What Is DragonChain?

Dragonchain was originally developed at Disney’s Seattle office in 2015 and 2016 as the Disney Private Blockchain Platform. Over 20 use cases and applications were explored and documented 1 publicly via the W3C Blockchain Community Group. The platform was later released as open 2 source software under the Apache 2 license in October of 2016.

Dragonchain simplifies the integration of real business applications onto a blockchain and provides features such as easy integration, protection of business data and operations, currency agnosticism, and multi-currency support. The Dragonchain Foundation, a Non-Profit Corporation was created in January of 2017 to maintain ownership and responsibility of the open source code.

The Dragonchain team is now in the process of launching a commercial entity to build a serverless architecture blockchain platform, and an incubator. The combination of serverless and blockchain technologies is unique and tremendously valuable. The timing of the Dragonchain platform launch is highly strategic to benefit from explosive growth of cloud computing over the last few years and the emerging wave of Blockchain solutions entering proof of concept stage across enterprises.

The Dragonchain team will launch Dragonchain, Inc., as a commercial entity to provide an array of products and services to the community. Our vision supports areas of the market that are underserved with strong demand and projected growth in the blockchain industry ($7.7b by 2024 ) 3 across an array of multi-billion dollar sectors such as Arts, Wine, Automotive, Legal, Digital Marketing, etc. These sectors and more will experience market disruption with blockchain capabilities shifting the value proposition into decentralized environments. Dragonchain platform will support these needs.

A Turnkey Blockchain Platform for Business

Dragonchain provides a commercial platform for application developers to rapidly and securely deploy Blockchain applications while maintaining existing language development environments (e.g. Java, Python, Node, C#, Go); a tremendous costing and speed to market advantage. The Dragonchain architecture is also designed to allow nodes to handle approval of transactions based upon five levels of network consensus to provide a spectrum of trust to data consumers; a level of security and flexibility unseen in the market by current blockchain solution providers. These design attributes position Dragonchain for exponential growth.

Benefits

DragonFund Incubator

Dragonchain will provide project incubation as well as professional services with strategic partnerships to develop successful tokenization ecosystems focusing on long term value. This includes;

Security on a Blockchain Platform

Data exposure and security is a known issue to large institutions wanting to leverage blockchain technology, as they typically have very sensitive customer data that sometimes has regulatory or legal risks associated (e.g. banking, health, identity, etc.). The data exposure risk can be somewhat alleviated by either obfuscation or separation, however, in both cases, this requires extra design and development work up front, as well as reduces somewhat the utility of the blockchain system itself.

A so far generally unrecognized risk in the use of blockchain technology is that associated with the public exposure of smart contract logic as necessary on most blockchain platforms. The smart contract is exposed and transparent which means that the team must implement very sensitive proprietary business logic in a separate system. Also, any obfuscated data may be unraveled by an interested viewer of transactions. Most important however is the combined risk of exposed data and business logic, as it is the equivalent of placing your operational system, all of your data, and a bounty of funds in the public domain.

Unlike the well understood and successful open source model, where the discoverer of a flaw or vulnerability in utility software is incentivized to to fix the issue or notify the community of its existence, in the case of a discovered vulnerability on a blockchain, the discoverer is actually incentivized to attack the smart contract and withdraw funds or valuable information.

Skill Set Challenge

Leveraging blockchain technology for real business initiatives is expensive and very risky in an operational environment. This can be expected to result in low success rates as creation of software without blockchain technology is already fraught with difficulty and the addition of a relatively new technology such as blockchain with features such as cryptography, Proof of work, economics, currency modeling, game theory, and custom programming languages is sure to cause more trouble for a team as the overlap of these skills is particularly rare.

Dragonchain solves this problem by allowing development and integration before the economic model is known. Monetization can be applied after a system is functioning and enough real data is available for analysis.

what is dragonchain

Solution & Business Focus

When Dragonchain was originally launched, the team had several goals in mind based upon past experience developing blockchain solutions:

The platform was designed for use in a wide variety of use cases and applications. It is particularly useful in non-financial systems and in monetization and modeling of micro-economies for example to replace political economies within an organization with transparent rules to incentivize productive or otherwise valued behavior.

Verification and Consensus

In the open source Dragonchain Architecture document , we introduced the concept of "context 4 based verification" wherein Dragonchain adds another dimension to the common blockchain model. This new structure may be best thought of as a "blockchain of blockchains," where business nodes handle approval of transactions based upon local and sometimes proprietary business logic.

