Our first steps into Blockchain coding
By: Thomas Wollburg
Tags: Blockchain, Ethereum, Future, JavaScript, Cloud Computing

We have now deployed the smart contract for the Friend Network Token initial contribution offering. We have learned quite a lot about the Ethereum Blockchain on the way.

The first thing is that it is in its very infancy. It has huge potential. But also many rough edges that require patience and a developers mindset.

During deployment we of course ran into issues that we did not hit when deploying to our local test network or the Ropsten test network. For example, transactions were taking too much time, locking the account used which ought to handle the next transaction in queue.

Thankfully we could manually connect the two deployments: we took the address of the first contract and added it to the deployment script for the second contract. Then we just had to unlock our account once more to get our crowd-sale contract deployed.

For those interested, we had help from Augusto Lemble for the smart contract development, we used Truffle for deployment to all networks (local test network, Ropsten, main net). We did some debugging in Remix and used Solidify to flatten our files to get them verified on Etherscan (using their beta verification tool which has better support for Truffle deployed contracts).

Being first and foremost a JavaScript developer, getting used to waiting, waiting and more waiting, was tedious at first — another important lesson learned on Blockchain technology: the fact that everything is slow, compared to other program execution — means that testing and reviewing is hugely important. Especially as deploying a relatively large smart contract like ours to main net costs real money (about 20 USD in our case) — even Ropsten deploy “cost” you money as it is quite time and labour intensive to acquire enough test ETH to run a couple of meaningful tests.

Get your FRND tokens!

So now our ICO is live! The so called crypto winter gave us enough reason to postpone a bit and learn more and be more comfortable with the technology with its quirks and issues. The scene and the technology are maturing. The possibilities are huge and it is great to be part of the journey.

Friend will provide a truly simple and elegant interface and provide useful to both end users, Blockchain and other software developers that aim to be part of the next era of computing: device independent, decentralised, open — empowering the user to make informed decisions and providing tools to ensure privacy, safety and security for the ever increasing amount of data generated by all of us.

As a distributed ledger everything is out in the open. With our sourcecode now being verified and published on both etherscan and github we play with open hands and will now work hard to make the token generating event a success.

We still have one small thing around our token which we need to address but for this we will work with or smart contract developer.

To round this up — we are happy to be live now and will focus on marketing, meeting partners, developers and our community at events wherever we can. We are also pushing hard to get Friend 1.2 out on the my.friendup.cloud server so that all demo users can.

Friend’s redesigned workspace with our native word processor and our collaboration solution FriendChat.

Image credit: Hoop photo by Tyler Nix