Inside the blockchain developers’ mind: How to build the next big social DApp

cointelegraph.com:

Cointelegraph is following the development of an entirely new blockchain from inception to mainnet and beyond through its series, Inside the Blockchain Developer’s Mind, written by Andrew Levine of Koinos Group.

People use social applications daily, but despite all the hype around supposedly “next-gen” blockchains, none of those social applications are decentralized. Let’s unpack why, using two blockchains as a reference: Ethereum and Steem.

Ethereum has far more developers than any other general purpose blockchain, and yet none of those developers have managed to build a social application with mainstream adoption. At one time, Steem was one the most widely used blockchains of any kind in the world, making it also one of the most used social DApps in the world, with a market capitalization that reflected this with an all-time high of about $2 billion.

Steem was able to grow extremely fast and onboard hundreds of thousands of ordinary users, but never received the level of developer adoption that Ethereum did, and ultimately failed to live up to its potential. How and why this happened is a valuable lesson about building both DApps and blockchains.

Related: The future of DeFi is spread across multiple blockchains

When Steem was being built, Ethereum was the only viable blockchain that a developer could use to build their DApp without forking and modifying the code of an existing blockchain like Bitcoin.

Thanks to Ethereum, instead of having to build a blockchain from scratch just to support some specific application (like a social network), the developer could just write up the code needed for their application and upload it to the Ethereum blockchain as a “smart contract.” This would enable the developer to piggyback off