Two blockchain industry leaders, Algorand Inc. and Blockstack PBC, today announced an independent open-source project to support Clarity, the blockchain distributed ledger smart contract language.

A smart contract is a programmable agreement that automates actions based on the completion of agreed-upon terms between multiple parties that have been encoded. The code of the smart contract and the agreements made exist within a blockchain, which acts as a tamperproof record of the contract, as well as assets under contract, which could be money, property, shares or anything else of value that can be represented digitally.

This collaboration recognizes that the industry needs to adopt smart contract languages that are more safe, secure and predictable. The goal is to provide a foundation that can be built up to support numerous use cases such as those needed for financial service, healthcare, voting and more.

Teams run by Blockstack founder Muneeb Ali, a Princeton Ph.D. in computer science, and Algorand founder Silvio Micali, a computer science professor at MIT, will collaborate on Clarity design and development.

“The value locked up in smart contracts recently crossed a billion dollars, and that number will likely continue to grow exponentially,” said Ali. “While JavaScript might be the language of choice for writing web apps, smart contracts have radically different requirements for verifiability and security which require a different approach. We could get away with using insecure languages when the stakes were low, but with increasing real-world use cases, it is time for a serious upgrade.”

The smart contract language Clarity is an interpreted and “decidable” language, meaning that the contract code itself is published directly in the blockchain and that the code itself can understand what the contract will do when activated.

The development of effective, secure and understandable smart contract languages is important because although blockchain networks are tamperproof, smart contract systems have been hacked. One particularly problematic example is the 2016 attack against the Ethereum Decentralized Autonomous Organization, a code-governed business entity that ran entirely on smart contracts, that led to the loss of more than $55 million worth of Ether in 2016.

Although smart contracts have seen widespread experimentation by many businesses, full-scale adoption of this technology has still fallen short. In part, that’s because it’s still difficult to produce secure, trustworthy code using today’s smart contract languages.

“Smart contracts are an integral driver of blockchain adoption, as they eliminate the need for a third-party intermediary and facilitate frictionless economic exchange,” said Micali. “With high volumes — and values — of assets stored in smart contracts, the emergence of a next-generation programming language such as Clarity has the potential to unlock blockchain-based solutions for large-scale enterprises and governments, which demand a higher level of trust and security.”

With this joint collaboration between Algorand and Blockstack, the two companies hope to bring Clarity into the mainstream and show that it’s ready for prime time and use it to grow and mature the blockchain industry.

Additionally, the two companies intend to use Clarity for what is called interchain communications, enabling the ability to transfer data between different blockchains in a trustworthy manner. That would help eliminate the problems of walled gardens that traditionally require an outside intermediary. Using Clarity, developers can initiate and execute contracts between different blockchain networks seamlessly and thus interoperate across multiple environments.

More information is available at the Clarity language website for laymen and developers can deep dive into the code and its implementation at GitHub.

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