What is the The Railway?

An on chain registry and mass connection / transit system for dapps and their users. In brief, it adds a time and place to users in the decentralized web for coordinated group activities. It allows for movement between hubs synchronously as a group or asynchronously, depending on the particular use case. Hubs can encapsulate anything from a DEX to a multiplayer game to a series of tasks ending in certification, i.e. anything that can be written into a smart contract. Hubs can register with a unique name to easily identify themselves and talk to one another, similar to a domain name.

At its core, the The Railway connects smart contracts and directs transaction flow to and from one another in either direction. We can perform a task on one contract, then a second task on another, and continue to run a third task back on the first contract. And these tasks can be for many users, so we can monitor the state for group operations and more complex collections of coordinated transactions. This adds a new level of composability to web3 and opens the door to all kinds of collaborations and interconnected dapps.

Some possible use cases

• By registering as a hub on the The Railway, a smart contract can process many coordinated transactions and send users through a series of interconnected dapps. Here are a few examples of how that might be applied to some practical uses.

  Defi / NFT hybrid connections

• - trade tokens on one contract

• - stake new tokens on the next contract

• - purchase NFT on third contract that requires staking on second

  If all of these contracts are connected, all three contract calls can be executed in a single transaction, making the user experience much smoother.

  Group Certifications

• Give tests in real time, with one live proctor and as many participants as desired. Questions and tasks can be delivered at the same time to all participants.

  Massive multiplayer gaming

• For a blockchain based game, many players can enter a play zone at the same time so all participants in a group start in sync and no player has the advantage of a head start. Move players in and out of lobbies and various game levels, either individually or as a group. Or host a massive trivia game with question hubs, moving massive groups of players synchronously from question to question.

  Curating Dapp Collections

• For dapps that choose to have a public portal on The Railway, anyone can connect to these hubs, which allows for curated collections.

• Invite your friends to play your collection of games together in a private party or open up a public decentralized web arcade, charging admission for entry.

  Expand Social Circles

• Connect your dapps to others as a way to connect and expand these wonderful communities. Make a portal from one experience directly to another, so we can support like minded groups and grow together.

  Group Authorization

• Gain a collective time-sensitive authorization. Let’s say we’re hosting a virtual event with group activities. We might setup a ticketing hub to which anyone can connect their dapp. Users enter the ticketing hub as a gateway to their desired destination. The ticketing hub queues up groups of participants and gives access to everyone in a group for the same amount of time. Finally, it sends participants into the event in groups so that each can start and finish the activities in sync.

  Referencing hubs

• We are building a fully on chain registry for addressing hubs via a unique string (a sequence of readable characters). This way we can easily connect something like “mydapp.lobby” to “mydapp.level2”, and connect “mydapp.level2” to “otherdapp.lobby”. So now we have a portal that we can move players from one right into the next and right from the contract, the user flows between hubs.

  The goal of interconnectivity

• We aim to stay connected as we embark on this journey into web3. There are a lot of challenges to overcome, and we can overcome them faster and with more finesse if we can work together. The promise has been to easily move between worlds with web3, yet we’re seeing relatively limited interconnectivity between the ever growing catalog of dapps and experiences. We need to stay connected and open the portals between worlds.

  Any world built on chain can exist as a hub along the The Railway.