Blockstack is a new decentralized web, where users own their data and apps run on user devices without the need for hosting. Developers can build serverless apps without the need to trust any centralized services or infrastructure.

For more info on Blockstack see: http://github.com/blockstack/blockstack

Blockstack Core is the reference implementation of Blockstack. It is responsible for processing blockchain transactions, creating virtualchain state, and building the peer network amongst other things. Blockstack Core provides a RESTful interface for clients and also comes with a command-line-interface (CLI).

• Quick Start
• Development Status
• Blockstack Docs
• Contributing
• Community

The fastest way to get started with Blockstack is with pip.

For Debian & Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y python-pip python-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev rng-tools libgmp3-dev
$ sudo pip install blockstack

For macOS:

$ brew install gmp libffi openssl
$ sudo pip install --upgrade pip
$ sudo pip install blockstack

You can test your installation by trying:

$ blockstack info 

which should display the last block processed and the latest consensus hash.

After installation, you can start Blockstack Core and index the blockchain:

$ blockstack-core --debug start
$ tail -f ~/.blockstack-server/blockstack-server.log

Next, visit the basic usage docs and extended usage docs to learn how to register names of your own, as well as transfer them and associate data with them.

If you encounter any technical issues in installing or using Blockstack, please search the open issues and start a new one if your issue is not covered.

v0.14.1 is the current stable release of Blockstack Core (available on the master branch).
v0.14.2 is the next release candidate for Blockstack Core (available on the v0.14.2 branch). See the release notes.

Most of the development is happening in the v0.14.2 branch. Please submit all pull requests to that branch.

You can learn more by visiting the Blockstack Website and checking out the in-depth articles and documentation:

• How Blockstack Works
• Blockstack vs. DNS
• Blockstack vs. Namecoin
• Blockstack Namespaces
• Blockstack Light Clients

You can also read the Blockstack paper:

• "Blockstack: A Global Naming and Storage System Secured by Blockchains", Proc. USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC ’16), June 2016

If you have high-level questions about Blockstack, try searching our forum and start a new question if your question is not answered there.

We welcome any small or big contributions! Please take a moment to review the guidelines for contributing to open source in order to make the contribution process easy and effective for everyone involved.

Developers: You can try out Blockstack Core in a local sandbox using our integration test framework.

You can install the latest release candidate by:

$ git clone https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack-core.git
$ blockstack-core/images/scripts/debian-release-candidate.sh

We have an active community of developers and the best place to interact with the community is:

• Mailing List (3,000+ members)
• Blockstack Forum
• Live chat on Slack (2,400+ members)

The code and documentation copyright are attributed to blockstack.org for the year of 2017.

This code is released under the GPL v3 license, and the docs are released under the Creative Commons license.