Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy

General-

http://ethereum.org/

purpose Turing-

complete

cryptocurrency

platform

Mastercoin

Financial

http://www.mastercoin.org/

derivatives

NXT

Altcoin mined

http://www.nxtcommunity.org/ with proof-of-

stake consensus

model

Open Transactions

Untraceable

http://opentransactions.org/

anonymous, no

latency

transactions

BitShares

Decentralized

http://bitshares.org/

crypto-equity

share exchange

Open Assets

Colored coin

https://github.com/OpenAssets issuance and

wallet

Colored Coins

Bitcoin asset

http://coloredcoins.org/

marking for

digital/physical

assets

Wallet Development Projects

Perhaps the primary category of

applications being built atop blockchain

protocols is wallets. Wallets are

obviously a core infrastructural element

for cryptocurrencies, because they are

the mechanism for the secure holding

and transfer of Bitcoin and any

cryptographic asset. Table 2-3 lists some

of the different wallet projects and

companies in development, with their

name and URL and the underlying

platform upon which they are built.

Table 2-3. Sample list of

Table 2-3. Sample list of

cryptocurrency wallet projects

Project

URL

name

Wallet projects

ChromaWallet http://chromawallet.com/

CoinSpark

http://coinspark.org/

Counterwallet https://counterwallet.io/

Wallet companies

Coinprism

https://www.coinprism.com/

Melotic

https://www.melotic.com/

OneWallet

https://www.onewallet.io

Blockchain Development

Platforms and APIs

In addition to Blockchain 2.0 protocol

projects, there are several developer

platform companies and projects

offering tools to facilitate application

development. Blockchain.info has a

number of APIs for working with its

ewallet software (it’s one of the largest

ewallet providers) to make and receive

payments and engage in other operations.

Chain has interfaces to make calls to the

data available in full blockchain nodes,

and standard information queries such as

the Bitcoin balances by address and

push notifications when there is activity

with a certain address. Stellar is a

semidecentralized (maintained by

gateway institutions, not miners) public

ledger platform and unified development

environment (blockchain APIs, multisig

APIs) linked to the Stripe payment

network. 59 Related to Stellar are

Block.io, Gem, and BlockCypher, which have multisig wallet APIs.

More unified API development

environments will be needed that

include the many diverse and growing

parts of the blockchain ecosystem

(storage, file serving, messaging, wallet

interactions, mobile payments, identity

confirmation, and reputation). There is

also an opportunity to link blockchain

development environments out to other

major segments like the machine-to-

machine (M2M) communication and

Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks

infrastructure for rapid application

development. An example of an

advanced integrated application of this

kind envisioned for the farther future

could be a smartwatch that can interact

with smart-city traffic-sensor data to

automatically reserve and pay for lane

space with a Bitcoin-denominated smart

contract.

Blockchain Ecosystem:

Decentralized Storage,

Communication, and

Computation

There is a need for a decentralized

ecosystem surrounding the blockchain

itself for full-solution operations. The

blockchain is the decentralized

transaction ledger that is part of a larger

computing infrastructure that must also

include many other functions such as

storage, communication, file serving,

and archiving. Specific projects that are

developing solutions for the distributed

blockchain ecosystem include Storj for

any sort of file storage (text, images,

audio, multimedia); IPFS for file

serving, link maintenance, and storage;

and Maidsafe and Ethereum for storage,

communication, and file serving. First,

in terms of storage, perhaps the most

obvious need is for secure,

decentralized, off-chain storage for files

such as an electronic medical record

(EMR) or genome, or even any simple

Microsoft Word document, which would

not be packed into the 40-byte (40-

character) OP_RETURN field used for

transaction annotation (even in the case

of Florincoin’s 528-character annotation

field). File storage could either be

centralized (like Dropbox or Google

Drive) or could be in the same

decentralized architecture as the

blockchain. The blockchain transaction

that registers the asset can include a

pointer and access method and

privileges for the off-chain stored file.

Second, in the case of file serving, the

IPFS project has proposed an interesting

technique for decentralized secure file

serving. IPFS stands for InterPlanetary

File System, which refers to the need for

a global and permanently accessible

filesystem to resolve the problem of