Tendermint aims to create a globally decentralized validator network suitable for enterprise. The first step towards achieving that goal is a new tool they recently launched, which empowers developers to quickly and easily launch their blockchains to any major cloud provider in under 3 minutes.

A creator’s perspective

Jae Kwon is the Founder and CEO of Tendermint. Jae speaks to Cointelegraph on this new creation at Tendermint. He says;

"At Tendermint we believe that in order to build a robust blockchain platform we cannot work with a single cloud hosting provider. We must work with a set of globally distributed hosting providers. This is the only way to provide 100% uptime and security guarantees.

We have taken the first step towards achieving that worldview with an open source tool for deploying blockchains to any major cloud provider: Mintnet.

We are in the midst of creating an extremely modular and agnostic blockchain platform. Today using the Tendermint Socket Protocol(TMSP), you can build your blockchains with any programming language, and now with mintnet you can deploy your blockchain to any cloud provider.

We are working hard to tie all the pieces together under one unified platform"

Jae Kwon, Founder and CEO of Tendermint

Mintnet is up and running

The Co-Founder of Tendermint, Dustin Byington adds:

“You can begin using mintent today! The proof is in the source and our source is on github.”

“One of our goals is to create the first globally decentralized validator network suitable for enterprise.”  

According to Dustin, mintnet is designed to allow developers launch their own testnet on either the google cloud platform, aws, microsoft azure, or digital ocean. Total time to deployment will take under 3 minutes and using the Tendermint Socket Protocol they'll be able to program their blockchains in any language. Current speed tests are clocking at 10k+ tx/block with 1 second block time. In his words;

Tendermint hosts a step-by-step tutorial on how to run Tendermint Socket Protocol (TMSP) on their website.

Dustin explains that Mintnet is a tool created to allow developers to quickly deploy their Tendermint TMSP applications to cloud providers, noting that TMSP is the Tendermint Socket Protocol that allows developer to build blockchain applications using any programming language and leverage Tendermint’s best-in-class speed, security, and scalability. The Consensys/Microsoft Azure partnership is the closest application to mintnet that he is aware of.

“As far as we know this is the first tool that allows developers to deploy to any major cloud provider.” He concludes.

The Blockchain is evolving

The Founder of UTXO, Rob Gonzalez, thinks that this new development is an “evolutionary step, and not a revolutionary leap.”

Rob puts it this way:

“Mintnet is a deployment tool, it commands to start, stop, provision, create, etc. blockchain applications. It is like Heroku, it is the Heroku of Blockchain. Whereas in Openchain you have to stop and start it, all the same, but it’s running on your own machine.

Mintnet is a command-line interface for interacting with Tendermint’s remotely hosted blockchain as a service.”

Rob believes that there is more to come as he concludes by saying:

“I believe 2016 will be an interesting year for not only blockchain [sic] but also the web in general.”