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Reach - The Easiest and Safest way to Build DApps

Chris Swenor
Chris Swenor Reach
November 12, 2020

Odds are, if you’ve attempted to build a blockchain application on any platform using existing tooling, you had to overcome many obstacles or been thwarted altogether. Fact is, blockchain development is extremely complicated, time-consuming, and risky; only those with language specific knowledge can truly engage with blockchain. This is a major deterrent to promoting blockchain development, which continues to be in its nascency.

Reach was recently awarded an Algorand Foundation Grant to tackle this set of problems. Not just to incrementally improve the development experience, but to fundamentally change the way blockchain developers approach their craft. To fully appreciate the value of the Reach solution, it’s imperative to delve deeper into the crux of the blockchain development problem:

Time-Consuming - First, blockchain development requires developers to code at a very low level of abstraction. This would be similar to building a web application, but you may only use Assembly. It’s theoretically possible, but entirely impractical.

Complexity - Second, when you develop a blockchain application you aren’t building a single application, you are building multiple applications that all have to communicate with each other in a highly adversarial environment. You have to make sure that every update is applied to every application, and you have to guarantee that they will stay in sync.

Dangerous - Third, the likelihood of error is high – and auditing is too expensive. When someone hacks your web application worst-case scenario you roll back your database. When someone hacks your blockchain application not only all of your assets will be taken but all of your user’s assets can be taken.

Protocol Lockin - Finally, protocols are divided and mostly proprietary. If you chose to build on a protocol your application would now be locked on that protocol. Should you ever want to transition to a different platform you would have to rewrite your application from scratch.

Clearly, current blockchain development is prohibitively difficult and in need of significant, measurable improvement. Considering the aforementioned challenges, we asked ourselves the question, “How can we make blockchain development 10X or even 100X better?” The solution emerged over the course of a year and is based on our Co-Founder and CTO’s 15+ years of computer science research and investigation of formal verification, compilation, and cryptographic protocols.

Reach fixes all of the major challenges associated with building on blockchain in the following ways:

  • Reach raises the level of abstraction to allow developers to code at the level of business logic allowing them to develop applications in a fraction of the time.
  • Reach outputs the entire protocol level of the DApp so one need not worry about building both the smart contract and the client endpoints.
  • Reach automatically mathematically guarantees protection against entire categories of potential bugs, and allows for a developer to insert inline custom assertions that would have otherwise taken a highly-skilled consultant many hours to replicate.
  • Developers no longer need to worry about proprietary coding requirements of the individual protocols. They can write their application once and launch it on a chain that best fits their needs. This benefits the developer mindshare because it will allow more developers to more readily collaborate no matter the protocol of their choice.

Reach continues to add robust use cases to its reserve, all of which paint a telling picture of the unique advantages the Reach platform has to offer. For example, Algorand Developer Ambassador Cosimo Bassi recently implemented the game of Nim as AlgoNim on the Algorand Blockchain. As bulleted below, results of this use-case are striking; while AlgoNim took over 60 hours and 1500+ lines of hand-built TEAL, Reach cut development time to under an hour using fewer than 100 lines of code.

AlgoNim

ReachNim

Reach is drastically faster, easier, and safer..

Using Reach, mainstream developers are introduced to Algorand Smart Contracts on Layer 1 (ASC1) along side Ethereum contracts by outputting both TEAL and Solidty code for each Reach program. Furthermore, our solution gives developers the agency to seamlessly transition between protocols, leveraging each chain’s unique value proposition and features without added complexity, time, or resources.

But don’t just take our word for it! Check out Reach for yourself and join our community! We’d be thrilled to have you.

Docs: https://docs.reach.sh
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnrHr0UG2pRkHCO-EloEkjw
Discord Community: https://discord.gg/AZsgcXu

Start Building on Algorand

Check out the Algorand Blockchain Development using Reach tutorial series to get started quickly.