The Decentralized Web powered by Ravencoin & IPFS – Good Audience

A few months ago I heard about a project Overstock.com and Medici Ventures were involved in called Ravencoin. I just recently decided to take a look at the code and see what it is currently capable of.

I found the chain being BTC based has some powerful features like the ability create digital assets much like you would create an ERC20 on Ethereum and NFT (Non-fungible Tokens) which are unique like Crypto Kitties / ERC721 tokens.

Along with an important feature if it happens to be a security token. The ability to message token holders.

The other feature I did not initially get the full impact of was IPFS which can be attached to the metadata of a Fungible and NFT token by including the hash generated for an image or video. IPFS is a decentralized protocol for hosting files, images and video. Feature wise it is much like AWS S3 which many companies use today to host and serve files.

After creating a Garbage Pal Kid themed Crypto Kitty on the Raven Testnet (yes I grew up in the 80’s) I had a thought experiment. What if you could attach an entire dApp or Site to a token?

• You could have a company site linking out to dynamic content automatically linked to your token.
• Gaming tokens could include a dApp.
• You have a censorship resistant, decentralized site which can be easily shared. China may not let you enter the country with 50 King James Bibles to distribute but sending a KJV Bible token with a decentralized site attached is much harder to censor.

To my surprise. It worked.

Clicking the IPFS link takes you to the demo React website:

The Process

Much like launching a React Website on Amazon Web Services S3 you can create a new React app and build it. Upload the build folder to IPFS.

Install IPFS

https://docs.ipfs.io/introduction/install/

Create a React App