In a recent instructional vlog on YouTube, Cardano Chief Executive Officer Charles Hoskinson spelled out his vision for cryptocurrency in 2022.
Hoskinson’s primary goal was to create an expanded UTXO smart contract mechanism for Cardano smart contracts. Since the Alonzo hard fork, Cardano has enabled smart contracts.
Hoskinson distinguishes between how bitcoin smart contracts are written, how Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) smart contracts are documented, and how Cardano tries to fill the gap in the middle.
In the works is an extensible UTXO concept
Hoskinson goes into detail about bitcoin’s UTXO structure. Bitcoin smart contracts are written in Forth, a functional programming language.
Functions that operate on UTXO inputs to produce UTXO outputs are included in the smart contracts.
The functions have terms and constraints that define how expressive they can be, as defined by the language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwFSKSgQCuA
The depth of a concept that may be represented and communicated in a language is known as its expressiveness.
Programming environments like the Java Virtual Machine, on which Minecraft runs at the most expressive end of the spectrum, are found as one progresses along the spectrum from least expressive to most expressive.
Bridging the gap
The EVM comes close to being fully expressive, but due to security concerns, it has significant limitations.
Cardano is attempting to establish an extended UTXO (eUTXO) model that bridges the gap between the bitcoin UTXO smart contract model and the EVM model.
The rationale for this is simple: are there functionalities in the EVM that aren’t required for a DeFi application that users of the EVM are paying for?
If there is, the redundant aspects of EVM can be removed while the bitcoin functional paradigm is preserved. This is what Cardano’s new model attempts to achieve.
The programming language Haskell is used for the majority of Cardano’s code.
Image courtesy of Cointelegraph News/YouTube