What is DragonChain? | Beginner’s Guide

• What is DragonChain?
• What Does DragonChain Do?
• How Does DragonChain work?
• What Sets DragonChain Apart?
• Which Industries Does DragonChain target?
• Who’s on the DragonChain Team?
• Token Distribution
• Dragon Slumber Score
• Where Can I Buy DragonChain?
• Where to Store DragonChain?
• Final Thoughts

What is DragonChain?

DragonChain, originally developed by Disney in 2014 as the “Disney Private Blockchain Platform,” is an open-source software that empowers businesses to build and deploy their own blockchain applications.

What Does DragonChain Do?

In simple terms, DragonChain aims to help companies integrate blockchain technology into their business operations. The platform facilitates the creation of Smart Contracts and decentralized applications (DApps), providing businesses with the potential for more secure and efficient customer transactions, while also minimizing the risk of fraud and scams.

In more technical terms, DragonChain provides the serverless ecosystem that enables businesses to use blockchain applications in a private and secure manner. The platform aims to give businesses a “turn-key” product that is compatible with the development stack that companies are accustomed to using- like Java, C++, and Python. With this compatibility, businesses are able to build their own smart contracts on the DragonChain platform using common programming languages.

From the DragonChain whitepaper, we can see a complete list of the DRGN ecosystem’s attributes:

• Serverless system and smart contracts
• Established language support for smart contracts (Java, Python, Node, C#, Go, etc.)
• Scalable – Amazon AWS and Google deployments
• Secure – Protection of business data and operations
• Advanced currency implementations
• Smart contract libraries
• Currency Agnostic

These key properties, discussed in more detail later, create the infrastructure that allow businesses to run their decentralized applications. Together, these properties are advertised to deliver lower development costs, faster speed to market for projects, increased scalability for those projects, and significantly heightened levels of security.

How Does DragonChain work?

The DRGN ecosystem consists of three key components:

1) The DragonChain Platform

The Platform can be thought of as the backend aspect of DragonChain that stores and secures business-client data. This is where developers can create and store Smart Contracts in common programming languages. Also included in the platform is access to Amazon Web Services (a subsidiary of Amazon.com providing on-demand cloud computing platforms).

 2) The DragonChain Crowd-Scaled Incubator

The Crowd-Scaled Incubator is where companies can go to develop their blockchain projects by following DragonChain’s standardized process.

The incubator’s “crowd-scaled” feature aims to significantly increase exposure for company projects. The way it works is, after a business develops their blockchain project in the incubator, they can have it reviewed and scaled by a crowd consisting of individuals/investors from all over the world.

DragonChain’s website includes a section where businesses can apply to enter the incubator:

At the time of writing, DragonChain has 5 projects under incubation: Look Lateral – Liquid Art, Seed2You, LifeID, IDPay, and ClevX.

More information on each of these projects is available in the DragonChain whitepaper. 

3) The DragonChain Marketplace

Lastly, the DragonChain Marketplace is a support system for client companies. Here clients can access a pool of verified Subject Matter Experts on topics like crypto, marketing, and software development. Also found in the Marketplace is a library of pre-developed smart contracts for clients to use or build on.

Together, these 3 components (Platform, Incubator, and Marketplace) make up the DragonChain ecosystem. The ecosystem is fueled by the Dragon Coin (DRGN), a token that is micro-licensed to serve as credit for each of the service components.

What Sets DragonChain Apart?

DragonChain is aiming to provide a solution to the issue of existing platforms restricting the creation of truly secure and scalable blockchain applications in real-world business use cases.

Ethereum, for example, provides customers with an ecosystem that runs Dapps and Smart Contracts. DragonChain serves a similar purpose, but is designed to be more secure than the Bitcoin and Ethereum protocols.

DragonChain’s whitepaper makes a point to emphasize the level of security proposed by their blockchain:

Included in the DRGN platform is a system of five standardized levels of consensus. Security increases as the verification level for a block increases. These five levels are:

1. Business (Approval) Verification
2. Enterprise (Validation) Verification
3. Network Diversity Verification
4. External Partner (Notary) Verification
5. Public Checkpoint Verification

This form of layered security works to add another dimension to the common blockchain model. DragonChain suggests thinking about their levels of consensus model as a “blockchain of blockchains.”

