Reach: DApp Programming Gateway with Chris Swenor and Jay McCarthy

Blockchain technology has a wide variety of potential applications. Fields such as finance, supply chain management, and even voting have seen innovations driven by the development of distributed applications built on blockchains, called DApps. However, developing a DApp on a blockchain often requires low-level knowledge about cryptographic protocols or particular networks. Since no one blockchain platform has emerged as dominant- and the field itself is rapidly evolving- there is a high opportunity cost for developers if they choose to invest significant time learning one blockchain paradigm or another. Reach provides a platform for developing DApps, complete with a high-level language based on Javascript. Reach allows developers to write one set of code to specify the DApp and all its components, and which can be deployed onto any blockchain implementation under the hood. Reach’s goal is to allow developers to focus on writing business logic for their DApps rather than worrying about low-level implementation details and aims to smooth the steep learning curve for developers new to the world of blockchain. Chris Swenor and Jay McCarthy are the founders of Reach. Chris was formerly the co-founder and CEO of Alacris Protocol, an operating system for blockchain applications, and he is currently a technologist in residence and mentor at Harvard. Jay has been a computer science professor for over a decade, and worked on the development of the Racket programming language. Chris and Jay join the show today to talk about the challenges of developing on blockchain, how Reach helps make blockchain developers more productive, and how the blockchain ecosystem might evolve in the future.