Introducing the ArcBlock Blockchain Developer Platform and Ecosystem for dApps

Author: Matt McKinney

ArcBlock was founded in early 2018, but the ideas behind the development platform and ecosystem started much earlier than that. Originally conceived as a “knowledge-sharing platform” Founder and CEO, Robert Mao, he was quick to recognize that many users coming to the website in an attempt to solve many common issues that were many in the blockchain industry were encountering — poor performance, lack of features, scalability, vendor lock-in and more. Like any good startup, the concept behind ArcBlock shifted to focus on creating a blockchain application platform and ecosystem that continued to leverage decentralization, while at the same time solved many of the problems developers were encountering with legacy blockchain 1.0 and blockchain 2.0 systems.

ArcBlock shouldn’t be thought of as a company, blockchain or cryptocurrency, but rather a larger “blockchain services” platform that includes everything a developer needs to successfully code, deploy and manage decentralized applications and blockchain-enabled services easily.

ArcBlock solves many of today’s blockchain problems — complexity, scalability, vendor lock-in, developer tools and more. ArcBlock is the first blockchain application development platform to provide a complete end-to-end user experience designed to allow developers to build their blockchains and decentralized applications and enable their end-users with well-designed user experiences and features that make adopting and using decentralized applications easily. Gone are the days of scalability issues, no more generalized public chains, no more custom development languages requiring specialized languages. Developers can simply create their own custom blockchains using their preferred language to support their use case.

Using the successful web application model proven over the 20-year, ArcBlock Blockchain services platform has reinvented the web stack allowing developers to maintain their existing application models but leveraging the latest blockchain technologies, cloud services, and interconnected blockchain network designed to support millions of blockchains and applications that are interoperable with each other.

Forge Framework includes the broadest transaction support of any blockchain framework including several industry firsts that create significant efficiencies for developers including easy account migration, real-time node upgrades without having to reboot and ArcBlock’s patented Asset Factory to support to easily support large numbers of assets automatically.

Forge SDK is a complete software development kit (SDK) for the Forge Framework that gives developers everything they need to build blockchains and decentralized applications easily. Unlike other public chain solutions (e.g. ethereum), Forge gives the developers and application builders the freedom to launch their own custom blockchains using their own application logic. Developers can easily build their own blockchains on top of Forge to allow their users to support almost any type of use case that they can imagine. Forge includes language support for Python, Erlang, Node.js and more. Developers also have access to industry-leading transaction support including the ability to add new transactions into their app without the need to restart their blockchain.

Forge SDK also enables non-blockchain developers by allowing anyone to build services that leverage blockchain technologies and their benefits including:

Every ABT Node gives users the ability to easily see the health status of their blockchain node including storage, network, and consensus. In addition, each node includes a block explorer to validate transactions and blocks being generated. ABT Node also includes a set for developer tools to make it very easy to debug an application including access to GraphQL to query and use blockchain data, as well as a simulator, decentralized identity workshop and more.

The primary token of the ABT Network is ABT. ArcBlock’s network launch three blockchains to support their ABT Network — Argon, Bromine, and Titanium, and will eventually lead to hundreds and thousands of interconnected blockchains that will make up the ABT Network.

The first protocol to support multiple DSA and Hash algorithms into a single protocol. To support the ABT:DID Protocol, ArcBlock will also leverage the DID Authentication Protocol that allows a user with a mobile wallet app and an application running on the ABT Network to mutually authenticate with each other by exchanging publicly verifiable claims.

These block explorers also allow you to search, view and analyze ArcBlock data — like blocks, transactions, validators, etc.

Forge-CLI is a command-line interface that lets you interact with the Forge SDK and ABT Network. Forge-CLI is the only tool that supports 100% of the Forge SDK’s features, including accounts, transactions, transfers, delegation, and governance. Learn more about Forge-CLI here.

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