# Revisiting Dash Platform for JS frameworks - 5 > Rion Gull and Anthony Campolo discuss how to present Dash Platform to JavaScript developers through docs, use cases, and teaching-focused streams. - **Collection:** Video - **Published:** 2024-03-15 - **Author:** Anthony Campolo - **Canonical URL:** https://ajcwebdev.com/videos/2024-03-15-revisiting-dash-platform-for-js-frameworks-5/ - **Markdown URL:** https://ajcwebdev.com/videos/2024-03-15-revisiting-dash-platform-for-js-frameworks-5/index.md - **JSON URL:** https://ajcwebdev.com/videos/2024-03-15-revisiting-dash-platform-for-js-frameworks-5/index.json - **Channel:** [Dash Incubator](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZVi0jeaBJ-bYcXQabnE9jA) - **Original URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfvnCTrBUgk - **Original Label:** Watch original --- ## Episode Description Rion Gull and Anthony Campolo discuss strategy for presenting Dash Platform to JavaScript developers, exploring documentation, use cases, and plans for teaching-focused coding streams. ## Episode Summary Rion Gull hosts Anthony Campolo for a strategy-focused conversation about Dash Platform's path to attracting JavaScript framework developers. With testnet down, the planned coding session pivots into a discussion about how Dash should position its platform product alongside its core peer-to-peer cash offering. Rion explains his role steering Incubator strategy by reading both developer interests and market demand, while Anthony brings perspective from the Web2 frontend world, his FSJam podcast, and prior crypto infrastructure work at Quicknode. They walk through the existing Dash Platform documentation, examine how data is stored as JSON objects (a natural fit for JavaScript developers), and touch on devnet setup options for working around testnet outages. The conversation lays out a longer-term plan: Anthony will progressively learn the platform on stream so he can eventually teach it to other developers in a Learn with Jason style format. Rion frames the platform's sweet spot as the "SPA" use case — storage, payments, and authentication for single-page applications — and reflects on past Incubator projects like the decentralized social app Gembe as examples of what's possible. ## Speakers - Anthony Campolo - Rion Gull ## Chapters ### 00:00:00 - Opening and Context for the Stream Rion opens solo before Anthony joins, explaining that the originally planned coding session has to be reworked because testnet is still down despite hopes it would be back up. Rather than cancel, they decide to use the time for a strategy conversation about Dash Platform's positioning to developers. Rion lays out his role in the Incubator as the strategy person responsible for figuring out what's actually worth building, balancing developer interests and skills against real market demand. He establishes that Dash's primary product remains peer-to-peer digital cash with a decade of operation behind it, while Dash Platform represents the next major bet — one whose true test will come when it reaches developers and the open market. ### 00:05:58 - Anthony's Background and the Jamstack Era Anthony introduces himself, tracing his path through GraphQL work at StepZen, contributions to Redwood.js, blockchain infrastructure at Quicknode, and enterprise deployment at Edgeo. He hosts the FSJam podcast and has interviewed many web framework creators, giving him an unusually broad view of how the frontend community thinks. The conversation turns to what "full stack Jamstack" actually meant — a reaction against monolithic CMSs like WordPress that pushed static frontends with separated services. Anthony reflects on how the term faded as Next.js, Astro, and React Server Components pulled web development back into integrated full-stack territory, with databases now appearing in platforms like Vercel and Astro themselves. ### 00:11:56 - Web3 as Jamstack and Exploring the Documentation Rion connects the Jamstack philosophy directly to Web3, noting that decentralized apps are Jamstack by default since the blockchain serves as a decoupled backend. Anthony confirms this framing and asks how Dash actually structures stored data, prompting Rion to share his screen and walk through the docs.dash.org platform documentation. They navigate to the example data contract under Tutorials, confirming that data is stored as JSON objects — an arrangement Anthony sees as natural for JavaScript developers since they can simply work with the returned objects directly. Rion uses the moment to evaluate whether a developer arriving fresh from a Google search would have a smooth onboarding experience with the current docs. ### 00:17:32 - The Teaching Plan and Learn with Jason Format Rion explains why he brought Anthony back: not just to learn the platform himself, but to reach a level where he can teach it to others in his frontend community circles. He references Jason Lengstorf's Learn with Jason show as a model, where guests navigate while Jason drives the coding. Anthony recognizes the pair-programming pattern of driver and navigator, and they envision a future where Anthony could navigate Jason through building a simple Dash Platform frontend with input fields connecting to testnet. The goal is for Anthony to first build rudimentary frontends that wrap the Node.js script examples in the docs, then progress to teaching the workflow to outside developers. ### 00:22:01 - Streaming Style and Useful Resources Rion describes the streaming approach he wants — unpolished, working sessions rather than rehearsed presentations, similar to what AJ has been doing on the channel. The point is to show real problem-solving, including the messy parts where things break, so viewers learn how to navigate obstacles rather than just see finished demos. He shares useful resources: docs.dash.org for documentation, the testnet block explorer for Core, platform-explorer.com for the Platform blockchain, and the testnet status page where they