Official Interpretation of Nebulas Mauve Paper

Developer Incentive Protocol (DIP) aims to reward DApp developers in the Nebulas ecosystem, so as to help developers benefit fairly from the decentralized world and at the same time, to promote sustainable development of the Nebulas ecosystem. DIP is based on the design of Nebulas Rank (NR), and also includes many excellent features of NR. Therefore, to some extent, NR is the foundation of DIP.

DIP includes two steps in its implementation: DApp ranking score and developer incentive distribution. In the first step, voting of a DApp simply means calling the DApp, and the ranking score is based on users’ voting action. In the second step, rewards (NAS reward) will be distributed to DApp developers’ addresses according to their ranking scores.

In the following section, we will give a detailed interpretation on the key part of the Mauve Paper.

Calling Is Voting

Different from the traditional evaluation based on download numbers, DIP innovatively defines voting action as the users’ calling the DApps. Such strategy has some advantages. On the one hand, users’ calling action is public on chain and cannot be tampered with. On the other, compared with simply downloading the DApp, the calling action can better reflect the users’ real usage of the DApp. At the same time, we removed the data relating to fund transfer in the calling action, since such data will cause noises and may also lead to cheating behavior.

Ranking Score Calculation

After collecting users’ call action, we adopt the method of square root and function to calculate the DApp ranking score, instead of the commonly used linear summation.

By using this calculation method, the more DApp’s the user call, the higher effectiveness their voting is. Through this way, we can encourage users to interact with more DApps, and can also effectively prevent developers from buying users.

Anti-cheating

Actually, we take into consideration the various potential cheating behaviors when designing Nebulas Rank (NR). However, since both common users and developers are included in DIP, the cheating behaviors become more complex. Therefore, we have a detailed analysis on the potential cheating behaviors in the actual situation, as well as the anti-cheating feature of DIP, including buying voters, malicious splitting and Sybil attack, etc.

We have always believed that the value of blockchain systems cannot be separated from the contribution of everyone, which includes not only the liquidity brought by the users, but also the creativity of DApp developers. The publication of the Nebulas Mauve Paper marks a milestone in the Nebulas ecosystem and will definitely play a vital role in further Nebulas development.

Nebulas Mauve Paper: Developer Incentive Protocol has been open sourced on the Nebulas GitHub. Community members are welcome to discuss and give suggestions: GitHub

Nebulas Research Institute