Book Image

Ethereum Smart Contract Development

By : Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Book Image

Ethereum Smart Contract Development

By: Mayukh Mukhopadhyay

Overview of this book

Ethereum is a public, blockchain-based distributed computing platform featuring smart contract functionality. This book is your one-stop guide to blockchain and Ethereum smart contract development. We start by introducing you to the basics of blockchain. You'll learn about hash functions, Merkle trees, forking, mining, and much more. Then you'll learn about Ethereum and smart contracts, and we'll cover Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) in detail. Next, you'll get acquainted with DApps and DAOs and see how they work. We'll also delve into the mechanisms of advanced smart contracts, taking a practical approach. You'll also learn how to develop your own cryptocurrency from scratch in order to understand the business behind ICO. Further on, you'll get to know the key concepts of the Solidity programming language, enabling you to build decentralized blockchain-based applications. We'll also look at enterprise use cases, where you'll build a decentralized microblogging site. At the end of this book, we discuss blockchain-as-a-service, the dark web marketplace, and various advanced topics so you can get well versed with the blockchain principles and ecosystem.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

The Ethereum ecosystem


In Chapter 1, Blockchain Basics, we studied how an Ethereum blockchain is represented as a giant Merkle tree with the leaves of the tree being the state of execution of a code. We also learned that blockchains are distributed ledgers with a web 3.0 framework.

Figure 2.4 depicts such a framework for an Ethereum technological stack. Things are going to get tricky now, so please pay close attention:

Figure 2.4: Web 3.0 tech stack for Ethereum, Source: Ethereum stack exchange

Mist

Let us start with the mist browser, which will be easiest to understand. This is the user-facing layer of the Ethereum platform. If you are a smartphone user and have used Android or iOS phones, you can think of a mist browser as the web 3.0 equivalent of Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Mist is the tool of choice to browse and use decentralized applications.

The tricky part is that, as of today, this browser has no stable release available for mobile phones.

It is worth mentioning that P-ACS...