This article was originally posted to Hackernoon.

I’m Andrew Levine, CEO of Koinos Group, and today I have a super exciting announcement that is the culmination of many months of hard work by the Koinos blockchain team; the developer preview release of koinos testnet! It’s in a very raw form, but this is still a first-of-its-kind, infinitely upgradeable and scalable, general purpose blockchain capable of running WASM smart contracts!

Be Free: Run the rEvolutionary Blockchain

This developer preview enables anyone to run the first blockchain ever to feature modular upgradeability and a microservice architecture! In fact, we will be using modular upgradeability over the coming months to iteratively add features to the developer preview (without a hardfork) like a consensus algorithm, token contract, and (of course) fee-less transactions, turning it into a full-fledged testnet right in front of your eyes!

In the following video, I interview Koinos Group co-founder and Koinos blockchain architect, Steve Gerbino, who explains the developer preview, why he’s so excited about it, and the opportunities that it creates for people who are looking to get involved in Koinos or blockchain more generally.

The developer preview is essentially a way to run and test the Koinos blockchain framework, which means that it has the 6 critical microservices which can all communicate with one another to produce blocks, containing smart contracts, and then broadcast those blocks over a peer-to-peer network. Those microservices are; the mempool, jsonrpc, block producer, p2p, block store, and of course, the Koinos blockchain (koinos-chain).

Developer Obsession

Koinos is more than just “the fee-less blockchain.” Koinos is designed from the ground up to be the most developer-friendly blockchain EVER. As we’ve discussed before on hackernoon, our pioneering work on Koinos-Types (the Rosetta Stone of blockchains) will enable developers to work in the programming languages they already know and love. Obviously, accessibility is a top priority for us which is why we made it as simple as possible for developers to begin running a Koinos node.

All it will take is 1 simple command (docker-compose up) to get a Koinos cluster up and running locally!

This developer preview is a great opportunity for developers and engineers to gain a deeper understanding of how Koinos works whether they want to build a decentralized application or get more involved with the project. There’s plenty of work left to do aside from engineering (and there’s plenty there too) whether it’s technical documentation, quality assurance, or advocacy, so this preview can help you figure out how you can help the project bring blockchain to common people everywhere.

Hands-On Blockchain Education

The microservice architecture makes Koinos a great educational tool by breaking the system up into bite-sized pieces that are easy to understand at both a high and low level. Interested in the p2p code? You’ll find it in the koinos-p2p microservice. Want to know how blocks are stored in a node? Check out the koinos-block-store microservice. The blockchain? Koinos-chain microservice. You get the idea :)

In addition to modular upgradeability and the microservice architecture, contained within this preview are other innovative features native to Koinos like positive state deltas and active/passive data, both of which will provide massive benefits to vertical scalability.

Help Wanted!

Building out the Koinos ecosystem will take a diverse and active community, which is why we’re so excited to finally get something in people’s hands. If you’d like to become an active participant in this project by running a node, visit the Koinos github.

Be free!

• Andrew Levine, CEO of Koinos Group