About

Nebulas is a search engine for the blockchain world. It uses a custom algorithm to determine the best users and apps across blockchains called Nebulas Rank. This allows it to determine who the biggest contributors are to blockchain communities and to reward those who participate in their own community.

History

Nebulas brands itself as a decentralized platform that provides a search framework for all blockchains. This framework allows users to search through all blockchains for decentralized applications and users, like how Google created the first web search engine. Instead of ranking pages based on how often they were cited, Nebulas ranks people on how ‘valuable’ they are with metrics like how often people are sending transactions and how liquid their supply of funds is.

Nebulas also has created a dynamic programming environment equipped to handle future upgrades with considerable ease. Along with their ‘value’ rank, Nebulas incited a self-evolving ecosystem for their blockchain in which their Nebulas Virtual Machine (NVM) and its upgrades are isolated from the node clients. This means that as the NVM is upgraded, there is no responsibility on the part of the wallets, exchanges, or nodes to upgrade their software. This also means that unlike in Ethereum, smart contracts do not need to be changed or supplied with a new version during upgrades. In this way, the NVM is stored in the blockchain itself where the Ethereum Virtual Machine is a standalone entity.

Finally, they have implemented a “Developer Incentive Protocol” which aims to reward developers accurately for participating in their development ecosystem. This is specifically for smart contracts on the Nebulas platform, as opposed to the platform participants. This relies on the user ranking system mentioned above by gauging how many many high-ranking users are interacting with the smart contract.

The team believes that these principles will allow them to create an ecosystem that is self-fulfilling, in that it can evolve its core value proposition while relying exclusively on monetary incentives, similar to an app store. It will also try and serve as a base layer of operability for the blockchain ecosystem, serving the ‘search’ and ‘rankings’ niches instead of specifically targeting transactions as many blockchains do.