A JS Dev's Guide to Not Dismissing Blockchain

WIPO Thank you so much for coming to the talk. I also want to extend a huge thank you to all the amazing folks at the Algorand Foundation who make this possible, and of course the GitNation team for bringing us here for this excellent conference. I'm Brian Wipo. I lead the Developer Relations team at the Algorand Foundation. We're the non-profit that promotes the adoption of the Algorand blockchain. You can find me on most socials as SilentRhetoric or on LinkedIn by my full name.

You may be wondering why I'm talking to you about blockchain in 2025, especially the end of 2025, and I'm going to take a few minutes to tell you why it's relevant as a general statement and also why it's relevant to you as developers at JSNation. We at the Algorand Foundation appreciate that blockchain is off the peak of inflated expectations in this concept of the Gartner Hype Cycle. Years ago there were all sorts of talks about blockchain and people thought that it would be a solution for all sorts of problems. Now though, I think it's fair to say that we're working our way up the slope of enlightenment on this framework. There's a lot of quiet work going on and with new laws and regulations in Europe and the U.S., a lot of regulated crypto-based stablecoins and other blockchain technologies are going to become mainstream very quickly. I think over the next 12 months this is going to be huge in the U.S. and you're going to want to know what's happening on this front.

For context, Algorand is a single-layer blockchain. We run this blockchain and it's been up for over six years with no downtime. It's what you could describe as a third generation blockchain. It's very high performance and it solves some of the problems that you may have experienced with Bitcoin or Ethereum or other blockchains if you ever tried to build something web-3.

In 2025 we understand that there are a few classes of problems that blockchain is good at solving. The first is disintermediating markets, taking middlemen out of these situations and enabling peer-to-peer transactions. Also, publicly tracking data integrity, taking advantage of the fact that blockchain is a public distributed database and you can record data there if you want people to be able to verify it for various reasons. And just creating new markets in things where the infrastructure enables things to happen like fractional ownership of assets that isn't really economical in traditional financial markets.

So we have a few examples of real businesses that are being built on the Algorand blockchain. These aren't theoretical anymore, these are live. These are running on our main net network. Things like the tokenized ownership of solar panels so you can get the value from the electricity they generate. Tokenized ownership of real estates or houses that you can buy a share of for as little as $50. Supply chain traceability, gold and metals tokenized on-chain for trading.

And then right in the center there you can use a para wallet with a mastercard debit card and buy stuff at the store using the stable coins that are in your account. So a stable coin representing a dollar at the bank so to speak. So this is all happening now it's not theoretical anymore and as I mentioned there's going to be a bit of a Cambrian explosion now that the US and Europe are regulating all of this and it doesn't exist in this gray area anymore.

So for developers I want to talk about where this fits into your stack. On the left you have the traditional front and back-end database stack that we all know and love and blockchain can sort of be an add-on module for a lot of different applications and businesses. And you can interface with it from the front or the back end that's why it's sort of up there. But then you also have this concept of a virtual machine. Small applications can execute in a constrained execution environment that runs on the chain on this distributed network.

And so there's a couple of extra components that you need to build blockchain-enabled applications. So we appreciate that this is hard and at the Foundation we've been working for years credit to all the engineers who have worked to make this much easier. And today the newest development is we've just released Algorand TypeScript 1.0. So this is a framework for writing smart contract applications that run on the chain and execute in that virtual machine. But you can write them in real TypeScript. It is syntactically and semantically correct. It works with all your tools you have testing, linting, building etc. And you get a typed client you can use to call methods on these applications that run on the chain.

So you don't have to learn special purpose languages anymore like Solidity or Vypr or Rust or Move or stuff like that. So as TypeScript developers in this room you can essentially add blockchain into your stack in the language that you already know and love. So how do we do that? We created a compiler. This is kind of a cool thing in the TypeScript world these days. Our compiler takes a few steps. It starts with the TypeScript that you write, goes through the TypeScript abstract syntax tree, a couple more steps, a couple of intermediate representations, and then it ends up as Teal.

This is an assembly language that runs on the blockchain. That eventually becomes the bytecode that runs on the nodes of the chain. So Teal, which is what you used to have to write smart contracts in, looks like this. This is an assembly language, and I'm going to see what this looks like on the planetarium. Wow. So it's kind of impenetrable if you've never read this before. If you're familiar with assembly it'll look vaguely familiar. But this is not fun to write programs in.

But this is a real Hello World in Teal, and this is Hello World in Algorand TypeScript. So you should all be able to read this because this is real TypeScript, and you know what this does. So essentially, Algorand TypeScript is a framework with a limited implementation of what you can do in real TypeScript because the virtual machine doesn't have all the resources that your laptop does or a server does. But otherwise it's going to feel mostly the same. We have a couple of other examples to show you how approachable this is.

So if you wanted to accept stablecoins for your business or tokenize some digital asset, you could transfer an asset. And this is a really simple example of sending a token through an asset transfer. And it's just a couple of methods and you can chain them together and it's very approachable. And then finally we have the blockchain equivalent of a key value store because you can store data on the chain. And this should be familiar to anyone who's used a KV store in other contexts. So it's all easy to read and easy to develop now with this TypeScript framework that compiles down to the hard stuff. So that's it. We would love for you to experiment around and you can scan the QR code to get started with Algorand, read our docs, join our Discord, come ask some questions, and we run workshops all the time, live and recorded, so you can build your first application in one sitting. Thank you very much.