Ethereum smart contracts in details
Ethereum is often mistaken for yet another Bitcoin sibling. However, this is completely incorrect to say that. While Ethereum can be used for transactions in a way Bitcoin is used, and, in fact, does so faster and cheaper than Bitcoin, Ethereum has a staggering smart contract functionality, which is, basically, a blockchain that runs apps in a P2P Ethereum cloud. The idea is to create a sort of blockchain supercomputer, where everybody can create and execute their apps at ease.As stated previously, smart contracts are basically apps. Smart contracts are written in Solidity, a programming language that runs atop of Ethereum Blockchain. Smart contracts can be used to design almost any type of program — be it a financial institution or a betting app. Anything that involves transferring value can be built in form of a smart contract.
Just as any computer language, programming a smart contract in Solidity usually consists of many functions, which are triggered when some event happens. These can be transfer of value, or some event defined in another smart contract, or some information retrieved from the Web. But the real idea and novelty behind smart contracts is the multisignature concept. This is something very close to a voting in a perfect democracy — each defined user of a contract votes either A or B, and if enough votes were received in favour of A, then the function A is called. Otherwise, function B comes into play. This is, ultimately, a projection of social processes into blockchain intended to reach a fair consensus for some fact. Hence the name of the language — Solidity.
To elaborate smart contracts purpose and design, let’s look at Genesis Vision project. Genesis Vision strives to be a decentralized platform for trust management, which will make all investment process easy and transparent via use of Ethereum smart contracts. There are three main roles in our smart contract ecosystem — investor, manager and broker. No administrator or any other ruling authority is needed — peer-to-peer consensus, blockchain and scrutinized balance of incentives will take that role. All of this is hard-coded into a smart contract.
The main medium of exchange on the platform will be GVT — Genesis Vision Token. It is a cryptocurrency built on Ethereum API using Solidity. However, all tokens generated by smart contracts, be it GVT or any other tokens, are stored in an ordinary Ethereum wallet — no special address or account is needed — all tokens are compatible and can be easily spent and received to common wallets.
It is also worth noting that Ethereum developers issued a token standard — ERC20, a standard which every Ethereum token should live up to. Actually, ERC20 is a set of functions that a token must have in its code. To speak freely, this is just a foundation, or basic behaviour that a token must have to prevent loss of funds and fraud. GVT is fully compliant with ERC20.When a user signs up with our software, he receives an Ethereum address to get GVT.Then an investor would like, of course, to do something with these GVTs. The main use for GVT is buying and selling managers currency. If a manager performs well, he can emit more coins and, therefore, get more funding from the Genesis Vision investors.
To explain how it works, it is useful to mention again the figure of a Genesis Vision broker. A broker is a user who acts as a bridge between real, chaotic world of trading and transparent, systemised Genesis Vision software. Investors come to seek good investment with their managers, and managers go to brokers to execute deals based on calculations and ideas of a manager. This allows a great freedom of investment on Genesis Vision. Everything a broker from any country can offer, every possible financial instrument on the planet is tradeable.
Now, in real world brokers provide almost no transparency to the market. Genesis Vision smart contract also respects privacy of users greatly, but trading history of each manager serviced is disclosed by a broker. And this trading history, which is basically raw data of numbers, losses and profit, is loaded into a smart contract and the value of a manager token is defined by the market based on manager performance. All of this happens on the internal exchange of Genesis Vision, which is also powered by a transparent and open-source program.
This is a Genesis Vision smart contract system in a nutshell. To see our code development or participate in our ICO, visit our website: https://genesis.vision
