Crypto Open Source Ecosystem 1.0
I wanted to take a moment to spotlight all the projects in our ecosystem that make the Loom SDK possible. We feel that it’s really important to give credit where it’s due and give back to the community. After all, we wouldn’t even be here without these trailblazers in the blockchain industry.
Recently, we’ve seen a lot of projects simply copy others’ code base and raise a bunch of money. So seeing people actually give back to the community while reusing source code makes us extremely happy. We are proud to have a hand in something that brings so much delight to our beloved community.
Without further ado, here are some of the projects we use quite a bit and some of the projects we contribute to.
Projects We Build Off:
Ethereum Foundation
Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM): To support Solidity on DAppChains, we reuse the EVM from the Ethereum Foundation go-ethereum project. While we might not love Solidity as a language, it is the clear leader in smart contract languages. To help the Solidity community, we created CryptoZombies, which has created over 300,000 new Solidity developers.
Consensys
Truffle: We are enormous fans of Truffle and the ease at which it makes deploying smart contracts. We have developed plugins for Loom to make Truffle a first-class citizen when deploying to DAppChains.
Infura: The Ethereum caching layer. While we don’t use the source code, we often rely on Infura to give us faster access to the Ethereum blockchain.
Tendermint Inc
Tendermint: We love Tendermint, and we use is it as our default Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (pBFT) engine. The pBFT subsystem in Loom is pluggable, but we found Tendermint to be the best solution on the market, and we recommend it to all users of our DAppChains. It’s one reason that games on DAppChains look more like games such as Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering, and not like another CryptoKitties clone.
Plasma
Plasma: We built our Plasma Cash implementation from scratch, and we use lots of research from EthResearch. We have been returning the favor by attending the biweekly Plasma implementers call, publishing the Plasma Cash whitepaper, and publishing on EthResearch as well. Some of our competitors claim to have Plasma, but have done nothing more then clone repos. We believe everyone should give back to the community.
Sparse Merkle Trees: One specialized area we think is a very novel enhancement is WolkDB’s SMT implementation. We use this over typical Merkle trees, and we have even ported it to Golang and Javascript as open source.
Golang: Golang rocks! And without all of Google’s work, none of this would have been possible.
Protobufs
The de facto serialization format — it allowed us to quickly get clients in four different programming languages. This has been one of the biggest pieces of leverage for porting the Loom SDK client.
Prometheus
We use Prometheus for all our metrics. I’m a previous contributor to the project and a big fan. It has helped us measure and monitor our blockchains in an impactful way.
Projects we maintain:
Plasma Cash: We have the furthest implementation of Plasma Cash out of any other project, and we contribute regularly. See our Plasma Cash whitepaper.
Mama Merkle: A sparse Merkle tree implementation in Go, based on WolkDb’s SMT research.
CryptoZombies: A free Solidity code school that has taught over 300,000 people to use the language. See the code here.
ECR721x: A next-generation token format for gas-efficient game assets. Unlike our competitors in the space, it’s fully open and implemented without needing any third-party tokens. Check the source here.
So many projects, and even still, I’ve probably missed a dozen more. I hope to have more articles going into greater technical detail why we chose these projects.
We want to give special shoutouts to the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, and Tendermint — who by far are our favorite projects. We want to encourage more people in the space to contribute to other projects and open source your building blocks so that the whole blockchain community can grow and flourish.
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