DISCLAIMER: Basecoin is not associated with Coinbase.com, an excellent Bitcoin/Ethereum service.
Basecoin is a sample [ABCI application](https://github.com/tendermint/abci) designed to be used with the [tendermint consensus engine](https://tendermint.com/) to form a Proof-of-Stake cryptocurrency. This project has two main purposes:
1. As an example for anyone wishing to build a custom application using tendermint.
2. As a framework for anyone wishing to build a tendermint-based currency, extensible using the plugin system.
It handles public-key authentication of transactions, maintaining the balance of arbitrary types of currency (BTC, ATOM, ETH, MYCOIN, ...),
sending currency (one-to-one or n-to-m multisig), and providing merkle-proofs of the state.
These are common factors that many people wish to have in a crypto-currency system,
so instead of trying to start from scratch, developers can extend the functionality of Basecoin using the plugin system, just writing the custom business logic they need, and leaving the rest to the basecoin system.
Interested in building a plugin? Then [read more details here](./Plugins.md) and then you can follow a [simple tutorial](https://github.com/tendermint/basecoin-examples/blob/master/pluginDev/tutorial.md) to get your first plugin working.
See our [introductory blog post](https://cosmos.network/blog/cosmos-creating-interoperable-blockchains-part-1), which explains the motivation behind Basecoin.
We are working on some tutorials that will show you how to set up the genesis block, build a plugin to add custom logic, deploy to a tendermint testnet, and connect a UI to your blockchain. They should be published during the course of February 2017, so stay tuned....
We will merge in interesting plugin implementations and improvements to Basecoin.
If you don't have much experience forking in go, there are a few tricks you want to keep in mind to avoid headaches. Basically, all imports in go are absolute from GOPATH, so if you fork a repo with more than one directory, and you put it under github.com/MYNAME/repo, all the code will start caling github.com/ORIGINAL/repo, which is very confusing. My prefered solution to this is as follows:
* Create your own fork on github, using the fork button.
* Go to the original repo checked out locally (from `go get`)