Stanford blockchain dApp showcase

People pays attention on Stanford students for their creative startup ideas. In the hot blockchain space, at 6/6/2018, Stanford has a public showcase of dApp which were built by students. I went there to learn and liked to share with you.

The showcase organiser, professor Dr. Nicolas Kokkalis gave a speech on blockchain history and said the world is changing because of blockchain!

He told one concept: Leveraging blockchain you own the digital asset, forever! Even after you die. That touches me.

Blockchain brings the freedom of the ownership which is a powerful concept and the freedom is not limited to any time window! Think again!

Students showed their dApp one by one. Maybe one of them shall become the future Steve Jobs and change the industry? Blockchain builder need to learn the needs from young people. I paid attention to their thoughts on the problems the society is facing, the ideas to solve these and the ways to solve it.

Case 1 - decentralized trust fund (bequeath) - Albert Chon/Stanley Xie

Problem:

• Fraud
• Can't securely pass on crypto if you die (Infant's dad died in an accident, his lawyer stole $461,000 from the boy's trust fund.

Idea:

The idea is the smart-contract based decentralized trust fund.

One of the top 3 common used keywords in Satoshi's bitcoin whitepaper is "owner". The trust or security around "owner" is the most essential aspects of the blockchain and the trust fund is one example of such a use case. Fighting with "fraud" and "fake" are the main themes of using blockchain.

Case 2 - A New Decentralized Index (DIY) - Jeffrey Yu/Ramnik Arora/Kyle D'sSouza

Problem:

• Centralised Fund Index which caused censorship and privacy issues and extra cost.

Idea:

So that means the the power now is back to people, they can build their own ETF kind of indexes. And you shall not need to pay the extra "management fee" to these fund managers.

People who invest on mutual funds know the chance to beat a simple S&P index fund is low. The centralised managed way and human adjustment on funds are not efficient, so the management fees eat the cost.

Case 3 - Image Trust - Kareem Hegazy/Jennifer Kalidoss

Problem:

• Code Distribution Channel (centralized, slow, infrastructure/resource intensive)
• Code Validation (expensive and cumbersome)
• License Management (Prone to piracy,slow payment, delivery process)

Idea:

Interesting thing I saw is that there two similar projects demonstrated in this showcase are related with code and license management. The Blockchain is really used to ensure the "owner" of the digital assets and prevent the "fake" stuff.

The code and license and copyrights are important digital assets. These ownership needs to be trusted and this dApp showcased a decentralised way to do code distribution.

Case 4 - India House Chain - Sam Kim/Neal Bedekar

Problem:

This case, the author brings an problem that the verification of the true owner of the asset (india land).

People paid lots of money to the "title" company just to prove that this house is theirs. And the title company actually does not know me and never in touch with me after that. This case makes sense.

Idea:

Two engineers presented the technology to solve the problem. And the interesting thing is that they have thought about to partner with the india government to do that experiment. That comes from students and show their leadership and global view.

Case 5 - True ownership of in-game items - Ryan Holmdahl/Derek Huang

Problem:

Game industry is a hot sector for blockchain dApps to be applied. I have seen other cases in this showcase. If you look around some dApp space such as Nebulas Challenge dApp dashboard, you shall find the same.The game items are digital assets, the true, cross-game and forever freedom of these assets attracts the attentions of these students. A good boost case for game developers too.

Idea:

Token was actually invented in Game system. And people used token buys weapons even before Blockchain started. The key thing is blockchain storage. provides immutable and public and "forever" records.

Token is the cornerstone of the blockchain and carry value and ownership over, without token, it is no value for blockchain.

Case 6 - Decentralized Content Delivery (Marlin Protocol)

Problem:

This is the only app I saw in this event showing resource sharing use case. Digital resource sharing especially on storage end is hot. There is one Chinese company (XNET), they sold the devices to pioneer the similar CDN idea in real market place (It should has passed 1M devices now)

Idea:

I am impressive on the dashboard I have seen. For a student project, the operation side of view was carefully designed. This is really cool. People put data into Blockchain and these data are very valuable and I think it could be the most valuable data in internet. But how to do mining on it? I saw the value of the company such as elementus.io in the space.

Case 7 - Web workflow (Allan Jiang/Long Tran)

Problem:

• Automated work (help users know how to do a work automatically to improve efficiency) can be put into market place and protect the author

Idea:

For people who know the idea behind Gems which rewards workers for the data tagging work etc. (https://gems.org/) It has the similar idea behind the digital asset work payment. But the new idea of web workflow automation and reward system seems have a chance to open a new market.

Case 8 - Fake Certificate Solution

Problem:

This certificate system idea is not new and it is attractive in general. In one of the blockchain showcase I saw in other place, the college certificate system based on blockchain was ranked #1 in all 8 showcases. And the first to the market and get adoption is the key. For example, how do you know the MIT certificate is issued by the true MIT? MIT can publish the public key in their web site.

Idea:

Not every project is needed for blockchain. So this question should always be asked "why blockchain".

In the certificate case, it has used all the benefits of the blockchain which is decentralized, with consensus and immutable. And it is more efficient than centralised system. I have a personal experience on it, for getting the "certifacte" for me to get visas to USA. I spent long long time and ran all places to tell " I am me" and "he is the real him" such kind of things.

Case 9 - Solve Fake News (Fnd)

Problem:

Now people has less trust than before, is it because that we have overloaded information? Maybe. The trust is the biggest problem we need to solve in this new digital world. Keep trust while keeping privacy is the combination which makes the use case of blockchain attractive.

Idea:

Elon Musk shared his idea on his twitter. He said "going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication"

This project was inspired by the idea of decentralized community-drivem consensus on the truth.

How:

This student group kept challenge their own idea and showed the depth of their thinking! Great thing.

He thought about incentive but also the bad actors in the case. His idea to use reporter to reach consensus. But is it against his original thought?

Summary

One main theme I have seen in aApp space cared by Stanford students are building trust (such as trust fund, india land, certificates, fake news solution) and ensure freedom of ownership and digital asset protection(such as game items, web workflow) and shared resources (such as CDN)

Most of the dApp Stanford students built is based on Ethereum.

Beyond technology, one impressive part I have seen is the end results they have thought in production and also thought to partner with government. Blockchain is a game for the whole society and a comprise is necessary sometimes to make optimal results!

Author: George Zhao (Founder of Chainmap - https://chainmap.org)