BSV SDK for Elixir: AI meets industrial-strength workload

Terms like artificial intelligence (AI), agentic economies, x402, and asset tokenization are on everyone’s lips these days. With that in mind, it’s handy for BSV to have a package that invites their developers in the door and speaks their language. That package is the new BSV SDK for Elixir, with toolkits that align perfectly with Bitcoin’s scalability and open up new career opportunities for builders.

The Elixir software development kit is open source and available here.

Elixir is a high-level functional programming language built on Erlang, and also shares features with Ruby and Clojure. Its concurrency handling via independent, lightweight processes and fault tolerance make it a favorite for high-throughput applications such as multiplayer games, fintech/trading platforms, and chat apps with millions of users sending messages at once (notably Discord). It’s popular in distributed and real-time systems, which fit well with the scalable blockchain’s networking needs.

The BSV SDK for Elixir was created by Jerry Chan, a long-time Bitcoin developer and commentator who built the “Frobots” NFT combat strategy game and helped develop the STAS token protocol. He’s also working on another BSV SDK for Rust.

More recently, Elixir has begun to challenge Python as the number one language for AI developers. Chan explained that Python isn’t as great for backends, especially those that require concurrent messages. Elixir’s dev community is increasingly focused on AI, and creating an SDK that plugs the language into BSV provides an attractive on-ramp for those building the future.

The BSV SDK for Elixir and its tools would be useful for building real production apps, he said.

“I’ve taken the composable locking scripts (composable smart contracting) method, which is very functional, and the Elixir way of doing things that BSV-ex pioneered, but added STAS tokens as well (with the newest templates that include freezing and unfreezing tokens). I also added transport integration with ARC for sending transactions, and JungleBus for listening to the ones you want. Finally, I added native implementation of ECDSA signing in Elixir.”

The BSV SDK for Elixir pulls in everything useful from BSV-ex (an existing BSV code library for Elixir by “libitx”) and the BSV Go SDK. This is far more than just a port of the Go-SDK, though, with several notable additions. It introduces Elixir to a native ECDSA implementation that supports RFC 6979, which is vital for security. JungleBus and ARC integrations handle transaction broadcasting and relevance monitoring.

The new STAS token features could make it attractive to central bank digital currency CBDC issuers. They’re likely to require the ability to freeze tokens they issue or recover stolen funds to remain compliant with local financial regulations.

With this SDK, developers “can build real production apps” whether they include monetary assets and/or require reliable transport layers. Chan is using it to bring his battlebot combat game “Frobots,” with its NFT-based characters and assets, up to date.

Blockchain networking becomes particularly important in the “Teranode Era” of potentially billions of peer connections, parallel processing of transactions, and real-time payment systems. These are precisely the kinds of pressures Elixir was built to handle. Though only about 13 years old, the language’s Erlang base has a pedigree going back four decades, with industrial testing on telecommunications infrastructure and financial applications.

Elixir developers are already out there building AI apps, but not everyone is familiar with the BSV network’s feature set. A language designed for concurrency and high throughput should definitely align with a blockchain network that shares its ambitions. The digital economy demands high speed and volume. Add the word “agentic,” and it becomes a million times faster and more demanding. 

In order for artificial intelligence (AI) to work right within the law and thrive in the face of growing challenges, it needs to integrate an enterprise blockchain system that ensures data input quality and ownership—allowing it to keep data safe while also guaranteeing the immutability of data. Check out CoinGeek’s coverage on this emerging tech to learn more why Enterprise blockchain will be the backbone of AI.

Watch: Why Saying BSV Is Bitcoin Still Gets You Censored