Last updated
Last updated
Let me preface this with saying - I love and . Both of our projects are dedicated to growing the pie, through building beautiful UX for decentralization.
Backpack/xNFT's may seem similar to Dappnet, but have pretty different realisations of their direction.
Dappnet is directed towards creating a bulletproof platform for all types of media. Censorship-resistant dapps, but also websites, news, and datasets.
Backpack is honing in on building dapps and a great wallet for users.
In terms of technical differences:
xNFT's are hosted on Arweave, and cached by the CDN. Backpack must run a CDN, kind of like how Infura runs nodes for Metamask.
Dappnet apps are hosted by IPFS nodes (and soon BitTorrent). IPFS/BitTorrent employ swarm-based P2P solutions to serving content, where each node can also contribute their resources. The scalability of the two designs is to be considered.
is a custom browser that accesses websites via Bitcoin public keys, and downloads them over BitTorrent.
In terms of their approach, there are two main drawbacks:
custom browser - meaning users have to download a separate browser, which means re-working their existing setup and extensions (web3 wallets).
.bit domains - ZeroNet uses the Namecoin protocol so users can access content via .bit domains. We commend Namecoin as the first protocol to square , though it shows its age. For users, the UX for updating .eth domains is simpler, using more common payment methods (ETH, USD), and widely integrated in the crypto ecosystem.
Finally, I would like to list some prior works. While Dappnet was developed independently, I grew up playing with I2P/Freenet/Tor, and they had a big influence on these ideas. There are a few other approaches which are worth looking into, to compare against what we're doing.
. See this on various approaches on HN.
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, and .