While initial exchange offerings have been catching the limelight, one crypto project has been quietly yet successfully raising funds for months. LiquidApps, an EOS scaling solution, has earned commendation for its less FOMO-filled approach to fundraising. The second-layer blockchain project is believed to have raised $2.8 million so far, and was praised this week in a Coindesk editorial which noted: “LiquidApps has put out a much more real product than vastly larger ICOs that ended long ago.”
That product has included the provision of resources to dApp developers who can’t afford EOS’ capricious vRAM prices. The cost of renting the virtual RAM can prove prohibitive for developers of high volume dApps. LiquidApps’ solution is to provide alternative storage for EOS developers off-chain that allows data to be stored and retrieved efficiently and at low cost.
The team behind LiquidApps, from left to right: Tal Muskal, CTO, Beni Hakak, CEO
Raising Capital While Raising a Community
As LiquidApps CEO Beni Hakak told Coindesk back in February, “Our goal…is to bring as many stakeholders into the ecosystem to best establish it for success. As true believers in the free market, we don’t involve ourselves in price speculation – there is no technical possibility to combine an auction, like we’re doing, with a capped amount.”
The startup’s move has been likened to the 12-month raise that prefaced the launch of EOS, the blockchain where LiquidApps does much of its business. It’s recently provided vRAM to Moonlighting, a freelancing marketplace that migrated to EOS earlier this year. With 750,000 users, Moonlighting would incur costs of as much as $2,000 a day if all its transactions were to be performed on EOS. LiquidApps promises to bring that down to around $10 a day, granting the freelancing site the benefits of blockchain without the scaling shortcomings that are normally inherent.
Dapps Upon Dapps
LiquidApps has released a number of products this year including LiquidLink, an interoperability solution that allows data from different blockchains to be integrated into a single dApp. Like many second layer startups focused on smart contract blockchains, LiquidApps is heavily invested in decentralized applications. It’s provided a suite of tools for dApp service providers, who can utilize oracles, storage, scheduler solutions and much more.
Proponents of Web3 envisage a future in which decentralized applications are the preferred choice of millions. The thesis for mass adoption of dApps holds that as the UX of these crypto-powered products improves, they will enable seamless web browsing within a secure environment that doesn’t rely on corporations for custody of user data. For this vision to be realized, crypto networks will need to be capable of supporting tens of thousands of transactions per second without impacting user experience or imposing significant costs. Should that level of demand occur, second-layer solutions like LiquidApps will be vital in lightening the load from the main chain, drawing demand for resources off-chain, where costs can be kept exponentially lower.
Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
