Why Did Blockchain Payment Processing Leave Developers Behind?

Every day developers are on the front line of mainstream crypto adoption, and yet it feels so much like blockchain technology has left them behind. Existing technologies are clumsy, payment forms on apps and websites only support one coin or another, and they’re impossible to run without a developer support contract.

Rising Above the Fanboy and Fangirl Culture of Crypto

The promise of fast, secure, and convenient transactions for all that don’t depend on a centralized fiat system has always been the underlying interest of the blockchain community and its developers. The whole avante garde, libertarian attitude that surrounds it has created an entire counterculture.

However, a surge in the usage of blockchain applications (dapps) has limited the speed and number of transactions on blockchain networks, with both a lag in network speeds and a spike in transaction costs.

Only a cult following could be loyal to something that still feels so primitive.

The Etherium CryptoKitties disruption magnified the scalability limitations that the blockchain still faces, and I won’t even get started on how dry the Bitcoin well has become.

Ethereum may not be the hero we’ve been waiting for.

(Still) Waiting for Superman

New options are beginning to spring up and no, I’m not talking about Ripple –they’ve already got their fans, but there’s still a lot of people looking for something more compelling.

And maybe that’s why newcomers like OPEN Chain have already been so attractive to investors — 3x in less than a month on KuCoin, it’s looking pretty solid as a contender in the poorly served crypto payment solution category. But more on that in a moment.

If widely accepted cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Bitcoin are already showing signs of age by way of slowing mainstream adoption due to speed and scalability issues, what does that mean for the industry as a whole?

It took ages for adoption to get to where it is, and it’s beginning to feel like there’s a bit of a reversal going on.

If cryptocurrencies are going to rally and move forward and adapt to a growing user base, scalability issues need to be addressed in order to manage the increase in transactions that come with it.

OPEN Chain seems to offer some hope of resolving the blockchain scalability dilemma, and it’s hitting exchanges at just the right time.

OPEN is now trading publicly on the Kucoin exchange with supported trading pairs being OPEN/BTC and OPEN/ETH. You can find the whitepaper here, and an additional slide deck here.

Who’s Backing OPEN?

The OPEN team is distributed between both Toronto and San Francisco, and they’ve got a pretty impressive list of backers on their website; Draper Dragon, RChain NEO, and Dahnua Capital are some of the prominent partners backing OPEN. Majority of these have backed blockchain projects like Zilliqa, Sora, VeChain, and ICON.

Here are a few headlines from their website:

An Emphasis on Businesses and Users

OPEN Chain is a blockchain platform that gives application developers the power to tap into the advantages of a cluster of blockchains while improving upon the flexibility and scalability of each.

OPEN brings to blockchain what Stripe brought to fiat payment processing, and WordPress to web development. And it looks like it’s poised to give Ripple a run for its market share.

Let’s take a closer look at the OPEN blockchain platform.

A Solution for Frustrated Developers

Originally, developers had to be familiar with the specific language of whatever blockchain whose components they intended to integrate into their code. Not anymore.

The work of everyday developers has been reduced to simply deploying OPEN Chain architecture into their back-end and leaving the OPEN API along with its scaffold system to do the heavy lifting.

It feels like Stripe and the OPEN Chain infrastructure supports multiple blockchains just like Stripe is multicurrency, and it supports smart contracts and dapps, too.

All developers have to do is choose what coins they would like to accept and pump out a “scaffold” using the scaffold generator –10 to 15 lines of code similar to an embed code like the kind you use to embed a YouTube video.

Simply put, OPEN is set to be the first fully “blockchain agnostic” cryptocurrency payment solution.

Things get a little more interesting when you move from the front to the back-end and take a closer peek at the workings of the OPEN Chain. They’ve already made their technology publicly available and it runs on Kotlin.

Features That are Synonymous with Fiat Payment Systems

OPEN strives to emulate the ease that Stripe and PayPal brought to fiat payment processing.

It emulates this first by the ease of deployment. As previously mentioned, a developer only need add a couple of lines of code to their back end to deploy the OPEN software development kit and API.

Once these are punched in and the scaffold is launched onto the blockchain, OPEN supports the rest of the transaction process. The OPEN platform predicts traffic trends that would otherwise lag the network and has measures to counter it.

Just Like Stripe, Better Than Ripple?

Much like fiat systems that provide users and developers the luxury of using and accepting different currencies, the OPEN platform doesn’t discriminate against any smart contract, blockchain or cryptocurrency, today or tomorrow. It’s designed to be futureproof.

We may not be able to exhaust the host of unique features that OPEN Chain presents, but the underlying objective of OPEN developers is quite clear.

The objective is to provide the app developer with a blockchain solution that operates in much the same way as the fiat systems they are used to; both in the deployment process and also the necessary under-the-hood transaction data for the developer’s app databases.

In Summary

My approach to OPEN has been pretty high level and editorial — if you’d like to take a deeper look under the hood, I suggest you check out their website, whitepaper, or slide deck.

OPEN Platform (OPEN) is now on KuCoin, you can deposit now. Trading pairs include OPEN/BTC and OPEN/ETH. Buying starts May 22, 2018 21:30 (UTC+8), selling starts May 22, 2018 22:00 (UTC+8), and withdrawal opens May 24, 2018 22:00 (UTC+8).@OpenPlatformICO #KCS #OPEN #BTC #ETH pic.twitter.com/Jf7e6EhWDF — KUCOIN (@kucoincom) May 22, 2018

What do you think? Is OPEN just passing through or does it have a strong horse in this race? Could it overtake Ripple? Let us know in the comments.

Related: Becoming a Blockchain Developer: How Do You Get into This Hot New Industry?