These People Bought and Scammed Their Way to Get Instagram Verification Checkmarks

Games have always been considered the most direct and largest gateway application of the Metaverse. Blockchain gaming has solved the pain point of most NFTs and Metaverse concepts that have no application scenarios and value that cannot be realized to a certain extent in the real world. As many people questioned the illusoriness of NFTs, the GameFi business has been more than prosperous with its Play-to-Earn model. According to DappRadar statistics, in 2021, there were more than 544 GameFi applications, which can be regarded as a surge compared to the 200 in the previous year, and it is increasing every month. Want to know the next thing in GameFi/Metaverse in 2022? Don’t miss these 3 projects! Ace Eagle: the Metaverse Casino Ace Eagle is a collection of 8,888 well-designed Eagle Pokers stored as ERC-721 on the Ethereum blockchain, with hundreds of hand-drawn traits that will be ready to mint in March 2022. Each Ace Eagle Poker is unique and exclusively generated from over 160 hand-drawn traits. As a pioneer in the gambling industry, the Ace Eagle team is dedicated to building a Metaverse Casino, combining with their high-end offline casino connections worldwide, to create a brand-new gambling entertainment complex. The Ace Eagle Casino will be extended to Sandbox and other similar blockchain real estate platforms, followed by the launch of the Ace Eagle Casino & Web 2.0 Casino. Virtual lands will be acquired and open for players. Website: Twitter: https://www.aceeaglenft.com/ https://twitter.com/AceEagle5 STEPN: Move-to-Earn Built on Solana, STEPN is a Web3 APP combining DeFi and lifestyle. In STEPN's world, users own NFTs in the form of virtual sneakers. By walking, jogging, or running, users can obtain game tokens GST and governance token GMT, the tokens can be used in the game, and they can be cashed out, which is the supposed Move-to-Earn. Although the concept of STEPN sounds quite simple, it increases the game's playability and token incentives towards the users, so that the token economy does not collapse simply due to users' mining, depositing, or selling. When integrated with daily fitness, we believe this project will truly get people moving…and earning! Website: Twitter: https://stepn.com/ https://twitter.com/Stepnofficial Harmony Protocol: Cross-chain NFT Passport The developers of the Harmony chain announced at ETH Denver that they will launch cross-chain NFT Passports, and currently supports Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) as user’s avatar on the chain's largest project, DeFi Kingdoms, which, according to data from DappRadar, has more than 120,000 users in a span of 30 days. Passport enables users to import proof of possession of NFTs on other blockchains onto the Harmony chain. When BAYC holders connect their MetaMask wallets to DeFi Kingdoms, their BAYC holdings will be able to be cross-chain verified and displayed in-game. It is going to solve the pain point of cross-chain NFT assets transfer and offers opportunities for using NFT assets across different chains and different Metaverses. Website: Twitter: https://www.harmony.one/ https://twitter.com/harmonyprotocol The GameFi/Metaverse industry is expected to continue to grow even faster in 2022. After all, since the epidemic, the gaming industry has been the most unaffected, and blockchain innovation has brought more opportunities to the industry. Don’t miss out on those projects in 2022, join the development of a diverse and exciting new world of Web3 Metaverse! First Published here

The Most Exciting Metaverse Projects of 2022

Although part of cryptocurrency’s vision is to decentralize and circumvent supervision, price changes in the market are still closely affected by government regulatory policies. Looking back at 2021, whether in China or the United States, regulatory agencies and departments have become stricter about cryptocurrency, and policies have been notably tightened. Recently, Chinese blockchain users have encountered a complete dead-end: More than 20 cryptocurrency corporations have announced the full stop of providing relevant services to users in China and completely exit the Chinese market. Chinese users are undoubtedly an indispensable liquidity provider in global cryptocurrency trading, and the blockchain industry is unwilling to see Chinese investors withdraw. So how should Chinese users deal with the existing assets that are about to be liquidated in the exiting exchanges? Furthermore, in the post-exiting era, where should China's new and old cryptocurrency investors