Despite the tumultuous events that the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had to surf through the past couple of weeks; there is no denying the fact that the underlying technology behind them, the blockchain is growing at an unprecedented rate. And it is highly likely that the future holds even greater prospects for this comparatively new sector.

However, nothing is perfect and nothing grows without facing problems, the same applies to blockchain tech. Despite the development and investments pouring in, there are problems like the lack of interoperability, scalability and consumer friendliness.

Targeting these problems is the next wave of projects dubbed as blockchain 3.0. This generation of blockchain will address the current shortcomings of the tech and allow it to power further business process across various industries. Nebulas, is a blockchain 3.0 project aiming to do just that.

The Need for Nebulas

With the birth of the famous Ethereum and smart contracts, came into being, a number of issues, like,

No way to measure the value of different applications and smart contracts

The self-evolving ability, whereby changes can be implemented in a healthy way without the consequence of hard forking and a community split.

An ecosystem that incentivizes all participants of the blockchain to make itself future proof.

Now, these may seem like weird problems, for a platform to tackle. But once you understand Nebulas itself, you’ll definitely understand the significance.

What is Nebulas?

Founded only recently in 2017, the Singapore-based Nebulas is basically a decentralized platform, which provides a search framework for all blockchains. The self-evolving and incentive based blockchain system, is aiming to integrate a blockchain search engine to index and rank its Dapps, smart contracts, and data, as well as external blockchains. With this aim, Nebulas has earned the title ‘The Google of Blockchain’.

While Nebulas does bear striking similarities with the search engine giant, the two hold different use cases. Google, as we all know is more intended towards our daily Internet information searches, while Nebulas is more blockchain centric and focuses on searches among decentralized applications (DApps), smart contracts, and user’s blockchain assets.

The Nebulas Token

The native token of the platform is NAS. And initially it was an ERC20 token that is, prior to the launch of the Nebulas mainnet, back in March of this year.

Key Features of Nebulas

The Nebulas Rank

For the purpose of understanding this better, lets put it in context to both, Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s blockchains. Bitcoin’s blockchai represents the one-dimensional world of peer-to-peer transactions. Ethereum’s blockchain, on the other hand, has taken us a step forward by offering us a two-dimensional with dApps and smart contracts.

The Nebulas’ whitepaper, sketches a reality of the ever-growing blockchain world. According to which, with the rise of smart contracts and various dApps, both the blockchain world and Web 3.0, will be in dire need for a universal measurement of value, such that would be applicable to smart contracts, dApps and even users.

And thus the platform gives us the Nebulas Rank, which will have the ability to quantify the value of each entity on the blockchain, by algorithmically exploring and analyzing the on-chain activity. It will also serve as the Nebulas Search Engine, which will provide a way to explore Web 3.0, similar to how Google allows exploring Web 2.0, but in a decentralized fashion of course.

Proof of Devotion

The famous Proof-of-Work (PoW), is apparently a waste of computing power, where as the Proof-of-Stake (PoS), contributes to making the rich, richer. So the team behind Nebulas, steered clear of the two widely used algorithms and decided to develop the Proof-of-Devotion (PoD) algorithm, which uses the Nebulas Rank as the measure of value to identify all the accounts that show a greater devotion to the Nebulas ecosystem. And then gives those accounts the fair chances to be bookkeeper in order to prevent monopoly in bookkeeping.

Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP)

Talk about no subtlety. This is protocol is as the name suggests; it incentivizes developers of smart contracts and dApps, by offering them rewards for their efforts. In the event that a developer’s dApp or smart contract, upon being deployed, reaches the NR score that’s higher than a specified threshold, they will in turn be rewarded in NAS.

All the rewards that that are given out by this protocol will also be recorded on-chain to serve as an attraction for more developers.

Nebulas Force

The Nebulas blockchain system functions on the blueprint of the human DNA, so to speak. In the sense that like the DNA in our system, which doesn’t require hard or soft forking for evolving, rather only small mutations are integrated in the system for that purpose.The Nebulas Force is used to meet the purpose of evolution of the blockchain itself and its application layer.

Nebulas seems to be offering pretty convincing solutions for the troubles that the blockchain is in fact facing. And it is that approach which probably will help in plunging it to the top of the blockchain world.