We're thrilled that you want to start building your app on the Hedera platform. We've assembled a bunch of resources (see below) to help you on your path to Hedera enlightenment; if you still have questions afterwards, come and ask us in the Hedera Hashgraph discord channels.
Everyone who builds their project on the Hedera platform will be granted early access to the Hedera mainnet and the opportunity to earn ℏ ("hbars" are our platform token) based upon their API activity on testnet and mainnet.
🏁 Build an application that best takes advantage of micropayments using the Hedera Cryptocurrency API.
- Pay per API request
- IoT device usage per second
- Blog post read
- Advertising
- Financial services
- In-game item used
The winning team members will each receive a Nintentdo Switch.
Teams who develop outstanding apps may also be introduced to Hedera partners who manage accelerator funds, with a view to possible funding and/or sponsorship.
When: TBD
Location: TBD
Time: TBD
Three of our amazing Hedera people are on site to help you with your questions
- Gehrig Kunz our Product Marketing Manager and the go-to person for general Hedera information (and swag)
- Ken Anderson our on-site Developer Advocate, is here to answer your technical questions
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- Anthony Middleton our Community Marketing Specialist, so he's right guy to talk to if you are interested in expanding the Hedera community
Do you have a development question for the Hedera team? Do you feel confident answering developer questions?
Hedera Q & A is your space to ask any technical questions or participate in Q and A about development on the Hedera platform.
Getting connected through the Hedera portal
We want to allow devs to earn ℏ by using our APIs. In order to be allowed to do this under US law we need to verify your identity on the Hedera Portal. This process is explained in detail in this video.
Should the automated identity verification fail, please email compliance@hedera.com with your name and email used to create your account.
For illustrative purposes, the examples below use the Hedera Go SDK. You can use whichever of the Hedera SDKs you prefer. If you prefer, you can watch a video walkthrough of these steps to get you connected and make your first micro-payment.
- Complete the ID verification process (see above)
- Ken can provide teams with Hedera access codes once they have completed registration. Please feel free to approach him in person or email at da@hedera.com.
- Create a folder for your repo. In terminal:
mkdir hedera-z2mfollowed mycd hedera-z2m - So that you don't have to build your entire codebase from scratch make sure you have git-lfs installed. In terminal:
brew install git-lfs - Initialise a new module in Go. In terminal
go mod init github.com/<username>/hedera-z2mmaking sure that you replace<username>with your own github username. - Use your IDE of choice to manipulate source code in subsequent steps. In the Hedera DA team both VSCode and GoLand are commonly used.
- You can achieve this easily with the following go code (see file
keys.goattached to this gist)
package main
import (
"fmt"
"github.com/hashgraph/hedera-sdk-go"
)
func main() {
secret := hedera.GenerateSecretKey()
fmt.Printf("secret = %v\n", secret)
public := secret.Public()
fmt.Printf("public = %v\n", public)
}- Execute this code from terminal, using
go run keys.go - Make a note of both of the keys output generated. For a testnet you can copy and paste the keys into a text file, although for security reasons you should never do this for mainnet.
-
There are several key items shown in the Hedera portal. Keep the Hedera portal open or make a node of these items so that you can connect to the testnet:
- Your Hedera Account ID for this testnet – e.g.
0:0:1099 - The testnet Address and Port – e.g.
testnet.hedera.com:50123 - The Hedera Node ID – e.g.
0:0:3
All Hedera IDs consist of three long-integers separated by colons. The three numbers represent
Shard-number,Realm numberandAccount numberrespectively. Shards and Realms are not yet in use so expect the first two numbers to be zeros. - Your Hedera Account ID for this testnet – e.g.
All of the code explained from here to the end of Step 9 is contained within the file main.go attached to this gist)
- Create a new
main.gofile as follows:
package main
import (
"fmt"
"time"
"github.com/hashgraph/hedera-sdk-go"
)
func main() {Establish connection to the Hedera node by using the testnet Address and Port shown in the Hedera portal. Be sure to replace the example 50123 to your specific port.
Defer the disconnection of the connection to guarantee a clean disconnect from the node.
client := hedera.Dial("testnet.hedera.com:50123")
defer client.Close()Initialise the myAccount variable based on your Account ID from the portal. Ensure that you replace the example 1099 with your own Account ID.
myAccount := hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1099)Check your account balance. GetAccountBalance constructs the request; adding .Answer() executes the request. Don't forget error-handling.
fmt.Printf can then output the balance.
myBalance, err := client.GetAccountBalance(myAccount).Answer()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("Your balance: %v \n", myBalance)Finally, close the braces for func main.
