NPK TALK SERIES (EPISODE 4)

Welcome to another exciting episode of NPK Talk Series. In this episode, we will be looking at Appchains.

Blockchains as one of the emerging technologies recently has shown promises of what it can be used for as it is also one of the powerful technologies behind web3. Well, in this episode of NPK Talk Series, we are not talking about Blockchain itself but some powerful features discovered proving to make blockchain technology a technology that is here to stay. AppChains with the case study of Octopus Network as it is built on NEAR Blockchain is our main focus of discussion in as we have a chit chat with Octopus Network Nigeria Ambassador Mr. Damilola Oguntola. Let’s Go
What are AppChains?
So Appchains in simple terms are independent blockchain infrastructure used explicitly for a specific set of custom designed Applications. The whole idea behind Appchains is that each dApps don't need to be writing out smart contracts on another Blockchain to get things done, instead they build, own and configure their Blockchain based on what the team of Dapp wants. Examples are like the parachains of Polkadot and kusama ecosystem.

We can find appchains on Octopus Network. Octopus Network is a multichain interoperable crypto network for launching and running Web3.0 Substrate – based apps also known as appchains
How are AppChains relevant to blockchain?
Appchains are relevant because it removes from projects wishing to have a flawless service to their community the bottlenecks of building on well known blockchains. We know that no matter how perfect or decentralised various blockchains have claimed to be there are always issues in terms of
1) cost of transaction fees
2) speed of transaction
3) security of such blockchains
4) scalability.

With the four items listed above you would have noticed that popular blockchains that people are currently executing smart contracts on have one or two of the problems listed above.
Each appchain build is unique in its nature as the founding team can configure the appchain to fit their project and the community and since it is an app specific blockchain, those problems can be outwitted and projects can be sustainable.

What are the difference between Dapps and Appchains?
A decentralized application or dApp, is a web application with at least a portion of its backend residing on a blockchain. A dApps backend can be implemented in two ways — smart contracts can be hosted on a blockchain platform, or a decentralized application could live on its own dedicated blockchain.
When a dApp has its own blockchain, its called an application-specific blockchain, or appchain for short. Unlike dApps, appchains allow developers to customize their application in terms of governance structure, economic design, and even its underlying consensus algorithm.
Why use AppChains if we can build a smart contract for execution of Activities?
appchains allow developers to customize their application in terms of governance structure, economic design, and even its underlying consensus algorithm.
Appchains also give developers dedicated transaction processing capacity.
To illustrate, while thousands of different applications might share a standard set of configurations on a generic smart contract platform, each appchain in a PoS setting could easily achieve 1K+ TPS throughput and fast finality — and all this transaction processing capacity would be dedicated to just one application.
And each appchain is interoperable with other blockchains such as Etherium, NEAR, COSMOS and etc

What are the skills required to build an appchain? {includes Development, Deployment etc).
In terms of skills
* Substrate coding skills. Substrate is a completely free and open-source project. It is built using the Rust programming language, which is designed for creating fast and inherently safe software.

In terms of Deployment:
This is usually decided by the validators and holders of in the network and since this is a case study of Octopus, the holders of $OCT tokens. They have the power to upvote and downvote for projects to deployed.

What does it take to build an AppChain?
The process of appchain selection is a part of the Octopus protocol and the decision-making power belongs to the Octopus Community.
Besides being appchain Validators and Delegators, $OCT token holders have the right to select the best appchain projects by upvoting or downvoting in an on-chain candidate queue.
Substrate-based chains can become Octopus appchains by successfully completing the following stages:
Registration
Audit
Voting
Staging
Booting
Each is explained in Octopus website.

And in conclusion what are their limitation?
So Far no limitations just the technical skills needed to build substrate based blockchains and now octopus Network is solving it by creating an EVM- compactable substrate chain