EMURGO, the official commercial arm of Cardano and the Cardano Foundation, overseer of the Cardano blockchain, announced the launch of a project that will see the two organizations combine efforts and resources to foster the development of a community-generated and maintained tool stack to support the Cardano ecosystem and accelerate decentralized application development.
The project will consist of an MVP1 and MVP2.
MVP1 will consist of a modular tool stack. It will be built by Five Binaries, an infrastructure development company focused on creating customized, highly reliable blockchain solutions, under the Apache Software License 2.0 publicly on GitHub and hosted by the Cardano Foundation.
This first stage will include the Blockfrost Blockchain connector, the initial release of the Chain Watcher, and a simple backend that will serve as a proof of concept. Five Binaries will develop three main components at this stage of the project:
- Blockchain Adapters – Adapters are plug-in components used to bridge Cardano blockchain data using different methods. For MVP1 an adapter using the Blockfrost API will be provided. There are other ways to access the blockchain data, and these may be added in the future or added by the community.
- Chain Watcher – The Chain Watcher is a core component that is similar to the Plutus Application Backend’s (PAB) concept of a chain indexer. It follows a subscription to the specific chain events and relies on the dApps backends as they happen.
- dApps Backends – dApps backends are application backends that communicate with Chain Watcher and contain the specific logic of a decentralized application. The MVP will include a simple backend that will serve as a proof-of-concept of the project functionality and will give developers a good starting point to build their own.
For the second stage, MVP2, the Cardano Foundation will reach out to different projects and partners from across the ecosystem, publicly inviting them to contribute to the project.
At this stage, each pull request to add a new adapter or a backend will be required to follow the programming guidelines of the project, including tests. The development of these guidelines is part of MVP1 and the implementation of MVP2 will be managed by Five Binaries.
An Application Programming Interface (API) allows developers to interact with correct application instances seamlessly. API access to Cardano is essential to ensure developers can easily interact, test, and launch applications on the blockchain without the need to have deep technical knowledge and experience with Haskell Code for direct interactions with Cardano nodes or other layer-1 components.
The work will augment the development work IOG is doing on the Plutus libraries within the PAB. Developing a second application backend for the Cardano ecosystem is crucial as it increases the options available for developers to build solutions on Cardano and will allow apps to be built by 3rd-parties. Additionally, it will support industry standards for smart contract-based infrastructure.
“EMURGO fully supports the development of valuable Cardano infrastructure components and we are excited to contribute towards its development by a team with an experienced track record. With smart contract functionality now supported on Cardano, the new tool stack will provide developers with further useful options to build socially impactful dApps on Cardano.”
– Ken Kodama, EMURGO CEO
