Kevin Solorio - Hands-On Smart Contract Development with Solidity and Ethereum: From Fundamentals to Deployment

by Kevin Solorio , Randall Kanna , and David H. Hoover

Copyright 2020 Kevin Solorio, Randall Kanna, and David H. Hoover. All rights reserved.

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• December 2019: First Edition

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(illustration of blockchain data structure)

Fundamentally, a blockchain is a data structure. It is a list, or chain, of unique blocks. Each block is itself a list of transactions. On top of this relatively simple list-of-lists data structure is laid the key innovation that blockchains have given us: a protocol for how blocks are added to the chain without any central authority. The cryptocurrencies that have come along with blockchains are not the true innovation, they are a means to an end, providing incentives for people to run software that secures the network. For the first time in history, we have the ability to share digital information without trusting any person, government, organization, or corporation to facilitate the interaction. Ethereum provides a cryptographically secure platform for storing, updating, and removing data from a blockchain using what is referred to as smart contracts. We are still in the early days of learning how to use smart contracts to improve things in the real-world, and its hard to predict how the technology will be used in the future. Similar to the World Wide Web in the 1990s, there has been a global influx of inspiring and creative problem-solvers who are working every day to deploy decentralized applications (DApps) that they hope will make a dent in the universe.

We will be spending most of this book focused on the programming language Solidity and smart contract development. Solidity is a popular programming language for developing smart contracts, and was designed to run on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Solidity wasnt the first programming language to run on the EVM, and it certainly isnt the last. Many other languages, such as Vyper, will be written to run on the EVM, attempting to improve on Soliditys design, or provide powerful domain-specific languages. Before we dig into the revolutionary world of smart contracts, we need to lay a conceptual foundation for you to build on. Due to the historically unique nature of running code on a blockchain, its critical for developers to have a sufficient understanding of how the pieces fit together underneath the wonderful abstractions that Ethereum provides.