seek new investment opportunities? Faced with this very large number of exchanges that are still available, which one is suitable for Chinese users under high-pressure policies? Many experienced users have already turned their attention to decentralized platforms/exchanges. It is almost that the exit of centralized exchanges in China has directly encouraged more transactions to flow to those decentralized exchanges. Uniswap Well-established decentralized exchanges such as are the primary choice of Chinese users. Uniswap Due to its completely decentralized nature, many projects can be launched directly on the platform without too much verification, hence anyone can list counterfeit protocols, MLM projects, and induce inexperienced users to swap assets for worthless rug-pull tokens… Therefore, this article hereby only recommends users who have longer and deeper blockchain experience use this type of decentralized exchange. dYdX , launched in 2018, has become the largest perpetual contract trading platform for cryptocurrency assets. The average daily trading volume of dYdX has exceeded 11 billion U.S. dollars, surpassing the trading volume of centralized exchanges such as Coinbase. dYdX dYdX uses an order book system, it is non-custodial, and it supports advanced order types, providing a variety of DeFi derivatives. Its biggest innovation is that although it has completely switched to Layer 2 from November 2021, its API can still achieve a similar user experience as centralized exchanges, there is almost no learning cost for investors who have been investing with centralized exchanges for a long time. With ZK-Rollups technology, dYdX guarantees high security and low GAS fees. In simple terms, its Rollup technology is to integrate multiple transactions off-chain and update the transaction status on-chain. Based on the constantly generated zero-knowledge proofs to ensure the consistency of the state of Layer 1 and Layer 2, it is close to Layer 1 in terms of security. This is a highly concerned and promising technology in the Layer 2 expansion proposal, and it is also the first choice for investors who want safer transactions. At the same time, with the in-depth technical cooperation with StarkWare and Chainlink, dYdX has created a derivatives platform comparable to the most mature centralized exchanges. However, dYdX is definitely not perfect. For example, as of now, the settlement asset of dYdX trading pairs is USDC and it is the only token accepted. In addition, except for stablecoin trading pairs, dYdX supports very limited spot transactions and leverage services, which cannot adequately meet users’ needs for diversified project investments. Moreover, for newbies and investors who wish to easily have fun with DeFi, its professional UI/UX design may still be overwhelming. ZKSwap , which has a more user-friendly UI/UX design, is also based on ZK-Rollups technology like dYdX, and utilizes Layer 2 with an AMM mechanism. ZKSwap However, although ZKSwap stated that it will support the BSC, HECO, and OKEX chains after its V2 mainnet is launched, as of now, it still only supports the ETH mainnet, which often discourages investors with decentralized assets and cross-chain needs. SwapAll For users who require cross-chain transactions and are not willing to spend time on too many cumbersome technologies and interfaces, the Exchange from Toronto is a very suitable choice. It is operated with high-quality UI/UX design and modules. SwapAll Like dYdX, this exchange also has in-depth technical integration with Chainlink. After full decentralization, users of SwapAll can still choose between the mobile APP and Layer 2. Users’ assets are stored on Layer 2. SwapAll supports ETH, BSC, HECO, HSC cross-chain, and will soon support more mainstream chains. Its functions are also relatively adequate for Chinese users who are keen on DeFi diversity. The SwapAll team has created safe liquidity pools, cross-chain deposits and withdrawals, mainstream cryptocurrency transactions and swaps, NFTs, community governance and other gameplay for users with dedicated supervision. To a certain extent, it avoids the risk of users being deceived by unknown issuers. At present, the exchange is rising, and mainstream coins will be launched on this platform every month and reward events will be launched. It is suitable for users who want to explore the blockchain world with a relatively safe experience on a simple and easy-to-use platform. The world and the haze brought about by China's blockchain ban can make blockchain users feel that they are overshadowed and hopeless. As a promising industry where both risks and opportunities coexist, users can still choose a decentralized trading platform that suits them in this new era. No matter how turbulent the blockchain industry is, we do hope that blockchain investors from China and all over the world will maintain the core spirit of decentralization, maintain a pursuit of a more free and open financial world, and keep moving forward. First published . here

