Rise, a decentralized application and investment platform, has closed its ICO campaign on June 24, and is now on the road to becoming one of the most secure and user-friendly DAPP platforms out there.
DApp platforms going mainstream
The success of Ethereum as the largest Blockchain-as-a-Service platform so far have lead to the appearance of many similar projects.
The idea of a tool which would allow any user to develop their own decentralized application working on a Blockchain is becoming more and more popular with each month; projects such as Lisk and Ardor are a testament to that.
Enter Rise
Rise is a Lisk-based cryptocurrency and distributed application platform that’s been flying kind of under the radar so far. Despite not being reported by any major cryptocurrency news outlets, it has managed to secure an impressive $1.11 million in its ICO, which was closed less than two weeks ago.
Based on that success, the team behind Rise plans to develop a highly secure and the most user-friendly decentralized application platform.
According to their White Paper, Rise is to hire a dedicated vulnerability analyst, and work continuously with Node Security Project (the app’s backend is developed using Node.js) among just a few of the measures in place to ensure as high security as possible.
A tool for everyone
However, the main advantage of the new platform arguably lies elsewhere: it’s going to have a simple drag and drop GUI for the development of its DAPPs. That allows basically anyone to create their own decentralized application, as opposed to, for example, Ethereum, which requires the developers to know its internal programming language, Solidity.
- Rise Introductory Video
That accessibility does not come at the expense of some of the more demanding users, however: Rise will still provide an opportunity to code DAPPs directly in many programming languages - in fact, any language that can run on Linux and consume APIs is available.
In an industry heavily oriented towards professional software engineers and cryptocurrency geeks, Rise wants to represent an opportunity for people from many other walks of life to participate in an overarching trend of decentralization, which seems to be upon us.
Cointelegraph has contacted the Lead Developer of Rise, Justin Donnaruma, in order to ask him about the project:
Cointelegraph: What are the Rise’s team’s prior experiences? Have any of you participated in major cryptocurrency projects before?
Justin Donnaruma: Steven Remington and myself built a small mining company back in 2013. We did pretty well, right up until the big collapse. Even sold a couple of miners. That was my only major project in cryptocurrency, though building a dashboard for the minors was quite the challenge.
Outside of that, I have worked in two major capacities. I was Director of Cyber Intelligence Operations for SIROAL International for approximately 3 years. That entailed everything from open source intelligence gathering, using custom built tools, to vulnerability analysis and exploit development, even Red-team operations for clients.
Most recently, I was the lead developer of the Tools and Technology team at Carbonite, Inc. That entailed designing system architecture for new tools that needed to be built, scoping work items for time / size estimates, and developing the solutions. There were a few I developed before starting to build a team there, specifically the Knowledge base. That is a public site that handles a significant portion of Carbonite’s client traffic in a month. After another couple developers were brought on board, we built a bunch of internal tools, including some complex Quality Assurance tooling for managing Technical Support agent performance across phone, email, and chat.
Steve’s experience is more in networking and affiliate marketing where he has worked with many companies - including a multi-million dollar golf simulation company - to generate sales by offering incentive type programs.
CT: Do you expect to have to make compromises, in order to achieve the high degree of security that is promised in your White Paper?
JD: I do expect to make some compromises. That is nearly always the case with security systems. The APIs we have right now are somewhat limited, and that will likely not change. We are still architecting how the hosting platform will function, and we will likely have some more announcements on that front in the coming weeks.
CT: How limiting will the DAPP GUI be? Will users be able to develop any kind of app in it, or will more complex projects still require them to learn a programming language?
JD: Our MVP that will be released for testing will likely be somewhat limited, we will need to get the design out there to get feedback on how it functions and how good the User Experience is before getting into the more complicated features of the GUI.
Ideally, there will be two modes, a basic one, with nearly complete components that will aid in speeding development, providing the basics for any application, with minimal customization and a large number of predefined opinions.
Then an advanced mode where you are basically given blocks that are the basics of all languages (conditional statements, methods to control flow of the application, and the individual API calls with their options) and you put them together. Customizable JSON object components and an API call function to be able to reference third party services, etc. This mode would require the ability to think logically, but that would be it. Each block will have built in documentation with examples on how to use it, so even a beginner should be able to pick it up without too much effort.
CT: Are there any other characteristics Rise prides itself on, other than security and ease of use?
JD: Even above those, we want to bring people together, and give them options to control their own futures. Right now, Cryptocurrency is fragmented, and unstable. We hope to be able to provide some stable, common ground, where all of cryptocurrency can come together. It’s going to be a long, hard road, but I think we can make that happen. We have a few ideas that we aren’t ready to share quite yet that will radically change our position in the marketplace.
CT: What do you expect the DAPP industry to look like in two years? Ten?
JD: I expect, if we succeed in making the tools easy to use, and find some legitimate use cases for them, then we will see an explosion in the DApp industry in 2-5 years. For the next two years, it will be slow, until people start figuring out how to integrate the technology into their lives and businesses.