Agoric Blockchain: 1-Minute Fundamentals

Agoric is a Cosmos-based L1 smart contract blockchain using “Hardened” JavaScript to build and deploy DeFi projects rapidly.

Hardened JavaScript provides developers with a safe, stable environment to build, deploy, and operate sophisticated Dapps, NFTs, and DeFi markets.

The blockchain is “JavaScript First”, aiming to bring the 10 million+ global community of JavaScript developers into the blockchain and crypto industry compared to the 10 thousand+ Solidity developers available to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Agoric seeks to save developers time by offering composable, pre-built smart contract components and decentralised applications.

As well as DeFi, the blockchain also seeks to bring JavaScript-based NFTs and its IST stablecoin to the Cosmos ecosystem.

Strengths

The blockchain leverages the popular JavaScript programming language, potentially ensuring greater adoption and participation than other blockchain-specific languages like Solidity or Rust.

The programming language could potentially leverage the 10 million+ global JavaScript programmers compared to the 10 thousand+ global solidity programmers.

Agoric is a Cosmos-based blockchain and can leverage the IBC protocol, potentially ensuring greater adoption, participation and liquidity interactions from other IBC-enabled blockchains.

Opportunities

Given the popularity of JavaScript, the blockchain could potentially become very popular and serve as a means of onboarding the broader development community into the blockchain industry and, specifically, the Cosmos ecosystem.

Currently, there are more than 800,000 reusable packages on Node.js’s npm. Ninety-seven per cent of modern web application code is from reusable packages; only 3% is newly written code.

Hence, the Agoric blockchain seeks to enable safe composability and npm-style reusability for blockchain use-cases. This strategy could make it easier for developers to deploy smart contracts on the blockchain.

Threats

There is a slew of L1 blockchains vying for developer attention, and Agoric faces tough competition from these blockchains. Agoric may have to prove its usefulness beyond market-specific narratives like privacy. Perhaps its focus on onboarding developers with the most popular programming language in the world could be a strong value proposition.

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