dApp World | Blockchain Applications, Uniswap, PayPal, and Challenges | Ep 10

Sheldon: 0:00

You're listening to the Sugar Cane podcast, where you get all of crypto's tastiest tidbits. Here's your hosts, sheldon Trotman and Rudy Dogum.

Rudy: 0:11

Welcome, welcome. And today we're talking about dApps, DApps, dapps. So I love the word dApps, I think it's a fun word to follow along. But what does a dApp mean? What does it stand for? Sheldon?

Sheldon: 0:29

So dApp. Dapp also referred to so it's a decentralized application. So it's kind of like instead of taking an existing mobile app or a website that it's owned by one company, one organization kind of, can choose to update or control it. So dApp, otherwise referred to as a decentralized application, is a network or smart contract that live on the blockchain for anyone.

Rudy: 0:50

So back to the other episodes we were talking about, where you have smart contracts and there are kind of like apps built on top of it which are classified as a dApp. So the apps that you get from the app store are apps normal apps that are in control technically by Apple or Google because they can take it down whenever they want to take it down or give control to anyone else. But even if you're developing it, it doesn't mean you have control over it sometimes. So with the dApp, that means you have full control because it's the smart contract that's permissionless and decentralized on the blockchain. It's exciting, and do you have any favorite dApps that you use?

Sheldon: 1:38

That's a good question. Of course, everyone, for the most part, uses Uniswap, so, for those who don't know, uniswap is what's called a DEX, so a decentralized application or decentralized exchange I'm sorry, not a dApp and so the way that that works is that you're basically exchanging one token for another token, so that's a pretty popular one. I use Aave pretty frequently, so being able to lend US dollars out and be able to get some returns and yield overtime on that. Again, then, this is financial advice. Just me suggesting what I use and have fun with, of course, and there's a couple of other social dApps that I use as well, like Lens, farkaster. These are ones that allow you to actually engage tweets online, so just think of Twitter, or now X, but in a social format. So another one I use pretty frequently.

Rudy: 2:27

That's the thing too. It ranges from anything, just like. Again, I feel like a lot of people think of dApps as something that has to be financially part of something about financial program, but dApp can be really anything. It can be a social app, it can be exchange, it can be a contract for a real estate. It can really be anything. So I mean, these are like game changer. So can you like break down why they're causing such a stir?

Sheldon: 3:00

So historically you'd have to if you want to, like, interact with a financial application, right, you'd have to get approval by a bank. We have that specific account, let's say on Robinhood, to interact with options, for example. So now, with decentralized financial applications, you now have this whole world of decentralized apps, or dApps, that you can interact with, that you don't need any one account, and so you can actually interact with them without having to talk to anyone. You can trade in any way that you want without having any restrictions on that. So there's a way to like kind of break down the barriers, of kind of user control and user action, for sure.

Rudy: 3:33

And I feel like there's a new dApp coming out all the time, oh for sure. And then so many different industries too, yeah, and that's it ownership and access to whatever they feel most comfortable you know interacting with. It's nice to know that, oh, when I interact with this exchange, it's me and the exchange and everyone else who's involved using this exchange, kind of collaborating and working together to make me making it into an efficient ecosystem. And, like there's all the other smart contracts are, you know, disrupting multiple industry? Like, can you share some other examples that you found?

Sheldon: 4:18

Yeah, so it's a couple different areas that I tend to think about. Like, of course, finance, Crypto is kind of first big use case was the national applications. So anything from like economic stability, like if you're talking about actually being able to hold the US dollar without having the US bank account, so like, for example, someone is another country we talked about that before where, like your actual base currency for your countries gets like devalued pretty quickly. Like like Argentina, like Venezuela, like parts of like Europe as well, the actual currency gets devalued very quickly, but you actually have an accountability there. A couple different applications in terms of like supply chains as well.

Sheldon: 4:54

It's like you're talking about like tracking where products came from and actually the origin of that. Like the whole concept of like organic foods is about being able to sort, verify the actual source, the farm that it came from abided by certain pesticide rules and not pesticides. Also to like provenance and journeys to verify through just supply chains as well as, like I'm completely other lens Nothing we're talking about just now, just about social. So like we're talking about owning your own profiles to be able to control your own accounts and not get like de-platformed. You now have control of your account and actually have no one central entity that can like take you away from that or take that from you.

Rudy: 5:30

And like when you're, when you're talking about the food stuff, that was like what kind of hits home for me because, yeah, you know, I shop at whatever grocery store has good deals or as close by whatever is the occasion, like less traffic. But I go to the grocery store. I'm like, let me try to be like you know someone who buys fair trade and organic something, something, something certified by whatever stamp of approval with whatever organization made it, and I have no idea what they really are doing. Like they're just saying that they're certified, but what does organic even mean? Like anyone can just somehow label themselves organic if they find the way to bend the rules and make it work for them. But with DAPS it'll. You can have a DAP that actually is much more scrutinized by the community and watched over by the community to regulate how it's supposed to be governed, and I think there's no better, no better. Let's see, judge then people.

Sheldon: 6:32

Because they are ruthless. People are ruthless.