}-
You should now be able to run your first Hedera program by executing
go run main.gofrom terminal. -
If everything goes according to plan you should see
Your balance; 10000which represents the initial number of hbars in your testnet account.
-
For hackathon purposes, testnets have been throttled, allowing a limited number of Hedera transactions per account per second. Hackathon-specific testnet configuration is further described in a section later in this document.
-
In order to accommodate testnet throttling, it's necessary to add a short delay between transactions issued to the Hedera node. To add a one second delay, use the following code:
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)- If such delays are not included between transactions, it is likely that
transaction failed the pre-check: Busyerrors will be observed upon execution.
-
If you know the account ID of another account on your testnet – perhaps a friend or colleague – you can also check their balance. If your friends won’t share their accounts, or if you don’t have any friends, see the
account.gofile attached to this gist in order to create additional accounts. -
For the purposes of this example, an Account ID of
0:0:1100will be used for that second account. Don't forget to amend1100to the account number of your friend's account. Failing to do this will likely result in atransaction failed the pre-check: InvalidAccountmessage. -
To continue with the example, add the following code into
func mainbefore the closing braces:Before executing any transfers, you can initialise a second variable
friendAccountrepresenting the second account, query its balance and output the result.
friendAccount := hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1100)
friendBalance, err = client.GetAccountBalance(friendAccount).Answer()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("Friend balance: %v \n", friendBalance)Once again, a delay is be added to accommodate testnet throttling. For brevity, this statement will be included without further comment in all subsequent examples.
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)-
Run the program again by executing
go run main.gofrom terminal. -
Assuming that neither account has made any transfers so far, you should see
Your balance; 10000followed byFriend balance; 10000as the initial number of hbars in both testnet account is the same.
-
Your secret key (also known as private key) is required in order to transfer hbars out of your account. You should have noted this when it was generated in Step 4 of this process (above).
-
The term "operator" used in the naming of the next variable
operatorSecretis used to highlight the fact that this is the account responsible for submitting the transaction. Ensure that your replace<my-secret-key>with your own secret key in the following code block:
operatorSecret, err := hedera.SecretKeyFromString("<my-secret-key>")
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}The next statement is more complex as it takes advantage of the builder pattern. The statement is included in its entirety; each line is explained individually below. Take care to replace 1099 with your account number and 1100 with your friend's account number.
response, err := client.CryptoTransfer().
Operator(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1099)).
Node(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 3)).
Transfer(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1099), -1).
Transfer(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1100), 1).
Sign(operatorSecret).
Sign(operatorSecret).
Execute()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}-
Line 1:
response, err := client.CryptoTransfer().creates a transaction to transfer hbars between accounts. -
Line 2:
Operator(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1099)).identifies the account initiating the transaction. -
Line 3:
Node(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 3)).identifies the account of the Hedea node to which the transaction is being sent. -
Line 4:
Transfer(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1099), -1).sets up a transfer, which pairs an account with a signed integer. In this case, the account is your account and the amount is -1. The negative number indicates that the balance of your account will be decremented by this amount. -
Line 5:
Transfer(hedera.NewAccountID(0, 0, 1100), 1).creates a second transfer, pairing an account with a signed integer. In this case, the account is your friend's account and the amount is 1. The positive number indicates that the balance of your account will be incremented by this amount. Important: the sum of all transfers contained within in aCryptoTransfermust equal zero. -
Lines 6 and 7:
Sign(operatorSecret).adds a signature based on a secret key. It is necessary to repeat this line to sign as both operator initiating the transfer transaction and account holder associated with an outgoing (negative) transfer – even though both keys are the same. -
Line 8:
Execute()executes the transaction.Next, the ID of the transaction itself is captured from the
responsein the above statement. ThetransactionIDis made up of the account ID and the transaction timestamp right down to nanoseconds.
transactionID := response.ID
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)You can now request a receipt and print the status using the following code. Although this is not a mandatory step, it does verify that your transaction successfully reached network consensus.
receipt, err := client.GetTransactionReceipt(transactionID).Answer()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("Transfer Transaction Status: %v \n", receipt.Status)
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)A status code of 1 indicates success.
Finally, you can requery the balance of both accounts to verify that 1 hbar was indeed transferred from your account to that of your friend.
myBalance, err = client.GetAccountBalance(myAccount).Answer()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("Your new balance: %v \n", myBalance)
time.Sleep(1 * time.Second)
friendBalance, err = client.GetAccountBalance(friendAccount).Answer()
if err != nil {
panic(err)
}
fmt.Printf("Friend new balance: %v \n", friendBalance)-
Run the program again by executing
go run main.gofrom terminal. -
If neither account has made any transfers previously, you should see
Your new balance; 9999followed byFriend new balance; 10001demonstarting that 1 hbar has been transferred from your account to you friend's account.
