Is there a living, vibrant user and developer base? Are they passionate about the chain, its growth, and web3?
Blockchain and crypto have the power to enable a better future, and there is a vibrant community of developers that are building, testing and iterating on top of the technology to help uncover future use cases and applications. Ripple is just one contributor among many to the XRP Ledger; as members of this developer community we are deeply committed to helping it grow and thrive.
There are a number of programs like grants and bounties to help developers of all levels get started with the funding and resources they need to bring their web3 projects and applications to life. The XRP Ledger also recently launched an online learning portal where developers can learn more about the basics of crypto and blockchain, or dive straight into coding on the XRPL with courses in languages such as React.js (currently in beta).
For additional information or to join the community, check out the developer Discord, view open source code and repos on GitHub, and follow @RippleXDev on Twitter where we regularly share updates, projects, new features, and fixes from the XRPL community.
Tags: blockchain, partner content, partnercontent, web3
29 Comments
In 15 years, no one’s built a blockchain killer app. There’s a reason for that!
Name me one computing technology since the invention of the personal computer that’s taken that long to produce its first “killer app” and then went on to be successful.
Apple produced the first Macintosh in 1984. PageMaker came out in 1985 and put Mac on the map as The Platform for desktop publishing.
Tim Berners-Lee introduced HTTP to the world in 1991. By 1994 we had Netscape Navigator, the browser that actually brought the Web to the world, and HoTMaiL, arguably the Web’s first “killer app,” came out in 1996.
Sony released the PlayStation in 1995. Within a year and a half, Final Fantasy 7 came out and made it by far the best-selling console of all time, up to that point.
Good technology platforms, systems that actually work well and do something useful, do not take long to produce good software running on them. The fact that this has yet to happen in the crypto world strongly suggests that blockchain is not in fact a good technology platform that works well and does something useful.
agree. This is just frothy piece about tech for tech’s sake. Vague references to “economic and technical utility” and uncovering “future use cases” aren’t particularly persuasive.
I believe the “killer app” of blockchain is crypto-currencies, Bitcoin if you want to get specific. The original whitepaper came out in 2008, and Bitcoin began exchanged with USD in 2010, which meets your “less than 2 years” criteria for discovering useful applications.
Most of these other answers seem to have come straight out of the Trough of Disillusionment. They center around the fact that blockchain isn’t useful outside of the area of currencies, and it’s energy inefficient. It’s no problem that the Playstation has never been used for anything besides video games; and it takes 2.73 cents to make penny.
It’s ok for the tech to be of limited scope; still has value in it’s niche. It’s got to be what it is to do what it does.
Well, The Silk Road couldn’t have survived without bitcoin for anonymous drug deals and was a literal killer app as some users died of overdoses.
Similarly, ransomware has been going great guns with anonymous payments, and I suspect people have died when hospital systems have been hit.
Blockchain: the killer app liberating us from a corrupt financial system and banking the unbanked. However, history whispers tales of greed and power – JP Morgan stifling Tesla for profit. Satoshi’s anonymity speaks volumes. Will governments let blockchain reach its full potential? Their 15-year track record says otherwise.
A chain is only as good as its weakest link. And a chain made of blocks is gonna be weak.
One thing you missed out on in your list around this is:
> When choosing a chain to start on, developers should consider:
Is this a situation where there is *no one* you can trust… because let’s all remember what the blockchain is.
It’s an amazingly inefficient append only database, where you trust no one.
If there’s someone you can trust… say, yourself. Then good news! Get a database. You’ll safe a literal countries worth of electricity, and a ton of hassle,
Really, blockchain? I thought that trend already died off. It’s a technology that has no place in anything outside of crypto currencies. And hijacking the term “web3”, like it’s the next step in web, is just nonsense.
Sure we need better payment solutions in the web, but decentralizing them creates more problems than it solves. The additional complexity makes mit more prone to security issues. Centralized services have formed around these technologies to make it easier to work with them, completely undermining the whole point of decentralization. The sheer amount of scams, fraud and money laundering that has been done with these technologies is just crazy.
There’s only 1 (ONE) consistent factor between every blockchain application I’ve ever seen and that’s that they’re all scams other otherwise fraudulent or criminal.
Doesn’t mean there is a potentially beneficient use for it, but it’s not been shown. And for good reason, and that’s that there is no real benefit to blockchain, nothing it can do that can’t be done better/cheaper/more easily using other more established and less tarnished technology.
” Blockchain advances are bringing economic and technical utility to both users and developers.”
Can you list some ?
No, of course the author can’t.
Yeah, of course this was a sponsored post.
One simple question, how is any of this an improvement on top of Web2.0?
What value does this add the regular browsing user?
Just hyping what is essentially a push to make everything speculative investments, adds zero value to anyone’s browsing experience, except the grifters getting loaded off of it. web3 only became a thing after the value of bitcoin exploded and grifters realized there’s some actual money to be had, pumping this sh!t up as revolutionary to the web experience.
It did ironically improve browsing experience by adding a keyword (blockchain) that, when attached to a project, lets you know you can in most cases filter it out without missing much
What do you mean blockchain has no “killer app”? I don’t get it at all. A decentralized currency that isn’t ruthlessly controlled and manipulated by large and powerful central banks is the most “killer app” the blockchain will ever provide, dapps and smartcontracts aside. And btw smart-contracts themselves I would consider another killer app. Proof of ownership that cannot be revoked or forged by some third party entity? Yeah, I fail to see how that’s not useful.
