Build on 9Chain
This page is for people who write software: you want to deploy a contract, call into the network, or build a product on top of it.
The honest answer has to lead with the unglamorous half: the network has standard interfaces and can serve requests, but the path to contributing to the source itself is not open. Those two are different things, and blending them is the easiest way for an infrastructure project to overstate itself.
| What you want to do | Status | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Call the network through the standard EVM-ecosystem interface | RUNNING — verifiable from outside | The project's technical documentation, Connect to the network |
| Deploy a contract on a test period | RUNNING | Technical documentation, Quickstart |
| See the public addresses to point tools at | RUNNING | Network and endpoints in this documentation |
| Read the compliance rules a transaction must pass | RUNNING | Technical documentation, Protocol compliance; the principle is in The 9Chain platform |
| Declare a new chain from a description | PROPOSED — the mechanism exists, the door for outsiders does not | The 9Chain platform, under The chain-producing machine |
| Read and modify the source, submit contributions | LEFT BLANK — the code repository is not open | See Conclusion, Three doors the founding group still owes |
Figure 24 — Three doors for a developer, and only one fully open.
Why this documentation does not copy the technical guide. Commands and parameters change with each release; a page that copies them fails silently, and the reader has no way to know they are reading an old version. So this page does exactly one job: say which door is open, which is locked, and why — then point to the original kept by the technical team at 9chain.org/docs. If the two ever disagree, the technical version is the correct one, and this page is wrong and needs fixing.
A measure you should apply to any project, including this one. Do not ask "has documentation been published" — ask "can a stranger, with only what is public, actually build this". However open a guide is, it is no more open than the repository holding what it tells you to copy.
In short: the network's interface is open to outsiders; the source is not — and while that holds, every invitation to "build together" is only half true.