Stratis company was founded in the United Kingdom by entrepreneur and C# developer Chris Trew. This platform was still under major development which meant that components were still in beta or alpha. This month three of major components will graduate to production ready status,
Components being released as production ready is their Full Node, SideChains and Smart Contacts.
Full Node
The Full Node is based on a multi consensus blockchain. It is a one off in the industry, as it is very modular and based on different consensus rules.
It also supports the more eco friendly proof-of-stack mining algorithm.
The full node can sync with both the Bitcoin network and with the Stratus blockchain network. Looking at how the code was architectured with with minor modifications additional networks can be added in the future.
The code of the Full Node is open source and available on github. The Full node is also available on the Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. Making deployments of azure a very easy process.
Smart Contracts
Smart Contracts is also another feature that is moving to production ready status. This feature allows developers to create smart contracts using the Stratis network. This gives the developers the ability to create a smart contract using C# and the .NET Core framework. Considerably reducing the time and effort required to build a smart contact as existing development teams can easily switch to blockchain without the need of learning new languages or toolsets.
Contracts can be written and debugged with Visual Studio.
As with Ethereum these smart contract require ‘gas’ to run. The amount of ‘gas’ required to run the contract depends on the number of instructions present in the contract. The total amount of STRAT consumed to run the contract is represented as the amount gas * the gas price. (STRAT is the currency used in the Stratus network).
SideChains.
SideChains which will be released for production with smart contracts is a concept aimed at enterprise organisations that want to build their own blockchain solution based on the Stratis network. An organisation can create its own blockchain but still be part of the Stratis Chain.
The has the main benefit that any advancement in the main chain ripples down to the private chains (Side Chains) attached to it.
Being on a Sidechain also provides better performance since transactions are not part of the main Stratis Chain. A similar approach used by Bitcoin’s m. Lightning Network were transaction are handled outside the main network.
Sidechains can also be tweaked allowing adjustments to blocksizes and block intervals.
The distinctive feature of the framework is that development on this infrastructure in based on C# and the .Net Core which means that it caters for a huge developing force, numbering in the millions as opposed to its competitors. 2019 will be a very interesting year for this framework when it will come to adoption given that is is now production ready.
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