What are the use-cases for modular applications (nnApps)?
In the past two years, the space has been grappling with an industrial revolution of sorts — networks have fragmented into specialized components for execution, settlement, consensus and data availability. Whilst the network layer has moved towards modularism, decentralized applications remain monolithic, tethered to the native network’s set of rules around networking, consensus and security. The needs of these applications are increasingly dynamic, but the infrastructure available remains inflexible and inefficient.
Enter Blockless, and our modular, network-neutral application (nnApp). But how do nnApps stack up against the current meta of dApps, and our more recent fixation on appchains and rollapps?
We’ve broken down these differences in the table below, with a focus on what’s important — security, network performance, and the diversity of the network’s operators.
What differentiates nnApps from traditional dApps, and enables all of the above, is our ability to process an application’s functions workload-by-workload. In real terms, this means:
- Optimized performance for each workload, with reduced latency through the use of our Dynamic Resource Matching tool — using geolocation, hardware specification and previous performance records for each particular workload type to simulate future performance, and determine which node gets allocated what.
- App infrastructure can scale linearly with the user base.
- Users are rewarded for using and powering their favorite applications.
- Fullstack decentralization, from the frontend to the backend, transitioning away from the “community-owned, institutionally-powered” paradigm.
What does this mean for applications and the people that use them?
- Application sovereignty over off-chain data and compute
Blockless’ modular application structure allows apps to govern how the network they use behaves, even allowing their users to power them automatically, just by using them.
By building on Blockless and becoming a nnApp, for instance, applications get to incorporate any data they need in verifiable ways. This means AI platforms and LLM tools can verify datasets, process client-side tasks and leverage nearby nodes to achieve minimal latency. This goes far beyond users powering small tasks — a user-powered network leveraging our Dynamic Resource Matching tool means that nnApp teams can fully rely on its community for intensive and time-sensitive workloads.
2. End-game application scaling
dApps don’t scale linearly with the amount of users. When running an application on Ethereum, the application is essentially dependent on the computing capabilities of the underlying ethereum nodes, which are simultaneously maintaining thousands of other applications. Apps are in competition with one another, and the more users you have, the worse the UX tends to be.
nnApps on Blockless don’t compete with each other for resources. Each nnApp spins up its own dedicated network for each workload, powered by its community, and supported by the wider network. As nnApps user base grows, the pool of compute resources provided automatically scales with the application’s needs. The more users you have, the more performant and stable your application can be.
The nnApp approach also differs from traditional, homogeneous decentralized networks, where more nodes in a network can actually mean worse performance due to communication cost. For each nnApp on Blockless, its node community will dynamically form into subnets that each serve a distinct computational workload, and they don’t need to constantly communicate with each other. For instance, in a single application, nodes that are generating ZK-SNARK proofs for off-chain execution correctness don’t have to communicate its processes with nodes that are forming a BFT consensus on on-chain events.
This architecture allows nnApps on Blockless to scale efficiently for all computational workloads as its user base grows, turning a weakness of mass community participation into a unique strength.
We think that every decentralized application can benefit from what we’ve built, but we’ve listed what we believe to be some of the major use-cases below.
DePin and Blockless
Decentralized Dynamic Web Hosting has never been more important, with draconian restrictions imposed by an ever-growing number of totalitarian regimes. Blockless enables an era of censorship-resistant, self-sustaining web hosting, with users of Blockless decentralized applications automatically providing the application with compute resources, simply by using it. With IPFS storage + community-powered compute through Blockless — DEXs, DAOs and everything in-between will finally be able to relinquish control of the frontend to the communities they represent.
A globally distributed network enables fully anonymous VPNs and other privacy-preserving technologies, with user data encrypted and sent through multiple nodes in the network, each operated by different community members. In the case of mixnets, data is not only passed through multiple nodes but also mixed with other users’ data, further obfuscating any individual user’s identity. This approach not only masks the user’s IP address and location, providing enhanced anonymity and privacy, but also distributes the load across multiple points, enhancing the resilience and censorship resistance of the network.
AI and Blockless
From low-latency personalized AI models to local-first AI-generated text and images, all the way to a global edge federated learning network, Blockless provides AI applications with the benefits of performant, distributed off-chain networks, whilst maintaining security through any preferred L1. As user devices are used to compute over data, this process is publicly verifiable through ZKP, ensuring that the workloads are processed correctly.
Naturally, different AI data sets have different security needs. Whilst public datasets, like weather statistics, stock market data or on-chain data, can be processed through Data Aggregation, computing over private data needs to meet higher security standards. As we move towards a personalized AI experience, with AI providers like ChatGPT enabling increased customization, AI nnApps built on Blockless enable their users to process their own data within the application itself, as well as leverage our dynamic verification mechanism to decide which datasets they want additional security for.
Gaming and Blockless
Gaming nnApps on Blockless are servers that are powered by the players. From Minecraft and Roblox all the way to private lobbies in Call of Duty, gaming is hurtling towards a fully customizable, user-generated future. On Blockless, users are able to power and build on top of the games they love, with each player’s device requesting data (E.g. game state updates or player actions) from other devices in the network. Simultaneously, the same device responds to requests from other peers by sending the data they require.
With Blockless, gaming nnApps can expand beyond the current paradigm of centralized, protocol-owned servers, to a system where games are fully powered by the people that use them, with both the users and creators of custom servers able to directly reap the rewards of their work.
These are early examples of what some of our builders and community members are working on, but they only scratch the surface of what is possible with Blockless Network. The future of modular applications is only just beginning, and we’re excited to see what you can build. If you’d like to build with us but aren’t quite sure where to start, reach out here for a helping hand.
Till then, we’re nnApping.
