Vault Proposal: ChainIDE, a web-based developer tooling platform

The Network Vault
#1
Project Information
Usage Metrics

  • Total Usage: 12.6M

  • Average Daily Usage: 12.4K

  • User: 213.9K

  • Use Time(hours): 1.3M

  • Project Deployed: 3.7M

  • Public Chain Supported: 8

  • Twitter followers: 17.2K

Target Users

  • Developers who prefer cloud-based development environments and one-stop development services.

  • Beginners who are new to Fantom.

  • Multi-Chain Developers.

Project description
  • Introduction

ChainIDE is a web-based platform that provides one-stop development services for blockchain developers. ChainIDE not only provides a development environment for professionals and community support for beginners through detailed tutorials, Q&A sections, and online/offline seminars, it also benefits blockchain providers by promoting their platform and techniques. By providing cloud-based user experiences, ChainIDE enables users to immediately begin developing decentralized applications with no configuration, without any pre-installation or requirements on their local system. We’ve integrated a number of well-known public (e.g. Ethereum, BCS, Polygon, Flow, Aptos, Conflux, Nervos) and consortium blockchains (e.g. AntChain, Chain33, and Fisco Bcos) and assisted developers in compiling and deploying over three million smart contracts from over 100 countries.

  • Motivation and problems we solve

Web3 has become a catch-all term for the vision of a new, better internet. At its core, Web3 uses blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs to give power back to the users in the form of ownership. While the idea of web3 is appealing, the overall progress remains too slow. One key reason is that there’s no developer tooling and service platform that can boost web3 massive adoption. The technical structure and development environment of blockchain differs from existed OS a lot in many aspects. There are dozens of blockchains in the market and each of them could be totally different from consensus mechanism to smart contract language. It’s hard for web2 developers to entry. Developers have to set up the local dev environments with various dependency installations. There is a lack of user-friendly one-stop tooling platform to support the dApp development lifecycle on multi-chain ecosystem. That is where we start our project ChainIDE.

We aim to build a cloud-based comprehensive and user-friendly development environment for global blockchain developers. It is a multi-chain development platform that provides a unified user experience, developers can quickly develop their smart contract without any meaningless environment setting works on most of the commonly used blockchains and can easily migrate their dApps from one chain to another using our solution. With all the useful features on ChainIDE, developers can finish the dApp development lifecycle (development, test, publish, release, frontend development) in a full-featured cloud-based development environment. We believe our philosophy aligns perfectly with the increasing needs of dev tooling for blockchain industry.

  • Product features

We plan to build a comprehensive and user-friendly development environment for Fantom on our ChainIDE platform, which enables developers to develop smart contracts as usual. Since ChainIDE is a multi-chain development platform that provides a unified user experience, users can easily migrate their solidity-based decentralized applications (dApps) from other chains to Fantom using our proposed ChainIDE-Fantom solution. Finally, developers are provided with an extremely interactive user interface for all Fantom CLI tools, allowing for convenient testing and debugging of their dApps.

We will offer below useful features:

  • Language support essentials for solidity:

    • Syntax highlighting

    • Solidity lint

    • Solc-LSP

  • Smart Contract Toolbox:

    • Web3 integration (compile, deployment, debugger, verify, and other extensions) with dashboard UI

  • Full-stack development environment:

    • On-demand container sandbox for FTM dev environment to provide the same user experiences as users’ local dev machine

    • Pre-installed terminals including Hardhat, Truffle, Ganache, Node.js support, etc.

  • Out-of-box existing ChainIDE features like React/JSX support, GitHub Integration, Solidity project templates, logger and debugger, Javascript VM, cloud project storage, etc.

With the above features, developers can finish the dApp development lifecycle (development, test, publish, release, frontend development) in a full-featured cloud-based development environment.

  • Advantage

There are relatively few projects focused on developer tooling platform, compared to other middleware protocols. And there are obvious differences between ChainIDE and other middleware tooling platforms. Firstly, ChainIDE is specifically designed for blockchain environment and on-chain development is totally different from normal development. For example, blockchain has wallet address but normal IDE won’t support the wallet setting process. Another example is that developers can have full stack dApp development on ChainIDE thanks to our exclusive sandbox technology, which is impossible on IDE like github. We believe that the meaning of IDE tooling is to reduce and accelerate the intermediate steps as much as possible. It’s still complex when developers choose to write smart contract on normal IDE platforms cuz they don’t offer support for the whole dApp development process. But convenience is the core meaning for an IDE platform. In this way, I think a customized IDE like ChainIDE deliver more value to the developers compared to the general IDE platforms. The second difference is that we are not only providing a product, we also aggressively operate it to grow our usage and be accepted by the market. We offer tutorials and templates for the beginners to help them get quickly started. We host educational developer events to teach them how to write smart contracts step-by-step. But most of the existed blockchain IDE platforms don’t make such kind of attempt. They only provide tools and stand there and wait the developers to use.

  • Ecosystem benefit

Firstly, Fantom developers can enjoy better development experience and higher efficiency. Besides, we accumulated a large number of active blockchain developers in the long-term operation. Those developers from other ecosystem can join to build Fantom easily after the integration. We can provide a comprehensive set of convenient tools as well as a multichain developer community. We have supported several chains and most of them experienced a rapid growth in developer activity.

Deliverables and milestones

To fully migrate ChainIDE to Fantom ecosystem, the project can be divided into 16 modules. The following list gives a brief tour through each of these modules and their components, what they are, which functions they provide.The Fantom ChainIDE will aggregate the following features to provide a comprehensive and perfect user experience

fantom list
fantom list881×742 142 KB

Budget breakdown

We would like to request 30,000 USD equivalent FTM from the vault to cover part of the development cost. We plan to set up a project team of 8 people and the project development is expected to take about a month and a half. The grants we request will be used to pay employee salaries and greatly alleviate our financial pressure.

Team

We founded a company called WhiteMatrix in 2017 to run ChainIDE business. WhiteMatrix, as a blockchain technology company, provides blockchain solutions to individual blockchain developers and business corporation partners. Apart from ChainIDE product, we conduct academic research on fundamental blockchain techniques. Three collaborative research labs have been established at Hong Chinese University-Shenzhen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Beijing Normal University. Additionally, a WhiteMtraix Tech Lab is located in Vancouver, Canada, with a focus on fundamental research and corporate development in North America. We maintain a long-term relationship with several top-tier colleges by regularly hosting educational events like bootcamp and seminar.

Our team has been working in the blockchain field for more than five years. The core members have a combined experience of more than ten years in computing science and more than five years in blockchain development experiments. Additionally, we have over 30 product developers and a research and development team comprising ten senior engineers to ensure our services and products’ effective and high-quality delivery.

Research and development capability is one of the most important focuses for us. ChainIDE has been operated stably for more than 3 years without any security incidents which says a lot for our skilled tech team and superior technical strength. Since we are always not satisfied with our present achievement, we are aggressive in pursuing further development and innovation. In the future, the new functions and features will be continuously added to the tool set and it will be applied to more dApp projects.

Additional Information
  • Relevant links

ChainIDE is verified development tooling of Etheruem, you can find us on Etheruem website.
I can not add more links due to the account regulation, you can find more information and previous ecosystem events on our website.

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