What is DAB? 🤔
What is DAB?¶
DAB is an open internet service for NFT, Token, Canister, and Dapp registries that app can consume to auto-surface a user’s assets, names of canisters they are interacting with, and metadata in their user interface. Making assets and canisters easily discoverable, with metadata that makes them descriptive and human-readable (and safer to interact with).
Why use DAB? It provides two clear benefits:¶
1. Benefits for Tokens, NFTs, Canisters:¶
If you list your canister, NFT, Token, or Dapp in DAB's lists, it means it can be easily discoverable, surfaceable, and integrated by all UIs and applications that use DAB. Automagically integrated and supported, and visible to anyone on our public lists.
In the case of the Canister List, if you list your canisters you can increase the trust behind it by providing clear metadata that interfaces can surface to help users identify the canister's purpose and objective. It creates "canister profiles" with rich metadata that can better explain what your canister does, and help differentiate malicious actors.
2. Benefits for UIs/Apps/Interfaces:¶
For UIs and apps, DAB is an easy way to surface and integrate NFTs & Tokens without having to build custom integrations per-asset or standard, as well as auto-surface descriptive metadata for canister IDs to better inform users.
Instead of integrating NFTs and Tokens of different standards separately, through DAB they can integrate a list that automatically grows as new assets are listed, using a library that normalizes different standards into a common interface. No need to add NFTs & Tokens individually, all can be programmatically fetched at once.
In the case of the Canister List, UIs can integrate it to surface metadata for users regarding the different canisters that they interact with. UIs can query the Canister List for a Canister ID, and if it has a record they can fetch a descriptive name, logo, and description and relevant URLs related to the project that they can then surface for users in their UIs.
DAB's Architecture - How does it work?¶
DAB's multi-list architecture can be broken up into two components, the Router & Registries.
The Router¶
DAB's Router canister acts as an autonomous management canister whose sole purpose is to keep track of DAB's verified registries & their metadata. The Router does not have any direct interaction on control over any of these registries, but will allow you to query the data it tracks against the registries (such as canister ID, name, etc).
The Router canister follows the Registry Standard and can be interacted with just like any other registry. In this way, the Router can be thought of as a registry of DAB registries.
Registries¶
DAB Registries is a broad term for any registry that follows DAB's Registry Standard.
DAB Registries are split up into two camps: verified and unverfied. The only difference between verified & unverified registries is that verified registries have been vetted by the DAB community and deemed in-demand & trustworthy. Being accepted as a DAB verified registry meens more exposure to your registry and provides a stamp of approval from the DAB governing body as a whole. As previously mentioned, these are the registries that are kept track of by the DAB Router canister.
Newly created registries all start out as unverified by design. This allows anyone to be able to create a registry for any purpose, without the need for vetting by an entire community.
To request verification of your registry, submit this form.