Introducing BitLinks and Byzantine
The BLUE community today is stronger than it’s ever been. After staring down one of the worst bear markets in crypto history, we’re still here and still building useful products that help advance the state of cryptocurrency. Today, one year after our initial launch, we are happy to update the community with what we’re working on next, and share some news about our community.
First, quickly we want to introduce the Blue Ambassador program.
The Blue Ambassador program is an initiative to work with our community to help spread the word about our software and tools, growing our community, and improving our presence in the crypto sector. An ambassador can be any member of the Blue community who is vetted and approved by the board of ambassadors run by the Blue development team. Ambassadors join in a private group with the rest of the Blue team, are given early access to upcoming updates, help moderate our social media channels, write content, work directly with influencers, and generally help Blue grow as a community led initiative.
By introducing this program we hope to bring some of our core community members closer to the team, so we can all share in the decision making for the future of Blue, keeping true to the nature of decentralized crypto-currency.
Interested in becoming an ambassador?
Your application will be reviewed by the team, and if accepted you’ll be notified of a private channel to join where the ambassador team can get to know each other, and start developing strategies and plans for growth of the community.
BitLinks
Second, we are extremely pleased to announce BitLinks, the world’s first platform for decentralizing security and fraud prevention on the Bitcoin Core network.
BitLinks works by checkmarking security metadata in to the official, non-forked, Bitcoin Core blockchain. This allows for a native implementation of our whitelist and blacklist data to be validated on the BTC network, without the need to store the data itself on-chain (a very expensive and time-consuming proposition.) BitLinks connects this security data stored on the Bitcoin chain with data fully stored on the Ethereum chain. This is verified by hashing the latest checkmarked data from the Ethereum chain and comparing within the wallet software for validity. This allows us to keep our standard high throughput performance of the SDK, while also adding support for BTC addresses in P2PKH, P2SH, and P2WPKH formats for both legacy and segwit address support.
This is not only a big development for us at the Blue team, but this is a very useful way to bridge the gap between Ethereum and Bitcoin. For this reason, we will be open sourcing the majority of the BitLinks code, in hopes that other developers in the Bitcoin and Ethereum development communities can begin experimenting with cross-chain interactions, as a way of utilizing smart contracts on the Bitcoin Core chain.
To be clear: This is NOT a fork, and it is not a new bitcoin client. This is a set of software development libraries that enables the Blue smart contract system to interface with Bitcoin by utilizing our SDK.
Byzantine
As you may know, utilizing the Blue SDK requires holding Blue tokens in your Ethereum wallet today. It is required that tokens be native to the blockchain you are interfacing with when utilizing our tools, so we are working on a second component for BitLinks that allows us to create Blue tokens on the Bitcoin network with the working title “Byzantine”, and tracker symbol BYZ.
Warning: This is NOT available for trading today. Do NOT believe anyone offering BYZ tokens until we release them officially in the Blue wallet.
The BitLinks system will allow owners of the BLUE ERC-20 token that is available today to redeem their BYZ tokens upon release of the BitLinks support, made available inside the Blue Wallet as an update. For every Blue ERC-20 token owned by a user at the time of launch, the system will grant 5 BYZ tokens to enable use of the Blue SDK on the Bitcoin network. Initially this will be the only way to obtain BitLinks Blue tokens, and they will not be available for purchase from the Blue team nor any exchange. During the beta testing phase, only those with 150,000 BYZ will have access to the Bitcoin features of the wallet & SDK. After launch however, the features will be available to any user with 3,000 BYZ, keeping in line with our current rates on the Ethereum network.
BitLinks is being made available to developers and BLUE ambassadors next month, and the general community within the next 3 to 6 months, depending on the feedback during our beta cycle. More token details and wallet information will come as we develop the software further.
I want to thank you all for participating in the Blue community this past year. We’re very happy to have such a strong community, still going even after one of the worst bear markets crypto has ever seen. Our community is still building, still growing, and still excited for the future. Thanks again to everyone for joining us today, and be sure to get your ambassador application in!
Thanks,
Team Blue
