Today we’d like to talk about building on WAX and its benefits. The WAX Platform offers a host of advantages for both the developer experience and the end user experience with a mission that heavily emphasizes mainstream adoption. From the onset they have specifically targeted the digital goods markets and have thus built a platform that specializes in the handling and trading of NFT, or Non-fungible tokens.
Starting early on this year, AIKON submitted itself to be a WAX Guild candidate with the hopes to contribute to the advancement and innovation of the WAX network. AIKON hopes to expand this scope with ORE ID’s Enterprise solution that provides a completely seamless blockchain on-ramp experience for users to get data privacy conscious identities that can integrate into both Dapps and existing centralized apps, and with ChainJS, a blockchain development helper API library that supports multiple chains.
Since our inception we’ve been hard at work building tools and services that make the blockchain more accessible for both developers and users, including ORE ID, our simple user onboarding service, and our open source blockchain development helper library, ChainJS, that will make it easy to develop for multiple blockchains using a single codebase. With these two powerful tools you can easily bring your business to the WAX chain whether you’re porting and existing Dapp, or starting a new project.
Why would you want to develop on WAX?
We’ll get into the many reasons why WAX is a great choice, but let’s first start with an introduction of the WAX platform.
What is WAX?
WAX or Worldwide Asset eXchange, was built with the specific intent to provide a high performance network and solutions for the growing digital goods market that comprises both virtual assets from primarily video games, NFTs or Non-fungible tokens, and tokenized consumer products. Together these two segments are a $140 billion and a $1.8 trillion dollar markets which total to nearly a $2 trillion dollar total addressable market that WAX is looking to tackle.
WAX has already established itself as a proven blockchain with massive scale in delivering one of the largest and most active digital asset exchanges, OPSKINS, and the migration of numerous huge players in EOS including KARMA and ITAM games. WAX also announced an unprecedented partnership with the collectible cards giant, Topps, to bring collectible NFTs to the WAX chain. Topps is primarily known for being the creators of the coveted Major League Baseball cards, but are also responsible for other major IPs including NHL, UEFA Champions League, WWE, GarbagePailKids and StarWars. GarbagePailKids NFTs are available now for purchase and trade.
Benefits of going WAX
The WAX network offers a wealth of benefits that build off of the core technology developed by EOSIO for the EOS blockchain. The WAX platform was built to solve real world problems from the beginning and the team has put a lot of care and consideration into three main areas, chain performance, user experience and developer tools.
Great User Experience
The team at WAX has outlined from the beginning starting with their Whitepaper, a plan for both a great developer and user experience. To help users, they have developed and launched WAX All-access which has recently been combined into their wallet solution, WAX Cloud Wallet, an easy to use wallet and onboarding experience that allows anyone to get a blockchain account by signing in using their social media accounts via OAuth. The WAX Cloud Wallet also removes the scary and complicated experience of forcing a user to manage their private key which is great for mainstream adoption, but still allows advanced users to have proper control over their own private key.
The other user experience benefit developers get for their users by building on WAX are inherited from EOSIO, and that is free transactions. As with the EOS mainnet, WAX uses a staking system to gain resources rather than require that users pay a transaction fee in-order to interact with the chain. On-top of that, as implemented by EOS after the mainnet launch, WAX also allows the Dapp provider to pay for the resources on behalf of users, meaning end users will never have to worry about or even know that chain resource management exists when they access blockchain Dapps.
Performance
Since WAX is an EOS sister chain, using the same technologies developed by EOSIO, it inherits many of the performance figures that EOS is known for. As mentioned, WAX was built to solve real world problems, and those problems were performance issues that the WAX team themselves ran into during the early stages of their project. The WAX team initially built their first proof of concept on the Ethereum blockchain and quickly realized that the slow transaction times and unpredictable transaction fees made things completely unsustainable or not viable. They describe this in their whitepaper under a section titled “Ethereum Almost Killed our Business.” Whilst many agree that Ethereum adoption still dwarfs many other chains, its mainstream viability is still a ways off until the launch of Ethereum 2.0.
