Uniting Smart Contracts and DAGs: The Next Step
By: Fantom Foundation
Tags: Dag, Fantomfoundation, Fantom, Blockchain

The recent movement towards decentralised solutions across a number of major industries highlights how instrumental smart contracts will be in our future. FANTOM is the first to take the next step and unite smart contracts with the solution to blockchain scalability issues.

Satoshi, Script and Smart Contracts

A little known fact is that Ethereum was not the first blockchain with smart contract support. Satoshi included a language usable to create smart contracts within Bitcoin, called “Script”. Script was a basic language that has been widely viewed as almost an ‘afterthought’ by Satoshi–nevertheless, it was functional.

With a lack of recursion and loops, certain complex algorithms were impossible to execute. Satoshi designed the language in this way to minimise the potential risk of crashes or infinite loops that could lead to exploitation or unexpected results, reducing functionality with it. As Bitcoin was moving into unchartered territory, security considerations took priority.

A portion of Satoshi’s ‘Script’

A More Functional System

Opting to use a language with more functionality, Ethereum chose Solidity. Although the choice of language was still based on similar principles to Satoshi (less features meant less potential for malicious code), Solidity is a Turing Complete language that is widely viewed as–easy to work with and learn.

Implementation of the highly featured smart contract system and the consequential ERC20 (and other) standards has been one of the main factors for Ethereum’s explosive growth. Ethereum made it possible to write and implement your own smart contracts and DApps, and many took on this mantle. Aside from the thousand working on the underlying chain itself, hundreds of thousands of developers are all working on Ethereum-related projects.

An unreal amount of startups, projects and businesses have chosen to follow suite and use Ethereum’s platform to integrate decentralised solutions or launch their tokens. The uniformity of tokens created with ERC20 standards have also allowed cryptocurrency exchanges to easily transact and list the majority of tokens, in turn providing liquidity and trading options for entities and investors.

Binance, the most popular crypto exchange, sees daily trade volumes upwards of 1 billion USD

Considering every action in the Ethereum network requires a transaction to be broadcasted to all nodes, tasks that are computationally intensive are limited by Ethereum’s scope. Soon, communities began to realise that Ethereum could not cope with the massive amounts of throughput required at this level of use, often seeing transaction delays which in turn affected both DApps, tokens and viability as a currency.

Innovation Finds A Way

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) have been lauded as the future of decentralisation and collectively dubbed as “Blockchain 3.0”. The ability to process transactions securely in real-time, combined with almost infinite scalability purports to solves the issues inherent in every blockchain today.

Read a basic introduction to DAGs here, and how they are removing one of the largest barriers to widespread adoption here.

A variety of different projects are developing DAGs, with notable names including Byteball and IOTA.

IOTA’s ‘Tangle’ is being created to effectively scale and manage our connection to the Internet of Things (IoT), a term for the hyper-connective state our everyday devices are becoming.

Companies such as Microsoft and IBM have expressed a heavy interest into both the platform and the technology behind it, and many are watching closely as it develops.

However, Ethereum’s user-base has expanded so rapidly through the strength and flexibility of its smart contract system. This is something that other DAGs currently have no support for.

The World’s First DAG-based Smart Contract Platform

In much the same way that Ethereum added user-friendly and functional smart contracts to Bitcoin, FANTOM is creating a fully Turing Complete smart contract platform DAG.

The evolution of DAGs and DApps

Theoretically able to handle up to 300,000 transactions a second, FANTOM’s platform will completely revolutionize the way in which smart contracts can be integrated into all industries.

With a strong influence and background in the food tech industry though our renowned CEO Dr. Ahn, Byung Ik, we can first expect to see the implementation of the FANTOM platform changing the way we eat, the way we integrate technology and food, supply chain management and so much more.

We have all seen what the introduction of tokens and DApps have done for the growth and adoption of blockchain. FANTOM is pushing it one step further.