Smart contracts are essentially immutable programs that are designed to handle valuable assets on the blockchain and are mostly written in a programming language that has been around for a bit more than five years and is still rapidly evolving. That sounds a bit dangerous, and in fact the short history of the Ethereum blockchain…More
Basis structure of a token and the ERC20 standard
What is a token? The short answer is that a token is a smart contract that records and manages ownership in a digital currency. The long answer is in this post. Building a digital currency – our first attempt Suppose for a moment you wanted to issue a digital currency and were thinking about the…More
Compiling and deploying a smart contract with geth and Python
In our last post, we have been cheating a bit – I have shown you how to use the web3 Python library to access an existing smart contract, but in order to compile and deploy, we have still been relying on Brownie. Time to learn how this can be done with web3 and the Python-Solidity…More
Using web3.py to interact with an Ethereum smart contract
In the previous post, we have seen how we can compile and deploy a smart contract using Brownie. Today, we will learn how to interact with our smart contract using Python and the Web3 framework which will also be essential for developing a frontend for our dApp. Getting started with web3.py In this section, we…More
Fun with Solidity and Brownie
For me, choosing the featured image for a post is often the hardest part of writing it, but today, the choice was clear and I could not resist. But back to business – today we will learn how Brownie can be used to compile smart contracts, deploy them to a test chain, interact with the…More
Writing a smart contract in Solidity using the Remix IDE
Today, we will actually write our first smart contract, compile and deploy it and discuss some of the features of the Solidity programming language. To be able to start without any installation, we will use the Remix IDE, which is a fully browser-based development environment for Ethereum smart contracts. Getting started with the Remix IDE…More
The Ethereum ecosystem
So far we have mainly discussed what a node needs to do – processing and validating blocks and transactions and maintaining state. This by itself is not particularly useful – we need components to access nodes, manage accounts and balances and to develop, test and deploy smart contracts. There is an abundance of different tools…More
Smart contracts and the Ethereum virtual machine
In my last post, I have taken you through the foundations of the Ethereum blockchain, namely state, transactions and blocks and how they are related. We have seen that nodes update their local state by executing transactions contained in blocks. Today, we will take a closer look at how the transactions are actually executed and…More
Basics of the Ethereum blockchain
Today we will take a closer look at the Ethereum blockchain and discuss its most important structures, namely transactions, blocks and state. I assume that you are familiar with the basics of the blockchain technology, if not, I suggest that you read a few of my earlier posts on blocks, transactions and mining. This will…More
The Ethereum blockchain, smart contracts and token
If you have followed my blog for some time, you might know that it started with a few posts on the bitcoin blockchain – about its foundations in elliptic curve cryptography, blocks, mining and transactions. The bitcoin blockchain has been established in 2009, and since then, a lot has happened in the blockchain world. Maybe…More
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