can confirm the current outage. The idea of eventually building a single-page quick-start guide separate from the deeper documentation comes up as something the project needs. ### 00:29:27 - Devnets and Local Node Setup Anthony asks whether running a local Dash node would let him develop while testnet is down, leading Rion to explain the devnet concept — a local collection of nodes for development purposes. They search the docs together for devnet setup instructions and find pages on connecting to existing devnets versus setting up nodes from scratch. Rion mentions Dashmate as the tool that simplifies local network setup and notes that AJ has been working through this exact process recently, which should result in better documentation soon. The exchange itself becomes a small example of the unscripted exploration style Rion wants the streams to embody. ### 00:34:24 - Hire-for-Build Question and the Incubator Model A viewer named James asks whether Anthony would be available to build decentralized applications on Platform once it ships. Rion uses this to explain the Incubator's funding model: unlike traditional VC pitches that exchange equity for capital, the Incubator funds early-stage developers exploring the technology without taking ownership stakes. The model is designed to lower the barrier for developers curious about Dash Platform to actually build something, accepting that this is even earlier-stage than most VC-backed work. Rion frames helping developers discover what Platform enables — versus what traditional stacks do — as the Incubator's core value proposition for the platform side of Dash. ### 00:37:58 - The SPA Vision: Storage, Payments, Authentication Anthony asks the bigger question: what would Dash Platform realistically replace or enable for developers? Rion shares his "SPA for SPA" framing — storage, payments, and authentication for single-page applications. If a developer wants a client-side JavaScript app with persistent data, payment capability, or authentication without running their own server, Platform could fit. They discuss data storage limits, with Rion clarifying that Platform is designed for structured text data rather than media files like video, where something like IPFS makes more sense. The conversation acknowledges nothing technically prevents storing encoded images, but the architecture targets data that benefits from decentralized integrity guarantees. ### 00:42:47 - Past Projects, Gembe, and Wrap-Up Rion pulls up the Trello board to show Gembe, a decentralized Twitter-style application built earlier in the Incubator that's currently paused. While he notes the decentralized Twitter category has become crowded and probably isn't the strategic priority anymore, Gembe still serves as a concrete example of what Platform applications can look like. They wrap up by planning the next session: Anthony will likely code through the platform setup with Rion available to answer questions in real time, and Anthony may take over running StreamYard for upcoming Incubator Weekly streams in Pete's former role. The episode ends at 00:47:16 with plans to reconvene once testnet returns. ## Transcript [00:00:00] - Anthony Campolo Hmm. [00:00:04] - Rion Gull All right. Hello everyone. Right now I am just going solo for a little bit until Anthony gets back. Um, he's going to be joining me today, Anthony Campolo. Um, we did, um, have an Incubator Weekly with him, um, a couple months ago, I think, and he's back now. So welcome, Anthony. [00:00:29] - Anthony Campolo Oh, hey. Yeah, um, yeah, sorry, I'm on a slightly different setup from yesterday, so, um, you should probably screen share for today, especially since we're not really going to do any code. [00:00:40] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah. Um, so I was just, I was just saying, uh, Anthony, we had you on, um, a few months ago on Incubator Weekly to talk about web framework integrations using Dash Platform. And we're getting a little bit closer to Dash Platform being usable. Not on mainnet, but testnet. And unfortunately, so we planned this like a week ago. I was hoping that testnet would be, would be back up and running now. It's not, but we decided to go ahead with the stream anyway just to kind of give an idea of you and me talking about basically, you know, my job in the incubator is strategy. And overall what that means is, you know, there's, there's developers in the incubator, and there have been many developers at times and fewer developers at other times, but regardless these developers, sometimes they have great ideas of things that they want to work on. Sometimes they just want to work on something that's fun and whatnot. And my kind of job is like my self-appointed job, and what the network wants me to do and continues to fund me to do is to figure out like what is actually worth working on. And that has— that's pretty complicated because it involves like developers' interests, developers' skill sets, as well as the market's interest and the market's demand for certain things. So I'm constantly kind of trying to figure out and look at the market, the cryptocurrency market as a whole, Dash specifically, and figure out— and also like the the development world as a whole as well. Just the traditional Web2 space as a whole. And figure out like, what sounds, or what do we think is interesting to developers as our product? And one of those big products, I would say, actually I'll start out by saying Dash's first and primary product is peer-to-peer cash. That's what the name Dash is all about. Digital cash. Implied in that is things like privacy, low fees, things like what you would expect cash to be but in a digital realm. That's our number one product. And that's been running successfully for over a decade now. But then the next big thing, product that Dash is offering to the world is this thing called Dash Platform. In terms of resources spent and attention and overall Dash strategy, not necessarily Dash Incubator