What is Bearmint
Episode 1
Welcome to the new Bearmint Investigation Series. As we near the public release, this extensive series will dive into the brand new ARK framework and consensus called Bearmint while breaking it down as simply as we can.
This is just the beginning and a quick overview of what Bearmint is and what it’s attempting to accomplish. Of course it is more complicated than this simple overview, but this series is here to help make things less complicated and more understandable to everyone. In upcoming blogs, we may get more technical.
What is Bearmint?
On June 23rd 2022, this brand new blockchain framework was announced from both ARK and the Basecode team. Basecode is the team behind the new framework and is run by ARK’s former CTO Brian Faust.
Bearmint is a brand new complete blockchain framework developed for ARK. This new framework is called Bearmint because it is developed in part with an industry leading consensus protocol named Tendermint. Some of you may be familiar with Tendermint as the Cosmos Blockchain project also utilizes it.
Bearmint is being developed with the purpose to remove major hurdles of blockchain development. One such hurdle it tackles is the programming language itself. Coded in Typescript programming language, Bearmint gives developers an easy to use and understandable toolset. This choice is to also give new developers to the blockchain space a quick and easy entry with little need to learn new practices or new languages making entry into the blockchain industry less intimidating overall.
Utilizing Tendermint at the core level also allows for full Byzantine-Fault Tolerance(BFT) as well. We won’t get to deep into this, but essentially this means the network can continue to run even if 1/3 of the nodes are failing or acting maliciously.
Bearmint also tackles ARK’s biggest hurdle, block finality, known as Time to Finality(TTF). With Bearmint, transactions will be finalized completely once accepted in a block and forged. You may be familiar with block confirmations, ie: Bitcoin, which can take around 6 confirmations before transactions are finalized and irreversible. You can see this in action on a large portion of exchanges that use this 6 block confirmation period before crediting your accounts with a deposit. Finality in ARK will happen with every block forged and validated by the network.
This block finality upgrade is key to interoperabilty and will play a huge role in ARK moving forward. But Bearmint is much more than a block finality upgrade. It’s a completely new codebase and framework for ARK. With brand new transactions that include NFT’s, Native Tokens on ARK and so much more.
Why Create an Entirely New Framework?
After years of work on ARK Core and many complete rewrites, it was very clear to the ARK team that Core, as it stands, cannot facilitate everything that they wanted to implement moving forward.
One major hurdle discussed above was block finality. This is a requirement in most distributed ledger systems to prevent malicious replays, rollbacks and more. Having a transaction finalized, immutable and irreversible as fast as possible is the cornerstone of securing any blockchain technology.
Many tools and frameworks exist already to make blockchain development easier, but many of these preexisting tools are overly complicated and require a high level of experience and knowledge in order to use. This is another reason Basecode decided to build entirely in the Typescript programming language. Typescript is a form of Javascript and the developer userbase is immense. Even many Web Developers are familiar with Typescript for website building.
The Basecode team describes Bearmint as: “A progressive framework, meaning you can get started with very little effort, but as your knowledge and application evolve, Bearmint will not impede your growth or development efforts. This makes Bearmint the ideal choice for both junior and senior developers as a result of its open architecture and underlying pragmatic approach.”
Essentially, Basecode saw the need for an easy and simple to use framework that could provide everything even a seasoned developer may need as there is nothing available currently that can fulfill everyone’s needs without any major pitfalls.
Conclusion
Bearmint is the next step in the evolution of ARK, but also a huge milestone for the entire blockchain industry. It’s entirely made up of hundreds of working parts that live in separate modules all working together as one. This allows every developer full control of every working part with the ability to customize everything.
This is the first blog overview from the Strake Foundation, with many more to come. Stay tuned for more from this series as we get closer to the Bearmint public testing release. Be sure to subscribe and follow us on social media to stay up to date and jump into the conversation on the ARK Community Discord as well.