“We just want to make Bitcoin great again,” Purse said about its latest announcement. “Bcoin,” the company says, is a solution to help it manage wallet infrastructure without creating a “menace to the [Bitcoin] network.”
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Purse’s Bcoin to Help Build Bitcoin Infrastructure
The startup’s first crypto-currency offering was in discounts for Amazon. To accomplish this, Purse built its own infrastructure.
The main issue proved to be finding a way to manage the wallet infrastructure. The startup acknowledged its work on Core proved inefficient due to that client’s codebase, and other third party bitcoin API services just couldn’t perform well enough or scale efficiently.
To fix this, the firm has introduced Bcoin — a Javascript Bitcoin library aimed at simplifying Bitcoin coding. Purse believes it has accomplished the “most advanced fullnode Bitcoin implementation.”
The company said its new javascript Bitcoin library doesn’t aim to go against the wisdom of Satoshi. Instead, Purse sees Bcoin as an important application for the future of the Bitcoin, providing it with needed infrastructure.
“Having a full node implementation that we can utilize and build off of here at Purse is crucial for the success of our future products, and ensures our infrastructure can take advantage of new additions to the Bitcoin codebase as they become available,” the company wrote in a press release.
Allowing for ‘New Use Cases’
Purse described its goal thus: “To accelerate the development of the protocol — solve some scaling issues by implementing Lightning, and enable cool features that will allow for new use cases, like for instance, smart contracts.”
To achieve this goal, the firm brought on former BitPay employee Christopher Jeffrey, who helped build Bcoin.
According to Purse, Bcoin represents infrastructure for the entire ecosystem. “Bcoin is the most versatile and easy-to-use bitcoin library to date,” the company said, “with support for Segwit, Lightning, and Schnorr signatures — and other popular new BIPs.”
The company said Bcoin offers the following:
- blockchain validation
- SPV mode
- running natively in browsers and apps
- a wallet system and wallet database
- MEMPool/Miner
- rest API
- support for Segwit
- Lightning Network
- Versionbits
- CSV
- BIP70, BIP151, BIP152, BIP150, and MAST.
An Alternative Full Node
Bcoin exists as an open source project under the MIT license. Over the next couple weeks, Purse will integrate Bcoin into its backend.
“It’s an alternative to the Bitcoin Core implementation with advanced features not provided by Bitcoin Core,” Purse CEO Andrew Lee told Bitcoin.com.
When the company first started, the “blockchain as a service” startups which grew popular in 2016 did not exist — aside from a few smaller projects, such as Gem. Therefore, according to Purse, the company had to build infrastructure in-house. “Core is tough to work with and has limitations in scalability,” he said. “Ours is built from scratch, open source and ready for a large scale marketplace.”
Lee concluded: “An alternative full node represents a path forward to innovate faster in the bitcoin industry.”
What do you think about Bcoin? Let us know in the comments below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Purse.
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