New DSL For Smart Contracts Announced By Cardano’s Hoskinson

A new DSL (Domain-specific language) for smart contracts has been announced by Cardano’s founder Charles Hoskinson while revealing the increased efforts in DeFi for Cardano with concrete announcements to follow at the end of the month as per the reports that we have in our Cardano ADA news today.

In a new surprise AMA, IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson unveiled multiple plans for Cardano’s ecosystem and talked about the progress of the past few days. As he explained, Cardano is on its way to becoming a fully decentralized network as the stake pools are already taking over 24% of the block production, and 76% is validated by the federated nods of IOHK.

IOHK will also launch a peer to peer governance for Cardano in September which will improve the performance and will decentralize the network further as Hoskinson explained:

“That will considerably improve performance in certain respects. […] and also it is a fully decentralized network when you no longer are using relays from stake pool operators or from us.”

The Delegation portfolios and staking guilds are under discussion during the Shelley era but according to Hoskinson, there’s one too many delegations with a soon as possible implementation. The Goguen teams are working on a 3-phase rollout with native assets and in the final phase, the Plutus Application Framework. Hoskinson explained:

“Plutus foundations are kind of like the JVM vs. Java, it’s the base foundations, the core of a language, so you can write an assembly and the higher level representations of it. You will be able to write smart contracts, but this will be not very user friendly. But you have to have the JVM to have Java. […] So it makes sense to roll that out first and then to put on top the beautiful development experience.”

The new DSL for smart contracts will allow the developers to have the option of certified smart contracts as they will be able to implement and prove that the implementation is correct. This has already been done a few times but there are some challenges:

“It is generally very hard because the tools are not so good, they require a lot domain expertise and they are very heavy. So there’s a lot of discussion how we build a light weight specification DSL that can sit in tandem with your contract and then you can verify properties about it. For model check and quick check […] to verify that your contract is right.”