-
Transactions are throttled to one per second
- Fee schedule disabled, so transactions will incur no fees.
- Very early access to Hedera.
- Virtual infrastructure supporting testnets.
- Crypto Transfers will be throttled to 100/s if no receipt or record is requested.
-
Only ED25519 keys are supported
- ECDSA and RSA not supported yet, but "watch this space."
-
It's unlikely, but your testnet may be rebooted
- It's possible that your state may be erased. We will email you if that happens.
- Please don’t create too many entities (< 1000) or use too much storage (< 1GB)
-
We want to encourage innovation – not stress-testing of the testnets
-
System logs will be analyzed after the event.
- Prizes in ℏ may be awarded to those demonstrating paticularly imaginative use of the SDKs.
The Hedera API is based on Google Protobuf, which supports code generation and is highly optimised. The transport layer is currently gRPC. Hedera is seeding several open-source SDKs under Apache 2.0.
- Currently supported for Micropay:
- Coming soon:
- Hedera Python SDK
- Hedera node.js SDK
At Hedera, we would like to encourage the community to build more SDKs
- Abstraction of protobuf complexity
- OOTB support for cryptographic keys
- Easy on-ramp for app developers
We know that everyone says "we value your feedback" but we really do. Our platform lives or dies based on the opinions of our developer community. Your suggestions can have a huge impact on our direction.
Please reach out to Ken in person during the hackathon; as a developer advocate, it's his job to advocate on your behalf, pushing your impressions, comments and criticism to our core engineering team.
If you don't have time, or you're too shy, please reach out to us on our discord channels. We're fortunate to have an active community of over 5000 like-minded devs, who are passionate about our tech. The Dev Advocacy team also participates actively.
Once the hackathon is over, please fill out the feedback form.
Each project using the Hedera platform will be scored on the following categories:
- Novel, innovative idea (25%)
- Challenge fit - project matches the challenge specified above (25%)
- Real-world feasibility and fundability (25%)
- Technical execution and prototype maturity (25%)
The Hedera hashgraph platform provides a new form of distributed consensus; a way for people who don't know or trust each other to securely collaborate and transact online without the need for a trusted intermediary. The platform is lightning fast, fair, and secure and, unlike some blockchain-based platforms, doesn’t require compute-heavy proof-of-work. Hedera enables and empowers developers to build an entirely new class of decentralized applications that were never before possible.
Hedera hashgraph is fast. Right at the speed of your internet fast. The platform is built on the virtual-voting consensus algorithm, invented by Dr. Leemon Baird. This algorithm provides near-perfect efficiency in bandwidth usage, handling hundreds of thousands of micro-payment transactions per second and verifying over one million signatures per second. Time to finality is measured in seconds; not minutes, hours, or days. Consensus is 100% certain and, unique to Hedera, guaranteed to never change.
Hedera hashgraph is fair, ensuring the consensus order of transactions reflects the transaction order received by the community. The platform ensures no single user can block the flow of transactions into the community, and no small group of users can unduly influence the consensus order of these transactions. These features are absent from many distributed ledger technologies, but are a requirement for existing applications today, such as markets and games.
Hedera hashgraph has the strongest level of security possible in this category, which is Asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance (ABFT). The platform is the only distributed ledger technology that has formally proven this quality. Achieving this level of security at scale is a fundamental advance in the field of distributed systems. Hedera guarantees consensus, in real time, and is resistant to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, an area of vulnerability for some public ledger platforms.
With Hedera hashgraph there are no leaders; everyone gets a vote. Platform-level trust is achieved by explicitly mistrusting each individual node, but requiring 2/3 or more of tokens held by (and proxied to) all nodes to determine each and every vote.
- For an explanation of the underlying hashgraph algorithm, please consult our whitepaper or a simple explanation video.
- Hedera news can be found in the Hedera Blog including recent Coq validation of the hashgraph ABFT algorithm.
- 250+ Hedera interviews and videos on YouTube. Thanks to Arvyda – a Hedera MVP – for curating this list.
Please reach out to us on the Hedera discord channels. We're fortunate to have an active community of over 5000 like-minded devs, who are passionate about our tech. The Dev Advocacy team also participates actively.
This documentation contains multiple occurrences of OLD API call:
secret := hedera.GenerateSecretKey()which need to be replaced with:
secret, phrase := hedera.GenerateSecretKey()according the announcement by @kenthejr in Discord.
Please fix the docs.
Thanks!