The blockchain technology and crypto landscape are continuously evolving, it’s like the Wild West in the digital realm. While the blockchain space holds unlimited promise, many projects find it difficult to survive rapid changes across the industry, whether technical, regulatory, or wild market volatility. Projects face developmental challenges that could lead to early-stage failure.
As blockchain grows into a global technology, scalability has proven to be a headache for early-stage companies, interoperability with other platforms also poses a challenge, and getting competent developers to join has also seen several companies fail.
How a blockchain project responds to these systematic challenges can determine its future trajectory in the complex world of crypto. Having sound communities and development teams can help struggling platforms build a strong foundation for their projects or tokens, despite the raging technical and developmental challenges they face.
Ethereum, for instance, has millions of developers working on it, which has seen the blockchain introduce novel capabilities – moving to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus mechanism being a major step forward for the project. However, most projects cannot compete with the developer community that Ethereum or Bitcoin has grown over the past years. Therefore, newer blockchains have resorted to creating foundations that offer strategic responses to help ease the technical and developmental challenges.
For example, Agoric, a decentralized platform that aims to simplify the process of building and launching dApps on a blockchain network, has led the growth of its blockchain, addressing the developmental hurdles it faces. The Agoric Foundation has led the development of its blockchain and its token, $BLD, making significant decisions that have helped build a robust foundation for the project.
Having a robust foundation helps projects have long-term sustainability, trust, and credibility, boosts funding, enhances innovation and helps to build strong partnerships and alliances. All of these are crucial to the growth of a crypto project. In this piece, we take Agoric as an example. We go over the measures that have minimized the challenges during its developmental phase and how it has affected the growth of $BLD.
Challenges Web3 projects face in their developmental phase
As alluded to, many crypto and blockchain projects face massive challenges during their developmental phase, which has seen several companies crash before reaching their potential. Agoric has faced several developmental challenges in the past, including slow innovation, a steep learning curve for developers joining the blockchain, a lack of sustainable oracles, and a lack of developers.
As crypto has repeatedly shown, failure in technical development could be detrimental not only to the project but also to the underlying token. For instance, before Chainlink’s ‘Plug n Play’ oracles were integrated into Agoric, developers needed to build their own price data feeds, which is time-consuming, requires upkeep, and comes with unforeseen security risks.
Critically, most early-stage blockchain platforms suffer from a steep learning curve on a specific blockchain, lack of sufficient partnerships, slow innovation due to bureaucracy within the governance protocols, and poor tokenomics.
Luckily, Agoric, which launched in 2018, has had a strong team that has enabled it to thrive despite the multiple challenges. Through the project’s foundation, Agoric has been able to respond to the significant developmental challenges, growing its user base and maintaining its token value despite the current crypto winter.
How strategic decisions stabilize a blockchain project
As already stated, one of Agoric’s earliest strategic decisions, integration to Chainlink, back in 2020, removed a major developmental hurdle that allowed developers to build their decentralized applications (DApps) without worrying about oracles. The decentralized oracle services allowed developers to focus on building the best product and user experiences, ushering in a new wave of DeFi on Agoric.
Web 3 dev education is also a critical part of building your blockchain project. As seen with Ethereum and Bitcoin, a strong community of developers could help a project grow – both in developmental and financial value. In April this year, Agoric partnered with the BytePitch team to launch the first Agoric Bootcamp as part of its Chainboard Academy. The 10-week boot camp combined lectures and small projects to help developers get up to speed with Agoric.
By the end of the boot camp, tens of developers were able to build, test, and deploy their own dApps on the Agoric blockchain. By growing its developer community, Agoric was able to add innovative developers to its ranks, allowing them to create projects that can contribute to ecosystem development.
The biggest challenge for Agoric, however, is the innovation aspect – a challenge for most projects in their developmental stage. To ease innovation in a blockchain project, projects have to create simpler developmental frameworks to incentivize developers to join the project. Agoric’s mainnet launch introduced a rich JavaScript stack for composable smart contracts. Using the library of contracts and contract components — options, loans, a variety of auctions, AMMs, and more — many novel contracts can be built by composing and parameterizing well-vetted components.
Additionally, contracts benefit from extra security provided by the Zoe platform, Agoric’s smart contract framework. Via Zoe, contracts trade fungible, semi-fungible, and non-fungible assets using ERTP, the Electronic Rights Transfer Protocol.
These strategic responses have helped in the developmental growth of Agoric’s platform and, moreover, the growth and fortification of $BLD’s foundation.
How Agoric’s strategic decisions have fortified $BLD’s foundation
Agoric’s strategic decisions have positively impacted the developmental progress of its blockchain and its native $BLD as well. First, the mainnet launch birthed the token, as users were now able to utilize the capabilities of $BLD across the ecosystem and participate in governance votes.
The introduction of decentralized oracles paved the way for the development of more exotic and complex DeFi projects atop the blockchain. This gave rise to the utility of the $BLD on different DApps, allowing users to transact the native token on DEXs, for NFTs, and other transactions built on Agoric’s platform.
Exploits are still common in the digital assets space, especially in the more experimental realm of decentralized finance (DeFi). To build a platform used by millions, possibly billions, of users, security and trust plays a key role. The launch of the offer-safety feature on Zoe helps mitigate this issue of trust and security. Users need not rely on understanding contract code to be certain about how their assets will be handled by a smart contract.
The partnership with BytePitch welcomes a new market to Agoric’s platform – Web 2 developers and non-developers. Educating future developers offers a better chance of converting them into the Agoric community and building the user base globally.
‘Build in the winter, enjoy in the summer’
Agoric’s strategic decisions and unwavering commitment to overcoming challenges have not only fortified the foundation of their blockchain project but have also propelled $BLD forward. By addressing critical issues such as developer education, decentralized oracles, and innovative smart contract frameworks, Agoric has positioned itself for future success.
While market volatility remains a challenge, the resilience and forward-thinking approach of the Agoric team, coupled with their strong partnerships, hint at a promising journey ahead for the 16th largest CosmosHub platform and its dedicated community. “Build in the winter, enjoy in the summer” seems to be the motto, and with Agoric’s solid foundation, brighter days may well be on the horizon.
