The Debrief: RChain Developer Conference

Earlier this month, some members of the Includable and Moonshot.Express teams were invited to Boulder, a small town near Denver, CO, to join the RChain Developer Conference. There, the team behind RChain showed off their progress in the development of a new blockchain platform that promises near-infinite scalability by using asynchronous smart contracts and a new programming language called Rholang.

We came there with not much more knowledge about the RChain platform than the very short executive summary I had prepared for the team, but that didn’t stop us from quickly getting the development environment for writing smart contracts set up and even building our own tool to test smart contracts online after the first day of the conference. More on that later.

Without further ado, here are some of our main takeaways from the conference.

The flight to Mercury

Musk might have set his sights on Mars, but the RChain community is currently focussing on Mercury. That’s the code name for the first major release of the RChain platform (later releases are named Venus and Earth). As much of excitement there is for this release, which is currently planned for the end of this year, there’s has also been quite a bit of unclarity about what is and what isn’t included in this release.