Blockchain fundamentals and development platforms
Omar B. Badreddin, Abel Gomez Rivera, Adeel A. Malik · Computer Science and Software Engineering · 2018
Blockchain is an emerging computing and development platform. It is a new paradigm that aims at empowering peers and eliminating the need for central authenticating authority. In essence, blockchain has introduced a new level of distributed sovereignty. Cryptocurrency is one prominent outcome of this new computing paradigm that has gained broad attention. However, Blockchain paradigm has demonstrated broader potential impacts in many disciplines including secure and sustainable software engineering, supply chain, banking, and peer to peer commerce. Unfortunately, the fundamentals of blockchains remain unpopular and vague. Many existing information sources on blockchain focuses on the specific application of blockchain and ignores the fundamental concepts that are largely independent of the specific applications. Moreover, emerging development platforms have significantly simplified the development of blockchain based applications, but remain unpopular and are often not well documented. Sizable communities of developers and users of such open source platforms are yet to form and stabilize. The workshop presented Susereum [7], an emerging blockchain platform that provides transparent, immutable, and permanent credit to open source developers when they contribute sustainable code fragments. The workshop covered Susereum approach and its development as an extension to Hyperledger Sawtooth platform. This provided participants with first-hand experience with blockchain-based application development.