This session explains leads the enterprise financial domain developer through their first practical steps in building applications using public blockchain technology – specifically the Ethereum blockchain. Blockchain is rapidly becoming the technological darling in the worlds of Fintech and established finance alike. It is difficult to find a bank who will admit to not having an exciting proof-of-concept project underway and a huge number of Fintech startups use blockchain in their products. 

The fundamental ideas of blockchain technology are not very hard to grasp and once its key characteristics are understood, good candidate applications often do emerge. However, the leap from understanding how things might work to actually making something work can be quite daunting. Often, this isn’t helped by unfamiliar languages, frameworks, and technologies that most experienced finance developers don’t know much about. 

In this session, we will briefly review blockchain fundamentals. Then, we will go through the process of creating an application that uses Java enterprise technology with Ethereum’s blockchain step by step to solve a simple application problem requiring distributed trust. Along the way, we’ll see how the two worlds interact, as well as the architecture, development frameworks, and environments needed to develop effectively in the Ethereum environment.