At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Month in Review

We have been learning a lot during the past few months, getting insights from the blockchain space and other industries, but we need your help to continue our journey. It means that we are hiring!

Yes, we are looking for someone that is comfortable with the change, a team player ready to roll up the sleeves and get the hands dirty. Is that you? Know more about the position here.

HACKATHONS

In October, we’ve started doing internal hackathons to help us try new things, learn faster and think more about the different use cases of blockchain and how can they be applied in the real world.
Once a month, we will bring our small team together and spend 8 hours developing an idea in the blockchain space. We will try to share with you some of the details about the projects that we will be developing and you can obviously share your feedback and suggestions.

We want to do a specific post for this projects, but here is a sneak peek… We developed — Gym Block: a project for an attendance incentive system, for gyms!
The underlying logic is anyone can book a class from a gym, the payment is made when the class is booked and if people don’t show up the money goes to a charity. We’ve developed a dApp using Ethereum (Solidity) smart contracts for the backend and vanilla HTML + Javascript with Web3.js for the frontend.

Other stuff

Web3 Summit was also one of the highlights of the month, a super exciting event that wants to discuss and celebrate the latest developments in the decentralised web. In case you missed it, check out the blog post with the recap of the event and you can also watch some of the talks.

See you in November!

October update was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Month in Review

We continue to surf this amazing blockchain wave, meeting a lot of different people and projects and also working on challenging PoCs and MVPs across industries. It has been a hell of a journey so far!

Our website has fresh case studies with what we can share about some of the projects we have been working on, take a peek. We promise to continue giving you a glimpse of what we are working on.

EVENTS

As we shared in our last update, this month we organised Blockchain Thinking for the automotive industry and we sponsored and participated in the Blockchain Developers Club (BCDC).

Both went really well and we will share a bit more of BCDC.

On September 25th we were at BCDC to learn and discuss Cosmos and PolkaDot. Both are still quite early in terms of their implementation, but are promising solutions to address Blockchain interoperability. The ability to get protocols to interact with each other will definitely be valuable as Blockchain starts to emerge as part of the systems running our day to day.

Other stuff

In September, we organised an internal meetup to discuss our experience in developing smart contracts. It was as an interesting discussion to share some insights from different members of the team and we will be a writing about that next month and share with you.

See you in October.

Be sure to follow us to get future updates.
See you next week!

September update was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Month in Review

Who said August would be a boring month? Yes, we had our fair share of sun and beach but a good amount of our time was around cryptoeconomics!

We have been working more and more on helping our partners and clients in developing effective cryptoeconomics models to incentivise people to participate and cooperate directly. But also because we think this is a relevant topic in the space and there a lot of room to learn and improve. So we laucnhed a new meetup for cryptoeconomics enthusiasts.

CHAINSENTINEL

The new Neo-Python version (v0.7.7) created some connection issues to the testnet nodes and our service has been down for a while. We are working for a fix while waiting for a new release by City of Zion that will address this issue. We’ve received positive feedback about the project on the NEO subreddit and Discord but we still need alpha testers to test it. Let us know if you are one! Hopefully, we’ll be able to put our service up and running soon and understand if this is something useful and interesting for the community.

EVENTS

Events can be an awesome way to learn and be always up to date with blockchain technology.

As cryptoeconomics has been part of our conversations with clients and partners we decided to start a new meetup to learn, collaborate and deep-dive into the cryptoeconomics and how they enable impactful blockchain platforms.

The first meetup was really nice and we had two talks from Hugh Karp from Nexus Mutual and Sid Sid Shekhar from TokenAnalyst. The next one will be in October and we will share the details on our twitter.

During the last weeks we have been working on two more events — Blockchain Thinking and Blockchain Developers Club.

Blockchain Thinking is a workshop to help mavericks, founders and industry experts understand the opportunities and challenges of blockchain in their industry or businesses. In September, the workshop will be focused on the Automotive Industry, so if you work in this industry, you can’t miss it.

Blockchain Developers Club is also back in September, and we will be participating and sponsoring. In this edition, we will compare and contrast the top two contenders in the battle for Blockchain interoperability, Cosmos and PolkaDot. If you are a developer interested in knowing more about blockchain, join us on September 25th.

