Phore Developer Update — March 9, 2018
Phore has been growing throughout the last couple of months in regards to the team and the ecosystem. In the very near future, we’ll have a ton of new developer APIs, making it easier for developers to integrate Phore payments and blockchain access into their platform.
The Marketplace Issue
While developing the marketplace, we ran into one important problem. Without an SPV wallet, there was no way for users to use the platform without running a Phore process in the background. This was obviously a barrier to allowing people to use the marketplace with ease. Our goal was to allow users to simply download the program and use the marketplace.
RPC Wallet to the Rescue
Over time, we realized that for the everyday user, it was important to be able to access the Phore blockchain and Phore funds without running a program or having to download and sync data from the blockchain. In fact, most use cases are like this. SPV wallets are great, but can be slow and clunky. Instead, we decided to implement an RPC wallet.
RPC wallets are rather simple. They allow the user to keep track of the keys including signing transactions, but they do not do any verification themselves. For IoT devices or web wallets, this is important. They rely on a simple HTTP RPC interface that they trust. Trust in this case is only required when using data from received funds. An attacker could only fake received transactions and those can be easily verified through an external source.
Over the last few months, we’ve built a public RPC interface allowing apps to subscribe to addresses, send transactions, and even stake blocks. You can view the API here: https://rpc.phore.io/
RPC Wallet in the Marketplace
Once integrated into the marketplace, the RPC wallet worked perfectly. Funds were instantly sent and received between the two blockchains and most of the code from the OpenBazaar SPV wallet for Bitcoin worked great with Phore.
APIs Galore
RPC wallets allow us to build very simple developer APIs. Over the next few months, we’ll be releasing APIs for applications using Javascript, Go, and Python to name a few. Any application using one of these languages will be able to easily integrate Phore into their software with little to no setup required.
We’ll also be releasing our web wallet soon which will use these kinds of APIs to build something resembling https://myetherwallet.com/ but for Phore. This will allow anyone to access their funds without being at a powerful computer, without synchronizing to the blockchain, and using only the internet connection. This could even include staking in the wallet and Zerocoin support with not too much more work.