UPDATED 13:56 EDT / DECEMBER 19 2017

EMERGING TECH

Chain releases Ivy, a high-level programming language for bitcoin smart contracts

Making “programmable money” just got easier for bitcoin developers thanks to enterprise blockchain company Chain Inc.’s release of Ivy, a compiler and integrated development environment for writing smart contracts on bitcoin.

Chain released Ivy on Monday, following a public sneak peek demonstration earlier this month into its inner workings. An open-source compiler and integrated development environment, Ivy allows developers to write code for the bitcoin network that enforces custom conditions for transactions supported by the protocol, including signature checks, hash commitments and time locks.

“Ivy is particularly useful and well-suited for smart contract use cases that involve controlling property in a particular way,” product architect Dan Robinson told CoinDesk about the demo. “It’s a concept we call secured property or smart property.”

A real-world example of how a smart contract could be used is an escrow transaction. Three parties enter into the contract: a sender, a recipient and an escrow agent. The escrow agent uses a cryptographic key to approve or cancel the transaction in combination with one of the other parties, but cannot access the underlying funds. Also, it would be possible to program in a timeout, after which the sender can cancel the transaction if a set time expires — or, alternatively, the contract could be written to send the recipient the money upon expiration.

Ivy is a higher-level language, which means that it is designed to be somewhat human-readable, and when its code is compiled, it produces protocol-level smart contracts.

Bitcoin smart contracts are currently written in a protocol-level language called Bitcoin Script. As a language, it goes relatively unused except by a few select service developers, usually wallets and payment platforms. It has been put to good use by the community in projects such as such as for payment channels with Interledger and for scaling with the Lightning Network, but the use of Bitcoin Script is still considered arcane.

One reason for this is because of limitations in the bitcoin protocol’s virtual machine, but another problem is that Bitcoin Script itself is complex and difficult to read and write. Ivy solves this by providing a language template that will remind programmers of the syntax of C and JavaScript, simplified but similar.

Bitcoin is the world’s most popular and largest digital currency, with individual coins valued at over $18,000, though it’s possible to buy and transact in very small fractions of coins. That increasing popularity has come with some growing pains, though.

Slowed transaction speeds and high fees have followed surges in price and trade volume. That has pushed the community of bitcoin developers to seek solutions to bring the currency up to scale and to make it more useful.

The next most popular cryptocurrency, Ethereum, was designed since launch to be a platform for smart contracts and, as a result, is often used for business application development. Bitcoin’s scripting language is also intentionally limited to transaction processing, whereas Ethereum’s scripting is designed to be fully featured with high-level contracts.

Last year, Digital Asset Holdings LLC developed its own smart contract programming language called Digital Asset Modeling Language. However, unlike Ivy, that language is designed primarily for financial industry and not for more general purposes.

RSK Labs Ltd. is also working on a smart contract platform for bitcoin. The company received $1 million of seed funding in 2016 towards that purpose but has not yet released a solution. Unlike Chain’s solution, RSK is not working on a smart contract language, but instead a separate blockchain that will use the bitcoin blockchain in order to interface with and execute its own smart contracts.

Developers can try out Ivy today using the Ivy Playground for Bitcoin service from Chain. The playground portal includes preloaded templates demonstrating a small fraction of possible contracts and will run them in a simulated space. The language is also available as open source on the repository GitHub and documentation is also online.

Image: Chain

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