How We’re Innovating with Lity, a #CVM Mini-Series
As we’ve touched on previously, the CyberMiles blockchain comes alive with Lity, which consists of a dynamically-extensible language, a compiler (Lityc), and CyberMiles’ own virtual machine (CVM). But there’s a few aspects of Lity that really showcase how we’re innovating to make blockchain mainstream — both for the developer community and, ultimately, end users (i.e. consumers).
- Schedulability. An indispensable tool for widely-used financial contracts, this immediately differentiates Lity from Ethereum, which can’t easily support functions ranging from installments for e-commerce purchases and interest payments, to payroll and retirement savings.
- E-commerce functionality. Owing to Lityc and CVM, Library + Ethereum Native Interface (libENI) functions that are optimized for privacy-protecting, PKI-based encryption suddenly become a reality.
- Extensibility. With Lity, libENI functions also are fully optimized for common e-commerce scenarios, decentralized applications (DApps), and customized blockchains.
Let’s delve into the primary benefits of all three, shall we?
In today’s world, schedulability is key
One of the most glaring limitations of the Ethereum platform is its lack of support for timers, time-based actions that are easily defined at intervals or frequencies. Why? Because, absent a timer, DApps are unable to perform tasks such as transferring funds or executing a contract at a specified future date.
In contrast to Ethereum, Lity’s new keyword schedule allows smart contracts to schedule timer tasks to be executed in the future, a requirement of many real-world business contracts, which include:
- Wills and trusts
- Payroll
- Pension
- Retirement or college savings
- Mortgage, interest and insurance payments
- Stock options
- Dividends
- Purchase installments
- Product warranty and scheduled services
- Timeouts for various business processes without definitive outcomes (product delivery, for example)
It’s a challenge that CyberMiles has addressed head-on, creating a next-level DPoS blockchain that features short block time and fast finality. In support of this, our Lityc and CVM offer long-running, timer-based contracts that represent an entirely new class of “smart business contracts” with its own proven use and practical application: litylang.org/scheduler
Global e-commerce requires peak functionality
E-commerce, as we’ve touted, is a trillion-dollar-plus industry. But beyond its sheer lucrativeness, e-commerce also is something that brings people together — figuratively and virtually — while providing micro and macro economic growth opportunities.
CyberMiles, CryptoRecorder reported last week, is ensuring that the essential requirements of e-commerce are met through crucial innovations like Lity. Representing a unique and fully-functional extraction from Solidity, Lity enables CyberMiles to run existing applications that are based on Solidity, without requiring additional changes in the network.
You may be wondering, Why is merging Library and the native interface of Ethereum necessary? Because that’s what makes smart contract operations on the CyberMiles blockchain faster and, as we’ve said before, better performing. In fact, our development team’s identification of basic functionality issues commonly found within Ethereum smart contract operations is what led to their creating Lity in the first place. Considering T-Mobile’s data breach — just the latest in a long line of such breaches this year alone — dealing provactively with security issues and common e-commerce scenarios (chiefly among them PKI-based encryption to protect privacy) is more important than ever.
Perhaps nowhere is this better evidenced than with Blocktonic, the first of (one day) many e-commerce sites that CyberMiles, thanks to Lityc and CVM, has powered to life.
With extensibility comes flexibility
Lity is flexible because it supports new language constructs that can be added “over-the-air.” Harkening back to CyberMiles’ whitepaper, Lity has succeeded in supporting “business rules” constructs in our applications. Regarding libENI, you now can add functions, through a new OPCODE in the CVM, to the Lity programming language. The extension, in turn, can be deployed to the CyberMiles blockchain via validator consensus.
And that’s not all. Lity’s computational improvements have great implications on cross-blockchain asset exchanges, not to mention incorporating off-chain data into blockchain transactions. In other words, Lity is providing first-class native support for oracles — a huge benefit of our advancements toward blockchain 3.0.
Developed by The CyberMiles Foundation, Lity is released under GPL as a free software. Still interested? Then refer to our latest, most up-to-date documentation to get started today!
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