Cool stuff

Nodeunlock is gathering some cool blockchain and crypto assets resources for different levels and formats.

August update was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Generally, NEO dApps have their backend running on a decentralised network, using one or more Smart Contracts to provide them with the required backend logic. The client, on the frontend, makes some sort of action which will trigger a call to a Smart Contract and receive a reply.

But what if you want to monitor a Smart Contract? What if you want to know if a Smart Contract is being called or if a user has performed an action on a Smart Contract such as registering a new asset? What if you want to develop an application that reacts to whatever action was performed over a Smart Contract?

With ChainSentinel, we provide a service that lets you monitor every event emitted by any Smart Contract on the NEO Network by creating a webhook which will contact a selected endpoint with the data contained in that event. This way, you can update your application (or dApp) with events coming from the NEO network in almost real-time without having to run a network node in your end. By using webhooks your application just need to have an endpoint to handle simple HTTP POST requests, without the need for further integration.

How to use ChainSentinel

Using ChainSentinel is easy. After signing in you’ll have access to your dashboard. Here, you can add new webhooks to listen to smart contracts, either on the NEO Testnet or in the Mainnet. To do so, you just need to insert the hash of the contract you want to listen to, the endpoint you want the service to call whenever an event is emitted by the contract and the network where the contract is running.

To help developers who just want to test the service, an example endpoint using the Flask Python framework is available here.

ChainSentinel also provides a documentation page, which is regularly updated and which covers the following steps.

Authenticating your Endpoint

In this alpha stage, when you add a new hook, the service will attempt to authenticate your endpoint by sending a POST request with an authentication request. This request will contain JSON data, which will identify the request as an authentication request and a random nonce:

{
    “permission”: “asking”,
    “nonce”: {random number}
 }

To be authenticated your endpoint must reply to this request with the following data, giving permission for the service to contact the endpoint with further requests:

{
    “permission”: “given”,
    “nonce”: {random number}
 }

Receiving event data

Your new hook should now have been created with success, appearing in your dashboard and new events emitted by the contract you want to listen to will be sent to the chosen endpoint.

Event data will be sent in the body of a POST request, to which your endpoint should reply with a 200 success code. If the service fails to deliver the request or the endpoint replies with an error code, the request will be rescheduled and a new delivery will be attempted later.

Event data will be structured as follows:

{
    “event_type”: “{value}”, 
    “contract_hash”: “{value}”, 
    “tx_hash”: “{value}”, 
    “block_number”: number, 
    “event_payload”: 
        {
            “type”: “Array”, 
            “value”: 
                [ 
                    { 
                        “type”: “ByteArray”, 
                        “value”: “7472616e73666572” 
                    }, 
                    { 
                        “type”: “Integer”, 
                        “value”: “number” 
                    }, 
                    { 
                        “type”: “String”, 
                        “value”: “a given string” 
                    }, 
                    { 
                        “type”: “Boolean”, 
                        “value”: “true” 
                    }, 
                    … 
                ] 
            },
        “execution_success”: true, 
        “test_mode”: “{value}”, 
        “extra”: {‘network’: “{value}”} 
}

Next Steps

In the near future, we will implement a Web Sockets interface and API to give your frontend app access to real-time information without the need for a backend endpoint.

ChainSentinel is in alpha stage, and as such we are looking for developers who want to try and test this service and give us some feedback, so feel free to do so and drop us an email with any suggestions you might have to hello@blocksmith.tech!

ChainSentinel - Your eyes on the NEO Network was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Month in Review

How are you dealing with these hot days in London? At least for us, these days are bringing a lot of nice things!

Even though KR1 already mentioned their support on us, this month we had the official announcement of the investment. 🎉

Our network of partners and clients is growing fast. Through that we are working on some new blockchain products that will make a dent on their respective established industries. Definitely something we are eager to share in depth as soon as the cat is out of the bag.

Check out the other things that we have been working on.

