Transforming Polkadot Appchains with Tanssi

Thiago, co-founder of Tanssi and Head of Growth at Moondance Labs, presented an insightful session at Polkadot Decoded 2024, highlighting the transformative potential of app chains in the blockchain ecosystem. This presentation provided a deep dive into the framework and product offerings of Tanssi, an orchestration layer designed to streamline the deployment and management of app chains.

The Rise of App Chains on Polkadot

App chains, or application-specific blockchains, have seen significant growth over the past few years. Thiago emphasized that this trend is evident across various blockchain environments, including Ethereum with its rollups, which, while not identical to app chains, share the concept of a self-standing structure rather than a shared environment. The increasing interest in app chains is driven by their ability to offer dedicated block space, customizability, and interoperability, making them an attractive option for developers and teams.

Challenges and Solutions with Polkadot App Chains

Despite their advantages, implementing app chains comes with several challenges, including bootstrapping infrastructure, sourcing liquidity, ensuring security, and achieving interoperability. Thiago introduced Tanssi as a solution to these challenges, highlighting its role as an orchestration layer that coordinates the block production of various chains. Unlike traditional approaches, chains do not run on top of Tanssi but operate in parallel, with Tanssi managing the orchestration.

Tanssi Framework and Ecosystem

Tanssi simplifies the launch of app chains through its framework, significantly reducing the time and complexity involved. The platform offers two types of chains: Snap app chains for experimentation and dedicated app chains for more advanced and long-lasting use cases. Snap app chains can be deployed quickly for testing and automatically decommission after a period of inactivity, while dedicated app chains support more complex features and interoperability testing.

Thiago showcased Tanssi’s growing ecosystem, which includes applications in gaming, real-world assets (RWA), decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN), artificial intelligence (AI), social finance (SocialFi), and digital identity. The ecosystem has seen rapid growth, with over 2,000 chains deployed, attracting a diverse range of developers, students, enterprises, and advanced projects.

Tanssi Key Use Cases

Thiago highlighted several use cases to illustrate Tanssi’s impact:

• Kona Finance: A decentralized cross-border credit marketplace based in Brazil, leveraging its own chain for short-term credit operations and integrating traditional financial frameworks with blockchain technology.
• The Great Escape: A gaming project that uses Tanssi to offload on-chain components to their own chain, reducing gas fees and improving user experience.
• Lastic: A project creating a secondary marketplace for block space, using Tanssi to execute transactions and create blocks efficiently.

Tanssi Competitive Landscape and Advantages

Thiago compared Tanssi to other solutions, particularly rollups. While rollups offer fast and cheap transaction settlement on layer two, they come with a dispute period, which can be a limitation for certain applications, especially in DeFi. In contrast, app chains on Tanssi provide immediate finality with no dispute period, making them more suitable for time-sensitive transactions. Additionally, app chains offer complete customizability, including the ability to have gasless transactions and dedicated tokens.

Tanssi Team and Future Vision

The Tanssi team, comprising experienced professionals and advisors, continues to expand rapidly. Thiago underscored Tanssi’s commitment to providing app chains that meet user demand across different ecosystems, leveraging bridges and General Message Passing (GMP) to enhance connectivity and liquidity.

Let’s Forking Dance Campaign

Thiago invited participants to join the “Let’s Forking Dance” campaign, Tanssi’s incentivized test campaign. This campaign features three tracks—Block Producers, General Community, and Builders—encouraging diverse participation and leading to an airdrop for eligible users.

Conclusion

Thiago’s presentation at Polkadot Decoded 2024 highlighted the significant strides Tanssi is making in the app chain landscape. By addressing the challenges of deploying and managing app chains, Tanssi is positioning itself as a pivotal player in the blockchain ecosystem, driving innovation and adoption through its robust and flexible framework.