First release of Flowee the Hub

After building the most important parts of the Hub for a year, today Tom is proud to release the first public version of Flowee’s hub.

Flowee is a technology platform that aims to have a series of products which work well together and as such allow users, developers and professionals to go to one place and find all they need in order to work with Bitcoin Cash.

As this is a very new project we need a start, a center, to build around and Flowee the Hub is designed to be at the center of most setups.

Flowee the Hub is a fully validating node and can be seen as the black box which gives you access to the Bitcoin Cash network. The Hub is built for high performance and large numbers of users.

This release is a technology preview because there is still a lot of needed details missing in order to make this the platform that it will become. The main projects to be further developed is a mature developers API. The API we have today is as such marked as unstable and we reserve the right to change it in future versions.

How is the Hub unique?

There are several fully validating nodes for Bitcoin Cash and each has a different approach and target audience.

Flowee the Hub has taken the original Satoshi codebase and identified how to improve this in order to allow Flowee to become a platform. Emphasis has been on these high-level subjects:

Making the node scale to the next billion people.

Many software architecture problems were found and fixed. In Flowee bigger blocks don’t consume more memory during validation. We validate over many cores, we accept transactions from the net multi-threaded, we replaced the unspent output database with a better scaling one.

Many software architecture problems were found and fixed. In Flowee bigger blocks don’t consume more memory during validation. We validate over many cores, we accept transactions from the net multi-threaded, we replaced the unspent output database with a better scaling one. Refocusing the hub from a user-wallet to a server component.

The Satoshi client was build as good for everything, including a user wallet. The reality is that it didn’t excel at anything. To fix that the Hub fixes deployment, fixes logging and changing configs without restarting, and more is to come.

The Satoshi client was build as good for everything, including a user wallet. The reality is that it didn’t excel at anything. To fix that the Hub fixes deployment, fixes logging and changing configs without restarting, and more is to come. Focusing on one thing, and doing it well.

Flowee the Hub focuses on being the one step to get onto the Bitcoin Cash network. We look at the hub as the owner of the Blockchain data and we will provide fast APIs to access that data. Any other function will go to a specialized service. This means that Flowee is “cloud-native”. Want more functions, just select more components that together give you the services you need.

Flowee the Hub focuses on being the one step to get onto the Bitcoin Cash network. We look at the hub as the owner of the Blockchain data and we will provide fast APIs to access that data. Any other function will go to a specialized service. This means that Flowee is “cloud-native”. Want more functions, just select more components that together give you the services you need. Making it a platform for developers.

More directly, Flowee has modernized its buildsystem and directory structure to be more in line with the software industry. We will continue to switch to industry standards where applicable. The goal is to lower the threshold of entry for developers, especially those without crypto experience. We need those to grow our community.

Technology Preview

This release is marked as a technology preview.

In order to move toward real scaling of the network, architect Tom Zander realized about 2 years ago that several rather large projects needed to be undertaken to make the node ready for the next billion.

The architecture is stable and solid. The focus has been on stability, on making sure nothing breaks and that the original code is as much unchanged as possible, perferring simply moving code from one place to the other, intact, over changing the code to use modern technologies and potentially introducing bugs.

Due to this focus on stability and keeping the Bitcoin rules exactly the same, the benefits of the new parallel validation and others has not yet been fully reached. We might even be slower in some cases. The designs unique in Bitcoin are the foundations. Extending will be much easier going foward.

But the goal is stability, and as such we release a preview of the technology uniquely available in Flowee the Hub. Work from now on will be about small changes to start using the new concepts and with each such change we will see a nice speedup.

Developer API

One of the main components that makes the Hub actually a hub is that it has a fast, stable and great API for other components to use. The Hub will continue to ship the old RPC (JSON) that it inherited from the Satoshi codebase. We also ship an experimental developer API meant for the next layer of applications.

The reality is that to get the benefits the industry wants we need to design user authentication, action-logging, user-roles, and a cross-platform transfer method (probably gRPC) and many other details. These will come in version two of the Hub.

Flowee is not just the Hub

What bears repeating is that Flowee aims to be a one-stop meta-project where many people and projects gather to work really well together and aim for the same goals to become a platform. This will initially be mostly developer tools, but work has started for a point-of-sale component and other user-level tools as well.

Flowee: building the future of Bitcoin Cash together.