CHAINSENTINEL

We participated in the last hackathon of Whitesmith (our parent company) where we worked on a new project for the NEO blockchain.
ChainSentinel lets you receive real-time information about a Smart Contract running on NEO blockchain on your service or dApp, without the need to run and monitor your own full-validating node. A developer just needs to create a new hook with information on the contract to watch and the endpoint where he wants to be notified and voilà, our tool will do the rest!
The project is currently on alpha stage, and we are looking for feedback from NEO developers. At this point, we are looking to validate our MVP and understand what are the needs of NEO developers, as well as wanting to test our platform for bugs and other issues.
We will share all the details about the project in a next post, stay tuned!

NEW WEBSITE

To celebrate the official announcement of the investment we also launched a new version of our website. We will be going to do some more changes and updates during the summer time.

Cool stuff

If you want to keep updated about the latest blockchain or dAPP challenges, subscribe this list developed and curated by one of our team members. You can subscribe and get notified either by integrating with your calendar or using RSS.

[Introducing @anthdm: Winner of CoZ Consensus Bounty and creator of NEO Golang port](https://neonewstoday.com/development/introducing-anthony-de-meulemeester-creator-of-the-neo-golang-port-neo-go-consensus-bounty-winner/.

Be sure to follow us to get future updates.
See you in August, enjoy the summer holidays!

July Update was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Month in Review

This post is a bit delayed but just to be clear that was not because June was a bad month. June was great!
We closed another great deal, working on something super cool around fintech but we can’t disclose though.

Here are the other little things we have been doing on the side to keep learning and contributing to the community.

GOODGAME BETS — PROOF OF CONCEPT

For the OST Kit Alpha II challenge, we developed a proof of concept for a functional E-sports betting platform using OST API and their branded token.

Through our platform, the users will be able to bet on their favourite team to win e-sports events. Once an event is finished, we will reward the users that bet on the winning team with all the tokens that were staked on that event. The rewards will be distributed according to the number of tokens each user staked.

You can check the demo here and more info here.

CONTRIBUTIONS

During this month we also did some contributions to NEO-Python and we had an interesting call with one of the founders of NeoResearch and Neo Compiler. In this call, we also talked a bit about the idea of creating a unit-testing framework for NEO smart-contracts and integrate it with Neo Compiler.

EVENTS

A lot of blockchain events happen every week in London. In June we participated in the Cardano meetup, in the NEO meetup and also in the Blockchain Summit.

The NEO team visited London and hosted a meetup and a blockchain challenge. We were there at the meetup, getting the latest from both NEO ecosystem and projects like NeoAuth, New Kind of Network (NKN), Phantasma, nOS, Alchemint and PikcioChain.

Together with Blockchain Rookies we also started organising an event called Blockchain Thinking! This is an event that gathers decision-makers, experts in the field, founders and mavericks from an industry to discuss and understand the opportunities and challenges of blockchain in their specific industry. This first event was focused on the construction business and the second one on the energy. We are still figuring out the dates for the next events that will be focused on the telecom and insurance industry. We will keep you posted.

Cool stuff

We have been exploring Quorum, a permissioned implementation of Ethereum that supports transaction and contract privacy by J.P.Morgan. And we came across Quorum-Maker, a tool that allows you to easily boot a local quorum cnetwork and provides an interesting UI to manage the nodes. Check it out!

Hope you enjoyed the World Cup, see you next month.
Be sure to follow us to get future updates.

June Update was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Month in Review

Blockchain Developers Club

On May 3rd we participated in an interesting meetup that we’re sponsoring called Blockchain Developers Club. BDC is a recurring event where the goal is to discuss blockchain related technology, head-to-head, with some of the guys behind it. It was a really cool meetup where NEO(dBFT) vs EOS(dPOS) was the main talk. We had a great time and it was also a good opportunity for other developers to know more about Blocksmith!

Open-Source Contributions

Although we’ve been busy lately with some secret projects, we’re still making contributions to some open-source blockchain projects, such as NEO-Python and NEO-Ruby.

