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


The chapter started with a concept-enhancing discussion on private, consortium, and public blockchains. We saw that public blockchains are mostly permissionless by nature, while private blockchains are strictly permissioned. Hence, industries prefer the middle way of consortium blockchaining, to achieve a democracy among stakeholders. We then listed a few developmental platforms that help us in setting up such consortium blockchains. Hyperledger from IBM, Azure from Microsoft, and AWS Cloud promised us an exciting road map for consortium blockchains. We then explored the concepts of money laundering, and how dark web marketplaces have been used since the beginning of the cryptocurrency evolution to fuel this ever-increasing economic plague. We ended the chapter with a balanced note about how the concepts of smart contracts and blockchains have opened up a new set of Pandora's boxes, and how we as technologists, have the onus of squeezing out the goodness from them.

In Chapter 11,...