IOHK also plans to create a certification program for dapps on the network so that users can have some level of quality assurance. Certification would likely be automated and be given to projects that have been audited a certain number of times. This way, IOHK is not subjectively choosing which projects are given certification.
It's important to note that dapps do not have to be listed in the store and IOHK cannot control what smart contracts are deployed on Cardano.
In addition to the certification program, IOHK plans to have user review systems, upvoting and the ability for users to write feedback. This would allow for an eBay-like environment where the quality of a dapp can be determined by how many users it has and how it is reviewed by the community.
“The winners of the future in the DeFi space are going to have liquidity and interoperability, the ability to move multi-chain,” Hoskinson said. “And finally, cost predictability is such an important thing… It’s so bizarre how we just tolerate massive swings in the price of doing business.”
Cardano did not make it to the first wave of DeFi, which generated superstars such as Uniswap, MakerDAO and many more. Even so, despite calling DeFi’s current state a “bubble,” Hoskinson remains bullish on DeFi in the longer term. Cardano, its founder says, has had its eyes on the so-called “second wave of DeFi” all along.
“We need governance, we need certification, we need insurance, we need regulation on these things, metadata identity… at the same time, you need to decentralize,” Hoskinson said. “The next wave of [DeFi] will do that with a straight face and will be significantly harder to regulate in a traditional sense. The way we constructed Cardano was for that second wave.”
What DeFi needs: “First off, you need to have a dApp store. It just blows my mind that we don’t have a canonical dApp store for the industry. I have Google Play and we have the iOS store. I know people have been trying to do this, but you need to have some coherent way of curating dApps so that you know that the code’s been checked and certified, you know, the author information is right, the life cycle is great. Because we’ve already trained a whole generation of people using computing devices that this is the model.”
The brave new world of NFTs: “What are you actually selling when you sell an NFT? For example, I took some of my tweets and I sold them online as NFTs, and I raised like $30,000 and I donated the money to various people. That was fun. But [for] the life of me, I actually don’t know what I sold. I sold an NFT representing a tweet, but can I delete the tweet now? I don’t know. It’s like this type of stuff. There’s no real contracts or intellectual property. And it’s going to get litigated to hell.”
NFTs’ dirty laundry: “There’s also money laundering considerations that are occurring. So there’s a lot of evidence the Treasury Department’s been tracking where people are basically using NFTs as a mechanism to legitimize unlawful funds. So just create an NFT, you buy it from yourself, you say it came from someone else. ‘Oh, look, this picture of a stone sold for $5 million and I just made it out of nowhere. I have no idea who the counterparty is.’ Actually, it was you. This kind of stuff happens. So all that’s getting sorted and the way we constructed Cardano is we have a lot of stuff. The same things that make RealFi work really well are going to be really great for NFT curation creation.”
Why government should be on blockchain: “I’m getting damn tired of the government telling me I need to pay more taxes, and then they say at the same breath, ‘We don’t owe you anything. We don’t owe you any transparency about how we spend the money, what we do with the money.’ So I say, ‘Let me get this straight. You guys lose $85 billion worth of military hardware in Afghanistan to the Taliban, and then you lose all the receipts and you can’t even tell us what you’ve lost there?’ Conveniently ‘lose’ these things. Like stuff like that. It just makes me sick. There’s no accountability. There’s no transparency. There’s no oversight. There are these bodies like the Government Accountability Office and FOIA and things all that shit should be on a blockchain. All of that should be publicly accessible. It should be immutable. It should be time stamped, auditable so that we can actually get some transparency on how our money is being used.”
While account-based blockchains, like Ethereum, allow numerous users to interact with the same smart contracts by default, state-based or EUTXO-based networks, such as Cardano, present certain challenges for developers. The Minswap team published in a post-mortem blog post after the incident: “It’s an issue that every competent team and development lab building DeFi protocols on Cardano must overcome. It’s not a fundamental flaw, but is simply a design challenge that must be addressed.”
The Plutus dAppStore prototype will be previewed by IOHK during the Cardano Summit 2021, which will take place on the 25th and 26th of this month. Sidney Vollmer, Cardano’s head of marketing and communications, predicted that some of the summit’s partnerships may “blow people’s minds.” While the Plutus dAppStore’s official debut date has yet to be announced, it remains to be seen whether and when fully-fledged DeFi applications will be added to the store.
According to Shruti Appiah, head of product and smart contracts at Cardano, the dAppStore addresses two barriers to entry. The first is that there is currently no formal discovery process for dApps running on the network, and the second is that there is no consolidated view of all dApps available in a given ecosystem for end-users.
The Plutus dAppStore will allow Cardano users to explore the entire ecosystem of dApps running on the protocol through a single “storefront” or web page.