Chapter 9. The Ethereum ecosystem
This chapter covers
- A bird’s-eye view of the full Ethereum ecosystem
- Decentralized address resolution with ENS
- Decentralized content storage on Swarm and IPFS
- External data access through oracles
- Dapp frameworks and IDEs
In previous chapters, you learned about the main components of the Ethereum platform and how to implement and deploy a decentralized application using simple tools such as the Remix IDE and the geth console. You then improved the efficiency of the development cycle by partially automating the deployment with Node.js. You made further efficiency improvements by deploying and running your smart contracts on a private network and, ultimately, on Ganache, where you progressively reduced and almost eliminated the impact of infrastructural aspects of the Ethereum platform on the run and test cycle.
The tool set you’ve used so far has been pretty basic, but it has helped you understand every step of the build and deployment process of a smart contract. You’ve also learned about every step of the lifecycle of a transaction, from its creation, through a Web3 call, to its propagation to the network, to its mining, and ultimately to its persistence on the blockchain. Although you might have found these tools helpful and effective for getting started quickly and for learning various concepts in detail, if you decide to develop Ethereum applications on a regular basis, you’d use a different tool set.