Industry Trends with Etherparty

Etherparty is a blockchain platform working to enable a connected and inclusive world by building easy-to-use, versatile and intuitive smart contract solutions.

In today’s post we’re tackling, in brief, emerging functionality in the blockchain industry.

We’ve put forth a set of questions to our lead developer, Patrick Guay, to see what he thinks about where the industry is headed and to provide readers with some insight into what feature sets are currently in the works at Etherparty.

Q: Etherparty is currently described as “a smart contract creation tool that allows users to create smart contracts executable on the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains”. As an agnostic tool moving forward, what other blockchains will be supported?

Patrick: For our mainnet release, we are focusing on providing a seamless experience with both the Ethereum and RSK networks. We are currently researching other smart-contract enabled blockchains to support. Qtum, Achain, and Neo are some possibilities.

Q: What will it take to generate a smart contract using Etherparty?

Patrick: The whole point of Etherparty is to provide an easy and secure way to create smart contracts. Either by form completion or simple API calls, we take care of incorporating the necessary business logic and deployment on the blockchain. The whole goal of Etherparty is for consumers and enterprises to create smart contracts in a secure, clear and intuitive manner. We’re softening the blockchain learning curve for everyone.

Q: RSK mentions micro lending and voting in their white paper. Will EP have similar functionality?

Patrick: Definitely. RSK, one of the blockchains we are integrated with, rightfully talks about micro lending and voting use cases. On our immediate roadmap, we also are planning on deploying smart contracts for charitable lending. On the business side, we are exploring smart contract-based solutions for supply chain management.

Q: Do you see a time when one can convert an asset and then send a virtual currency with just a few clicks, one login, and without the need for multiple wallets?

Patrick: Absolutely. Already we have what are called atomic swaps. With the requirement that both blockchains implement the same hashing algorithm (whether on the smart contract level or protocol level), and both blockchains implement a form of “hash time-locked contracts”, then you can have atomic swaps between these assets.

We’ve seen this with Charlie Lee swapping Litecoin for Vertcoin. This is extremely exciting, where instead of having multiple “siloed” blockchains, we can now move funds freely between them, creating a true network of blockchains. The second part of the question deals more with UI/UX. At Etherparty we strive to make blockchain easy — this is our modus operandi. Our product team has been tirelessly iterating on the best way to make our application as easy as possible for anyone, so it can be used by people without blockchain knowledge.

Q: There’s been talk of charitable giving using the Etherparty platform. Can you discuss how this would work?

Patrick: We are still actively researching and developing our solution, but essentially it all boils down to people being able to donate to charities using crypto and those charities being able to accept the donation. One of our “lessons learned” moment from our Blockchain Charity drive is that it is hard for companies and individuals to contribute to charities using crypto.

Q: Where do you see the most urgent need for development? Where are the gaps the greatest across all the niches you are familiar with? Will Etherparty fill some of these market needs?

Patrick: Tooling. We need way more tooling for smart contract development. Formal verification will be a key feature that will make a larger amount of smart contracts safe and secure. As of right now, we go through a very lengthy process to validate any new smart contract that we create.

Q. Is there anything you’d like to add for our readers?

Patrick: We’re currently very focused on getting our application out and as soon as we launch, we will be releasing some dev tooling that we’ve created. We have dedicated time when developers are encouraged to create open source projects. Most of the ideas coming out revolve around tooling.

Thanks for reading and don’t forget about this week’s second installment of the #FuelFriday trivia contest. Three contestants will walk away with 400 FUEL tokens again, to be distributed following our platform launch in spring.

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