How to learn Etch: A tool for Solidity developers

Solidity is the most commonly used smart contract language. Today we are proud to introduce initial Solidity support into the Fetch.ai ecosystem. This is the first step towards making the Fetch.ai network as easy as possible to use for Solidity developers. Try it for yourself.

The transpiler website allows developers to paste Solidity code into an editor. The website then produces the equivalent Etch code. Etch is the computer programming language we have created to write unique AI-powered smart contracts on the Fetch.ai ledger. In this way, the transpiler makes it easy for developers who are new to Fetch.ai to familiarize themselves with the network by using a language they are already comfortable with. Alongside the transpiler, we have the Etch playground. Here, developers can test their transpiled code without requiring additional software.

There are many benefits to using Etch rather than Solidity. Etch is the world’s first smart contract language to provide extensive support for machine learning tasks and advanced optimization. It also includes built in sharding. Currently, our initial transpiler does not provide the full Solidity feature set. Events, assembly, constants and imports are not compatible with Etch at this point. However, the transpiler does cover all of the basics such as public and private functions, views and state variables. The next feature we are working on is contract-to-contract calls.

We will continue to enhance the transpiler so we welcome your feedback on how it can be further improved. Join our developer Slack channel, email us at info@fetch.ai, or contact us on Telegram or Twitter to let us know what you think.