EMURGO and the Cardano Foundation today announced the release of a decentralized applications tool stack or decentralized application backend (DAB) solution, for Cardano’s Web3 developer community. 

The joint project was originally launched in January 2022 with technical support from Five Binaries - an infrastructure development company focused on creating customized, highly reliable blockchain solutions, under the Apache Software License 2.0 publicly on GitHub and hosted by the Cardano Foundation.

What is the DAB? 

To date, there is a lack of open-source Plutus application backends available to Cardano developers. 

The newly released DAB solution is an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that provides an open-source alternative for Cardano developers to build decentralized applications (dApps) on Cardano’s blockchain, and also serves as an index, a common infrastructure for core integration components to launch a dApp. 

As the DAB solution is a Cardano community-based open-source tool, it enables the Cardano Web3 developer community to collaborate on developing common infrastructure.

What benefits does the DAB provide to Cardano developers?

Using this open-source DAB:

  • dApps and wallets will be able to connect to Cardano without a full node; the DAB is a lightweight solution that allows easy interaction with smart validators on the Cardano blockchain.
  • Developers can easily deploy a dApp to read or write smart contracts on Cardano
  • A variety of dApp use cases are able to easily be deployed on Cardano when needed to read and interact with the Cardano blockchain.
  • Enables faster and more flexible integrations to support dApps and wallets to further grow the developer community and diversifying the level of quality on-chain activity on Cardano.
  • Allows for a variety of applications to be built by third parties and increases the diversity of options available for developers to build solutions.

Ultimately, the DAB solution is a toolset that helps Cardano developers easily interact with the Cardano blockchain and collaborate to further build on community-owned resources. 

How is the DAB different from other tools out there?

The DAB is an MVP that is able to integrate with all blockchain connectors and serves as a “building block” or a toolset for the Cardano community to contribute

Alternatively, it can be looked at as a dApp framework for other components to also be built on top.

Currently, many other projects are building in what are effectively silos, without any planned interoperability features. This toolset supports standardized components which can be utilized by all DApps, supported by a consensus-driven community framework for sustainable dApp development. 

For more information, please access the Cardano Foundation GitHub repository: https://github.com/cardano-foundation/dab 

About EMURGO:

EMURGO is the official commercial arm of Cardano and provides socially impactful solutions to solve some of the most intricate problems of organizations. As a founding entity of the Cardano protocol, EMURGO is able to leverage its abilities for large-scale blockchain development and rapid solutions deployment to benefit its global clients. 

EMURGO has offices in Singapore, India, and Indonesia, and a roster of global clients & partners. To connect and learn more, visit https://emurgo.io.

About Five Binaries:

Five Binaries is a Prague, Czech Republic based consulting company who have been 100% focused on improving the Cardano ecosystem since day one. The members are all ex-Trezor Suite core developers and previously maintained the backend infrastructure for Trezor Wallet. The team created the first stake pool on the ITN and second on Mainnet, StakeNuts. They also processed the first Shelley Mainnet transaction. The Five Binaries team are also behind the first oracle solution on Cardano, Nut.link, and developed Blockfrost, APIs which are used to access the Cardano blockchain. Regarding usage and adoption, Blockfrost APIs is a core service used by the ecosystem and has a community of over 10,000 developers that have contributed to over 4,000 projects.