Use This Alternative Crypto Exchange Guide to Fight the Government Ban Hammer (When it Drops)

Network resource exhaustion can grind the entire blockchain down to a halt. As more people begin to rely on and use blockchain technology in their everyday lives, a hiccup or a bottleneck in the system can cause a domino effect and ultimately shut the entire blockchain down. That’s what happened to a high-performance public network BETA system this year in September. The system halted for an excruciating 17 hours and locked up $11 billion USD in investors’ money due to high transaction demand, which caused the nodes to suffer an Out of Memory (OOM) situation. Attempts to rescue the system included forking but this comes with a disadvantage. New forks failed to accumulate sufficient verification consensus, thus rendering the entire transaction to become invalid and as a result, causing transaction stagnation. Consequently, the token price of this network fell by 15% from this incident. Unfortunately, it’s not always the users at fault. Bots can even unleash a coordinated attack to the platform to overload the validators – also known as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. This type of attack forces the blockchain server to use more processing power and eventually lose connectivity to any exchanges, crypto wallets, and any connected applications. Then, the attackers may be able to gain access to the exchange. Thus, being able to keep the entire network functional during these attacks can protect the chain but also its users. A blockchain system that can handle large numbers of simultaneous transactions and adapt/scale to the increased load is the solution to resource exhaustion. The Kinglory Blockchain can handle 100,000 transactions per second (TPS) and is a scalable, decentralized network. Kinglory Blockchain’s technical advantages such as Kate commitments can handle increased transaction requests, tackle hackers, and consume fewer resources. Kinglory also uses a fault-tolerant structure so, in an event where a massive resource-consuming attack occurs, Kinglory’s network will be able to digest it through supernodes with high resource allocation to maintain the stability of the overall network to protect the on-chain transactions. Kinglory’s mission to build a trusted computing infrastructure and ecosystem to achieve large-scale smart contract execution and allow decentralized applications while consuming minimal resources may sound ambitious but it is possible. All while maintaining a secure platform, being able to handle a large number of transactions, and meets the needs of dynamic computing environments. Kinglory is a new generation of blockchain, which allows for global sharing, proof of authenticity, storing different mediums of information (transactions, photos, videos, and files). With these uses, Kinglory also provides strong encryption to protect user information and assets from hackers and other unauthorized organizations. Many cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum consume considerable energy for mining, causing environmental problems and concerns. Kinglory has implemented a low-energy, low-cost, and strongly decentralized mining-specific POS consensus protocol (as shown below). Kinglory’s low-energy, low-cost system along with its unique VM (as shown below) supports the development of smart contracts in multiple programming languages such as Java, C++, Rust, etc., which makes the deployment of smart contracts quite feasible. Established in 2017, Kinglory’s team is comprised of 200 internationally recognized researchers, mathematicians, cryptographers, and economists with professional skills, as well as recognized business leaders from global technology companies. Kinglory's public chain R&D team is composed of blockchain geeks from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Israel, and more. They gathered for a common vision. The internal testing began in 2020, and the testnet will be officially launched in November 2021. Then, in December 2021, Kinglory will be listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges. Gradually, Kinglory is realizing its mission and building an integrated blockchain platform.