Rudy: 6:37

They will go after you if you mess up, especially if you're trying to present yourself as someone who's fair trade, and if you mess up once, that's going to be on your permanent record, which would be the blockchain. So I mean, of course, we tend to trust these companies with what they offer, but there's no better way to prove something other than that's written on the blockchain and you know, of course, as it grows, there's also that hype around like security and scalability, and I definitely want to know more about the real challenges of DAPS.

Sheldon: 7:16

Yeah for sure. So, like, we talked a lot about the positives in the crypto blockchain space, but the reality is that, like right now, if you're doing anything on chain, it still is fairly costly, in that, in order to do a transaction, for example, it costs about like 30, 40 cents to make like just a swap, which is a pretty simple action, but it's still fairly costly. That's pretty big knock. That crypto gets a lot.

Sheldon: 7:36

There's a lot of scalability solutions to make that whole process cheaper. To be honest, also, the process is still fairly slow. So if you're talking about creating a transaction on chain, it still is takes about like 12 seconds of talking about Ethereum, maybe like four or five seconds if you're talking about another kind of L2 or layer two. But again, those are more solutions, that there are more solutions that are coming out that help kind of make things more efficient and faster there as well. So I'm starting over time, both the cost, the speed, the security will all get improved as we go further. So, given another like two, three years, I think things will get a lot faster and better. Yeah, exactly yeah.

Rudy: 8:12

That's, other people don't want to keep paying more for something. So obviously now such a high demand or high gas fees, you don't want to pay a lot of money to find out your food's organic or not.

Sheldon: 8:24

Yeah, Unless you're using something like shurikane.

Rudy: 8:28

Plug, yeah, no.

Sheldon: 8:34

Get rid of the cast, the cost, the speed.

Rudy: 8:37

It's the future it's going to happen. It's the new technology it's growing in. Our system is abstracting all that away. You can smart contract wallets, get all that stuff yeah for sure, as cheap as possible. We're working on it, folks, don't worry, it's coming. And then this brings out the other point is you know a lot of companies who've devoted their lives to creating these applications and the Web 2 world. Now what should they be worried about with depths so?

Sheldon: 9:05

yeah. So like you're seeing that big tech companies like, for example, paypal recently getting more deeper into the kind of blockchain cryptocurrency space, just because they see that's where the future is going, where people now have more control over their assets and they want to do things without having barriers and restrictions on them. So, like again in that PayPal context, they lost what's called a US dollar backed stable coin, so essentially now can create US dollars on the blockchain that can be used for other financial applications, and so you definitely see a lot more companies like I know JP Morgan also has a big arm, visa has a big arm, mastercard is also has a big arm. So like, why do these big companies are realizing that? Here's writing on the wall this is where the future is going for finance. Let's start getting into that and building technology there so we can get ahead of the curve.

Rudy: 9:50

Exactly, and I, for one do appreciate when large companies like you know PayPal, visa, mastercard, these banking systems are working with new technology, because it's hard to remember that Once something has momentum like the internet did or like blockchain, crypto does have now it's hard to stop it and if you see something disrupting your current technology or your current systems, it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just a signal for you having a new opportunity to grow, to grow with it. Yeah, otherwise, if we try to stop it and hold it or just talk poorly about it until you realize, oh no, I have to adopt or get held back, it's just, it's not a pretty look.

Sheldon: 10:44

Yeah, yeah, not like we talked a lot about, just like financial financial companies, but like even like Starbucks, they also got into the NFT game. Nike got into the NFT game, adidas got into it. Reddit also is pretty big into the NFT game as well. So, like a lot of companies who are non like financial in nature, are also seeing blockchain as the next emergence of internet technology and ownership of assets. So it's a huge thing to start thinking about and getting into.

Rudy: 11:12

Exactly, and for anyone who's trying to build a DAP, what would be your go to advice for them?

Sheldon: 11:20

Yeah, honestly, like how I got into it. This was back in 2016, 2017. I just looked at a bunch of YouTube videos to be honest, like especially now, like YouTube has been so like good at putting out high quality content, like the sugar cane pockets of, like how you can actually break down code, look at, like actual, how these smart contracts work. So definitely my go to source, for me at least, is been YouTube.

Rudy: 11:44

Yeah, for sure, I'm definitely a visual learner too. I need to see things happening for me to learn, and then I read on the side. But yeah, I mean that's like that's the whole essence of a DAP. It's the idea or the imagination of it is more complicated than it really is. It's basically what you were doing today with regular applications. Yeah, rather, instead of building in a more private fashion, it's built in a more public fashion and more accessible to anyone, and it's directly integrated with blockchain ecosystem. Whichever blockchain you use that can support a DAP and yeah, it's more of a decentralized form to bring it up to the world.

Sheldon: 12:32

Yeah, you'll start to see like a lot of mobile applications and websites start to have like blockchain enabled technology. It won't actually even feel, but you'll be able to get the benefits of, like ownership and sovereignty, and those are kind of benefits that you get over time just by using blockchain technology. So there definitely come a lot more to more simple solutions, oh yeah.

Rudy: 12:49

So we're excited to see what DAPs you will publish here. But yeah, thank you again for listening and we'll see you next week for some more tasty tidbits.

Sheldon: 12:58

The tastiest of tidbits. See ya, yeah.