Tagion, a monetary and open banking protocol, has launched its much-anticipated devnet allowing individuals and companies to test a new developer kit and wallet application with everything needed to begin the process of transferring tags.

“We’re really excited to share our work with the community,” said co-founder and CEO Theis Simonsen, “With the release of these new tools, our vision to create a cryptocurrency that restores financial power to the individual has taken a massive step towards becoming reality.”

Tagion has been under development for more than two years as the team worked to solve several technical challenges. And this new proof-of-concept release demonstrates that the technology stack not only works but also fulfils the wider goals of the Tagion project.

A complex mechanism

The DART (Distributed Archive of Random Transactions) database sits at the heart of the Tagion currency. Inside are stored details of each electronic ‘bill’ and its associated public key. The proof of concept model has successfully completed several synchronisation tests. Bills can now be stored and deleted as they are spent with all transaction details being replicated accurately across all distributed nodes.

Similarly, the scripting engine that executes each transaction is now working. Each transaction is successfully transferred using a gossip protocol to send updates between nodes, and the hashgraph consensus mechanism ensures that transactions are properly ordered.

“The underlying database and protocols are the foundation of Tagion. But this new proof of concept release goes much further,” explained Simonsen, “We now have an API interface for performing user transactions and a tested payment protocol that is tested for double-spend, so developers can use our API to perform transactions. We also have a wallet application so that users can store and spend Tagion – or at least test the process themselves.”

Both developer API and wallet remain in beta testing. The fact that the entire technology stack has been proven to work together with the payment protocol is extremely encouraging for the future of the Tagion project.

“There is still a lot of work to be done,” confirmed Simonsen, “the time taken to clear a transaction is still too slow for instance. But now we have a working technology stack our development team can focus on optimisation. Our dream of a more democratic economy based on the Tagion digital monetary system is about to be realised.”

The Tagion Developer Kit is available for download here – https://github.com/tagion/sdk.

For more information contact Tobias Ambs-Thomsen, ta@tagion.org

Also published on Medium.