Plugins streamline the process

Symbol lets you get to proof-of-concept faster than nearly any blockchain solution. Symbol’s plugins handle the most broadly useful enterprise functions, and they’re already built in. With our client apps, little to no programming is needed to configure them and get your test application live and ready to show.

To create your proof of concept you’ll need a good idea of what kind of assets you’ll be tracking and have your off-chain code or logic defined. Then we’ll create and configure those assets on the Symbol chain and look at connecting them to your code.

Desktop wallet is a development tool

Even though it’s called a wallet, Symbol’s desktop wallet app is also a project platform with a suite of built-in features. The wallet lets you do things like create tokens, explore the chain, and manage multisig accounts. It’s pretty easy to download the Symbol protocol and desktop wallet on your laptop and experiment with them. They have relatively few dependencies and setup is fast.

Six Steps to Custom Assets

Here’s an overview of the steps to create your first project.

1. Choose a language or choose to use the wallet app. Symbol currently supports Typescript, Javascript, and Java, with more SDKs on the way. However, if you don’t want to write code you can access most of these features using the Symbol desktop wallet. We’ll focus on the wallet since set-up is streamlined. You can download the wallet here. https://nemtech.github.io/wallets.html

2. If you’re using the wallet, open it and create a couple of testnet accounts. Using the public testnet is the fastest way to get running, but you can create your own testnet if you like. More instructions are here. https://nemtech.github.io/guides/account/creating-an-account.html

3. Get some test XYM from the faucet and send it to one of your new account’s address. You can request test XYM directly from the wallet, or use this link. http://faucet-941-01.symboldev.network/ You’ll need test XYM to pay small fees for the transactions you’ll be using to set up your project on the chain. Try sending some test XEM between your wallets to see how quickly transactions are confirmed.

4. Register a namespace by clicking on the wallet’s namespace tab or sending a namespace transaction. Namespaces are like web domains on the blockchain. They identify assets in an intuitive way. Once you have one, you can further divide it into subnamespaces. For example, if you have the namespace “streaming” you can also make “streaming.music” and “streaming.video”.You can link these namespaces to your accounts and tokens.

5. Create some token assets. (Assets that are identical and unchanging are called Mosaics.) When you create a Mosaic, you can configure:

Supply – How many of these will exist?
Divisibility – Can you split one into fractions? How many decimal places?
Duration – Does it ever expire? If so, when?
Mutable Supply – Can you create more later, or is the supply locked?
Transferrability – Can it only be sent or received by certain accounts?

6. We can get pretty far just using the wallet to configure assets, but if you are ready to use your existing business application or logic to create transactions on the blockchain, it’s time to break out one of the SDKs. https://nemtech.github.io/sdk.html

The next step is to look deeper into public or encrypted metadata, which lets you attach data strings to a transaction to validate or initiate off-chain actions. https://nemtech.github.io/concepts/metadata.html

With these you have all the building blocks for the majority of POC blockchain applications.

Whether or not you end up implementing a Symbol application, going through these steps is a quick way to get familiar with creating blockchain projects and defining your requirements. We hope you’ll have fun experimenting.

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