Meet The Blockchain Looking To Put An End to Resource Exhaustion

The idea behind the Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) was to provide an opportunity to people who have something unique which they have developed and want to make it their intellectual property over the blockchain network, so an NFT is generated for that thing either digital or physical and the right of the owner is provided to that person. Stickers platform has become a very popular NFT platform when it comes to selling digital artwork NFTs. The platform provides a range of digital artworks and accelerator cards that can be used over the platform. The digital artwork sold through the Stickers platform can be minted by the users if they have earned Tinders. Many of the NFT artworks currently listed on the Stickers platform have a specific theme they follow and are built upon. The idea was to bring the imagination to reality in the form of digital artwork and when combined with NFTs, their value and ownership get doubled. Following are the Stickers NFTs which are available on the Stickers marketplace: Vision ETH: Vision ETH is a very well thought artwork and in reality, it matches with the ‘Vision’ character in Marvel. The artwork shows the ETH as the stone which was fixed in Vision’s forehead which was later removed by Thanos. The artwork is completely on point and relative. Only 2 NFTs are minted till now and 8 more NFTs are available for this artwork. If you want to mint this artwork, you can start right now if you have already earned Tinders. Iron Mars Doge: This one is our favourite one as this artwork broke all records over the Stickers marketplace. The artwork was based on the concept of the sudden price hike of DogeCoin and Elon Musk’s involvement with it. As many people call Elon Musk the “Iron Man” of real-world, the artwork was made to depict how he sent DogeCoin so high to the heights of Mars. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to mint any NFTs for this artwork as it has already been sold out. Bit Thanos: Bit Thanos is a funny artwork, at least it looks like it as it is based on Marvel’s villain character Thanos who wiped out half of the human race from existence. Similarly, the artwork shows the power of Bitcoin and how its fluctuations affect the whole market. Currently, only 4 NFTs of this artwork have been minted and 6 NFTs are still available. Golden Hawk-BNB: Golden Hawk-BNB is a very unique artwork as it depicts the friendship of BNB with the crypto market. The idea comes from the two characters from Marvel, Hawkeye and Black Widow, as both were very good friends, and the Golden Hawk-BNB shows the durability and strength of the market. Currently, no NFT has minted for this artwork as it was recently listed on the Stickers marketplace, 10 NFTs are available for being minted. Open NFT Secondary Market There are many secondary markets for NFTs, Open NFT is one of them. The marketplace of Open NFT is not that diverse as it should be. Currently, there are only 6 Artworks available on the whole platform for both of their projects which are Bee Swap and SOVI Finance. Currently, all the available artworks are from SOVI Finance and there is no artwork available for Bee Swap. The artworks they are selling cost somewhere between $50 - $90 and in terms of the quality of artworks, there are much better and unique artworks available out there. Some of the Stickers NFTs are also listed on the Open NFT platform, NFTs such as Iron Mars Doge, Bit Thanos, Vision ETH, and Golden Hawk-BNB. The OpenNFT secondary market was built on top of the concept of reselling rare items. As an NFT is sold at the primary market, if the buyer decides to sell it on the secondary market, it could be sold at much higher prices given the rarity of that NFT for which the buyer could even pay three times more. That is what is currently happening at the OpenNFT secondary marketplace in terms of Stickers NFTs. This helps both buyers and sellers make a profit regardless of how many times it has been bought or sold. Each time an NFT is sold, its price increases as the demands are being increased for that specific product. Value of Stickers NFT on Secondary Market Currently, Stickers NFTs are being sold only through the Stickers Genesis platform as Open NFT has not yet listed any artworks on their platform. The value is a bit difficult to identify as time goes by, the real value of the NFT will be determined through the level of how rare it is. It is the very best time to mint Stickers NFTs as it is going to be very beneficial for the people who mint them at the right time. Users can mint NFTs if they have earned any Tinders, to earn Tinders, users will have to lock the SKS tokens in dedicated liquidity pools. Users can also use Tinders to earn accelerator cards and the more tinder they have, the better chances there are to unlock Rare Accelerator cards which can be used on any secondary market such as Open NFT. Right now, the market saturation for people who are interested in NFTs is very low and if you mint now, you’ll be able to reap its benefits in the near future. Stickers NFTs listed on Secondary NFT Market have different price dynamics as on the Stickers platform, these NFTs can be minted differently, but on secondary markets, their price is directly listed for the ease of buyers. Following are the Stickers NFTs with prices that are currently listed on secondary markets: 1. – Selling Price – 9000 USDT - 18000 USDT Vision ETH 2. – Selling Price – 2000 USDT - 50000 USDT Bit Thanos 3. – Selling Price – 2000 USDT - 30000 USDT (SOLD OUT) Iron Mars Doge By seeing these price figures, we could instantly see that there is a huge difference in prices. Of course, the prices of primary and secondary markets vary as the NFT which is sold from a Primary market is sold at a much higher rate in the secondary market. It helps in making the NFTs rarer and more due to this the secondary markets have grown a lot over the past few months. Stickers NFTs value on the secondary markets has increased dramatically as they are being resold in the secondary market at a much higher price. For instance, the Iron Mars Doge artwork was originally sold at 15,000 USDT at the Stickers platform and now it's being sold at even 30,000 USDT at the OpenNFT Secondary marketplace.

