As our dear readers widely know, Statebox is a company that heavily relies on category theory for the development of its products. Attention towards category theory by academia is not at all surprising. Applied category theory has become a fertile research field, as reflected by the several conferences and events which emerged in the past few years, such as the yearly applied category theory conference (ACT) or our own yearly summit.

On the other hand, the enterprise sector seems to get increasingly aware of how categorical reasoning could impact their own future. In many niches of the tech space, there…

Hello everyone! As promised, this post continues the story about behavioral programming done with Petri nets. In the last post, we modeled the dining philosophers problem to highlight how and why behavioral programming can be useful. In this blogpost we focus on modeling a smart contract using Petri net. For the video explanation, click below.

The net we drafted this time describes the behavior of a putative smart contract for online gambling. The kind of gambling game we want to describe is a rather simple one, like roulette or dices. We start by making the following assumptions:

• The player…

À la functional way, through examples

The Statebox language has come a long way in the past year, and so it’s time to illustrate how programming using Statebox works. Sure, the monograph details the mathematics behind Statebox but how do you actually use it?

Our codebase will soon be made public for everyone to read, but this is very different from making developers understand how Statebox can be useful in their everyday life. …

I’ve always been into hacking since the late nineties, when being less than ten years old I casually discovered IRC. At that time, curiously browsing through IRC channels, an entire universe unrolled before my eyes, made of swirling stories of how, being clever enough, you could use computers to make them do things that they weren’t supposed to do.

I have to admit, I’ve never been a good hacker. Nevertheless this experience had, at least on me, an everlasting educational value: I learned the importance of lateral thinking and the fact that, just because something is made or sold to…

Note: This article was first published in Rethinking Law, issue 1, on 31 October 2018.

Since the advent of Ethereum, one of the keystones of blockchain [1] infrastructure has been smart contracts [2]. Technically, as far as we are concerned, a smart contract is nothing more than a piece of code that runs on a blockchain. Having code running on a blockchain means two things: Firstly, being the history of operations happening on a blockchain immutable, smart contracts can be programmed to be immutable as well, in the sense that once they are issued they cannot be revoked. …

I claim that compositionality is extremely delicate, and that it is so powerful that it is worth going to extreme lengths to achieve it. [Jules Hedges]

Having worked on compositional structures for my PhD degree, I am used to hearing about compositionality a lot. Though to my utmost surprise, the word “compositionality” is not just confined to the academic environment as I believed, but is actually often used in enterprise as a buzzword connected to outrageous claims.

We call a system modular when it is composed of various parts that can be linked to each other.

Well, let me tell…

Some time ago Statebox founder and friend Jelle told me about the Critical Engineering manifesto. Many people in the Statebox team grew up in the first age of the internet, when hacking things was easier, new acquaintances could be made just by joining an IRC chatroom and copyright laws/privacy violations weren’t really a thing. When I first saw this document I just thought “It was about time that someone wrote a thing like this, and it’s a shame I haven’t been aware of its existence for years!” Now that I finally discovered it, I can only be grateful. Thanks, mate!

…

Statebox has received a lot of hype and attention in the last months. Nevertheless, we admittedly released very little information about what we are working on, and about the development state of our project in general. One of the reasons for this is because we are absolutely horrified by the amount of vaporware going around in the tech industry and we don’t want to make any claim without being able to substantiate it.

Nevertheless, the time has come to sketch what Statebox is, which problems it aims to solve, and some of the main principles that are guiding us in…