The Dragonchain architecture provides five standardized levels of consensus to provide a spectrum of trust to consumers of data;

  1. Business (Approval) Verification
  2. Enterprise (Validation) Verification
  3. Network Diversity Verification
  4. External Partner (Notary) Verification
  5. Public Checkpoint Verification

Getting Started With DragonChain

The team behind Dragonchain pointed out many characteristics of this platform and ecosystem that give it an advantage over other systems. As a hybrid system, it allows businesses to have their own chain and get enterprise consensus every step of the way to their chosen public blockchain(s).

Dragonchain also stands out for its ability to support more than one currency on a single chain and the fact that you don’t even need to use currency. The architecture itself supports controlled exposure of smart contract logic and sensitive business data. The server-less nature of the commercial platform allows for powerful yet simple scaling.

The leaders behind Dragonchain did not create this platform because Ethereum or Bitcoin weren’t “good enough” but instead to resolve some of the potential issues related to them. By creating Dragonchain, the team wanted to build on the structures used by Bitcoin and Ethereum yet make it easier and less risky to integrate new and legacy systems with the blockchain. They created Dragonchain architecture to allow for a range of risk, from total internal trust to several verification contexts to even a proof of checkpoint into public blockchains.

The Dragonchain ecosystem itself provides a turn key business platform and will eventually include a marketplace of resources and experts to support the execution of those business plans. We’re in the process of launching the incubator (Dragonscale) right now to support upcoming project launches such as Look Lateral and LifeID.

We’re going to be doing some level of vetting and will be looking to provide automated scoring to scale, but in the end, the vision is to create a “crowd-scaled” incubator/accelerator, using an information market to provide selection of projects.

With over 150 applicants pending review, we hope to be continuously running an ICO for Dragonscale projects to which there may be overlap at times in the near future. In the future we hope to have processes set to accommodate all incubator projects approved by vetting standards and chosen by the Dragonchain community. We’re also looking to use marketplace solutions to schedule.

The Dragonchain Foundation had no source of funding since release from Disney, and the commercial entity will be providing a funding source to the open source project and team, including for education, developer adoption programs, and general open source development.

Dragonchain uses a hybrid blockchain architecture and as such has unique capabilities and scaling possibilities. The team has conducted early stress tests of the original open source platform, and when the commercial platform is launched, we will be testing scalability and other factors. Because there is a blockchain for each application, the scaling is very interesting as we can utilize Amazon AWS, Google, and other platforms to provide extreme scale.

Basically, any use case that may involve incentivization of human activity (of which there is great need in enterprise systems and organizations). We found it interesting that many situations that are not technical problems but human problems are well placed as blockchain use cases.

There are an extensive number of potential uses for Dragonchain’s blockchain, with creativity as the limit. Just a few outlined by the team include ticketing; voting systems; reporting and compliance in auditing; a payments platform; open-source software project governance; peer-to-peer financial derivatives, like futures and bonds; and pay-for-performance systems using smart contracts.

The token for Dragonchain, Dragons, were available via a token sale. The public offering accounts for 55 percent, or 238,421,940 Dragons. The team receives 20 percent (86,698,887 tokens), with 10 percent (43,349,444 Dragons) each going to the reserve and foundation. Finally, 5 percent (21,674,722 tokens) goes to the DragonFund. The tokens for the team are locked and then released over the course of two years.

what is dragonchain

The price for each Dragon was not determined before the sale; instead, it is a result of the sale. Every participant gets a portion of the allocated 238,421,940 Dragons based on the amount of ETH or BTC they contribute. If a participant contributes 5 percent of all funds raised, they will then get 5 percent of the 238,421,940 Dragons at the end of the sale. In this way, a fair distribution is possible while still ensuring that all Dragons are sold. The sale lasted for one full month beginning on Oct. 2, 2017. Distribution of the Dragons took place following the public sale and a minimum of one internal and one independent external audit.

It is also important to note that a limited presale took place in August 2017 as part of a strategic partner network. The approximately $1.4 million USD raised was earmarked for development and marketing.

Dragons will have a value that reflects the value of all the fundamental aspects of Dragonchain, combining the platform, ecosystem, and incubator. The developers behind the project expect that the value will continue to increase while the ecosystem matures, making it a solid long-term investment.

Now that the sale is over, Dragons are used to access any part of the platform. This can include spinning up a node, subscribing to a data feed, accessing an advanced smart contract library, getting early or discounted access to tokens for incubated projects or the projects themselves, and more.

Platform - Build on a scalable serverless platform with built-in protection of business data using established programming languages (Java, Python, Node, C#).

Incubator - Get early access to exciting projects supported by an ecosystem of subject matter experts and blockchain enthusiasts.

