Open Source Blockchain Microservices To Help You Build Your Own

March 16th 2021 566 reads

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I’m Andrew Levine, CEO of Koinos Group, creators of the Koinos blockchain, the first blockchain that will be truly free-to-use, and today I am very excited to announce that we are open sourcing four new pieces of Koinos.

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But it’s not what we’re open-sourcing that’s so exciting, it’s why we are open-sourcing them. With Koinos we are pioneering a whole new way of developing blockchains that parallels the lean startup methodology.

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Lean Blockchain Methodology 

Koinos is built from the ground up to support an experimental and iterative product development process that allows the people building the blockchain to solicit feedback from other developers and rapidly integrate that feedback into the product.

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In other words, we believe that developers should be treated like customers, and product-market fit will be achieved when developers love using Koinos so much that they pour in. 

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Koinos is built so that we don’t have to figure out exactly how developers will use Koinos, we just have to deliver minimum viable implementations as either microservices or smart contract modules that developers can begin playing with and then provide feedback on.

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This provides many benefits, not the least of which is that it allows us to rapidly iterate toward product-market fit instead of having to build our product in secret as an enormous block of impenetrable code, which we release all at once, and then hope is exactly what developers need and will always need.

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You can think of that as the morbidly obese startup methodology and, believe it or not, it is currently the norm in blockchain development.

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Importance of Independence

Part of the reason we are able to develop Koinos this way is that we chose to perform a Bitcoin-style launch instead of ICOing or raising venture capital which means that we can build Koinos the right way, and build it out in the open. 

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On a technical level, all of this is possible thanks to the highly modular design of Koinos which means that if you’re a developer who’s interested in learning about blockchain development, Koinos makes it easier than ever for you to dive into the most interesting part of the system, grok it, and begin working on it in a programming language that you already know, not just Solidity or C++. 

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This also means that we can begin releasing these components the moment that they reach a minimally viable state, which is exactly what we’re starting to do today by opening up the Koinos block store and p2p microservices, along with all the Koinos C++ and Golang libraries. 

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These microservices are pretty self-explanatory, that’s the whole point. So the block store microservice stores blocks and transactions and then serve them up to the network using the p2p microservice. 

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First Blockchain Microservices

Like any microservice, the block store and p2p are simple (and easy to understand) programs. What makes these microservices special is that they are the first blockchain-specific microservices ever to be open-sourced.

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As you can see, we love open-source software development and decentralization but we’ve been saddened to see how many projects that claim to share these values pursue subtle (and not so subtle) ways of ensuring that they maintain control while developing most of their software behind closed doors.

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As one of the most experienced dApp and blockchain developers in the world, we understand better than most how difficult it can be to develop in the open, especially when you don’t have the right tools.

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So we’ve been delighted to find that by launching and designing Koinos the right way, we’ve found ourselves in a position where it makes perfect sense to continue developing it in the right way too; out in the open. 

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Developers, Developers, Developers

The modularity of Koinos means that the more chefs that are in the kitchen, the better.

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We want developers to begin digging into the code as soon as possible and helping to make it into the protocol they truly need, instead of the protocol we believe they need. This is only part of what gives us the confidence to believe that Koinos just might be the decentralized solution we’ve been waiting so long for.

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But take a look at the code we’re releasing today and let us know!

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