Algorand, Blockstack Announce Support For Smart Contract Language Clarity

Two of the big players in the blockchain industry, Algorand and Blockstack, announced a joint independent open-source project that will support the Clarity smart contract language. The project will be led by the founders of Algorand and Blockstack, Dr. Silvio Micali and Dr. Muneeb Ali respectively, who understand that the industry needs safer and more secure smart contract languages.

The two companies are among the top 100 projects on CoinMarketCap and this is the first time when organizations of such level collaborate to launch an alternative smart contract language. Clarity is designed to help developers, engaged with high-stakes transactions that reach amounts of hundreds of millions of dollars, and demand better reliability and consistency.

The Algorand protocol is the first open-source, permissionless, pure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol for the next generation of financial products.

Dr. Silvio Micali, who is also a Turing Award-winning cryptographer, shed light on the genealogy of the project:

“Smart contracts are an integral driver of blockchain adoption, as they eliminate the need for a third-party intermediary and facilitate frictionless economic exchange. 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.”

It is believed that this partnership will be a vital step toward better smart contract development. Many specialists believe that the industry is not reaching the needed maturity level and widespread usage, as in most cases smart contracts have been used for experiments. The current popular smart contract languages do not help enough in the creation of secure and effective code.

In contrast to common languages, which are a bit unpredictable pre-execution, Clarity is a “decidable” language. This means that developers know exactly what a program will do ahead of time.

Blockstack Founder Dr. Muneeb Ali also commented on the new project:

“The value locked up in smart contracts recently crossed a billion dollars, and that number will likely continue to grow exponentially. 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.”

Founded in 2013 in New York City, Blockstack PBC focuses on returning online data ownership to developers and consumers. It is an open-source project with a global community of over 7,000 people.