ArcBlock Community Technical Q&A 6/20/2018

On June 20th, ArcBlock held the sixth Community Technical Q&A event. The excepts from conversation between CEO Robert Mao and ArcBlock’s community members are as follows.

Before the Q&A session, Robert released a preview video of OCAP Playground. He had this to say:

As you can see, we can finally say that we are releasing OCAP Playground, our first ArcBlock app, this month. Sorry, the video is in Chinese; an English version is yet to be made.

Q: DAG is an amazing technology and a lot of projects are using it. Will OCAP support this technology soon?

OCAP can support most backends, depending on the adapter, but our first release will only support Bitcoin and Ethereum. We will open source OCAP soon, at which time the community can work together with us to support more blockchain.

Q: What is the advantage of using blocklets to build the ArcBlock platform?

The advantage of blocklet is that it's a framework for developing blockchain apps, which is our main focus, so it's OCAP-ready. Plus, with its serverless architecture, developers won’t have to worry about how to host blockchain nodes, how to host apps, or how to scale. We will ship OCAP first, then the blocklet.

Q: When ArcBlock opens to the public, what can we expect from your platform? What does your future marketing strategy look like?

After our first public beta release of OCAP Playground, we’ll still have a long way to go before we launch our platform. As such, in this development phase, our main marketing strategy is getting more developers on board through Hackathon events. Hopefully, at each hackathon event, we will see dozens of ArcBlock apps built, a handful of which are actually good :)

Because the first public release of OCAP playground is still in beta, it will let developers explore what OCAP can do, but it will take a lot more work to make it production quality. Our ultimate launch goal is still Q1 of 2019, at our DevCon.