Theta Blockchain Ledger Protocol

The Theta Blockchain Ledger is a Proof-of-Stake decentralized ledger designed for the video streaming industry. It powers the Theta token economy which incentives end users to share their redundant bandwidth and storage resources, and encourage them to engage more actively with video platforms and content creators. The ledger employs a novel multi-level BFT consensus engine, which supports high transaction throughput, fast block confirmation, and allows mass participation in the consensus process. Off-chain payment support is built directly into the ledger through the resource-oriented micropayment pool, which is designed specifically to achieve the “pay-per-byte” granularity for streaming use cases. Moreover, the ledger storage system leverages the microservice architecture and reference counting based history pruning techniques, and is thus able to adapt to different computing environments, ranging from high-end data center server clusters to commodity PCs and laptops. The ledger also supports Turing-Complete smart contracts, which enables rich user experiences for DApps built on top of the Theta Ledger. For more technical details, please refer to our technical whitepaper and 2019 IEEE ICBC paper "Scalable BFT Consensus Mechanism Through Aggregated Signature Gossip".

To learn more about the Theta Network in general, please visit the Theta Documentation site: https://docs.thetatoken.org/docs/what-is-theta-network.

Table of Contents

• Setup
• Smart Contract and DApp Development on Theta

Setup

Intall Go

Install Go and set environment variables GOPATH , GOBIN, and PATH. The current code base should compile with Go 1.14.2. On macOS, install Go with the following command

brew install [email protected]
brew link [email protected] --force

Build and Install

Next, clone this repo into your $GOPATH. The path should look like this: $GOPATH/src/github.com/thetatoken/theta

git clone https://github.com/thetatoken/theta-protocol-ledger.git $GOPATH/src/github.com/thetatoken/theta
export THETA_HOME=$GOPATH/src/github.com/thetatoken/theta
cd $THETA_HOME

Now, execute the following commands to build the Theta binaries under $GOPATH/bin. Two binaries theta and thetacli are generated. theta can be regarded as the launcher of the Theta Ledger node, and thetacli is a wallet with command line tools to interact with the ledger.

export GO111MODULE=on
make install

Notes for Linux binary compilation

The build and install process on Linux is similar, but note that Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS / Centos 8 or higher version is required for the compilation.

Notes for Windows binary compilation

The Windows binary can be cross-compiled from macOS. To cross-compile a Windows binary, first make sure mingw64 is installed (brew install mingw-w64) on your macOS. Then you can cross-compile the Windows binary with the following command:

make exe

You'll also need to place three .dll files libgcc_s_seh-1.dll, libstdc++-6.dll, libwinpthread-1.dll under the same folder as theta.exe and thetacli.exe.

Run Unit Tests

Run unit tests with the command below

make test_unit

Smart Contract and DApp Development on Theta

Theta provides full support for Turing-Complete smart contract, and is EVM compatible. To start developing on the Theta Blockchain, please check out the following links:

Smart Contracts

• Smart contract and DApp development Overview: link here.
• Tutorials on how to interact with the Theta blockchain through Metamask, Truffle, Hardhat, web3.js, and ethers.js.
• TNT20 Token (i.e. ERC20 on Theta) integration guide: link here.

Local Test Environment Setup

• Launching a local privatenet: link here.
• Command line tools: link here.
• Connect to the Testnet, and the Mainnet.
• Node configuration: link here.

API References

• Native RPC API references: link here.
• Ethereum RPC API support: link here.