Follow the Money: How Blockchain’s Transparency, With ByteKode’s Help, Fights Fraud

2022 was not a good year for crypto’s legitimacy. A year of smart contract hacks and DeFi exploits, culminating in the second largest crypto exchange by market cap going bankrupt overnight following the discovery that it was almost certainly misusing customer funds and using them as a personal checking account.

To crypto critics, it’s just another sad story of how crypto aids and abets criminal behavior. But for those who know better and have been around longer than the last few years, the events of late 2022 represent a wonderful opportunity to get back to basics and understand what crypto is good at: total transparency and total self-custodial of one’s money.

With the recent drama, many have decried how impossible it is to find out what FTX did with customers’ money, and fulminated about crypto’s obscurity. Nothing could be further from the truth. The great thing about a decentralized worldwide public ledger is that you can prove, indisputably, what happened to the money.

Blockchain and total transparency

The strange little secret – as everyone has said about the blockchain at some point, except that it falls on deaf ears – is that everything is traceable. Chain activity is far from being a place for crooks to hide their dirty money – it’s simply a matter of inexperience, poor regulation and the natural confusion that comes with any new cutting-edge technology.

Dapp developers don’t help, and for good reason. It is expensive, time-consuming and difficult to create an effective user interface that translates blockchain actions into a readable script that the layman can understand. However, it can make many dapps feel like Pandora’s box, with only happy reassurances of transaction IDs assuring them that transactions have been completed. For the initiated, that’s all they need. For the newcomer, it can feel overwhelming at best, and scary at worst. The experience, shared by all, harms adoption.

The truth is, with a little simplification, the natural transparency of the blockchain would be plain for all to see. Smart contracts and transaction IDs give any educated blockchain accountant everything they need to track billions, or even trillions, of dollars on the chain. The information is there, and everything is irrefutable. All that is needed is a way to analyze the secrets that hide in plain sight.

How Bytecode decodes the blockchain for everyone

That is the goal of Bytekode, Bytekode is a simple widget that takes all smart contract data, transaction IDs, public key or other blockchain information and reproduces it in readable plain text automatically for the end user. Their plan is to create a simple, modular, open source information rendering service that dapp developers can build seamlessly into their own projects and provide immediate clarity about the transactions within it and how they interact with the broader blockchain ecosystems they’re built on. on.

This kind of clarity is exactly what is needed before the next cycle of crypto adoption begins. Especially when there is still a lot of scrutiny surrounding the major players in web3 and how they handle their finances in the chain. It is true, with today’s analytics software and block explorers, that ill-gotten gains can easily be traced through the network.

However, it is the domain of blockchain experts who are comfortable with block explorer tools at the moment and can buy transaction IDs and smart contracts like they are blondes and brunettes. Yet these tools remain obscure to most, and the fact that they are creates resistance to crypto and a lack of faith or security in the system they participate in. Transparency is part of the gift of the blockchain. Nakamoto knew it, early crypto adopters knew it.

Everyone knows it now, but changing that knowledge into something everyone can work with is what Bytekode is trying to do. Bytecode’s software will also be a boon for dapp developers who create custom wallets for their protocol and want to have modern, analyzable, clean interfaces with easy-to-understand payment and receipt information.

Byte code creates readable code in bite size. The information in a Bytecode message is as secure as the underlying blockchain transaction or smart contract function it processes. It is translated directly from the “source”, so users begin to gain control over what exactly the transactions they perform are doing.

A clear lens to find the truth

That means that when it comes to FTX, we know where the money went. We can trace it through transactions in the chain. Right now, the general public—even crypto enthusiasts—rely on experts looking through block explorers to find the answers. But with Bytekode, everyone will be able to do it.

It is not only in the case of big name actors too. Perhaps you have purchased an NFT from a new crypto community that has outlined a roadmap for how they will distribute the funds. Even if you know nothing about crypto, you will easily be able to track what the DAO or the community is doing with the community financial wallet that, by buying NFT, has contributed to. Bytecode will help the general public more easily understand the underlying fundamentals behind blockchains, thereby bringing them closer to the communities they participate in, and more active, involved, value-delivering users of the web3 itself.

Over time, Bytekode will use the network effect of embedded protocols and software to build a block explorer platform that even your grandmother can use. By creating this basic readability about smart contract functionality, it will create a more trusting base for crypto as a whole. This transparency and readability is already hard-coded into crypto itself, it just needs to be brought out into the light for all to see – and that’s exactly what Bytekode aims to do.

A new, clearer financial system

The “crypto-financial system” is then not a dark web of blind money holes and untraceable funds kept in tax-free havens. No, it is current financial system, and it’s funny how it’s a more traditional boardroom product – like FTX – that ended up causing so much damage to crypto’s reputation – when really it was the same old bad actors in TradFi up to their old tricks in a brand new shell. Well, no – we know what you did. Blockchain will tell us.

With Bytecode, it will tell everyone. Bytecode will integrate anywhere and everywhere, reading impeccable smart contract code and laying it out in a simple language for the everyday user. The project is in alpha and interested dapp developers and end users can head over to their website to sign up for their beta test and get the latest information on Bytecode’s build process from their Twitter. Crypto may be cast into darkness, but with Bytekode the future is very bright.