Dragonchain – Disney’s Cryptocurrency Project

A lot of players have entered the cryptocurrency/blockchain industry over the past decade. Most of those players have consisted of startups, but there have been some major corporations attempting to get a piece of the cryptocurrency pie. 

Disney is one of those corporations that has taken a stab at the blockchain industry. They did this by funding a blockchain startup called Dragonchain. This article will cover everything that you need to know about Dragonchain and Disney’s foray into cryptocurrency. 

Why Did Disney Launch Dragonchain?

First things first, Disney did not launch Dragonchain. This was a very misleading statement by the developers to gain some social trust. 

What really happened is that Disney had a tech incubator in Seattle. For those that do not know, a tech incubator is when investors or a company will invest in startups and give them an office with other startups. The logic is that the startups in close proximity to each other can work together to solve problems. 

Dragonchain was simply a startup that was in Disney’s tech incubator. The project was launched in 2014 or 2015 and became open source in 2016 right before the major ICO frenzy. The reason for the project becoming open source is often debated, but it appears that Disney cancelled the entire tech incubator program and the projects had to make do on their own.

It was around 2017 that Dragonchain experienced a tremendous amount of hype and the price surged to an all-time high of nearly $5 at the beginning of 2018. 

What Does Dragonchain Do?

First of all, Dragonchain is a hybrid blockchain that allows end users and enterprises to launch applications on it. The key part of this is hybrid blockchain – that means businesses can launch their own private blockchain on Dragonchain. 

That itself is not really the main selling point of Dragonchain, though.

Dragonchain is great for businesses because of its interoperability due to something called Interchain. Basically, Interchain allows Dragonchain decentralized applications to interact with any external blockchain. However, at the moment the only blockchains that connect with Dragonchain are Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic.

Anyway, the benefit of interoperability like this is that a business can utilize the strength of another blockchain without having to rely on placing the information publicly on that blockchain. It also allows enterprises to utilize certain features of other blockchains that Dragonchain does not do as well. 

It’s also important to note that Dragonchain is extremely flexible when it comes to the programming languages one can use to write smart contracts and other applications. Basically, any programming language can be used to write smart contracts and decentralized applications. 

Strong Points of Dragonchain

Dragonchain does have some extremely strong features to it. This section will cover some of the positive features of Dragonchain. 

High Transactions Per Second

First, Dragonchain did a livestream in March 2021 that simulated 250 million transactions in 24 hours. The peak transactions per second was somewhere around 1,000 TPS. 

This is obviously impressive for a blockchain and is at the point where it could be a legitimate competitor to Ethereum based on transaction speed alone.

Stable Transaction Cost

Dragonchain has a stable transaction cost, which is more important than it sounds. It’s so important because it allows businesses to actually use Dragonchain without having to worry about being priced out of their own blockchain. 

See, the problem with a lot of blockchains (ie. Ethereum) is that the transaction cost varies so much that businesses can’t really use it without facing unexpected fees. And unexpected fees are something that businesses, the accounting department specifically, want to avoid at all costs. 

Interoperability

Interoperability in the context of a blockchain refers to a blockchain that has the capability to connect with other external blockchains. As mentioned previously, Dragonchain can connect with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ethereum Classic. 

The most useful blockchain for Dragonchain, in our opinion, is Ethereum because there are so many applications on the Ethereum blockchain for Dragonchain to hook into. In a sense, Dragonchain is almost like a layer 2 of Ethereum due to the interoperability. 

It’s also important to note that Dragonchain can connect to any external blockchain. There just has not been enough demand for Dragonchain to hook into other blockchains, but that could arise at any moment as other blockchains improve on certain aspects of their functionality.

Flexible Languages

Finally, Dragonchain developers are not limited to one particular language when writing smart contracts. 

This is another huge positive of Dragonchain because most other blockchains require smart contracts to be written in a particular programming language. In a way, this makes Dragonchain a lot more friendly to businesses as any development team can write a smart contract or blockchain in a language they’re comfortable using. 

What are Dragonchain Tokens (DRGN) Used For?

Dragonchain Tokens (DRGN) are used to pay for transaction fees on the platform and to earn something called TIME. 

Basically, holding DRGN in a wallet will earn TIME. TIME is then used to run verification nodes or by lending out TIME. 

Now, running a verification node requires 1 million TIME to run and costs around $9 per month to operate. 1 million TIME will earn about 1 DRGN per month, so it’s not really worth it to run a validation node unless you have a massive amount of TIME. 

Is Dragonchain a Good Investment?

No, Dragonchain is not really a good investment. All it takes is one look at the all time high price of nearly $5 in 2018 and the current price of $0.09 to see that the project is in extremely bad shape. 

We will put it this way – Bitcoin has risen in price by over 100% while Dragonchain has lost 99% of its value. 

The project has not been abandoned. But like we said, it’s in bad shape and really not worth investing in at the moment. The only real strength of Dragonchain at the moment is that the company has a patent on blockchain interoperability. 

What Went Wrong With Dragonchain?

Dragonchain did have some promising technology and, well, promising promises. But everything went wrong when the developers would announce partnerships before the partnerships had been confirmed. 

The price of Dragon always skyrocketed on this news. 

The partners would pull out and the team would lose a lot of trust. 

Finally, things began unraveling during the cryptocurrency bear market that started in 2018. A lot of the original developers left during that time and the project sort of just faded away. 

With that said, Dragonchain is still posting almost daily updates to its YouTube channel and does still make progress. The bigger problem is that the company appears to have lost most of the hype from 2018 and people automatically associate the name Dragonchain with scam. 

Closing Thoughts

To summarize, Dragonchain is not actually associated with Disney. That was part of a marketing gimmick to gain publicity for the project when it first launched. The only relation the project had to Disney was being a member of Disney’s tech incubator program before Disney decided to cancel that program. 

Anyway, the project itself has promising technology and even has a few patents on some very important features. But it suffers from a very bad public image due to some mistakes made in the early days to hype the coin in the short term. 

Due to the tarnished public image of the project and extremely depressed price of the coin, we must say that this project is not a worthwhile investment. Obviously, this can quickly change if the project sees some growth and announces some partnerships, but at the moment there just is not anything in the project worth investing in right now.