Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Third Edition

By : Imran Bashir
Book Image

Mastering Blockchain - Third Edition

By: Imran Bashir

Overview of this book

Blockchain is the backbone of cryptocurrencies, with applications in finance, government, media, and other industries. With a legacy of providing technologists with executable insights, this new edition of Mastering Blockchain is thoroughly revised and updated to the latest blockchain research with four new chapters on consensus algorithms, Serenity (the update that will introduce Ethereum 2.0), tokenization, and enterprise blockchains. This book covers the basics, including blockchain’s technical underpinnings, cryptography and consensus protocols. It also provides you with expert knowledge on decentralization, decentralized application development on Ethereum, Bitcoin, alternative coins, smart contracts, alternative blockchains, and Hyperledger. Further, you will explore blockchain solutions beyond cryptocurrencies such as the Internet of Things with blockchain, enterprise blockchains, tokenization using blockchain, and consider the future scope of this fascinating and disruptive technology. By the end of this book, you will have gained a thorough comprehension of the various facets of blockchain and understand their potential in diverse real-world scenarios.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
23
Index

APIs, tools, and DApps

The Web3 JavaScript API provides an interface to the Ethereum blockchain via JavaScript. It provides an object called web3, which contains other objects that expose different methods to support interaction with the blockchain. This API covers methods related to administration of the blockchain, debugging, account-related operations, supporting protocol methods for Whisper, as well as storage and other network-related operations.

This API will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, Chapter 13, Ethereum Development Environment, where we will see how to interact with the Ethereum blockchain with it.

Applications (DApps and DAOs) developed on Ethereum

There are various implementations of DAOs and smart contracts in Ethereum, most notably, the DAO, which was recently misused due to a weakness in the code and required a hard fork for funds to be recovered that had been syphoned out by the attackers. The DAO was created to serve as a decentralized...