What does it mean to be a blockchain developer? 👨💻📃 ⛓
Blockchain development has been rapidly rising in demand as of late. For a long time, mobile developers have been the golden geese of Silicon Valley, but those days are coming to an end. With the hockey-stick growth of the blockchain ecosystem, the need for specialized blockchain developers is increasing. In this blog post, you’ll learn what it means to be a blockchain developer. ⛓ Let’s dive in.
Let’s begin with an example — imagine that a company wants to launch an ICO (Initial Coin Offering). 💰 This company first needs to go through many hoops that the crypto community has come to expect regarding communication, presentation, marketing, etc. but most importantly they need a Smart Contract developed. 📃
To do that, the ICO founders need to first determine what blockchain will be used as there are many options. Ethereum is the most popular choice at this time, although the ability for companies to develop their own blockchain with technologies like Tendermint is becoming an attractive alternative.
If the founders decide to use the Ethereum blockchain, they will need to adhere to the ERC20 Token Standard which describes the functions and events that an Ethereum token contract has to implement — being able to query the total supply of tokens, the balance of addresses, the ability to transfer to and from accounts, approve or deny transactions, etc.
Once those foundational choices have been made Smart Contract development can begin, which — if using Ethereum, will be written in a language called Solidity. It’s a language created by the Ethereum team and it was heavily influenced by C++, Python, & JavaScript so if you’re well-versed in those, Solidity will look familiar. Regardless, Solidity has it’s quirks and limitations at the moment which can make it difficult to work with if you don’t know the idiosyncrasies involved in using it. 🙃
The purpose of building this Smart Contract is for the democratic distribution of tokens amongst shareholders. Essentially, a smart contract handles the acceptance of funds and distribution of tokens. Those who choose to fund the ICO can send cryptocurrency to a smart contract’s wallet address. The money is held there until a certain financial goal has been met — then the contract executes. This means that the money transferred in is converted into an amount of tokens which are distributed to the investors based on the amount they invested.
For instance, if we were building DevslopesCoin and stated that 1 ETH == 1,000 DevslopesCoin, if I invested 0.1 ETH, I would get back 100 DevslopesCoin tokens. 🤑
Eventually, DevslopesCoin could be listed for purchase on an exchange where other people could buy it. Assuming our technology or currency grew and became more valuable, the value would increase as the exchange price would increase. 📈
Once the Smart Contract has been built, rigorous testing and a full security audit is highly recommended to ensure that it is ready for potential exploits and cyber attacks. ICO teams are beginning to publish bug bounties where community members can search for bugs and vulnerabilities in their platform and be paid for their work when they discover potential exploits or weaknesses. 👾
As a dedicated Blockchain developer, you’ll deeply know the ins and outs of how your particular offering will work. Leading up to the launch and especially on the day you launch the ICO, you’ll need to be available to help answer community questions and manage expectations as well. This is super important as other team members may not be able to describe key components of the ICO in an adequate level of detail unless they too were a part of the development team. 🤓
Of course, an ICO is only a small slice of the blockchain pie. Companies and individuals can launch their own cryptocurrency without the need for investors, lawyers, or overseas shell companies. One could power an entire product or SaaS model business by virtue of a cryptocurrency. Smart Contracts need to be written for these projects as well. And then there are the wizards. 🧙♂️
For us regular folk, we don’t object to simply consuming blockchain technology for our own greedy purposes — hoping our small investments in Bitcoin or Ether grow into a billion dollar nest egg. 🤞 But the wizards are the people who are actually developing blockchain technology. Creating complex algorithms for consensus such as proof-of-work and proof-of-stake — creating new methods of cryptography, peer to peer communication and so much more.
There’s an entire world of possibilities ahead of us. If you want to learn more about Blockchain development, head over to www.devslopes.com and enroll in our Blockchain Developer Slope where you’ll learn everything you need to know to develop smart contracts, distributed apps, and more. ❤️
