We have created a new resource for developers. This should help developers getting started using the Byteball platform to power their apps.

Some example sections you may find useful:

Are you new to Byteball? Here are some reasons you may wish to develop on the platform.

Easier to develop for

Byteball is easy to develop for. The main scripting language is Node.js, which can be run on the back-end, not just front end. You can also code in any other language by connecting through RPC. Ethereum uses custom language which has an additional learning curve.

The developer site documents multiple APIs that you may need, has the guides and tutorials showcasing Byteball’s most interesting features. Our github has loads of source code of existing apps working in production that you may want to reuse in your apps.

Lots of Lego to build with

You have lots of building blocks to build your dream app from. Smart contracts, chatbots, payment requests, secure identity, attestations, private profiles, tokens with easily configurable properties, protocol links for connecting with the web, etc. What other platform has all of that?

Easy access to thousands of users for your apps (the Apple and Google model)

Byteball has a fully featured official wallet which contains a Bot Store where you can list your apps. The Bot Store is a prominent part of the wallet, meaning users can easily find your app.

With Ethereum, marketing your app is your own (difficult and expensive) responsibility. If users don’t find your app, its chances of success are remote. One reason Android and Apple apps have become so popular is because the Apple App Store and Google Play Store connect users to developers apps. This is the Byteball model for bots too.

Byteball smart contracts are readable by non developers

Most people cannot read the computer code which Ethereum contracts are written in. This means end users need to trust developers, which defeats the purpose of smart contracts.

Byteball smart contracts can be read by non-developers. Byteball contracts actually look similar to real world contracts with simple if/then language. Smart contracts have not been widely adopted in the real world yet, but when they are, users will want to use a platform where they can read the contracts.

Would you sign a contract you cannot read in the real world? This is what Ethereum applications are asking end users to do and it’s not an attractive proposition!

More secure contracts

Byteball smart contracts are more restricted than Ethereums, so you can’t cause as much harm. This is super important because cryptocurrency deal with money. People’s thresholds for tolerating bugs is much lower when their money is at risk. When cryptocurrencies are adopted en masse in the real world, smart contract security will be far more important than today when real world use volume is very low. You wouldn’t want to risk damaging your reputation by publishing code that can easily lose users money.

Free unencumbered access

Byteball is based on DAG which means that there are no miners between user and the ledger. Users just add their transactions to the DAG, there are no miners who could use their privileged position to front-run, censor, delay, or manipulate the order of transactions in the block.

Scalability

Byteball is the first DAG smart contract platform. There are no blocks or miners, just transactions. Ethereum uses Proof-of-Work and suffers from the same problems that all PoW projects do. Miners exist to make money, but users do not want to pay high fees. The model is inherently broken. This means that users who use bots on the Byteball platform will not have congestion issues when somebody’s bot gets popular. As CryptoKitties showed in December 2017, they might have this problem on PoW blockchains like Ethereum.

Very low predictable fees

Byteball is the only platform to price fees both predictably and fairly. To add 1 Byte to the distributed ledger costs 1 Byte in transaction fees. The average transaction costs around 500 Bytes, which currently in USD is around $0.00002. For Byteball transaction fees to go to even $0.10 the price of Bytes would need to increase more than 10,000x!

Develop on Byteball and you have piece of mind that Proof-of-Work mining farms are not going to jeopardize your apps success. If you bought one Byte then you can still be sure that this amount will able to post one Byte of data to distributed ledger, even if some other bot or ICO get super popular on Byteball platform at the same time.

Next step

If you are a developer that is building for a distributed ledger, please explore Byteball! The platform has many benefits that are not found elsewhere, and getting started is more straightforward than you might expect.

Questions? Ask them on our subreddit or join our Slack.