WAX, like EOS, has 21 block producers that are voted in as a DPoS, or delegated proof of stake, blockchain. WAX blocks are produced precisely every 0.5s and missed blocks queues the transactions into the next block to be picked up by the next block producer. This allows the WAX blockchain to handle up to 3,000 transactions per second, which is two-fold what Visa is capable of processing today.
Developer Tools
Outlined in their whitepaper, WAX are in the process of developing a full suite of blockchain development tools, which they call the WAX Service Layer. Some of these services and tools include:
- WAX Cloud Wallet – A single sign-on and OAuth
- WAX NFT Creator – A self-service tool that allows anyone to create NFTs on the WAX Blockchain for free.
- WAX ExpressTrade – A free, instant peer-to-peer trading service
- WAX Explorer – User friendly block explorer with an emphasis on visual representation for every item traded and multiple 3D views with interactive features to support NFTs
- WAX Marketplace – Create a WAX Marketplace via APIs
- On chain, decentralized Random Number Generator (dRNG)
All of these tools provide ease of development for a ton of fundamental features and greatly speed up the development time for your next project. To date, the WAX Cloud Wallet and dRNG are both live and ready to use in your integration. WAX also offers a docker container for a quickstart integration, you can read more about it in their dApp Development Documentation.
Where AIKON comes into play
ORE ID
Let’s talk about ORE ID first. WAX already has an amazing wallet solution with their WAX Cloud Wallet that allows any user to get a wallet for free with just a few clicks and their social login. While our basic ORE ID configuration offers a very similar user onboarding experience, ORE ID Enterprise expands upon that by allowing a truly seamless experience in which the user may not even need to know or understand that they are on the blockchain.
This is great if you already have a product with existing customers and want to leverage some of the benefits of the blockchain without alienating your customer base.
ORE ID Enterprise opens up mainstream viability for both Dapps and enterprise adoption of blockchain solutions, because let’s face it, not everyone is going to be able to, nor even want to, manage their ram, gas or respective account resources that are necessary to interact with the blockchain. While the truly self-sovereign nature of blockchain is exciting for many reasons, in the current climate where managing a crypto wallet and your private keys is far from ubiquitous, there is a simpler solution out there. We hope what we are working on with ORE ID enterprise is a step in the right direction.
This also applies to businesses that don’t want to create a special role just to manage the backend chain infrastructure for their business just to use the blockchain. ORE ID Enterprise offers FIAT invoicing and includes managing WAX token resource staking on behalf of your business leaving you to focus on the most important aspect of your app or business, your customer’s experience.
Chain JS
The other initiative we’ve been working on here at AIKON is our open source blockchain development library, ChainJS, that we are continuing to develop with more chains being added. Currently EOS, and Ethereum are live, Algorand is in Beta, and WAX and more will follow soon after. ChainJS abstracts most of the fundamental blockchain functions a developer would need including account creation and transaction signing into a simple to use javascript library. This both helps any developer familiar with javascript work with the blockchain and also means one set of code can work for and interact with multiple and different blockchains.
With so many different blockchains out there, it’s unfortunate that one of the repercussions is that the crypto user base is divided. Developers already have a difficult time choosing the right blockchain for their needs and user base is a big part of that equation as they balance chain performance, scalability and user experience. ChainJS alleviates that problem and allows developers to quickly launch on multiple different blockchains from the get go. This is also ideal for developers who already have a Dapp and are looking to port their dapp to another chain in order to grow.
In summary
WAX is a compelling option for your next gaming dapp, marketplace or any project that will use NFTs. Soon with the completed integration of WAX into ORE ID and ChainJS, WAX will be an amazing blockchain solution for existing enterprise marketplaces looking to tokenize their goods, especially those that deal with international transactions.
We hope you consider the WAX platform for your next blockchain project or solution. We’d love to hear what you’re working on or work together to bring your business onto the blockchain! Feel free to join our telegram channel below.
Cheers,
Team AIKON
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