Hangzhou, home to the e-commerce giant Alibaba, has seen a growing number of technology startups working to turn their ideas into business. Bytom, Hangzhou’s first assets-focused public chain project released its first testnet “BigBang” on September 29. With the combination of Bytom Core and Bytomcli, or command line tool, the testnet is completed via Golang and along with full test cases. The core code of BigBang is now available on GitHub.

At BigBang, Bytom accomplishes the design of a basic blockchain framework that enables multiple byte assets interoperation. Here are its main functions:

• It supports a blockchain nodes-based peer to peer communication module where blocks and transactions synchronize via Reactor.
• A public and private key management infrastructure that has an interface which is compatible with enterprise–level hardware security module (HSM).
• It supports the issuing(Issue) and spending(Spend) of diversified assets and a programmable scripting system (Control Program).
• It adds the feature Segregated Witness that makes transactions more flexible.

CTO of the Bytom project notes that:

“The next version of the Bytom testnet will work to improve completeness and practicality of assets interoperation.”

Initiated by 8btc, the Bytom project aims to connect the atomic world with the byte world to build an interactive protocol with which assets can be registered, exchanged, gambled and engaged in other more complicated and contract-based interoperation via Bytom.

A complete and effective blockchain protocol tailor-made for interoperation of multi byte assets has not been created. As an asset-focused public chain,Bytom enjoys eight innovations.

• Compatible with the UTXO design of Bitcoin
• General address format
• Compatible with National Encryption Standard
• Asset naming using ODIN
• POW algorithm that is friendly to AI ASIC-chips
• Cross-chain asset transactions and dividends distribution through sidechain
• Quasi “Segregated Witness” Design
• Enhanced Trading Flexibility

The Bytom team has been working on the development since they released the whitepaper in June. The testnet BigBang adds Segwit and new address of BIP 173 and other latest breakthroughs in the blockchain technology.

Why choose the name BigBang? The Bytom team is confident that the testnet will work like a huge cosmic explosion that opens a whole new world by bridging together the physical and the byte world.

At Bytom, there are a handful of experienced engineers and blockchain talents. Gavin who worked at ARRIS GROUP for years and contributed code for parity (Ethereum client) is now a developer at Bytom. James, designer and developer of big data and distributed game systems at Magmic Inc., is responsible for the development of Blockmeta. And the team took home the second prize of Cosmos Hackathon, which represents the best performance any Chinese teams achieved in the competition. The team will have more developers from America, Russia and Korea.

The Bytom team will follow their roadmap to release the official testnet at the fourth quarter of 2017 and Bytom 1.0 at the second quarter of 2018.

BigBang open source on GitHub: https://github.com/bytom/bytom