Predicting the future by building it

In a year with plenty of distractions, BSV’s builders kept their eyes on the ball. Teranode developers toiled deep into the machine’s inner workings to produce a blockchain network that can produce millions of transactions per second (TPS).

Meanwhile, closer to the outer surface, SmartLedger and sCrypt continued the quest to invent new ways to apply the tech. Their collective efforts have produced many a news headline and occasionally a round of applause, so let’s take a moment to look at what they accomplished in 2024.

“The best way to predict the future is to build it,” said sCrypt co-founder Xiaohui Liu. And he’s right. Developers are the vital link between blockchain’s theoretical greatness and real-world… well, also greatness.

Though we’ve hand-picked a few examples here, it’s by no means a comprehensive list of achievements by BSV’s (particularly talented) developers. We’d like to salute everyone who spent their valuable time in 2024 working on BSV projects—projects destined to be misunderstood by most until the moment the penny finally drops and the world finally understands why it needs an open, scalable blockchain network. If you have a favorite project that deserves some spotlight, please feel free to comment and let everyone know.

Teranode: the art of going exponential

On the technical side, 2024 could’ve been called the Year of Anticipating Teranode’s Arrival. Throughout the year, we’ve heard about the amazing feats it performed in its beta testing period. In April, it was processing a million TPS.

Bitcoin followers have whispered Teranode’s name in awe since the word entered common usage around the time of BSV’s “Genesis upgrade” in early 2020. Genesis restored the functionality required for unbounded scalability, massive data throughput levels, and service layers to handle information indexing and Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) messaging (among other things).

While all this was great in theory, it would eventually be too much for the existing SV Node protocol software to handle. Teranode is the next step, and making it a reality was no small task, since it’s essentially a complete ground-up rewrite of the Bitcoin protocol software—following all of Bitcoin’s original set-in-stone rules but with parallel processing and the ability to scale horizontally.

Despite the internal and wider-world events that threatened to delay its arrival over the past few years, Teranode is almost ready to go live in early 2025, as in live on the open public mainnet for anyone and everyone to use.

Teranode represents the next generation of scalable blockchain networks that rival not only existing digital payment networks but the Internet itself in data throughput. It’s important to note that no one else has successfully scaled a blockchain to these levels before (despite numerous attempts and dubious claims on other networks), so when it goes live, we want to be damn sure it works well.

To handle the overlay services, Teranode will require smooth interactions between outer nodes (i.e., users and applications) and the transaction-processing super beast at its center; it was necessary to form relationships with existing and well-known infrastructure providers. These have included Aerospike and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Aerospike’s low-latency NoSQL architecture “makes Teranode exceptionally efficient” at usage costs that undercut major payment networks. AWS has a global reach that allows one-click deployment for app developers accessing BSV’s open-source components, like SPV wallet.

SmartLedger and CERTIHASH: just look at all those transactions

The crew at CERTIHASH again proved themselves among the most imaginative blockchain use-case hunters, something that reflected in its volume of on-chain transactions throughout 2024. Its flagship product, Sentinel Node, is a cybersecurity tool that logs system states and can detect/flag any intrusion in a fraction of the time alternative methods would take. This drastically reduces response times to security breaches. These response times have the biggest impact on how much damage a breach can do to a company’s reputation and financial situation.

By November 2024, Sentinel Node had logged its 56-millionth “state capture.” All captures are logged immutably on the BSV blockchain, leaving records that may be examined and verified at any future point. According to WhatsOnChain tag stats, CERTIHASH has consistently broadcast over 100,000 transactions to the blockchain daily throughout the year.

CERTIHASH wants Sentinel Node to be part of a comprehensive cybersecurity suite and the go-to solution for companies looking to protect their valuable data. Throughout 2024, it continued to build new modules for the product and has maintained close communication with its clients to fine-tune their offerings to specific needs.

Just to clarify things for those unfamiliar, CERTIHASH itself comes from the SmartLedger project, which Chairman Bryan Daugherty refers to as a “hybrid distribution channel” for various developers and their work, creating “companies as a product.” Thus, you’ll see a lot of mixing and matching of those names in articles and at meetings. SmartLedger’s representatives have also been active on the blockchain advocacy front and have continued appearing at congressional hearings and events at both the state and federal levels to explain the benefits of a truly scalable blockchain network.

SmartLedger has spawned other BSV blockchain-based projects including TicketMint, Enterprise Elements, MetaMeet, PayCircles, the Satosender faucet and the VanitySV custom address generator. Some of these are destined for the enterprise world, while others are intended as proofs-of-concept (PoC) and “just fun” ways to experiment with Bitcoin.

Another of its initiatives, Proof of ESG, was one of the highest transaction generators for BSV in 2024, hitting its peak when it recorded 9 million transactions over two days back in March 2024.

sCrypt: The developers’ developer

Smart contract and Web3 development platform sCrypt began to broaden its appeal in 2024, reaching out to developers on “Bitcoin-compatible” blockchains other than BSV while maintaining that BSV remains the only network realistically capable of handling the long-term transaction volumes Web3 will produce. BTC, on the other hand, would need to implement extra proposals and new network layers to attempt to compete.

sCrypt gained the most news coverage in 2024 for its regular Hackathon event. Although the Hackathon competitions occur online and are open to anyone in the world, they’re usually accompanied by multi-day kickoff events that have become must-attend developer conferences. 2024 was no exception, with two days of presentations that included technology updates and possible use cases like mailbox locks, cross-chain atomic swaps, and functions in the physical world like hotel keys and tangible asset-ownership transfers.

The Hackathons usually have a theme intended to showcase a particular feature on scalable Bitcoin, and its event in March-April 2024 was all about merging smart contracts with Ordinals tokens. Ordinals exist on BTC and BSV, and have become the most popular token protocol on each chain (they’re called “1Sat Ordinals” on BSV). However, BSV’s much larger data processing capacity makes it possible to add more features and functionality to each token (on top of being far cheaper and faster to use).

Who’s feeling better about 2025 after reading this? We know we are. Stay tuned, because the next year could be a wild ride (this time, in all the good ways).

Watch: Want to develop on BSV? Here’s how you can build with Mandala

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