Stickers NFTs Sold on Secondary Markets for as High as 50,000 USDT

Authors:
(1) Nora Schneider, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (nschneide@student.ethz.ch);
(2) Shirin Goshtasbpour, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland (shirin.goshtasbpour@inf.ethz.ch);
(3) Fernando Perez-Cruz, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland (fernando.perezcruz@sdsc.ethz.ch). Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Background 2.1 Data Augmentation 2.2 Anchor Regression 3 Anchor Data Augmentation 3.1 Comparison to C-Mixup and 3.2 Preserving nonlinear data structure 3.3 Algorithm 4 Experiments and 4.1 Linear synthetic data 4.2 Housing nonlinear regression 4.3 In-distribution Generalization 4.4 Out-of-distribution Robustness 5 Conclusion, Broader Impact, and References A Additional information for Anchor Data Augmentation B Experiments 2.2 Anchor Regression To trade-off predictive accuracy on the training distribution with distribution robustness and to enforce stability over statistical parameters, AR [4, 42] proposes to relax the regularization in the optimization problem in (1) to a smaller class of distributions P. where γ > 0 is a hyperparameter. The first term of the AR objective in Equation 3 is the loss after “partialling out" the anchor variable, which refers to first linearly regressing out A from X and y and subsequently using OLS on the residuals. The second term is the well-known estimation objective used in the Instrumental Variable setting [11]. Therefore, for different values of γ AR interpolates between the partialling out objective (γ = 0) and the IV estimator (γ → ∞) and coincides with OLS for γ = 1. The authors show that the solution of AR optimizes a worst-case risk under shiftinterventions on anchors up to a given strength. This in turn increases the robustness of the predictions to distribution shifts at the cost of reducing the in-distribution generalization. This paper is available on arxiv under CC0 1.0 DEED license. Authors: (1) Nora Schneider, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (nschneide@student.ethz.ch); (2) Shirin Goshtasbpour, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland (shirin.goshtasbpour@inf.ethz.ch); (3) Fernando Perez-Cruz, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland (fernando.perezcruz@sdsc.ethz.ch). Authors: Authors: (1) Nora Schneider, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland (nschneide@student.ethz.ch); (2) Shirin Goshtasbpour, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland (shirin.goshtasbpour@inf.ethz.ch); (3) Fernando Perez-Cruz, Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland and Swiss Data Science Center, Zurich, Switzerland (fernando.perezcruz@sdsc.ethz.ch). Table of Links Abstract and 1 Introduction Abstract and 1 Introduction 2 Background 2.1 Data Augmentation 2.1 Data Augmentation 2.2 Anchor Regression 2.2 Anchor Regression 3 Anchor Data Augmentation 3 Anchor Data Augmentation 3.1 Comparison to C-Mixup and 3.2 Preserving nonlinear data structure 3.1 Comparison to C-Mixup and 3.2 Preserving nonlinear data structure 3.3 Algorithm 3.3 Algorithm 4 Experiments and 4.1 Linear synthetic data 4 Experiments and 4.1 Linear synthetic data 4.2 Housing nonlinear regression 4.2 Housing nonlinear regression 4.3 In-distribution Generalization 4.3 In-distribution Generalization 4.4 Out-of-distribution Robustness 4.4 Out-of-distribution Robustness 5 Conclusion, Broader Impact, and References 5 Conclusion, Broader Impact, and References A Additional information for Anchor Data Augmentation A Additional information for Anchor Data Augmentation B Experiments B Experiments 2.2 Anchor Regression To trade-off predictive accuracy on the training distribution with distribution robustness and to enforce stability over statistical parameters, AR [4, 42] proposes to relax the regularization in the optimization problem in (1) to a smaller class of distributions P. where γ > 0 is a hyperparameter. The first term of the AR objective in Equation 3 is the loss after “partialling out" the anchor variable, which refers to first linearly regressing out A from X and y and subsequently using OLS on the residuals. The second term is the well-known estimation objective used in the Instrumental Variable setting [11]. Therefore, for different values of γ AR interpolates between the partialling out objective (γ = 0) and the IV estimator (γ → ∞) and coincides with OLS for γ = 1. The authors show that the solution of AR optimizes a worst-case risk under shiftinterventions on anchors up to a given strength. This in turn increases the robustness of the predictions to distribution shifts at the cost of reducing the in-distribution generalization. This paper is available on arxiv under CC0 1.0 DEED license. This paper is available on arxiv under CC0 1.0 DEED license. available on arxiv

