Meroku — dApp Hosting & Distribution: Web3 Style

cryptogenics

3 min readMay 4, 2022

Hosting

How do you host you dApp? On Web2 technologies like — AWS, Google, Azure, Netlify, Heroku etc.

Drawbacks:

centralised control
upfront costs associated with hosting your dApp. This costs is directly proportional to the number of users using your dApp.

Distribution

How do you distribute your dApp? On Web2 technologies like — Twitter, Discord etc.

Drawbacks

In order to get distribution, you must pay the web2 entities because they own the audience.
They don’t know what their audience wants (in web3 dApps); and even if they know they do a lot of ML to get that. It has shown that this approach falls under gray area of user privacy, and some companies have crossed the lines many times.

The new thought

What if you never had to pay for hosting or distribution?

Think about it — your backend is blockchain. Your frontend is a React or Vue app that interacts with blockchain. The transactions are signed by desktop user on the browser extention. This extention has no notion of where the dApp is running. So it could be mycoolDapp.com or localhost, and the dApp would still work perfectly.

Imagine if you had a pool of crypto native users whom you could distribute your dApp.

How do we do it?

Introducing Meroku

Meroku is a Community Owned (Web3 Style) dApp Store.

It allows a developer to

Package and ship their dApps to a large userbase
Remove costs associated with hosting
protect their user’s privacy because no web2 ad company is used to tatget people to use the dapp

It allows a user to

Discover new dApps: Users can search for dApps + a discovery module that pushes new and relevant dapps to users.
Install and Uninstall a dApp
Run the dApps locally. The dApps run locally in their laptop/desktop.

Usage

Developers

Make your dApp compatible: It is very simple to make your existing dApp compatible with Meroku. It involves creating a file named Selfhosting in your repository. Sometimes an empty file is enough. If your project is complex you can specify the instructions to execute in Selfhosting file. The Selfhosting file specification is present at https://github.com/merokudao/meroku/blob/main/docs/Selfhosting.md
Publish your dApp to Meroku dApp Store registry: You can publish your dApp to Meroku dApp Store Registry by simply forking the https://github.com/merokudao/dapp-store-registry and updating the https://github.com/merokudao/dapp-store-registry/blob/main/src/registry.json and creating a PR. The schema for registry is available at https://github.com/merokudao/dapp-store-registry/blob/main/src/registrySchema.json

Users

Install the Meroku CLI from https://github.com/merokudao/meroku/releases/tag/v0.1alpha

Roadmap

The detailed Roadmap is available at https://github.com/merokudao/meroku/blob/main/docs/Roadmap.md. At a high level we want to

Build a desktop and mobile app
Have a strong community around it

How do we improve it?

We would love to know how can we improve it. There are of course tons of features that we can build but your feedback will help us prioritise them right.

Please open a discussion for new feature at https://github.com/merokudao/meroku/discussions

if you love our project star it https://github.com/merokudao/meroku

Join our discord at https://discord.gg/TNQBt3vQ7x

#dapp #meroku #web3 #distribution