Expanding horizon with IOTA Ruby Gem

Introduction

IOTA is a revolutionary new transactional settlement and data integrity layer for the Internet of Things. It’s based on a new distributed ledger architecture, the Tangle, which overcomes the inefficiencies of current Blockchain designs and introduces a new way of reaching consensus in a decentralized peer-to-peer system. For the first time ever, through IOTA people can transfer money without any fees. This means that even infinitesimally small nanopayments can be made through IOTA.

IOTA is the first thing that got me interested in cryptocurrency space. It seemed like true improvement on blockchain which has reached its scalability limits already in its infant stage. Architecture of Tangle is such that it will become faster with scale.

So, I decided to try development in IOTA, but the main issue I found is lack of diversification of languages in libraries. Being a Ruby on Rails developer, I needed something familiar to me. I have experience in JavaScript, but it seemed unrealistic to run NodeJS server just for IOTA functionality in a RoR project.

So, I decided to implement IOTA library functionality in Ruby. After few days and many cups of coffee, result is out there. Couple of days ago, first version of ruby gem was open sourced on Github with MIT license.

You can find the library code at https://github.com/vivekmarakana/iota.lib.rb and the documentation can be found at https://vivekmarakana.gitbooks.io/iota-ruby

A few developers are currently testing this library and any bugs found during this are being fixed. CoinFalcon, A zero fees cryptocurrency exchange, is currently integrating iota-ruby gem to implement IOTA deposit/withdrawal processing.