Welcome to Into the Interchain!

In this series, we at Shade Protocol sit down with leaders in the blockchain industry to discuss current trends, innovative solutions, and the future of decentralized finance. This week, we had the pleasure of speaking with Dean Tribble from Agoric. Our conversation centered around the current landscape of smart contract languages and frameworks, how Agoric is breaking away from current smart contract development trends, and the importance of this shift for the entire blockchain industry.

What Is Agoric?

Agoric is a blockchain company that provides a two-layered solution for smart contract development. The foundation layer of their solution is a smart contract platform that allows developers to write smart contracts in JavaScript, the most popular coding language in the world. With over 15 million developers worldwide, JavaScript far outnumbers the developers of current popular smart contract languages such as Solidity and Rust, which have less than 20,000 combined developers across all major ecosystems.

To date, billions of dollars of value have been lost to reentrancy bugs associated with the current popular smart contract languages in use. By utilizing JavaScript for writing smart contracts, Agoric helps reduce the risks that developers face when building. Furthermore, JavaScript allows developers to build unique applications using open source components that can be safely composed together. Through the combination of open source components and libraries, Agoric aims to accelerate and improve industry-wide UI/UX standards, as well as exponentially expand the development possibilities of smart contracts.

Agoric's Long-Term Vision

Agoric's long-term goal is to enable and promote decentralized solutions in both Web2 and Web3 while providing long-term programmability and accessibility to mainstream developers. By providing JavaScript-based smart contract solutions, Agoric is able to onboard the most populous group of developers around the world that have currently built the frameworks for the most popular financial and information systems used today. Through this massive onboarding opportunity, Agoric expects to unlock a significant amount of collaborative potential amongst decentralized teams and ecosystems.

JavaScript In Blockchain

Agoric uses a JavaScript smart contract engine that utilizes embedded systems JS that has been hardened to enable the "locking down" of particular elements of the frameworks to reduce and/or completely eliminate the risks associated with general JavaScript development. In addition to the ability to write smart contracts in JavaScript, Agoric is experimenting with how to make more seamless and secure front-end smart contract interactions due to the language compatibility between the various application components.

Leveraging IST (Inter Protocol)

The second tier of Agoric's value proposition and solution is a series of critical economic services that other builders can leverage to better empower the development and economic environment. The flagship service/product that Agoric has provided through JavaScript smart contracts is the InterStable Token (IST). The Agoric team realized the value stablecoins provide to businesses and commerce, especially those that leverage the interchain, and thus set out to build a stablecoin that was backed by assets in the Cosmos that participate and contribute to the value proposition for business and financial development within the Cosmos.

Shade Protocol and Agoric share commonalities when it comes to the attributes they wanted to see in DeFi products, specifically stablecoins, as well as their common goal to provide the expectation of privacy within their respective services. The vision for both SILK and IST is to be adaptive over time as internal mechanisms and value drivers are better understood, as well as in response to the changing global macro environment. Adaptability is key to survival and success, especially in a rapidly evolving industry such as the blockchain industry, and both groups seek to provide the best and most secure services and products available to their respective and commonuser bases.

Agoric has partnered with a few external development teams to build and ship third-party applications once the ability to do so has been enabled, which will occur once more thorough testing has been completed.

The conversation ended with a brief discussion about the role of privacy in the digital age, and how Agoric views the attributes of privacy within the context of the services. While currently, all of their smart contracts are public by nature, the Agoric team has ensured their infrastructure for the smart contracts could eventually include a variety of privacy solutions such as ZK proofs or leverage existing solutions such as Secret Network through interchain contract calls. Right now, the Agoric team is prioritizing the assurance of language determinism including high integrity execution before focusing on confidential execution, but has plans to prioritize this in the future.

To learn more about Agoric, make sure to follow them on Twitter and join their social channels as well to stay up to date with their current developments.

If you’re interested in learning more about the collaboration potential between Shade Protocol and Agoric, check out our blog post detailing our upcoming interchain event, The Cosmos Stablecoin Summit!

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Information provided in this post is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute formal investment advice. Please read the full disclaimer at shadeprotocol.io/disclaimer before relying on any information herein.