Anchor Regression: The Secret to Stable Predictions Across Shifting Data

The fintech industry is on high alert as authorized push payment (APP) fraud continues to escalate. This type of happens when a fraudster poses as a bank or another trusted organization and deceives a victim into sending them money.  In the UK alone, APP fraud losses amounted to £293,3m in the first half of 2023, with £42.6m of it being business losses. financial scam Open banking can help companies in mitigating these risks. It’s a new technology that allows traditional banks to share data with fintechs (legally named third-party providers) through the power of application programming interfaces (APIs). Consumers consent to the sharing of their data, and fintechs use it to create personalized products and secure payment flows. Security Features to Prevent APP Fraud "To effectively counter APP fraud, we must leverage Open Banking's advanced security measures,” said Lasma Gavarane, Chief Risk & Compliance Officer at . “These tools enable us to build a fortress of trust with our customers and stay several steps ahead of fraudsters." Let’s take a look at the security features she recommended. Noda Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) is a legal requirement under PSD2, the European open banking regulation. It follows a two-step authentication protocol, where the customer must confirm the transaction with two of these: something they know, like a password; something they possess, like a phone; or/and something they inherently are, like their fingerprint. In terms of APP fraud prevention, the third factor may be especially valuable. While a fraudster may trick their victim into sharing their password or an authorization code, they cannot impersonate their fingerprint or facial features. Real-Time Transaction Monitoring Deploying advanced transaction monitoring systems that leverage open banking APIs can help businesses in catching fraudsters. Real-time monitoring, while it may sound time-consuming at first, is an excellent feature to improve security algorithms. To detect APP fraud with this method, fintech companies should monitor for unusual behaviors and transaction patterns. They can also set automated alerts for high-risk indicators such as new payees, large sums of money being transferred, and rapid frequency of transactions. It may be useful to establish a dedicated team responsible for monitoring. Educating Customers Knowledge is power. The nature of the APP fraud is such that if customers are aware of its intricacies, they can easily detect and report the fraudster. To inform consumers, fintech companies can invest in online courses as well as send client communications and content about APP fraud risks and how to avoid them. This measure can go a long way in preventing customers from falling victim. Uniform Security Protocols While it may seem self-evident, applying consistent security protocols across an organization is key. Crafting accessible procedures and guidelines for employees is arguably the most important element in mitigating fraud that stems from human error. Companies should also regularly update security protocols and ensure they are ahead of evolving fraud tactics. This applies to SCA, real-time monitoring, and other facets of . In terms of open banking, fintech companies should follow their local open banking security guidelines. In-depth compliance audits can help in verifying adherence to legal standards. cybersecurity Final Thoughts Fintech firms will benefit from a proactive approach to the prevention and detection of APP fraud. By educating customers, ensuring strong security systems and protocols, as well as leveraging SCA, which is legally required in open banking, fintechs can safeguard themselves and their clients from this elaborate scam.

