IOHK launches new Cardano blockchain tools

blockchain

IOHK, the blockchain research and development company, has announced the launch of two tools for the Cardano blockchain. Their names are Plutus and Marlowe and their aim is to enable start-ups, the financial services and fintech industries to prepare blockchain contracts that will run on Cardano.

Plutus comes with a general purpose programming language and tools for Cardano, while Marlowe is for generating code and creating software products. IOHK has provided a Plutus Playground testing environment emulator for Plutus contracts, which are ready to be deployed to the blockchain itself. Marlowe’s emulator is Meadow.

IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson said:

We’re really excited to release testbeds of Plutus and Marlowe so developers, finance professionals and academics can test how they can use smart contracts on Cardano. Both technologies are a major step forward for the blockchain industry. They have been rigorously designed by a team of leading experts in programming language design, with the aim of reducing the kinds of software bugs that have led to huge losses totalling hundreds of millions of dollars.

Philip Wadler, the area leader for programming languages at IOHK, commented:

IOHK is unique among cryptocurrency firms for its insistence on basing its development on peer-reviewed research, and one of the few to support rapid and reliable development by using the functional language Haskell. Plutus continues these trends. Where programming Ethereum requires coding in two languages, Solidity for the on-chain code and Javascript for the off-chain parts, and other systems suffer a similar split, Plutus is the only system that provides an integrated language for both, based on Haskell

Its core language for on-chain code has been kept extremely simple to make it future-proof and so it supports verification. The core is taken directly from the work of the French logician Jean Yves Girard and the US computing researcher John C Reynolds, who independently invented the same system. We have a crack team of world-leading researchers and developers designing, implementing, and formalising Plutus.

 

 

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