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

Summary


This chapter began with a clear distinction between geth, Mist, and Web3.js, and how they come together to operate over the Ethereum blockchain using IPC and HTTP. Both were seen to use the JSON-RPC protocol. Then we moved on to categorize the Web3.js library into four main modules, namely eth, shh, bzz, and utils. We also saw how we can call the Web3.js library on plain JavaScript to run smart contracts over private blockchains. We learned how to explore various API sub-modules and functions of the Web3.js library. We concluded this chapter with a solidity implementation of an ownership contract along with its Web3.js equivalent code generation.

In Chapter 8, Developing a Cryptocurrency from Scratch, we will develop a cryptocurrency token from scratch and learn about initial coin offering (ICO).