strategy, but Dash strategy has been put into this Dash platform thing. And now that we're getting a little bit closer to a stable testnet, again with the caveat that today it's not up and running. We were going to do some coding today, but I decided to— let's just go live with this anyway and talk about the game plan. My goal is to try to figure out how can we present this Dash platform thing to the world in a way that the world wants it. Because we kind of have this underlying assumption that people might want this. But the test, well, the true test will be when we put it out into the market. Is anybody going to be interested? Is there going to be a ton of interest? Will there be a very niche, niche interest that only Dash platform can provide to this niche market? But it won't be very widespread. Like, what exactly is, is that going to look like? And the reason I have you on specifically is you've spent a lot of time in both the traditional web development space and going around these different front-end framework communities. So you have a very good idea about that, as well as you have a history with blockchains. So why don't you give it— give it— go ahead and introduce yourself again to the audience, uh, just briefly, probably You'll do that better than I am doing with the brief part. I guess I've been only going for 5 minutes, but I think we have plenty of time to kill. Yeah, this is not like an Incubator Weekly or anything like that kind of vibe, but it's a little bit more chill. We can spend as much time or as little bit of time as we want on this, especially now that we're not going to be doing any coding. But yeah, just introduce yourself to the audience. [00:05:58] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so my name is Anthony Campolo and I, as you said, I've done kind of Web2 stuff, Web3 stuff. I got my start on like GraphQL. I worked for a company called StepZen and that kind of came about from contributing to Redwood.js, which is like this full stack JavaScript framework. And from there, I worked at Quicknode and they're focused on giving easy infrastructure for like smart chains, smart contracts on things like EVM, Solana. They've expanded out to a lot of different chains at this point, but that was really, really interesting. And I did that for maybe about a year or so and then kind of pivoted back to Web2 and worked at Edgeo, which is like an enterprise deployment platform, kind of like Cloudflare, kind of like Fastly, those type of things. And yeah, so you and I kind of got in touch, I think from my podcast actually, 'cause I also host a podcast called FS Jam. And I'm just very interested in frontend and kind of like where decentralized apps and things like that and cryptocurrency are gonna go. 'Cause I've had a longstanding interest in cryptocurrency even before I knew how to code. I first heard about like Ethereum and Bitcoin and stuff in like 2017 and then had to like learn to code and then just kind of made websites for a while. And it's just something I've had a longstanding interest in. And, you know, you've been kind of really in the crypto world a lot longer than, than me because you've been doing it for like a decade, I think. But, um, I feel like I have probably used more of like the front-end web frameworks and talked to like the creators of web frameworks more than probably most people because I've had like almost all of them on the podcast at this point. [00:07:53] - Rion Gull Yeah, I'm just— just so the audience knows, FS Jam— FS was full stack, right? [00:07:59] - Anthony Campolo Full stack Jamstack. [00:08:00] - Rion Gull What does that mean exactly? [00:08:03] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so, you know, the— [00:08:04] - Rion Gull it's relevant to this. [00:08:06] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so the Jamstack was kind of a reaction against things like WordPress and like full-stack CMSs that would kind of just bundle everything together. And they're more about just shipping like static front ends with like, you know, React or even just pure HTML generated from like a Jekyll or a Hugo. And that was the paradigm that Netlify and to a certain extent Vercel were really pushing originally. But that like can only get you so far. You don't have a backend to do all the stuff you needed a backend for, like having a database authentication and all that kind stuff. So, the full-stack Jamstack was kind of like, how do we take this new frontend deployment static site paradigm and extend it into the backend? And, you know, now we see all the stuff like React Server Components and edge functions and even databases. Like Vercel has a database now. And Astro just added a database now. So, I feel pretty vindicated on that. Like calling that back in 2020. But no one ever uses really the term that kind of just phased out using Jamstack. The people who now are still kind of clinging to Jamstack are going back to like the original just kind of static site kind of front ends. Whereas now just web development in general is kind of like this weird kind of partly front end, partly back end with like Next and Astro and everything is going all the way into the back end now. So yeah, that's, um, and those things like, you know, quick and solid. And Nuxt, but I feel like React Server Components and Next especially has been kind of driving the conversation over like the last year. [00:09:49] - Rion Gull Yeah, it's been interesting. I spend a lot of time because, because of this product called Dash Platform, um, where we're hoping that basically developers will use using the Dash blockchain as the backend database, essentially, and API, with an API and SDK to connect to that backend from the frontend. And so I've— ever since I was getting deep into the incubator, I knew that I had to know what traditional web developers were doing. Like what their application architectures were and know that at a fairly deep level so that when we come to them, we