How Blockstart will empower developers and companies

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Hello all, Bader here (ツ)

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There is a major problem.. the entry to blockchain development is super hard. I know this myself. I have been developing on Ethereum, Tendermint, and NEM. It's a hard tech to get under your belt.

And, not everyone can afford IBM to build out their solution for them if you're a small company.

So when I heard of Blockstart, as a developer it certainly peaked my interest.

What is Blockstart?

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To start off, Blockstart is owned by Devslopes, a platform that teaches people how to code.

It also uses the NEM blockchainas the backend platform.

I actually learnt the majority of my developer knowledge from Devslopes. They are great at what they do, which is teaching.

When they announced Blockstart and a token sale, I have to admit I was pretty wary of this. The ICOs of 2017 left a bad taste in my mouth and I thought this might be similar. When I looked more into it, however, I was blown away. I truly think this will break that tough barrier entry in blockchain tech.

Let's look at the definition of what Blockstart is:

Blockstart is a blockchain platform and suite of tools focused on empowering developers, startups, products, and enterprise to implement blockchain technology into their existing platforms and tools.

According to their description, Blockstart will be used as an all-in-one solution for smaller businesses to implement blockchain on a large, (or small) scale. Essentially, the "Firebase" solution to blockchain.

Blockstart has a whole suite of tools to-be-included, here are my favorites:

• Decentralized Identity - verifying unique users and identity security.
• Escrow - has many applications with implementing trustless systems.
• Crypto Mail - email addresses with unique address hashes.

I know this is being marketed as a solution for organizations, but I think this has a lot of potential for solo developers as well. All of the Blockstart code is open source, meaning anyone can use, modify, or reference it without worrying about any copyright issues. This means someone can replicate the Blockstart model for their company if they wanted.

This also means SDKs (development kit) for developers (found here)

Blockstart is built on top of an implementation of NEM Catapult, a fantastic technology that I have been following for a little while now. They plan to develop Unity, iOS, Android, and Javascript SDKs for developers to easily interact with Cache, the cryptocurrency that powers this whole thing.

Just the other day they released a really awesome looking demo with the Blockstart testnet and Unity. They are making real progress everyday, something pretty rare in this seedy world of token sales.

Here is an example of creating a currency in Swift on their website:

As you can see, super simple and straightforward. The developer can focus more on the project and less on setting up their own smart contract or configuring any nodes. This is a big win and advantage for small startups.

There is also a shiny analytics desktop app that is shown off in the whitepaper:

From this dashboard, developers and members of the company can view analytics powered by their blockchain, information like number of transactions, fees, user count, and nodes. Rather than have your info jumbled into the public Etheruem chain, you can cleanly monitor your progress in your own blockchain. Pretty cool.

The Blockstart testnet is in development, and you will be able to run your own Blockstart nodes with an Electron app:

Needless to say, I believe in this project. It has huge potential, and with already a huge community of developers that they have taught, they will be the first building block to expanding this implemention of blockchain.

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