Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Fourth Edition

By : Imran Bashir
5 (3)
Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Fourth Edition

5 (3)
By: Imran Bashir

Overview of this book

Blockchain is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, it has had a massive impact in many sectors, including finance, supply chains, healthcare, government, and media. It’s also being used for cutting edge technologies such as AI and IoT. This new edition is thoroughly revised to offer a practical approach to using Ethereum, Hyperledger, Fabric, and Corda with step-by-step tutorials and real-world use-cases to help you understand everything you need to know about blockchain development and implementation. With new chapters on Decentralized Finance and solving privacy, identity, and security issues, as well as bonus online content exploring alternative blockchains, this is an unmissable read for everyone who wants to gain a deep understanding of blockchain. The book doesn’t shy away from advanced topics and practical expertise, such as decentralized application (DApp) development using smart contracts and oracles, and emerging trends in the blockchain space. Throughout the book, you’ll explore blockchain solutions beyond cryptocurrencies, such as the IoT with blockchain, enterprise blockchains, and tokenization, and gain insight into the future scope of this fascinating and disruptive technology. By the end of this blockchain book, you will have gained a thorough comprehension of the various facets of blockchain and understand the potential of this technology in diverse real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
23
Index

Smart contracts

We discussed smart contracts at length in the previous Chapter 10, Smart Contracts. It is sufficient to say here that Ethereum supports the development of smart contracts that run on the EVM. Different languages can be used to build smart contracts, and we will discuss this in the programming section and at a deeper level in Chapter 14, Development Tools and Frameworks and Chapter 15, Introducing Web3.

There are also various contracts that are available in precompiled format in the Ethereum blockchain to support different functions. These contracts, known as precompiled contracts or native contracts, are described in the following subsection.

These are not strictly smart contracts in the sense of user-programmed Solidity smart contracts but are in fact functions that are available natively to support various computationally intensive tasks. They run on the local node and are coded within the Ethereum client; for example, parity or geth.

Native contracts

There are nine...