How to Fortify Fintech Against APP Fraud Using Open Banking

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5 Major Challenges Faced by Web Application Development Teams Today and Solutions to Solve Them Without Breaking Your Company’s IT Budget The first challenge with web application development is Monoculture. What is monoculture? Even though there seem to be different approaches when it comes to developing web applications, companies are still focused on the main fundamental idea of shipping a web application to production while accounting for the scope of project, cost and time to deliver the scope. Let’s look at the above triangle. When you increase the scope of a project, you either will need to increase the cost or project will not hit the deadline as it’ll take more time. Thanks to agile development, software development teams are familiar with this fact. But let’s look at a different perspective outside of scope, cost and time. i.e. your app’s technical performance i.e. scalability, for example. Performance i.e. how the user perceives the performance of your application. User Experience (UX) i.e. how the developer feels with the tech stack used to build the application measured in terms of developer productivity, time to production, and subjective happiness or frustration of the developers. Developer Experience (DX) The tech giants like Google, FB, AMZN, NFLX have a strong focus on application performance. Large companies have a huge amount of concurrent users so they have to navigate scalability and performance issues regularly. But they also have lots of cash in the bank and they can hire more developers to fix the app’s performance. So DX is not as important for them. But for the rest of us, it’s cost-effective to add a bigger server than add an additional head-count as a developer. User Experience (UX) is another one that’s critical. Companies love to evangelize their way of doing a thing — whether it’s design or development. 98% of the time, that’s for recruitment purposes. But it also leads to developers drinking the cool-aid and they go — “React/Vue.JS/Angular etc is the right way to go.” The problem is that most of your applications don’t have to scale to serve 1M+ concurrent users. For that kind of setup, there are different tradeoffs relevant to what big tech companies have. So in order to address the challenge of monoculture, how about we: i.e. if there’s a choice between choosing something for increasing developer productivity versus optimizing for the server, choosing developer productivity could have greater long-term gains as it directly contributes to developers being happy and willing to stick around as they enjoy working on the tech stack. - Optimize for DX first Combining this with a framework that is built-in with good UX at its core, companies can get both, DX and UX without having to worry much about scalability from the get-go as there’s always one extra node you can add to your cluster. The second challenge with web application development is Hype-Cycle. Framework of the month — Angular, React, Vue, Flutter, etc. Architecture of the year — SOA, Serverless, Microservices, etc. As engineers, we like to use bleeding-edge technology. It makes us feel powerful and in control of keeping up with time. But companies prefer stability. They want to build an app and then put it in maintenance and don’t want to have to update from Angular 1 to 2 to 3 every year. Companies prefer to have minimal efforts to keep an application running. It also makes a lot of business sense to want to use the same tech stack for the next application in order to minimize training costs. When Google builds an application, it explicitly plans to deprecate the stack at the end of 5 years. So when the time comes, they’re not refactoring or redesigning their app and prefer to start from scratch. Another thing you end up with due to Hype-Cycle is the mashup of best practices. You pick the best template engine, best REST API Framework, best CSS pre-processor and then you integrate those because they’re all best practice. And we all know how complicated web development can become due to this mindset. So what’s the solution? Using an integrated solution. Focus on . It doesn’t matter which message bus you want to use. When you use Web Components, it is agnostic of whether you’re using LitElement or Polymer 3 or React or built the interface using low-level JS/HTML stuff. Web Standards Have an i.e. a full-stack solution that comes with a front-end framework, client-server communication layer, theming solution, set of web components based on web standards. Integration Solution When you get the above open-source solution from a single vendor, you mitigate the risk of not having stability or incurring extra costs due to mash-up of different tech stack across your engineering team. An additional advantage of choosing a vendor backed open-source solution is that when things break (and trust me it will) and it’s a critical situation where your CIO is up all night and having to scream at people on the phone — you can reach out to experts who’ve built the technology you’re using and get it fixed with an SLA versus letting your developers post on SOF and hope a community member comes and saves the day. : That’s the 3rd challenge with web application development today. JavaScript Why? Because it’s doing something totally different from what it was designed for. Sir Charles Anthony Richard Hoare is a British computer scientist who calls his invention of the null reference back in 1965 as a billion-dollar mistake. But programming languages started to copy it as well and the fact that JS doesn’t have 1 kind of null references but 2 different ones, could JS be a 2b mistake? What’s happening is that — JS isn’t used for what it was designed for. Back in 1995, 1996 — when both Java and JS were relased by Sun Microsystems and Netscape respectively, the plan in