know how— what language to speak and what, uh, we know what they're doing already. And then we can frame what we have into what they already know. And I feel like that whole journey has been, well, not only very time-consuming, but I feel like they're the JavaScript space and the front-end application developer space is still just extremely volatile. Like, we're focusing on the front, like you were saying. I don't know if you actually spelled out what the Jamstack was. J-A-M, JavaScript, APIs, and markup. That's what JAM stands for. And that there was this, this whole phase where developers were betting on this idea that, you know, they would just have a front-end framework that was JavaScript because that's what the browser runs. And then for everything that you need in the back end, you would just— there would be some service for you to call in through an API. So the A part of the Jamstack: JavaScript APIs and then markup Or Markdown, was it? I can't remember actually. [00:11:56] - Anthony Campolo Markup, but yeah, but Markdown is how a lot of people would write their content. Yeah. So this is really funny actually. So something I used to say was Web3 is Jamstack by default because it has the decoupled backend because it has to be like the blockchain is, it's a backend that is separate from the frontend. It's like the whole, that's the decentralized network. So, you're right on the money with that. And the paradigm fits very well. The thing that a lot of people are doing now, though, is just using Prisma and like a Postgres database. I feel like that's kind of become a big thing that backend people have done. But with Dash, it's more like— they're more like JSON objects in terms of how the— is that right? In terms of how is the data actually queried at the end of the day? [00:12:47] - Rion Gull Yeah, uh, and that's, that's actually a good question that I would like you to kind of figure out. I'm actually going to separate some windows here so that I can share this, the other window, and I want to look at the documentation. Uh, let's see, so I've got to go back here and I have to, um, present, I guess. Present, share screen. Okay, so this is the same. And by the way, everybody, I'm, I'm, I don't— I'm not in the driver's seat with, with this, um, uh, StreamYard stuff mostly. I'm usually on the other end just and having Amanda and Pete do the driving. So I am learning a little bit here as we go. So hopefully people can bear with me. So I'm going to go ahead and do a window, um, and I think this is the window that I want. It's hard to see. And then I'll go ahead and add this stage. [00:13:44] - Anthony Campolo Okay. [00:13:44] - Rion Gull So, yes, this is the right one. So, this is our documentation for like docs.dash.org, projects, platform. And then this is basically the main start page. Hopefully this is something that you would get to if I just wanted to say like Dash platform documentation. Because I want to know if, if this is going to be a great smooth experience for people that don't really know what they're doing. They come here and they just Google something like Dash platform documentation. And this does look like— I think this is the same page that we were just looking at. So This is what people will probably go to. Eh, okay, close enough I think. Maybe it was this, "What is Dash?" If they were— you know, we're already on platform docs, so let's just go to the introduction. And I think this is the same page. "What is Dash?" "What is Dash?" Yeah, exact same page. So this is the page that people would come to. If they go to Google, at least from my search engine. So I'm going to close that one out. And you're seeing the screen. So you had a question. You're a developer. Put yourself in the developer standpoint. And I'm telling you, hey, there's this interesting thing called Dash Platform. Why don't you check it out and see if it will suit our needs for backend data storage. And then you do your Google search, you come to this page. And I would probably say, like, what is Dash Platform? And then here's— these are all conceptual ideas. And I'm wondering how— [00:15:52] - Anthony Campolo I would actually skip all this stuff. I would go straight to introduction. [00:15:56] - Rion Gull Tutorials, introduction tutorials. [00:15:58] - Anthony Campolo Okay, I know I've already gone through all this, so, um, you know, the— I know what is actually in here, but, um, the, the thing specifically, quick start, um, I wanted to talk about was to go to the example data contract under treatment data contract. [00:16:16] - Rion Gull Uh, example data contract. [00:16:19] - Anthony Campolo So yeah, so go to under Tutorials, Contracts and Documents. [00:16:28] - Rion Gull Mm-hmm. [00:16:29] - Anthony Campolo And then under— [00:16:30] - Rion Gull Tutorials, Contracts and Documents. [00:16:31] - Anthony Campolo Got it. Yeah. And then Retrieve a Data Contract. Okay. [00:16:35] - Rion Gull Yeah. [00:16:39] - Anthony Campolo And then scroll down to the example data contract. Yeah, right there. So is this— if we're using it for the backend, is what you're talking about in terms like this is the data that's actually being stored? [00:16:53] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah, everything as far as I understand, and I haven't really played with this myself, this is one of those things that I was, um, maybe going to start doing, but platform's been down for several weeks now, so, um, haven't been able to do it yet. But, but yeah, everything is stored as far as I understand in the JSON object. [00:17:15] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so that's nice because then you have something that is going to be very, you know, natural for JavaScript developers to work with. It's just, if you're calling it and getting a JSON object back, just do what you need to do with the JSON object. [00:17:32] - Rion Gull Yeah. And, um, I had a thought. My thought with that was to just back up a little bit and, and