Cardano Introduces dAppStore for Certified DeFi Apps

The development company behind Cardano, Input-Output (IOHK), has unveiled the Plutus dAppStore, a new shop for decentralized applications on the network. Developers will be able to post their Cardano dApps to this shop, making it easier for the community to find them.

Cardano Introduces dAppStore

Cardano has announced the creation of a marketplace for verified decentralized applications. In a blog post published on Wednesday, IOHK gave a sneak peek at its new “integrated approach” to the development of the Cardano ecosystem, which will be unveiled at Cardano Summit 2021. The Plutus dAppStore, a shop where developers can publish their decentralized applications running on Cardano and make them simpler to discover, is the centerpiece of the announcement.

The dAppStore, according to Shruti Appiah, Cardano’s head of product and smart contracts, removes two hurdles to entry. The first is that there is no formal discovery procedure for dApps running on the network, and the second is that end-users do not have a consolidated picture of all dApps available in a specific ecosystem.

Cardano users will be able to explore the complete ecosystem of dApps running on the protocol through a single “storefront” or web page with the Plutus dAppStore.

IOHK is also launching a formal certification scheme for third-party decentralized applications on Cardano, in addition to the dAppStore. Through automated logic tests, manual smart contract auditing, and formal verification, the program aims to provide users with assurance about the integrity of the dApps they utilize.

The dAppStore, according to Appiah, will provide a “democratized environment for developers to publish their dApps without facing censorship,” which means that both certified and uncertified apps will be listed on the storefront, as the site does not intend to act as a gatekeeper but rather as a “platform for transparent user assessment.”

The long-awaited Alonzo hard fork for Cardano, which added smart contract capability to the network, went live earlier this month, but not without issues. While the upgrade itself proceeded without a hitch, many members of the community were unhappy to see only a handful of applications launch on the network.

Minswap, the first decentralized exchange to debut on the testnet, quickly ran into scale issues and was forced to cease down. Long Nguyen, the founder and engineering lead of Minswap, told Crypto Briefing that the issue stemmed from the so-called concurrency “issue,” which refers to the capacity for several agents to engage with the same smart contract at the same time.

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.

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