Other stuff

One of our developers wrote a really neat post on how to develop and deploy a NEP5 token on NEO blockchain! Make sure to take a look at it (and other really cool posts) at: https://blog.ovalerio.net/archives/1478

Launch Enterprise-Ready Blockchain Networks on AWS in Minutes with Kaleido — a ConsenSys Solution

Applied Blockchain launches FERN to bring security to private blockchain networks

CoZ Software Bounty Program

Be sure to follow us to get future updates.
See you next week!

May Update was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Week in Review

OST — Challenge accepted!

This week we’ve embarked on a new adventure and will be developing a Proof Of Concept integration of an app with the OST KIT blockchain toolkit.
Read about it here: https://medium.com/ostdotcom/kicking-off-ost-kit-phase-ii-developer-proofs-of-concept-challenge-5f2987f92a97

NEO meetup in Lisbon

On the 17th we attended the first NEO workshop and meetup in Lisbon.
We’ve detailed our impressions in a separate post.

Shifthappens

“Shift APPens” is a technological event, where the goal is to create an app in 48 hours. It’s almost a tradition nowadays for us to contribute to this event. This year is no different!

We challenge all Shifters to create a distributed application using blockchain technology.
They won’t need any prior experience working with blockchain technology, we will provide all the tools and support they’ll need to build smart contracts and dApps:

1. We will provide access to a private ethereum blockchain deployed for the event
2. dApps must demonstrate a successful integration between a web app and our Shift tokens
3. Participants can use these tokens to do whatever transactions they want (e.g. earn, reward, buy, transfer, spend)

Other stuff

Inside the Jordan Refugee Camp That Runs on Blockchain

Have you heard about using web3.py? Yep, Python + Ethereum Smart Contracts = https://hackernoon.com/ethereum-smart-contracts-in-python-a-comprehensive-ish-guide-771b03990988

How Blockchain is Already Taking Over (YouTube Competitors, Finance and More)

Be sure to follow us to get future updates.
See you next week!

Weekly Report #8–2018–04–20 was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Workshop

The Workshop was, sadly, almost empty and stayed on very introductory subjects.

Meetup

As for the meetup, the room suddenly got full of people. It started with an overview of what is NEO, the history, the present and the future objectives.

Some of the talks covered there were:

• Phantasma Protocol (6th place CoZ 1st dApp competition)
• Dean van Dugteren (CoZ member) did a remote presentation, talking about nOS
• Alchemint, explaining the project and that the airdrop is just around the corner
• Alan Fong (CoZ co-founder) then talked about moonlight

We were surprised that Moonlight resembled neo-vitae quite a bit, but of course, with a lot more development and thought.

Overall we think it was a nice event, but we do have some notes on what should be improved. There should be incentives for socialization in between the talks, like coffee breaks and such.

Anyway it was the first NEO meetup in Lisbon, and we’re looking forward for the next one!

NEO Lisbon workshop & meetup — Impressions and feedback was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At Blocksmith we build novel concepts and products using state of the art blockchain technologies.

Week in Review

NEO is coming to Lisbon next week!
Be sure to sign up for the meetup and workshop.
We’ll be around so, come and say “Hi!” if you find us :)

CoZ contributions

• neo-ruby: we’ve made a few PRs mostly to clean-up and organize code. Ensure CI is well configured and that we follow best-practices. Sill need to properly define the roadmap.
• neo-python / neo-go: no significant development this week. Complexity of what is in “next-up” is starting to increase, so it’s harder to fit PRs within a week.

Other stuff

NeoResearch team announced NeoCompiler Eco: an ecosystem designed for users and advanced developers, to edit, build and test Smart Contracts.
Check it out here: https://github.com/NeoResearch/neocompiler-eco

Also, they released the draft for a statistical and optimization competition they will be helding:

The focus of this competition will be limited to awarding concise statical reports, focused on Neo blockchain bottlenecks and interesting time aspects. However, participants are encouraged to go further. We do not discard the possibility of increasing the reward for outstanding findings.

If you’re interested, there will be significant NEO rewards: https://github.com/NeoResearch/neo-opt-tests/blob/master/competition/1st_NeoOptTests_Competition.md

Be sure to follow us to get future updates.
See you next week!

Weekly Report #8–2018–04–13 was originally published in Blocksmith on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.