What will the future of blockchain look like?

Like anybody in the tech industry, I’m always wondering where we're headed. If we’re already seeing a colossal pace of change, where will we be in 10 years? Blockchain is just one of many examples, having come on in leaps and bounds since the turn of

Web3j Community Update

We’ve spent a good chunk of 2020 with our heads down continually investing in Web3j to improve the Ethereum developer experience for Java and Android developers. This has always been an area close to my heart, and we’ve been fortunate enough to secure funding from the Ethereum Foundation

Announcing Web3j Eth2 Beacon Node API Client

Following the recent launch of the Ethereum 2.0 Beacon Chain, Web3 Labs are very excited to announce our first contribution to the Eth2 ecosystem: the Web3j Beacon Node API client. This client is a thin library that will allow you to interact fluently with the new Eth2 nodes using

How blockchain can help us meet the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, the United Nations created 17 goals for sustainable development. These interdependent goals would pave the way for a better future for all by 2030. At Web3 Labs, we believe that blockchain can play a pivotal role in meeting these targets. Here are just a few examples of blockchain’

Solidity Dependency Management comes to Web3j

At Web3 Labs, one of our core missions is making Ethereum development more accessible to the Java and Android communities. To this end, we’ve just added an awesome new feature to Web3j - it can now automatically resolve third-party contract dependencies for you. That’s right - no more

Principles of Successful Blockchain Deployments

The opportunity that blockchain presents for businesses continues to go from strength to strength spanning dozens of industries. Global spending on blockchain solutions reached USD 2.7 billion in 2019, and is projected to reach USD 4.1 billion this year in spite of the pandemic, while some forecasts go

The Eth2 Network Is Launching—What Do I Need to Know?

You may already have heard about the upcoming launch of Eth2, a long planned upgrade to Ethereum. Separated into three phases, the first of which is set to roll out on December 1st, 2020, the upgrade intends to bring Ethereum to a whole new level in terms of speed, scalability,

Web3j - OpenAPI

One of our goals at Web3 Labs is to make development on Ethereum as simple as possible. During the past three years, we have seen many teams (ourselves included) write RESTful services again and again on top of Web3j to provide straight forward integration with Ethereum for their server applications.

Microsoft For Start Ups Award - 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year

We are proud to announce that today, Web3 Labs has been named a finalist of the Microsoft For Start Ups - 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award. The company was honoured among a global field of top Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions

Connecting your Java Application to the Ethereum Blockchain

As a Java developer, it can be a pain to build a system that interacts with Ethereum smart contracts. There are numerous challenges that you need to overcome, not to mention some understanding of what a blockchain is and how it works. The fact that smart contracts are generally written

The IW what? Introducing the InterWork Alliance

Today marks the launch of the Interwork Alliance (IWA), an industry organisation to drive standardisation across tokenised assets. Its launch members include Accenture, Credit Suisse, the DTCC, IBM, ING, Microsoft, Nasdaq, UBS and, of course, Web3 Labs which bears testament to the significance of this initiative. Enterprise Token Standards With

ABIv2 comes to Web3j

We’ve just released a major milestone for Web3j - support for the Solidity ABIv2 specification! In this post I’m going to dive into what ABIv2 means for you as a smart contract developer and how Web3j supports it. One of the most powerful features in Web3j is the

10 reasons why standards matter for Ethereum - Part 2: The #Buidlers

In the first part of this mini series, several prominent community leaders from Hyperledger, the Ethereum Foundation, W3C and others, gave their opinion on why standards are so important for Ethereum. In this second part, we reached out to the following teams working on Enterprise Ethereum client implementations to get

10 reasons why standards matter for Ethereum - Part 1

With the v5 release of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance’s Client Specification just around the corner and the unprecedented period of uncertainty we are in, it seemed like a good time to reflect on why standards matter for Ethereum in the Enterprise.  To assist with this we reached out to

Why We Believe in Ethereum - Part 2

In the last blog post, I compared Ethereum’s technical capabilities to Bitcoin. It made a pretty strong case, showcasing that Bitcoin and Ethereum are a generation apart. Ethereum gained the superiority title for two main reasons - * For introducing the ability to run smart contracts  * For boasting a community

Why we believe in Ethereum - Part 1

Blockchains and DLTs can be viewed from two angles. One is purely technical, and one is purely economical. In this two-part series, I’ll be outlining the arguments for why we believe that Ethereum, both as a technical and economic system, is superior to Bitcoin. In this blog. I'

A Solidity Version Manager using Sokt

In my last blog post, I discussed the issues presented by having to switch between different versions of the Solidity compiler on a daily basis. Sokt, is the software written by Web3 Labs to tackle these problems and to streamline the experience for developers. The great news is that Web3j

Viewing other nodes on a network

We tend to take for granted that blockchain networks are just there, but have you ever thought about who else your node is talking to? It’s all well having a node to connect to, but how do you know that your node is speaking with reliable sources? Although it’

What the Baseline Protocol means for your Business

There’s been a significant announcement in the world of enterprise blockchain today - the creation of the Baseline Protocol. The Baseline Protocol facilitates secure and private business processes utilising the main public Ethereum network (Mainnet). Think of how you could use Mainnet as a giant globally distributed message bus

Making manual Solidity version management a thing of the past

When you’re a blockchain developer, managing Solidity installations sucks. It shouldn’t have to be this way, so we decided to do something about it. Any decent blockchain library worth its salt takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting for integrating with smart contracts. In the Web3j

What to do when you lose your (crypto) keys

Remember the last time you lost your wallet? Like, the physical wallet you have, with bank cards and IDs? It’s a terrible feeling, isn’t it? Such a hassle. You need to call your bank, block your cards, get new cards, new IDs, and you lost 40 bucks you

A brief history of Enterprise Ethereum Standards

As we approach the third anniversary of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), I wanted to share my perspective on the journey that has got us to where we are with respect to standards for enterprise Ethereum. The Launch The EEA launched back in February 2017, intending to provide industry standards

How to create a CorDapp in 3 steps

When you embark on writing your first CorDapp, it is a significant undertaking for the first time around. There are a lot of moving parts and concepts to learn, some of them may be completely unfamiliar such as distributed systems and cryptography.  At Web3 Labs, we strive to make the

Debugging Solidity Smart Contracts

In my previous post, we looked at the web3j-unit and web3j-evm libraries. These are tools that help you test your Solidity smart contracts using Web3j and Java. In this blog post we’ll spend some more time looking at the console debugger you find in the web3j-evm library.  The console

Web3j Ethereum Foundation Grant Update

Back at Devcon V, we were delighted to announce that Web3 Labs was awarded a grant for Web3j by the Ethereum Foundation.  Web3j is the leading Ethereum integration library on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). It was first released at Devcon 2 in September 2016, and has been downloaded over