let you know what What my— the reason that I'm bringing you back in, like, part of it is because you reached out and you said, hey, you guys got some availability. But part of it also is, is that I want you to kind of learn this enough to— from a user standpoint, standpoint, and an application developer standpoint, that you could then explain this to the people in your circles. And so that's going to be kind of the ultimate goal with this series. Because this will be the first of a series where I'm not really training you. You're training— I'm helping answer questions along your way, along your path, with my understanding of Dash and just like the resources that I know about. Um, but you getting to a point where you're developing applications and then hopefully being able to teach other people. Like, for example, I'm just going to bring this up as a, as an example. Learn with Jason. Um, one of the prominent Web2 guys in the space is, is this guy named Jason Langsdorf. And he has this channel and website, Learn with Jason, where he basically has guests on and then the guests tell him how a certain technology works. And he basically is like, he just says, I'm— I haven't watched him a while, so I don't know what his style is these days, but he is the same. Basically, he just, you know, has the guy come in and say, okay, open your web, open your editor, and this is what I'm gonna tell you to do. And basically he would just try to learn this thing with somebody that is very well— [00:19:51] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, it's pair programming where Jason always is driving and the guest is always teaching and answering questions. [00:19:58] - Anthony Campolo Do you know that terminology, driver navigator? This is a thing where when you have people coding something, you have one person who's actually controlling the code and they're the driver, but they're not allowed to decide what to do. Like, someone else is the navigator and they're actually telling them what to do. And they're like two separations of concerns. That's basically what he's doing. [00:20:23] - Rion Gull Yeah. So who knows if we'll actually be on his show or not, but the idea would be if you can get good enough to the point where you can be either the driver or the navigator, I guess, what role would you play in that case? You would be the— [00:20:44] - Anthony Campolo I would be the navigator because Jason always is always the one coding. So basically, I would just walk him through, like I would build, like, basically, I've already got kind of rudimentary front ends that basically implement a lot of these. Because what you've got here in the docs, these are all kind of just like Node.js scripts the way they're written. And so they're just functions that you can kind of run and then you just like hit it and get it back. And so you can turn all that into just like a frontend with like inputs. And then that would be like the frontend implementation of it. So I'd probably walk him through something like that and just kind of get him connected to testnet and just get it throwing data back and forth with it. [00:21:27] - Rion Gull Yep. Yeah, and, and you have done a lot of this already, so you're, you're already somewhat familiar with it, but it's been a while and some things have changed. And so yeah, just getting reacquainted with this whole, this whole process, uh, to the point where you could then teach other people. That's that kind of the ultimate. [00:21:50] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, it seemed like nothing too major had changed. I couldn't really run through the whole flow because of, because of testnet, but, um, is there anything top of mind, you know, that I should be aware of? [00:22:01] - Rion Gull No, just, just, um, there are just some, um, SDK, some API changes basically, um, and hopefully those are well documented. Now I don't think that this is like— we're not going to be, we're not going to be doing this um, this isn't going to be on mainnet soon, but, um, so I wanted to, to have some practice before we get, before we get to a point where we're actually reaching out to somebody like Jason. Um, that would be something that we would only want to do when it's on mainnet, but I want, yeah, I want us to get to the point where, you know, we, we would try out some random developers that, you know, in these spaces and, um, basically have like little trial runs so that you get good at teaching the concepts, they, to the point where they can learn it very well and, and easily. And it should get to the point where like we have a one-page document, or website rather, that is just like the super easy quick start way. There is a quick start in here I saw it somewhere, but it's buried in this deep documentation. And we might want to have just a single page that says, okay, this is the quick start, and then here's a link to these other, these other docs for detailed, more detailed stuff. But just figuring out what like your style of teaching it would be. That's, that's what I want to get, get to eventually. And you may find that in your testing— so AJ is somebody who does a lot of streaming on our channel. A lot of people that tuned in today were probably expecting him to be on stream. But I was thinking that maybe you could start doing some of that streaming. Streaming your coding and streaming your documentation of like, okay, this, uh, the, the process of you going through this so that other people can— not only like guests that we would have on the show later, um, can learn from you and in that style of Learn with Jason, but also anybody that just watches the stream could kind of figure out and like know how to do this development. With real applications, hopefully. So I don't want to be just doing tutorials forever. I want to be— [00:24:45] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, that would be my big open question would be what are going to be like actual applications that would