A lot of folks like to pretend there is no utility to blockchain but I find this line reasoning disingenuous at best. Of course there is plenty of incentive for those central bankers who have gotten so used to controlling and manipulating the money supply at their whim and discretion for pretty much the entirety of civilication to spread FUD and push for controlled crashes like FTX.
But that’s just the thing, centralized holdings like FTX and Coinbase are entirely missing the point of block-chain, and thats intentional. If the masses actually realize how valuable a decentralized currency truly is, and those in developing parts of the world with more blatent corruption already have, there will be no turning back for the poor central bankers. I say good riddance. There feeble attempts to thwart the blockchain market are proof enough to me of the tech’s real value, and also proof of its resiliency.
Hmm, *FUD*? Lets see what that means: “Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults.”
Guess that explains the rest of the comment! 😂
If you think the world was better before central banks existed you’re just buying into tired libertarian propaganda. Crypto currencies do not function as currencies. They are hard to use, slow, volatile, inefficient, and not accepted anywhere. They are primarily used for speculation and scams. They will not replace real currencies and if they did it would not benefit society.
There’s two problems with these killer apps’ sales pitch though: as regards Bitcoin, is that it’s control is hardly decentralised. Big exchanges, big miners and Bitcoin’s core developers control it pretty tightly.
And for smart contracts, they don’t actually prove ownership: indeed they can’t. What they provide instead is proof of integrity, which is *way* different. For a proof of ownership, you need to trust that the party entering it is honest which runs counter to the sales prospectus of trustlessness.
That would be the main issue for blockchains for me: the technology may be useful but it overpromises and is oversold to a laughable degree.
I love smart contracts. Immutable code is the best idea ever. Especially when if you write some code with a bug(which every developer does) it can result in drained wallets, drained liquidity pools, or burned tokens that go no where.
I also love being my own bank. If I forget my pass phrase I have no one to blame but myself. And I also have no way to get my money back. Fraudulent transactions? Those are my fault too. Someone got my keys? My fault. Goodbye life savings.
This is truly the future of finance!
If you want to replace the international monetary system, first you need to spend some time studying how it works. Reading some Austrian economics pseudoscience doesn’t count.
Bitcoin as the “killer app” falls apart when you realise how painfully slow it is. It just doesn’t scale.
The “solutions” to this (Solana) solve the problem by centralising and moving transactions off-chain.
It’s like if someone launched a new database, touted it as the “future of data storage”, but it only managed 3 transactions an hour and the solution was “oh but you can stick a huge memcache in front of it”.
That would rightly be laughed out of the room. The fact bitcoin isn’t just shows how much of this is hype and not genuine technical analysis.
Smart contracts fall apart for any real-world non-digital use case because of enforcement. The only benefit blockchain brings is in situations where you trust no-one. But unless you have someone to enforce the contract in the real world it is worthless. If you have someone to enforce it, you have a trusted 3rd party & a blockchain isn’t needed.
That you need to invoke conspiracies to justify your tech is the final nail in the coffin.
I mean, if you want a currency the govt. can;t control, gold is a classic.
Web3 is just latest grift on the web of people pretending they’ve reinvented the wheel. As we see social media shifting towards decentralized social networks like Mastodon and the Fediverse, these are techs that rely on web fundamental technologies instead of the smoke and mirrors of blockchain and NFT grifts. The fact this article wraps up pointing to React.js says it all.
Web 3 is not “hear to stay”. Web 3 isn’t even here.
15 years later, blockchain is still a solution i nsearch of a problem.
Reading this on April 1st made me think it was an April Fools gag but the further I read the more obvious it became that this was not a joke. It’s telling that every screed extolling the virtues of blockchain technology always remains vague about it will totally be useful and beneficial at some point in the future. Blockchain technology has added no value to humanity or the internet in the decade plus that it has been around. It is a solution looking for a problem that does not exist. All blockchain development endeavors are nothing but get rich quick schemes once people realized how easy it is to con people into parting with their wealth for digital nothingness tokens.
Also I hate how the crytobros hijacked the web 3 moniker from what was supposed to be the semantic web into whatever scam filled hellhole it is associated with now.
Git is a blockchain app. Its repos consist of a series of blocks, called commits, represented by hashes. Each commit block includes the hashes of previous blocks. That makes it a blockchain.
Now, it’s not a very secure blockchain: its hashes are too easy to crack, so spoofing blocks is too easy.
But it is a blockchain nevertheless.
Git is blockchain if you’re desperate enough to play semantics games. But it’s really just an evolution of SVN, and Source Safe, and Mercurial, and the other version control systems. It’s a VCS first and anything else afterward.
More importantly, it’s a form of blockchain will an actual use-case,
For God’s sake, it’s 2023. Aren’t you done with this Web3 malarkey? If there is really a potential for Web3, then maybe spend time proving that instead of writing useless blogs about it.
Proof of Stake is complete BS and chips away at whatever decentralization existed in Proof of Work by giving the authority to users with more stakes; i.e., people with more money will control the whole network. Even if PoS is environment-friendly, it’s useless because we already have environment-friendly solutions much better than PoS.
The Web3 community Is filled with naive developers who think they are solving a problem that doesn’t even exist. It is typical to see tweets from these developers like “Built sh!t. Learned sh!t.” etc., but you fail to realize that it’s quite literally what they mean.
Suggested reading: web3isgoinggreat.com/