Trondheim, Norway. Photo by Sindre Aalberg

Today, we’re really excited to announce that we’re open sourcing Lightchain. Lightchain is an Ethereum-based blockchain using Tendermint as the Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus engine. It’s fast, responsive and it forms part of the technology stack that powers the Lightstreams Network.

Background

Over the past couple of years, we’ve been working hard on building an easy-to-use, fast, and privacy-enabled technology stack for real-world decentralized applications. When we first started, Ethereum didn’t have a running PoA network. Tendermint had a side project called Ethermint which attempted to bridge together Ethereum and Tendermint, but it wasn’t actively developed and unfortunately had a few important bugs (as an aside, the current version of Ethermint depends on the Cosmos ecosystem). So we decided to create a new project and to make this our problem to solve. It took a lot of different iterations and we eventually ended up completely rewriting the project from scratch, but we finally managed to build something that we are truly proud of.

Open Source & Community Involvement

We love free (as in free speech) software; we contribute to open source projects as much as we can and actually believe it makes the world a better place. When people get access to the source code, there are many advantages:

Code is peer-reviewed and tends to be more secure

The Project becomes community-oriented and benefits from the knowledge/work of that community

Openness helps integration with other projects

People can learn from it

We have benefited from many people’s work over the year and this is our way of our sharing back with the community. You can find the source code on Github and we look forward to getting more people from the community involved in the development of the project.

Get involved

Lightchain is very much an ongoing endeavor and it should not be considered a finished product. If you encounter a bug, or simply have an idea, comment, or want to submit a change, we welcome discussions and pull requests. Our Byzantine Fault Tolerant Blockchain is licensed under GPLv3. You can start using it today. Also, check out leth if you’d like to have content-sharing features.

Don’t forget

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