Book Image

Learn Ethereum

By : Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song
Book Image

Learn Ethereum

By: Xun (Brian) Wu, Zhihong Zou, Dongying Song

Overview of this book

Ethereum is a blockchain-based, decentralized computing platform that allows running smart contracts. This book provides a basic overview of how Ethereum works, its ecosystem, mining process, and the consensus mechanism. It also demonstrates a step-by-step approach for building decentralized applications. This book begins with the very basics of Blockchain technology. Then it dives deep into the Ethereum architecture, framework and tools in its ecosystem. It also provides you an overview of ongoing research on Ethereum, for example, Layer 1 and 2 scaling solution, Stablecoin, ICO/STO/IEO, etc. Next, it explains Solidity language in detail, and provides step-by-step instructions for designing, developing, testing, deploying, and monitoring decentralized applications. In addition, you’ll learn how to use Truffle, Remix, Infura, Metamask, and many other Ethereum technologies. It’ll also help you develop your own cryptocurrency by creating ERC20, and ERC721 smart contracts from scratch. Finally, we explain private blockchains, and you learn how to interact with smart contracts through wallets.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Blockchain and Ethereum Basics
5
Section 2: Blockchain Development Cycle
8
Section 3: Ethereum Implementations
12
Section 4: Production and Deployment
16
Section 5: Conclusion

Security testing

Smart contracts are self-executable and self-enforcing programs; once deployed to a decentralized public blockchain, the smart contract becomes immutable and fully transparent. Everyone in the blockchain has access to it. A smart contract can be designed to transfer and manipulate funds in user accounts for payment purposes. For example, a token amount can be transferred from one account to another account in the ERC-20 token standard. Since it is public and decentralized in nature, it becomes much more sensitive from a security perspective. The potential cost of vulnerabilities and the bounty available is an incentive for hackers to spend time and resources to find and exploit security bugs and loopholes in smart contract codes.

The most notable attack is the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) attack. DAO is an organization that acts as a finance venture...