Cosmos .NET API released

C# steadily stays in top 5 positions in Tiobe rating for years. There are many applications built with it from web applications and services, to machine learning algorithms and games, both mobile and desktop.

Cosmos Blockchain provides rich infrastructure for decentralized solutions such as Identity, shared security, IPFS, and interoperability.

Marrying two technologies through Cosmos .NET API allows anyone to expand their .NET application to the world of decentralized Apps. With Cosmos .NET API a client application may use Cosmos blockchain node as a gateway to the serverless application such as a distributed database or a trustless piece of application logic. Blockchains allow secure sharing of data and logic between multiple .NET applications or multiple users of the same application.

Let’s imagine a service that allows tracing of items in supply chain (either food or airplaine parts). Any large supply chain will have tens or hundreds of companies, each with its own technology stack, business processes, and a management system. With the power of .NET, simplicity of blockchain interoperability, and shared security, the integration task that looked enormous before becomes more and more possible.

Disruption of industries, the term that was popular in 2017 during ICO rush and crypto-hype, may also become a reality, since many enterprise systems are based on .NET technology stack. With a simple adapter code written in C#, one can use a chain based on Cosmos SDK as a database layer or run distributed code on a Tendermint virtual machine.

For example, both Blue Cross Blue Shield and United Health Care use .NET technology and relational databases to build their software, and they would happily share some data. Not all data of course because of regulations and commercial secrets, but some data such as patient payment credibility would be beneficial to share. Right now it is done through a third party such as a credit bureau. How nice would be sharing zero knowledge proofs about how (in)accurately a patient makes payments directly between BCBS and UHC? It would not be necessary to integrate with credit bureau APIs and pay for credit checks. Without any additional knowledge about Cosmos blockchain, our API can be used by the .NET engineers who work for these companies today to integrate each other’s systems.

Another huge set of API applications lays in gaming. Games lose and attract users every day. They face security issues, which are hard to track because of high development pace. They starve for monetization schemes. All these issues can be addressed by means of integration with a blockchain, but blockchain developers are sometimes hard to find, and sometimes developing a dApp takes longer than the time-to-market requirement allows. Luckily the majority of games is developed in the Unity framework. This framework is based on .NET, and developers who have experience with Unity, are also knowledgeable in C# and .NET, which opens doors for the integration with Cosmos blockchains through the .NET API. Of course gaming applications will require some custom logic put on-chain (such as Non Fungible Tokens, user identity and profiles, and maybe some basic game logic), but this code can be made very reusable, and there is a good chance it is already being built by someone at the time of reading. So the only job for developers would be to stay agnostic about blockchain insides and just use these features through a well known API interface.

Usetech has created the .NET API, it is available here: https://github.com/usetech-llc/cosmos_api_dotnet