Blockstream, the developer of Bitcoin’s layer-2 protocol Liquid and led by Bitcoin cypherpunk Adam Again, has launched Simplicity, a brand new good contract language designed for Bitcoin.
In keeping with a Thursday announcement shared with Cointelegraph, Simplicity smart contracts shall be built-in into Liquid. The corporate mentioned the transfer marks a step ahead in remodeling Bitcoin (BTC) from a safe retailer of worth right into a programmable basis for decentralized finance.
The corporate additionally launched SimplicityHL, a higher-level implementation of the language that facilitates simpler improvement with elevated abstraction.
A Blockstream consultant advised Cointelegraph that this model of the language “is right here and usable at the moment,” with a web-based built-in improvement atmosphere additionally obtainable.
A unique strategy for a unique structure
Simplicity differs from Ethereum’s Solidity language, largely because of the totally different underlying architectures of the 2 blockchains.
Associated: StarkWare researchers propose smart contracts for Bitcoin with ColliderVM
This stems from totally different approaches and totally different architectures of the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks, with Solidity developed for the Ethereum Virtual Machine. State is the community’s agreed-upon snapshot of all account balances and saved knowledge at a given block.
Bitcoin makes use of the unspent transaction output (UTXO) architecture, whereas the Ethereum community employs a network-wide state. This distinction manifests itself in how Simplicity good contracts work, with a Blockstream consultant saying that “not counting on the worldwide state is a giant shift.” “Each little bit of state your contract wants has to journey with the transaction.”
Blockstream’s researchers mentioned Solidity builders might want to break their behavior of studying from globally accessible variables and as a substitute present all essential data at each step. In such a system, two good contracts can’t share state or reference the identical variables; every part have to be explicitly handed inside transactions. Nonetheless, the agency’s representatives defined that this strategy additionally has a constructive impression:
“Even when one thing goes unsuitable, solely your contract’s particular a part of the transaction graph is affected. It’s a unique mindset in comparison with the worldwide state, however it in the end results in safer and extra contained contracts by design.“
Builders additionally received’t be capable of use recursion or unbounded loops, which Blockstream claims aren’t essential for onchain logic.
Associated: A deep dive into the five popular smart contract development platforms and their comparison
The rise of domain-specific good contract programming languages
Simplicity joins a rising checklist of domain-specific good contract programming languages.
Noir, a programming language released in 2022 for writing and verifying zero-knowledge proofs (ZK-proofs), was adopted in 2023 by the builders of the upcoming privacy-first Ethereum layer-2 Aztec.
Noir has turn out to be a wise contract programming language particularly constructed for privacy-preserving functions that combine ZK-proofs deeply into their structure.
One other instance is Leo, a wise contract programming language that additionally creates ZK-proof techniques with carefully associated syntax and privateness in thoughts.
Ethereum’s Vyper is an EVM-compatible language designed to reduce the assault floor, which is now utilized by some main Ethereum decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols.
Journal: ZK-proofs are bringing smart contracts to Bitcoin — BitcoinOS and Starknet
