Bitcoin Cash [BCH] becomes dApp developer-friendly with the release of BitDB 2.0

Recently, the Bitcoin Cash [BCH] page on Twitter released the news of an update to a queryable database being built on top of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. This project is known as BitDB, and it saw the release of its version 2.0 yesterday.

The project allows users to build applications on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain and gives them access to a queryable database built on MongoDB. This represents a move from BitDB 1.0, which was a database built specifically for applications that utilized the OP_RETURN opcode.

It also functions as a standard API for all the tasks related to OP_RETURN on the blockchain, which served the purpose of crawling all OP_RETURN transactions. After doing so, the software would store the data in a queryable database in the form of an instance in MongoDB,

The various applications that used the first version of BitDB included matter.cash, a decentralized blogging site on the blockchain, and simpleledger.cash and Bitcoin Cash UTXO token implementation. Some other applications include the Chrome extension for memo.cash, bookchain.cash, which allowed users to store books on the blockchain and memopay, which was for running an advertising campaign on Bitcoin Cash.

Now, instead of being only an OP_RETURN database, BitDB is a universal Bitcoin Cash database. It has the ability to continuously sync with the blockchain, and stores every Bitcoin Cash transaction in a structured document format. This can then be queried like a regular database and can perform actions like filtering data and building powerful dApps on the blockchain.

It boasts of a universal transaction database, as it crawls every single transaction, and stores and indexes every piece of it. It also has a script database that indexes every push data in every Bitcoin Cash script.

This means that developers on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain can build dApps with BitDB2. Moreover, it also indexes connection edges between transaction inputs and outputs. This allows developers to query the transaction graph as well.

The announcement stated:

“Carefully leveraging all the potential, [developers] can even build a token that talks to another token, a token that interoperates with other protocols, and an application protocol that talks to another application protocol.”

The existence of Bitdb also means that dApps can be built without the presence of a server, as the database contains all the data and provides a query interface to go with it. This means that “moderately sophisticated” Bitcoin Cash data processing applications can be built with a focus on application logic.

The use of MongoDB stands out, as it exists as one of the most flexible databases with an extremely high throughput. It is also collated with a “trust but verify” model. The cherry on top of the project is that all the data is secured by the Proof-of-Work algorithm, historically hailed as one of the most secure consensus mechanisms.