With the rollout of Goguen, Cardano is becoming a smart contract platform. Adding metadata – information about the data being processed – to transactions is key to this, and last month this capability was added to the blockchain. From a focus on transactions, Cardano is now becoming a utility platform open for partnerships, enterprises, and commercial applications that can be…

The Ethereum Classic network suffered from four 51% attacks between 2019 and 2020. Three of those attacks have occurred recently – with just weeks between each other – which resulted in expensive losses for stakeholders due to double spending and service disruption. A number of Ethereum Classic Improvement Proposals (ECIPs) followed after these attacks aiming to provide the…

Project Catalyst is, at its heart, a series of experiments in innovation and governance. Once it was decided to set up a funded system to encourage innovation for Cardano, the IOHK team decided to collaborate with our global community from the start. So, that’s what we did. Now, with two funds already incubating hundreds of proposals and fostering thousands of conversations, we…

In our Developer Deep Dive series of occasional technical blogs, we invite IOHK’s researchers and engineers to discuss their latest work and insights.

Marlowe is a domain-specific language for secure financial smart contracts that is being developed by IOHK for the Goguen capabilities of the Cardano blockchain. Following my introductory post on Marlowe, in this Deep Dive post…

In this post, we introduce Marlowe, a new language for financial contracts, and describe the benefits of it being a domain-specific language (DSL). As a DSL it describes only financial contracts, rather than smart contracts in general. Because of this, it differs from general-purpose blockchain languages like Solidity and Bitcoin Script.

Marlowe is industry-scale. We have built Marlowe contracts based on examples from one of the leading projects for financial smart contracts, the Algorithmic Contract Types Unified Standards (Actus) system. Currently, these and other examples can be seen in the Marlowe Playground…