Algorand and Blockstack join to adopt Clarity blockchain smart contract language

Algorand and Blockstack join to adopt Clarity blockchain smart contract language

Blockchain News
June 11, 2020 by Editor's Desk
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Today, two blockchain industry leaders, Algorand Inc., and Blockstack PBC declared an independent open-source project to help Clarity, the blockchain distributed ledger smart contract language. A smart contract is a programmable agreement that automates actions based on the conclusion of agreed-upon terms among various parties that have been encoded. The code of the smart contract
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Today, two blockchain industry leaders, Algorand Inc., and Blockstack PBC declared an independent open-source project to help Clarity, the blockchain distributed ledger smart contract language. A smart contract is a programmable agreement that automates actions based on the conclusion of agreed-upon terms among various parties that have been encoded. The code of the smart contract and the agreements made endure within a blockchain, which serves as a tamperproof record of the contract, as well as assets under contract, which could be property, money, shares, or anything else of value that can be designated digitally.

This association acknowledges that the industry requires to use smart contract languages that are more safe, secure, and predictable. The aim is to give a foundation that can be raised up to help numerous use cases like those required for financial service, healthcare, voting, and more.

“The value locked up in smart contracts recently crossed a billion dollars, and that number will likely continue to grow exponentially,” said Ali in a statement. “While JavaScript might be the language of choice for writing web apps, smart contracts have radically different requirements for verifiability and security, which require a different approach. We could get away with using insecure languages when the stakes were low, but with increasing real-world use cases, it is time for a serious upgrade.”

The smart contract language Clarity is an evaluated and “decidable” language, indicating that the contract code itself is issued directly in the blockchain and that the code itself can know what the contract will do when activated.

The construction of effective, secure, and understandable smart contract languages is essential because although blockchain networks are tamperproof, smart contract systems have been hacked. One particularly problematic example is the 2016 attack against the Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization. This code-governed business entity ran solely on smart contracts, which led to the loss of more than $55 million worth of Ether in 2016.

Although smart contracts have seen extensive experimentation by many businesses, full-scale adoption of this technology has fallen short. In part, that’s because it’s still challenging to provide a secure, trustworthy code utilizing today’s smart contract languages.

“Smart contracts are an integral driver of blockchain adoption, as they eliminate the need for a third-party intermediary and facilitate frictionless economic exchange,” said Micali in a statement. “With high volumes — and values — of assets stored in smart contracts, the emergence of a next-generation programming language such as Clarity has the potential to unlock blockchain-based solutions for large-scale enterprises and governments, which demand a higher level of trust and security.” With this association between Algorand and Blockstack, the two companies expect to bring Clarity into the mainstream and show that it’s available for prime time and utilize it to develop and mature the blockchain industry.

Additionally, the two companies aim to use Clarity for interchain communications, allowing the transfer of data among various blockchains in a trustworthy manner. That would further reduce the difficulties of walled gardens that traditionally need an outside intermediary. Employing Clarity, developers can initiate and execute contracts between different blockchain networks seamlessly and thus interoperate across multiple environments.

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