Which Industries Does DragonChain target?

Since the blockchain aims to replace traditional contracts and payment systems with a more secure process, industries that currently suffer from fraud/scams have high potential to benefit. This means that companies dealing in real estate or law, for instance, could remove significant losses to fraud by creating Smart Contracts within DragonChain’s ecosystem.  

Another potential use case is found in the gaming industry. FlowPlay, a gaming company with over 75 million users, wants to use DragonChain tokens to allow gamers to safely purchase virtual items. This will effectively create the first non-trust based marketplace for virtual goods, guaranteeing legitimacy. 

A few more intuitive use cases of the platform include auditing, booking/reservations, and voting systems. To see a full list, reference this page made available by Disney. 

Who’s on the DragonChain Team?

The DragonChain team is comprised of eight members with Joe Roets as the CEO and Chief Architect of the protocol. Roets formerly worked for Disney before leaving to commit full-time to the development of DragonChain. Joe Roets is also noted for his involvement in projects at Coinbase and Overstock.

The team’s 7 other members include four core developers and three business/marketing professionals. More information on each member and their involvement is available on the DragonChain website.

The DragonChain team boasts a noteworthy advisory board, with Jeff Garzik standing out as a key advisor. Garzik is regarded as an established icon in the Bitcoin network and founded the blockchain company, Bloq. Another notable advisor is Ed Fries; VP of game publishing at Microsoft and Co-Founder of Xbox.

Token Distribution

Total Supply: 433,494,437 DRGN

Circulating Supply: 238,421,940 DRGN

The DRGN coin was offered on October 2nd, 2017 at $0.0663 USD at the ICO and surpassed $4 by January of 2018.

Public tokens make up 55% of the total tokens with the remaining 45% distributed accordingly:

Dragon Slumber Score

DragonChain offers benefits for those that hold their coin in the form of a Dragon Slumber Score. The more DRGN coins you own and the longer you hold them, the higher your “Slumber Score” will be.

A higher Slumber Score rewards you with a greater extent of the following benefits:

• discounts on Smart Contracts available in the DragonChain marketplace and on future tech products from DragonChain
• bonuses for future company ICO’s

Where Can I Buy DragonChain?

DRGN is not mineable, but you can purchase it on the following exchanges:

• KuCoin

• EtherDelta

• CoinExchange

• Gate.io

• Tidex

• Bancor Network

• Token Store

Many of the exchanges on this list are rather uncommon, leaving room for potential price jumps if DRGN gets adopted by larger exchanges like Binance. Of the exchanges on this list, KuCoin has the highest trading volume for DRGN by a large margin. Using KuCoin in this case then will allow your DRGN trades to be fulfilled quicker and with more price stability.

Where to Store DragonChain?

DRGN is an ERC-20 token so there are several options for where to store it, namely in an ERC-20-compatible wallet. For those storing their tokens in an online ERC-20 wallet, DragonChain recommends using MyEtherWallet or “MEW”.

If you’re looking for a more secure and offline method to store DRGN coins, you should look into using a hardware wallet like Trezor or the Ledger Nano S. Both wallets support all ERC-20 tokens including DRGN.

Final Thoughts

DragonChain’s platform is establishing a niche within the crypto world with the introduction of its layered security model. The 5-layer security system adds significant credibility to DRGN’s ability to tackle the overall challenge of helping companies integrate blockchain technology into their business operations.

Additionally, DragonChain’s business model is seen as a potential strong rival to Ethereum because of the platform’s ability to scale- an issue that has notoriously plagued Ethereum’s protocol. From a financial standpoint, if DragonChain is to rival Ethereum, then DRGN’s market capitalization has plenty of room to grow. At the time of writing, Ethereum’s market cap is roughly 120 times that of DragonChain’s.

As of January 2018, the DragonChain team is raising funds and finishing development of the platform. Although the exact date is currently unannounced, the DRGN platform is expected to fully launch later this year.