How long does it take to build an application-specific blockchain with the cosmos SDK?

[PinkFromTheFuture]

More specifically, a production ready chain, for an MVP.

Days? Weeks? Months? Years?

I'm currently considering my options to release an MVP. It's clear to me that we need our own blockchain, but not clear if I should work on the MVP on Ethereum or just start with my own chain.

The plan is to start with the Ignite CLI and then branch out from there.

[alexanderbez]

This is such a broad question. It's like asking "How long does it take to launch a startup?".

Take Juno for example, to build that app it's literally a one line command, i.e. basic SDK scaffolded app with Wasm enabled. Or Gaia, which is just an extended SimaApp with some custom functionality. Just a few hours of work at most.

So the idea of building the app itself is highly context dependent on what you're building (dex, perps, gaming, insurance, nfts, etc...). Then there is how you want to design the tokenomics, and then there's the idea of how you want to bootstrap liquidity and then finally testing, and validator sets vs ICS, etc...

[PinkFromTheFuture]

True, it's a broad question! I tried to make it more specific by mentioning an MVP. It's literally the minimum =)

But examples are exactly what I'm looking for. I was trying to find some articles about people sharing their experiences building with the Cosmos SDK

[alexanderbez]

Gotcha, so if you mean just building and designing the app itself, again, it's pretty context dependent. Are you gonna build in native Go or use Wasm? Or some combo of both? How many engineers do you have? What product are you building? There are many questions to ask. But in general, you can expect for it take anywhere from a month to several months.

[PinkFromTheFuture]

Your reply just pushed me to do a lot of research about the smart contracts:

I was under the impression that I could only use CosmWasm, which I didn't like because I didn't want to learn Rust just for this. If I could do it all in Golang, that would be simpler.

Plus, I would love to be able to use solidity to be able to use standard contracts like from OpenZeppelin. So I just found out about Ethermint. Looks promising.

We are two engineers. I can't talk about the product I'm building because of an NDA =)
But we basically need to support NFTs, one very similar to ERC721, and another kind with custom requirements.

[alexanderbez]

Yeah, so you totally have the option of building in pure Go! Many projects do this (Gaia, Osmosis (until recently), Umee, ...)