Your Seat On The Rollercoaster: Getting Started with A Blockchain Open Source Project
The following is the first in a series of posts about open source blockchain projects. Our goals are to highlight projects of note, to get our hands dirty by actively contributing to them, and to share our experiences with our readers so they can, if they so wish, do so as well.
In the startup world the saying goes, “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat.” In the blockchain world the saying may as well be, “If you’re offered a seat on a roller coaster, walk straight past the sign that says you need to be this high to ride this ride to your seat on said rollercoaster.”
The last couple of years the popularity of the blockchain has experienced a roller coaster ride to say the least. And I’m not talking about a roller coaster of the Wacky Worm variety, more like the Kingda Ka variety. The well-documented fluctuations in the price of such blockchain-backed cryptocurrencies as Bitcoin, Ripple, and Ethereum have brought people to the blockchain and made others run away from it. The same can be said of open source blockchain projects.
According to a report by the consulting firm Deloitte, developers created over 26,000 new open source blockchain projects in 2016. Unfortunately, only 8% of those are actively managed.
With such uncertainty, where does one go to learn more about the blockchain by participating in one of its open source projects?
We’ve done some research and have come up with seven active and interesting open source blockchain projects around today.
We have chosen the following open source blockchain projects based on a number of criteria. The criteria are projects that are active, that have more than just a handful of members, that have a good number of commits, and that have an easy to understand focus. Projects that do not meet these criteria are more difficult to participate in as they may have been abandoned, may have a high flake factor among members, and may be difficult to work on if their goal is not clear.
And so, without further ado, here are eight open source blockchain projects, in no particular order, to look into if you want to look under the blockchain hood and build up some blockchain developer experience.
- If cryptocurrency and smart contracts are of interest to you, a good place to start is the Ethereum blockchain application platform.
2. If you are interested in learning more about private enterprise blockchains, the Hyperledger Project under the aegis of the Linux Foundation has a number of different projects for you to contribute to.
3. Want to work on Bitcoin? You can do so at Bitcoin Core.
4. Want to help build a software library for working with Bitcoin? Then dig in to bitcoinj.
5. Want to get a little further out there with Bitcoin? Then check out the Elements, a collection of feature experiments and extensions to the Bitcoin protocol.
6. Interested in digital assets of the non-cryptocurrency variety? Then there is Factom.
7. Want to help build the next great internet browser? Then Brave is the project for you. Brave uses its token (BAT, Basic Attention Token) to let readers reward content makers whose websites they visit instead of relying on ads that interrupt readers’ experiences and load times.
8. The InterPlanetary File System is a “peer-to-peer hypermedia protocol to make the web faster, safer, and more open” that “could complement or replace HTTP.” Here’s a video that goes into more detail about how it works and what it hopes to achieve.
In future posts we will pick a blockchain open source project to contribute to, jump in, and then walk you through how you can do the same.
