Today, two blockchain industry leaders, Blockstack and Algorand, have jointly announced an independent open-source project to support a first-of-its-kind smart contract language, Clarity. Recognizing the need for smart contract languages that are more safe, secure, and predictable in order to mature the industry beyond its current state, teams run by Blockstack Founder Dr. Muneeb Ali, a Princeton Ph.D in computer science, and Algorand Founder Dr. Silvio Micali, a computer science professor at MIT, will collaborate on Clarity design and development.
To date, this is the first time two leading cryptocurrency projects have come together to release an alternative smart contract language that is purpose-built for the needs of developers working on high-stakes transactions in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which require more predictability and reliability than current solutions. Algorand and Blockstack are both top-100 projects on CoinMarketCap and have deep scientific roots that originate from the computer science departments at MIT and Princeton, respectively.
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“The value locked up in smart contracts recently crossed a billion dollars, and that number will likely continue to grow exponentially,” said Blockstack Founder Dr. Muneeb Ali. “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.”
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The collaboration represents an important step toward smart contract development. While smart contracts have been used by organizations to experiment with, in most cases, this has stopped short of significant use and prevented the industry from maturing. Experience has shown that it can be difficult to produce secure and effective code using today’s most popular smart contract languages. Unlike common “undecidable” languages, that by their nature make it impossible to know precisely how a contract will behave in certain situations without prior execution, Clarity is a “decidable” language, meaning developers can know, with mathematical certainty, what a program will and will not do ahead of time. This shift addresses a key obstacle currently preventing large-scale, serious use.
Algorand Founder Dr. Silvio Micali said, “Smart contracts are an integral driver of blockchain adoption, as they eliminate the need for a third-party intermediary and facilitate frictionless economic exchange. 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.”
Additionally, Algorand and Blockstack see Clarity as a way to work towards interchain communication, inviting others to join them on this open-source initiative to avoid walled gardens that traditionally require a third party intermediary. With Clarity, developers can initiate and execute contracts between each other seamlessly through the use of a widely adopted, decidable, open-source language. To that end, both teams will continue to work jointly toward blockchain interoperability to provide ways to execute smart contracts across several platforms.
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