2022 has seen over $3 billion worth of hacks in the Ethereum space. Each one was a tragedy for users, but also potentially ruinous for the developers behind the projects. Ethereum’s smart contract language, Solidity, is so expressive that developers have to foresee every undesirable state of the ledger and write specific code to prevent it. As decentralized finance (DeFi) has grown more complex, developers are spending 90% of their time looking for and patching vulnerabilities rather than shipping products. If DeFi is to fulfill its potential as an open-source alternative to centralized finance, then it first has to address this expensive waste of talent.
Since 2017, the Kadena team has been building Pact — a smart contract language designed notably for DeFi. Pact combines best practices of Bitcoin script and modern interpreters like the Javascript Virtual Machine (JVM) while retaining basic concepts like token contracts that are familiar to Solidity developers.
Pact has been in constant development since 2017 and is currently on release 4.4.1. The team is responsive to the developer community and regularly collaborates on new built-in functionality and other optimizations. The result is a smart-contract language that offers the best of functionality, auditability and transparency.
Here are a few reasons why Pact is the future of safe, performant smart contracts:
1. Human Readable Code
Smart contracts on Kadena are interpreted and directly executed on-chain, without needing to be compiled into an opaque, low-level bytecode. This institutes a much safer developer and user experience where smart contracts can be easily read on-chain and debugged, and users can read a simple manifest of every transaction, explaining what they are signing, which contracts they are interacting with, and exactly how much will be withdrawn from their account.
2. Safe Transfers
Being ‘Turing-complete’ is a badge of honor for some blockchains, but the reality is that unconstrained computation and infinite recursion is constrained by and relies on the robustness of the gas model in order to enforce restrictions that could and should be derived from the base computational model. This leads to inefficiencies in transaction costs that can be detrimental to both users and developers. In addition, a Turing-complete system opens up the possibility of bugs by widening the surface area of the programming landscape unnecessarily and for no benefit.
Pact deliberately imposes restrictions on the ledger state to ensure that many of the hacks we’ve seen over the past year are simply not possible. All transactions on Kadena are either atomic or provably correct by construction. A failure at any step rolls back the entire operation so that funds can’t be stranded somewhere unexpected.
3. Native Multisig Support
Crypto is a new paradigm in personal responsibility because losing a private key means losing access to its funds forever, with no recourse. Pact mitigates this danger by natively enabling users to attach multiple keys to accounts. Even if one is lost, the remaining keys can still recover the account.
4. Dependency Management
Because most code relies on external libraries, safety and reliability challenges can arise if they are accidentally or maliciously altered. To guard against this, Pact uses inlined dependencies by importing arguments directly rather than calling them from unreliable sources. If a Pact developer does want to take advantage of an upgraded dependency, they can simply upgrade the contract.
Conclusion
While Pact has too many optimizations to list comprehensively, developers can lean into Pact’s functionality through its offer of LISP-like syntax. This ensures that the code can be parsed into syntax trees and executed as fast as possible. For auditability, Pact supports formal verification, unit tests, and blockchain simulations. And finally, in terms of transparency, Pact only allows static variables and doesn’t support null values, macros, or the evaluation of arbitrary strings. This is why Pact is becoming the first choice for web3 developers wanting to build safely and efficiently!
For more information about Pact, check out https://kadena.io/build/ and our Github. Pact is available from Homebrew on macOS with the following command line:
brew install kadena-io/pact/pact