collaboration was that Jave would be universal app for building complex things but there’ll be JS for building smaller scripting kind of things. Today, Java has become write once, read everywhere. But they’re also using JS as a virtual machine similar to Java byte code. They write an app in other languages and then at compile time it’s translated into JS. One of the biggest reasons for this solution is to get static type-safety. Why have static type-safe code from your client to server-side logic? When you have explicitly defined types in your code, it makes it much easier for someone who’s not familiar with that code to still know what it does. Static typing often serves as documentation. Static typing also helps to use the compiler to make better and inlining things. So, the only thing you’re actually using ends up in compiled JS. optimization like dead code elimination Type safety is business-critical when you’re building a huge Enterprise application with lots of developers coming and leaving but you want the code to be optimized for end-users. So what’s the solution? Using static typing both, in the client-side and server-side logic. For example, TypeScript in FE and Java in BE. The 4th challenge is around Client-Server Communication. Yes, project managers face their own set of communication challenges during the SDLC. But an even more critical challenge is how the client and server communicate with each other. The big challenge is that we have a process boundary. We have different things that are separate with latency between them. We have to do things in a synchronous way. We have to do an optimistic update which comes with its own set of challenges you have to solve. Latency makes it even longer. If you have infinite latency and you have an offline situation, you have to deal with problems of how to keep things in sync. How do you ensure when users return online, things are put into the database and conflicts are resolved? It also causes a language barrier. What you typically have is that you have Java or C# on the server and on the client, you have JS. There’s the alternative of using NodeJS on the server or GWT on the client that gives you Java everywhere. Different programming languages come with separate code bases so there’s the difficulty of having shared validation rules or shared constants. So you end up duplicating things or doing it in a not so optimal way. When it comes to the web, the question for communication is — do we use REST or GraphQL? Both of these are for the use-case when you have front-end team doing FE and back-end team doing BE and the interaction between them is the communication layer. REST requires you to define what the client and the server will do. GraphQL gives slightly more power to FE teams but you still have a hard boundary between the client and the server Communication is difficult enough without having to add this encapsulation layer. So what’s the solution? Transparent communication from encapsulation between front-end and back-end. What if the front-end team is also doing server-side part of the communication which has a thin layer that talks to the business logic. In doing this way, you separate 2 complex things — encapsulation and overall communication challenge and helps to do things in a smoother way. By tightly coupling your FE and BE in your client-server communication layer, it lets you avoid all those problems like not being able to share constants and shared validation rules, etc. Mobile: The last of the major challenges with web application development today. In theory, you should just do mobile-first and everything will be awesome. Why? In many cases, you still need to do native apps. Because mobile-first web app won’t be good enough What you end with is multiple clients with different codebases — Web for Desktop iOS for iPhone Android 3 separate code bases (i.e. web, iOS, Android) also add up the development costs. What you want is a single code base so that you change things once when there’s a business requirement or when you have to fix bugs. Another challenge with mobile-first app development is how to deal with offline functionalities. In addition to the synchronization of data problem, you have the additional problem of how to cache static asset so that your app can be truly offline. So what’s the solution? Progressive Web Applications (PWA). Maybe it’s still a buzzword today. But the reason it will stick is that it’s the 3rd iteration by Google. Based on Google’s record, the 1st and 2nd time they build something, it’s not really good because they’re themselves learning what to keep in mind but the 3rd time is often a home run. Google’s 1st iteration with mobile app development was the same as everybody else does i.e. separate web, ios, and Android clients. Their 2nd iteration was — do as much as possible in Java. Android clients natively running java and web client using GWT to compile Java into JS. Google has a similar solution for compiling Java into iOS clients. Much of the client-side logic can be implemented in the same codebase. But they’d be doing UI in respective native tech for each stack. Google’s 3rd iteration is PWA. The Big Idea — Turn the problem upside down. What if we don’t need a native client by making the web browser strong that makes it easier to deal with caching of the static asset. So there you have it. The above are the 5 challenges based on our experience here at Vaadin helping companies with their business web application development needs and how we’re navigating it. Whether you’re a web app developer, architect, or engineering leader responsible for ensuring the business goals are met when selecting the tech stack for your team, what is your #1 single biggest challenge when it comes to building business web applications based on your current team dynamics? Share your thoughts below in comments.

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