be something to show off, you know? [00:24:56] - Rion Gull Yeah, because you know, part of the issue is in the incubator and in Dash in general and just like all sorts of places in any industry, really, you have a lot of people— a lot of times you'll have a few people with all the knowledge just in their head, and I want to get that out. So if this, if this, this conversation even seems a little unpolished and, you know, not quite like, oh, this isn't like a presentation, well, that's because it's not supposed to be. I want people to, to go through that process of like you're learning on stream and you're not— you don't have everything figured out. Because part of what people have a problem with is they don't actually— they don't know what to do when you do run into a problem. And so I want people to have that, um, get that experience of Okay, this is, this is somebody who's more experienced than I am, maybe, uh, with this technology development, and this is how they got through these issues. And maybe there's somebody that is actually more, um, knowledgeable than you that can help you. So, um, yeah, like, this isn't going to be something that where you're going to have a polished presentation, um, ready to go. It's just you working, essentially. And I think you'll probably see me use ChatGPT a lot, using ChatGPT, using, using the chat, helping out, just like AJ does with his stuff. I mean, he doesn't use, uh, ChatGPT a lot, but he, uh, yeah, like sometimes I'll throw him a link to something and that he'll need. Anyway, um, so we have a little— we had a little bit of a rough schedule that we wanted to chat about I want to bring that up. That was just on our Discord. So we've introduced ourselves. You were going to stream— you were going to share your screens and we were going to do some coding. Let's see, demonstrate setting up the Dash client and querying blocks from testnet. So all of that stuff we've got to put off to a later date. I did want to share real quick just some of these links that I have. Just for anybody who's interested in working on Platform, there— this is the documentation, and there's all sorts of stuff here. There's also the block explorer for the Core. So just in case anybody is not aware, Dash has two main blockchains. There's the Core blockchain, and then there's platform blockchain, and they're different. And then there's also different networks. So there's the mainnet and there's testnet. So what we're looking at here is this is the testnet network for, um, for the core blockchain. And then this is supposed to be— this platform-explorer.com is supposed to be, um, dubious. It's supposed to be the platform blockchain Uh, if Shenmick's watching this at all, uh, this does work for most people, I think, but because I'm in an office that has these some, some weird settings or some firewalls or something, uh, this is the cert. It looks to be expired or something, not valid for whatever reason. So just an FYI on that. You were able to get this, right, um, Anthony? [00:28:38] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, yeah. [00:28:41] - Rion Gull So you were able to see this, probably most people, if they go to platform-explorer.com, you'll see the, the testnet, um, Platform Explorer. And you got a faucet. And then the status-page- I'll say hyphen testnet.freshstatus.io is a status page where you can see like the status of testnet. [00:29:06] - Anthony Campolo Um, not doing so good. [00:29:09] - Rion Gull Yeah, you can see here it's, it's been down for— it was up for a little bit yesterday, so that's when we scheduled the stream thinking it would be still up today, but it went back down. Um, but it is a useful web page that you can kind of check and see if it's, if it's up and running. [00:29:27] - Anthony Campolo Here's the question for you. I don't know if I necessarily do this, but I'm just curious. If I were to run like a Dash node locally? Would I be able to connect to that and do something? [00:29:41] - Rion Gull A Dash node locally? [00:29:44] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, just like running it, because that's the whole thing, is like you just run the— run another node, right? [00:29:52] - Rion Gull Yeah. So are you talking about like— we have this concept of devnets and Um, and a devnet would be like a series of nodes, a collection of nodes that you can run locally to develop against, uh, even when the, the testnet is going on, or if it's not on mainnet yet. And yes, so if we go back to our documentation here, and I'm just going to go back to Google again, um, And let's see if we can get to there from Google. So Dash DevNet setup. I'll just put crypto in there as well, just because— just namespace it a little bit. Testnets and DevNets. [00:30:49] - Anthony Campolo Ah, right, I remember this, the seed1.testnet.network. [00:30:53] - Rion Gull Yeah, and, and this is something that we were working on with AJ, um, recently. Like, he was, he was working on setting up his own devnet and how, how to do that. So he's hopefully going to be, um, successful with that soon, and, and we'll— we may have some better documentation about how to set that up. But let's see. I don't think testnets and devnets. I don't know if this was— I'm going to open the previous search up because I think that was not exactly the documentation. I think this one is it. Let's see. No, that's rm-docs. Hmm, let's go there. That's a weird— you need the link URL. What's that? [00:31:50] - Anthony Campolo Do you need the link? [00:31:56] - Rion Gull Uh, did you find it? [00:31:57] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, yeah. [00:31:59] - Rion Gull Oh, okay, let's see. [00:32:00] - Anthony Campolo Pop it in the private chat. [00:32:04] - Rion Gull All right. Copy that, pop it in here. Connect to a devnet. Yeah, okay, so same documentation, same docs.dash.org, and yeah, it was just a few, a few links down. So, but this doesn't tell you how to create your own DevNet, and that's