The world of blockchain enables new and exciting possibilities each and every day. However, with these new initiatives also carries new challenges. A major challenge facing blockchain developments is the ability for on-chain, off-chain, and cross-chain contracts, dapps, and other entities to communicate with one another and the outside world. Fortunately, there is a solution: Nebulas, a custom blockchain situated specifically for traversing through and communicating across and within the different blockchains that make up the space.
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At its core, Nebulas (NAS) is akin to a search engine, like Google, geared specifically to explore and locate smart contracts, dapps, assets, addresses, and other points of interest broadcasted by different blockchains. Similar to Google, Nebulas utilizes a formula that accounts for different metrics to return the most relevant and reputable results to users.
Beyond this, Nebulas looks to go a step further, providing a network that enables interoperability, or communication and functionality, of smart contracts, dapps, and assets across different blockchains. In the future, this would look like decentralized exchanges that are compatible with Ethereum and Bitcoin assets, games that value and accept tokens across different blockchains, or digital assets that can be transferred to wallets across chains. This future would indicate a comprehensive and complete solution to the communication problem, where developments anywhere in the blockchain space would be compatible with any other. Such a future would suggest huge implications for the Nebulas network.
How It Works
Nebulas utilizes a formula coined Nebulas Rank (NR) to determine the value of smart contracts, dapps, blockchains, and so on. Nebulas Rank accounts for three metrics of the target entity: liquidity, propagation, and interoperability.
Liquidity deals with how frequently and easy transactions take place, and the volume of said transactions. Of course, proper liquidity is necessary to assign value or merit to any asset. Propagation refers to the scalability and performance of the entity. How big of an audience can it take on, and how reliable is the performance currently? Interoperability measures the applicability of the entity to communicate off-chain (or on-chain) and between chains. Is the information essentially “private” from other blockchains or can it be readily communicated?
The associated Nebulas Rank is the basis in which assets and developments across blockchains are catalogued. Additionally, NR is used to assess involvement and merits on Nebulas- through community participation and development.
Community-Driven
A major success thusfar of Nebulas has been its ability to attract developers to the community and capture the efforts of said developers among the community. Smart contracts on the Nebulas platform are JavaScript compatible, which means developers who are veteran and inexperienced in blockchain engineering can build on top of Nebulas. Additionally, Nebulas utilizes the Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP) to reward developers within the community for their work.
Creators of dapps published on Nebulas that achieve a certain Nebulas Rank will earn NAS for their contributions. This further incentivizes community members to build and improve upon the network they are a part of.
Nebulas has been very successful in bringing in development from the community. As it stands, Nebulas propagates close to 7,000 dapps. Although the network mainnet launched just months ago, that number more than doubles that of Ethereum. The incentives program for Nebulas currently has US$5,000,000 worth of NAS up for grabs, which likely contributes to the massive participation.
With these components, alongside others that make up the network, Nebulas is seeking to forge a self-evolving blockchain system. Essentially, the community, incentivized automatically through the blockchain, will build upon and perfect the Nebulas network in a decentralized, autonomous manner.
Trading History
Nebulas has performed very well throughout the course of the bear market that has taken up much of 2018. In the past months, Nebulas has climbed over 20 spots on Coinmarketcap. The coin is currently ranked 58 by market cap, with a NAS price of US$4.60 and a market cap of just under $210 million. The strong price performance relative to the market is indicative of the team’s abilities to meet deadlines and continue to put forth impressive developments. The coin continues to appear as a strong buy, and if the goals of the project are achieve, the coin will likely undergo exponential price appreciation.