INTRO TO EMERALD PROJECT
As many of our readers know, the ETCDEV team is working on the Emerald Project, which is going to be a platform for future decentralized applications (dapps) on the Ethereum Classic blockchain. One of the first of these dapps will be the Emerald Wallet, but the project is not limited to just being a wallet. With this article we’re going to explain what the Emerald project is and why it’s important for the future of ETC.
What Problems do the Emerald Project Solve?
The first and most obvious problem solved by the Emerald Project is that there is currently no wallet for the Ethereum Classic community that verifies transactions for users in a trustless way.
Other problems that the Emerald Project aims to solve is that there’s currently no common framework for developers to build dApps on Ethereum Classic, a lack of User Interface (UI) components, and no standard practices for 3rd party developers.
As a result every Dapp developer has to reinvent the entire architecture and components for new dApps, reimplement methods to integrate with hardware wallets, and build individual support for Ethereum smart contract features and tokens. It’s very time consuming, expensive and it’s hard to integrate Ethereum into existing apps on the server/client side, because the RPC API provided by Geth/Parity is just too low level for most use cases.
Architecture
The main idea behind the Emerald Project is to use a modular approach, and split apps into several replaceable layers with reusable components, which can be later replaced or integrated into 3rd party dapps.
Emerald has the following parts:
Geth, or other service which provides standard Web3 API
UI for desktop, mobile, web or console
Connector UI < - > Chain, which also operates all private data, such as private keys, address book, tracked contracts & tokens, etc
RPC Node can be a local full node, such as Geth or Parity, or a remote API endpoint, which is already provided by epool.io and GasTracker. This will allow users to run the Emerald wallet in light mode, without syncing the full chain.
UI part is replaceable too. We’re working on a simple CLI which is usable for scripting. In addition to that we expect that someone (i.e not even from our team) will come with full-featured text-mode wallet interface, for those of us who don’t trust browsers. Just because it’s fun to build some vim-like (or emacs-like?) wallet :)
Connector basically unifies those two sides. Runs as a standalone app, but is also going to be embeddable into other apps also. This layer operates your keys, signs transactions, and so on. This layer also cares about hardware wallets, can give your UI a simplified access point to Ledger/Trezor and others. We are trying to make a connector as lightweight as possible, to make it usable not only on mobile platforms, but on IoT and specialized hardware. Maybe someone will make a hardware Dapp on top of it.
Tech
Rust for Connector layer. Very lightweight and embeddable
React + Redux for Javascript UI
Material UI as base style
ES6 with Babel and Webpack
Electron to bundle it as a desktop app
See https://github.com/ethereumproject/emerald-wallet and https://github.com/ethereumproject/emerald-rs
What it’s going to provide
React UI components as separate library, to build your own Dapp or even wallet
Javascript library for general use of Ethereum Classic, access APIs, common utilities, etc
A library to integrate connector into other apps, native to Rust language, or through FFI into languages such as Go, Python and others
Command line utility usable for server scripting (allow to sign transactions, read balance, including tokens, contracts, etc)
Set of graphical components and Style Guide (fonts, colors, icons)
SDK
As it was mentioned in the beginning, a wallet is just a first step. One of ETC Dev’s ultimate goals is a Software Development Kit for Ethereum Classic Dapps. Which means that Emerald Project would become a platform for a set of other Dapps. It will provide a set of tools to build your own Dapps with instruments to test and pack as a desktop, web or mobile app.
Plans
Currently the ETCDEV team and ETC community is focusing on building the Emerald Wallet. It will be comprised of all these components in one place. In the future, the ETCDEV team is going to start splitting Emerald into several independent pieces, separating Emerald SDK and building a second Dapp, which is going to be an app for Smart Contract developers (develop/deploy/debug cycle). In addition to that, ETCDEV is going to work on a separate command-line utility to help 3rd party software to be integrated into Ethereum Classic.
These tasks will take time, several iterations and releases, but a beta version of Emerald Wallet, as a first app of this series, is expected to be released in the following weeks. We have a pretty functional Minimal Viable Product (MVP) ready, and we are now working on a nice and usable UI.