Note: This story is dated. We now have a fully functional testnet integrated into the great Ark platform. Please see Ark and PRAX for more information.
After months of work, Incentum is proud to introduce Praxis and Praxis Developer, applications that will revolutionize the Smart Contract ecosystem. Praxis and Praxis Developer let you create, manage, and use Smart Contracts entirely from a browser and mobile devices.
In the near future, Smart Contracts will be used by everyone. But why are they so hard to understand and design? Do they have to be? Most definitely not. The complexity comes from programmers designing tools for themselves, rather than spending time identifying and simplifying the problem.
With Praxis, Smart Contracts are modelled as JSON to JSON transformations. A smart contract is composed of multiple actions. The contract accepts signed inputs and other data, performs an action, updates it’s internal state, and sends some outputs. Very simple and understandable, and yet it’s just as powerful as any other Smart Contract platform.
Development is done in the browser with Praxis Developer. You can write and debug smart contracts in their entirety within the browser. After you have written the Smart Contract, you use the Form Builder (another part of Praxis Developer) to create simple forms for each Smart Contract action. The users of the Smart Contract interact with these forms to execute the actions using the Praxis client. Here is an introductory video of Praxis Developer in action.
Further, you can turn a Smart Contract action into a link, and post it anywhere. When someone clicks the link, they navigate to the Praxis client and see the customized form corresponding to the action. Here is a video of the Praxis Mobile client in action, and another one with more detail is here.
Let’s take a simple example. An auction. Let’s say you’re an artist — a painter to be specific. You want to auction one of your paintings. Here are the steps you would perform in Praxis:
- Tokenize the painting. Praxis supplies a tokenization contract. Start it, and then tokenize any item you wish. The contract let’s you add any level of information and detail to describe your painting. The tokenized painting has a unique identity, and you can prove that it came from you — you own the tokenization contract that tokenized the item.
- Start an auction with your tokenized painting as the auction item. Incentum supplies an auction contract for doing this. You can add parameters like start and end dates, the coin you’ll accept for bids, etc.
- Get others to bid on your auction. With Praxis, you can create a link to the bid action of your auction contract. Post the link on social media, web pages, etc. When someone clicks the link, they will be taken to Praxis and shown the bid action form which they can use to make a bid.
Praxis runs on Cosmos, The Internet of Blockchains, a fully decentralized consensus engine. You now have the ability to interact in complex ways and transfer tangible value with anyone in the world. And it’s all done in a decentralized and trustless environment that is secure, can’t be shut down, and can’t be censored.