really what we would need. [00:32:40] - Anthony Campolo Oh, I think that would be— set up a node. Is that the same thing? [00:32:54] - Rion Gull Um, it might be, but I, I don't think so. [00:32:58] - Anthony Campolo So click set up a node. There's dropdown with two things. There's the master node and the Dash Core full node. [00:33:11] - Rion Gull Yeah, I mean, that, that helps you set up a node and a master node, and I— that may be enough for what you— depends on what you're trying to, to do. If you're— if you need like a whole network where it's where you have enough masternodes and enough— you have miners on the network, um, and the network itself, so that there are enough masternodes, for example, to create quorums and do things like that, then you really need to set up your own, um, DevNet. And this does look like— yeah, this does look like it might be, um, helpful. And setting up your own DevNet, by the way, like, that's That's pretty simple. [00:33:55] - Anthony Campolo It's not advisable. [00:33:57] - Rion Gull Yeah, that's not— [00:33:59] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, that's what I was saying. I probably won't actually do this. I was just curious like what it would look like. [00:34:03] - Rion Gull But yes, Dashmate is a tool that you would use if you wanted to use Dashmate. That does help you set up a local network. So this is, you know, this is kind of like exactly the process that I'd want you to go through without me fumbling through Yeah, you know, trying to teach you. [00:34:24] - Anthony Campolo Depending on if testnet doesn't come back, I might have to at some point. [00:34:28] - Rion Gull So at any rate, um, I don't know, like, there's not much more that I, I want to go through today, um, specifically. This is going to be rather short, um, so let's see. Yeah, once platform is done, you'll wait. Yeah, so let me just practice this because— okay, so, so James says, once platform is done, uh, will you be for hire to build decentralized applications on platform? I mean, that's basically what he's doing right now through the incubator, but I would assume, you know, if somebody else wants to hire you to do something as well, then I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to. What do you say, Anthony? [00:35:14] - Anthony Campolo Well, yeah, and I'm not sure if he's asking for me or if you're just— if Dash, the platform, will be hiring other people to build decentralized apps. But, um, yeah, I mean, depends what you want built, I guess. [00:35:26] - Rion Gull Yeah, well, and hopefully, you know, stepping back a little bit, the idea with the incubator is that if somebody thinks that they have a good profitable business idea and they need something like Dash Platform in order to build that business, then Incubator is there to help fund them to begin that process. Because, you know, it's a new thing. It's something that, you know, traditionally what developers would typically do is they would go to a VC and they would pitch their idea to a VC and they would say, here's my business idea. [00:36:09] - Anthony Campolo Give me money. [00:36:10] - Rion Gull Give me some money, help me build my idea for, you know, some share of equity in return. And Incubator does something similar but not similar in the same— in some ways it's similar in that we, we give you some funding, but it's not similar in that we, we don't ask for equity in return because Incubator is mostly about, you know, this is very, very early-stage stuff. Like somebody just wants to play around with the technology. So it's even earlier than you would go to a VC, for example, I think. Because it's just trying to help get developers, give them an idea of what Dash Platform is and what it helps them do. Better than traditional technologies. And so figuring all that out, you know, it takes some time. And, you know, we have an interest in having developers build on this. And so I think that's, that's the whole value proposition of the incubator in terms of Dash platform stuff. So, so go ahead and hide that now, I guess. Again, just figuring out how to learn, learning how to use this platform. But if anybody else watching has any other questions for Anthony or for me, let me know, put them in the chat. Otherwise, I think that we'll probably call this a wrap for now since there's not much to do development-wise, which was the original purpose of this scheduled stream. But Anthony, do you have anything else that you wanted to ask? Or— [00:37:58] - Anthony Campolo I guess I'm kind of curious, like, in your ideal world, what would people use Dash instead of? Like, are there things that it would replace for people's current crypto setups? Or would it enable them to do things they can't do with their current setups? Like, what in your wildest imaginations would you like people to be able to do with Dash? [00:38:24] - Rion Gull Yeah, and that's the big question that, you know, a lot of people have been discussing in the Dash forums for a long time. Like, what is the sweet spot in Dash? What we offer? And to me, in my mind, I have this vision. And I'm not sure if the market wants this or not. That's the big question that everybody has to ask themselves is, does my idea stand the test of the market? My idea is that people in the future would be doing— using Dash and potentially like using Dash and specifically Dash Platform for 3 things. And I use the acronym SPA, like, like a single-page application. That's what you would typically hear the term SPA in, but in this case, the SP&A would be storage, payments, and authentication. If you have an application that you need storage for, or you need payments for, or you need authentication for, and it is a SPA, SPA for SPA kind of thing, then I think Dash Platform could be interesting. So let's say that you have an application where you want to build it as a single-page application, so frontend-only stuff, so that it's all client-side JavaScript-driven, but you also want some