Marketplace - Leverage an ecosystem of pre-built library smart contracts, qualified vendors, specialized experts, and incubated projects.

How To Get A DragonChain Wallet?

According to their website FAQ section "We currently do not have a wallet but being an ERC20 Token, all ERC20 compatible wallets work for DRGNs. Currently we recommend MEW (MyEtherWallet) and are a default token there."

DragonChain Resources

How To Buy DragonChain?

Now the token sale is over you are able to purchase the tokens on different exchanges.

You are not able to purchase DRGN with “Fiat” currency so you will need to first purchase another currency – the easiest to buy are Bitcoin or Ethereum which you can do at Coinbase using a bank transfer or debit / credit card purchase and then swap that for DRGN at an exchange such as Kucoin.

Register at Coinbase

For first time buyers of crypto currency, we recommend that you use Coinbase to make your first purchase – its easy to use, fully regulated by the US government so you know it is one of the safest and most reputable places to purchase cryptocurrency from. Coinbase offers the ability to purchase Bitcoin, Litecoin and Ethereum with a credit or debit card or by sending a bank transfer. The fees are higher for cards but you will receive your currency instantly.

You will have to carry out some identity verification when signing up as they have to adhere to strict financial guidelines. Make sure you use our link to signup you will be credited with $10 in free bitcoin when you make your first purchase of $100.

what is dragonchain

To get started, click the “Sign up” button where you will be taken to a registration form where you will need to enter your name, email and choose a password.

what is dragonchain

Coinbase will then send you a link via email to verify your email account, once you click the link in the email you will be taken to a verification page. You must then add your phone number and upload a photo of your ID – this can be a passport, driving license etc. You also have to add your payment details, so you can add your bank account or a debit or credit card as required – after a short period your account will then be verified and you can then make your first purchase.

what is dragonchain

Purchase Ethereum

For this guide, we will be purchasing Ethereum to swap for our target cryptocurrency. The reason for this is that it has far cheaper fees than bitcoin for sending and the transaction also happens a lot faster. So in Coinbase, visit the “Buy / Sell” tab at the top, select “Ethereum”, choose your payment method and enter the amount you wish to purchase – you can either enter a US Dollar amount or a number of Ether.

what is dragonchain

You will then be asked to confirm your transaction, if paying with a card you might have to complete a verification with your card provider. Once that’s complete, your Ethererum will be added to your account.

Purchase DRGN at Kucoin

You can now send your Ether over to Kucoin to make your purchase of DRGN.

what is dragonchain

Latest DragonChain News

Disney-Incubated Dragonchain Is Creating a Magical Blockchain Platform and Ecosystem

what is dragonchain

Goldman Sachs is looking into ways to create a cryptocurrency trading platform. The CEO of Fidelity said that they are actively mining Bitcoin and Ethereum. James P. Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley said cryptocurrencies are "certainly more than just a fad." Now, Disney incubated Dragonchain is creating a blockchain platform and ecosystem of their own.

Dragonchain was incubated at Disney by Founder and CEO, Joe Roets, and his team of developers. Dragonchain is featured in the Disney Open Source project. Joe, who I was able to interview for this piece, has quite an interesting background. Not only has he held a position at The Walt Disney Company, but also Overstock.com, and the FBI amongst other notable companies and organizations.

Disney is arguably one of the largest, most well known and iconic brands in the world, joining the blockchain space. They have been involved since late 2014/early 2015, but managed to stay under the radar until now. And this is not some kind of weird side partnership. In fact, as Joe pointed out the crew at Disney have been extremely supportive of this project, "the open source committee (at Disney) was excited about the project and very supportive."

We have heard a few cases of various Fortune 100s showing interest in the blockchain space, but I have not personally heard of them actually using the technology, until now.

A lot of people mistake Dragonchain as an Ethereum competitor. Maybe in an indirect sense, but that's not the whole story. Joe pointed out, "we look at how we can leverage the capabilities of other blockchains and their ecosystems."

Dragonchain focuses on the protection of business assets through serverless architecture on the blockchain. Joe stated, "Amazon AWS is the first of several integrations that are planned. The interesting point there is that our hybrid architecture allows a best practices approach for deployment and security, and we are able to leverage AWS for scale."

The platform itself uses established programming languages (Java, Python, Node, C#) and a serverless architecture to protect business data.

Dragonchain also contains an incubator which allows for others to launch blockchain projects and scale them with crowd participation. Then there's Dragonchain marketplace. You can hire and communicate with others involved in cryptocurrency, blockchain tech, developers and software engineers, legal, and they even have libraries for pre built smart contracts.