There is no “smart contract” on Cardano, but a “programmable validator”

IOG CEO Charles Hoskinson recently tweets that the term “smart contract” is actually a misnomer with regard to Cardano.

Instead, he suggested that the community refer to the new feature as a “programmable validator”.

The semantic inaccuracy was first discovered by IOG developer Matthias Benkort. In his thread, Benkort explained that the programmability of Cardano is significantly different from competing blockchains like Ethereum and Solana due to its eUTXO transaction model. Therefore, what is provided on Cardano is not really a smart contract:

“Compared to most of the existing smart contract platforms, Cardano is taking a completely different approach. Lately we have seen a lot of discussions about “concurrency problem” and “EUTXO versus account”. Although the implication is the same, the programming of Cardano is different and atypical.

Cardano introduces the concept of a programmable validator. Validators are fully determinable: their outcome depends entirely on the transaction it bears (i.e., predictable fees). They are somewhat similar to the concept of “pure functions” in functional programming.

In contrast to Ethereum, Solana, Algorand, cannot be described as “using” a smart contract on Cardano. Instead, validators are implicitly referenced by hash functions before use, and these are exposed when activated. ”

Benkort goes on to explain that the community tends to bundle validators and smart contracts.

However, he admits that using other terms such as “on-chain validator” will be challenging from a marketing perspective:

“In short,“ smart contract ”seems like a misnomer. Instead, I prefer more specific terms like “on-chain validator” and “off-chain code”. I think that’s a challenge for the marketing department. ”

Cardano successfully activated the much anticipated Alonzo hard fork on September 12 after controversy over its parallelism problem. In just 24 hours, 100 smart contracts were deployed in the network.

While Cardano is a laggard with the decentralized finance party, with Ethereum having the upper hand so far, Hoskinson has long dismissed the first-mover advantage in DeFi.

We invite you to join our Telegram for faster news: https://t.me/coincunews

Annie

According to U.today

Follow the Youtube Channel | Subscribe to telegram channel | Follow the Facebook page