persistent data storage. What are your options? Your options right now are, well, you could set up a server. You know, there's— you can put some data in local storage, but what can you— [00:40:26] - Anthony Campolo what's the limits of what you can store? Like, I'm sure you wouldn't store like a video file, but would you store like an image file? [00:40:32] - Rion Gull It's meant for data, so it's not meant for— it's not meant for media. I know that those, you know, when you say data, it is a little ambiguous and it could mean lots of things. But when I say data, I mean like text data mostly. So that's, I think, what it's— that is what it's mostly built towards. [00:40:59] - Anthony Campolo I— [00:41:00] - Rion Gull there's nothing stopping you from that part of that data being an image. And, uh, you probably know what I mean. Like, there are certain encodings that you can take data, yeah, encoded a certain way, and it's actually an image. So there's not going to be anything that you can, uh, do to stop that, and nor do we really care. [00:41:20] - Anthony Campolo I guess the question is, at what point would that become like absurd and it would be better just to use like IPFS or some decentralized storage thing that already exists? Or is there a point where that ever makes sense to to combine something like that. [00:41:36] - Rion Gull Yeah, so, um, so IPFS, to my understanding, does store, uh, like all sorts of stuff. Like that, that is where you would store media and, right, like pictures, videos, that, that kind of stuff. [00:41:50] - Anthony Campolo But, um, just giving an example of that type of tech. James Doe is giving me crap. Yeah. [00:41:59] - Rion Gull Yeah, um, so, so yeah, it's mostly like structured data that you do not want any particular person— that you want your application users to be able to rely on, um, without any centralized control. So Yeah, uh, there's different things that you could think of as far as that goes, but in terms of like social network would be the, be the thing. Yeah, if you wanted to build a decentralized Twitter, and, and like we have— somebody has done that exact thing in the incubator a long time ago, um, it was called, uh, Gembe. [00:42:47] - Anthony Campolo And yeah, I don't know if that's actually needed right now, it's just so many Twitter competitors, but in terms like an example that ties all that together that people would understand and can kind of like, you know, that's, that's the first thing comes to mind, but there's probably other stuff that would be more interesting. [00:43:02] - Rion Gull Yeah, in the time that, yeah, we started and, and, and now we started building platform and now like there have been a ton of, of Twitter competitors like, oh, we're the decentralized Twitter. So that I, I would say from a strategic level, which is my kind of job, I probably wouldn't somebody to do much more of that. I think that we should get that application back online to show up. Actually, yes, I can. And because we're not— [00:43:32] - Anthony Campolo stare— [00:43:32] - Rion Gull this is another one of those things where I really need somebody to be operating this in the background because nobody really cares to see the Dash masternode documentation for as long as they've seen it. But yeah, let me go, let me go to Let me go to our Trello board and pull up the, the Gemba project. So this, this is something specifically that you could look into doing. And like, like we said earlier, like, you know some people in different places and you might, um, you might know somebody in the Vue community, for example. That we could give this project to and say, hey, get this working again. Or maybe it's you to begin with. But yeah, we've done a lot of work on this in the past. And it's— you can see here it's paused. This is not one of my projects, by the way. This is one of Ash's projects. [00:44:40] - Anthony Campolo What do you think of James's comment that you don't really want decentralization, you want to be in control? [00:44:47] - Rion Gull Um, I— let me see if I can— you don't really want decentralization, you want to be in control. I don't know who you is in this case, I'm not sure how to answer that. Let me go back here. Um, yeah, I wish I had some videos of this because we did, we did some good work on this. This was a good project. And I did some testing for it. And yeah, as you can see, my computer is a little laggy right here with this. But let me see if there's source code. Yep. I don't know if— I haven't looked at this for a long time. So, okay. Yeah, I'm not gonna like jump into this yet. Because I don't want to figure that out right now. I don't know if that might show something there that I don't want to show. But yeah, that's one example of an application that we've built and that could be picked up again. Yeah, other questions? [00:45:54] - Anthony Campolo No, that's probably it. [00:45:58] - Rion Gull Yeah. I think we'll end it up there, end it out there. The next time we come on, we will— might just be you, um, coding, um, figuring out some things. Like, you've done this before, I think. [00:46:13] - Anthony Campolo So yeah, ideally I like to have you on for at least one or two, just so that when I'm going through it, as I have questions, I can just ask. Because there are times when there are things I was kind of curious about, didn't really make sense, like asking messages after. Yep. [00:46:27] - Rion Gull Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no problem on that. [00:46:30] - Anthony Campolo Um, let's see, what are we doing? [00:46:36] - Rion Gull Oh, I was going to say also, yeah, you might be, um, you might be doing the, uh, the behind the scenes, uh, what used to be Pete's job running this, um, running this, uh, StreamYard for our Incubator Weekly going forward. So, um, yeah, that's the plan right now is that you'll be doing that this Monday and we'll see you then. So until then, bye everyone. Yep, thanks for hanging out, James. Bye.