The ActorForth Organization and Bitcoin Cash
The ActorForth organization is focused on innovative development in the cryptoledger space. What's unique about our team is that several of the core principles of the group individually have over 30 years of software engineering and architecture experience. We founded the Proteus Group which consists of Proteus Technologies and Proteus Ops that introduced bleeding edge language, software, and operations in the United States, UK, Europe, Japan, and SEAsia since 1995. We launched the ActorForth organization in 2018 as a result of our core belief that cryptoledgers are going to revolutionize the world in terms of both commerce & governance, and that the development tools and languages available today to the crypto community are completely inadequate to meet that potential. We've done innovative projects for clients using Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar, and Bitcoin Cash. Today we believe the direction that Bitcoin Cash has adopted and the culture of its community are best placed to demonstrate the innovative possibilities of cryptoledgers and benefit from our organizational experience. That belief was recently reinforced by the great community response we received in our efforts leading the new CHIP process for pushing through the "Multiple OP_RETURN" proposal for the upcoming May release. We anticipate that process will continue to mature and guide innovation within the Bitcoin Cash community while also keeping it on track with its core purpose to be the best peer-to-peer digital cash in the solar system!
In 2020 our first Bitcoin Cash effort was to attempt to introduce some core software engineering processes and tools to 1) make it easier to onboard dev groups to create new Bitcoin Cash focused applications, and 2) vastly increase the quality and reliability of these systems both in terms of functionality and non-functional terms such as system uptime, performance, and scalability. To wit, we identified Bitcoin.com's RESTful API and the SLPDB systems as core services that any dev group would need to be able to host local isolated dev/test environments. This project is called BCH-toolkit and is a simple to install code base consisting of multiple Docker images from over 10 existing core open source Bitcoin Cash projects + an implementation of Bitcoin.com's proprietary NSight service interface that we've open sourced called OpenSight. As regtest mode was broken for most of these projects we did a lot of updates to repair this problem and have submitted those PRs upstream to their main projects. We've also added SLP support (mostly SLP addresses) to several that didn't have such before and have also submitted those PRs upstream. There are also other core Bitcoin Cash systems that we plan to bring into the BCH-toolkit project so anyone can run them locally quickly and easily under regtest mode. Our driving policy is that we want to contribute to the open source nature of the community and the diversity of implementations of the core protocols. We believe having multiple implementations of the Bitcoin Cash key infrastructure and protocols is extremely healthy and valuable to achieving the goals and realizing the potential of Bitcoin Cash and you will see this as a driving force in 100% of our efforts. A healthy Bitcoin Cash community should have enough traction to support a sufficient variety of quality implementations to ensure it remains fully decentralized.
BCH-toolkit was designed to be a dev/test tool and not focused on Main Net because Bitcoin.com had been doing a fine job of supporting the Bitcoin Cash development community for longer than we've even been aware of Bitcoin Cash. So imagine our surprise on March 31st when we discovered that the RESTful API services of Bitcoin.com were going to be decommissioned and are referring their users to Fullstack.cash to continue their service! As it happens we're also big fans of Chris Troutner's (the guy behind Fullstack.cash) work and have incorporated his Javascript apis, bch-api & bch-js, into BCH-toolkit while adding missing regtest address support for both. We believe Fullstack.cash will be an increasingly important commercial & community member of the Bitcoin Cash community - especially for those focused on Javascript based systems. Fitting in with our belief that diversity of protocol implementations being an important thing to maintain, our focus is on more type-safe languages such as C++, Elm, and Typescript by providing implementations of core systems in these languages and to keep as much API compatibility with the original service as possible so we have deployed a Main Net version of our BCH-toolkit to duplicate the soon-to-be decommissioned offering at rest.bitcoin.com as another alternative for Bitcoin Cash developers and users. As we stabilize these extended capabilities we will offer them as updated features of our open source BCH-toolkit as well so others can host their own deployments in either Main Net or regtest modes (and likely other test nets as well if there is sufficient interest).
ActorForth's RESTful BCH Service
You can find our RESTful service at https://rest.bch.actorforth.org/. It lists the currently supported core APIs that were previously found at https://rest.bitcoin.com/. There are some additional legacy API endpoints that we have not added support for yet as we are not aware of anyone using them. If YOU need some of these APIs supported for your current project please let us know in our ActorForth Gitter community support group or email bch-api@actorforth.org.
Presently access is free but rate limited to 4 requests every 3 seconds or 1.33 reqs/second per IP address. So long as we operate the service there will always be a free tier. It will likely adjust its response time dynamically based on overall server load once the SLA (Service Level Agreement) tracker is configured and deployed. At that point we will also be offering a few paid tiers that will provide not just guarantees for request velocity, but also guarantees for timeliness of the response - something almost no other vendor in the world is capable of providing for any API. This is in the works now and we will publish updates as progress is made. Right now we have the working service and are conducting the necessary performance, load, and capacity tests as we make adjustments to the deployment so we can have confidence in our SLA offerings. You will, of course, always be able to pay using BCH!
ActorForth's SLPDB BCH Service
At https://slpdb.bch.actorforth.org/ you will also find that we have full support for SLPDB. We're big fans of SLP tokens and have specified a protocol for a Bitcoin Cash Auction System that utilizes both NFT & FT SLP tokens (which drove our support for the Multi OP_RETURN enhancement). As with the rest.bch API service, it will be available free but rate limited. Since SLPDB queries are so dynamic the SLA we'll be offering will have different terms & conditions most likely.
Going Forward with Bitcoin Cash
Additionally, we will be expanding the types of APIs we'll be offering based on some commercial capabilities we want to offer (for example support for easy payments, a secure price Oracle, etc...) and also what kind of feedback we get from the community. Based on usage we will add additional infrastructure and likely distribute servers to parts of the world closer to the demand. Our team has extensive experience doing this for highly utilized systems but we really don't have a clear idea what kinds of loads we will encounter given this is a legacy system with a lot of anonymous users. Regardless - our own systems are using this environment commercially so we have real skin in the game for ensuring it runs well and stays up all the time. Hopefully our initial kickoff won't be too bumpy and we will help Bitcoin Cash establish a reputation for being a highly reliable community on which it's safe to build high value commercial offerings. Please don't hesitate to contact us for advice and assistance on how to do just that.