Five lessons in blockchain governance

Project Catalyst is bringing collective innovation to Cardano.

15 October 2020 Dor Garbash 6 mins read

Five lessons in blockchain governance

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…

Actus smart contracts in Marlowe

Writing in the language of finance, rather than the language of blockchain

13 October 2020 Prof Simon Thompson 12 mins read

Actus smart contracts in Marlowe

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…

Marlowe: industry-scale financial smart contracts for the blockchain

Move over Solidity – this specialized language will bring decentralized finance to Cardano

6 October 2020 Prof Simon Thompson 5 mins read

Marlowe: industry-scale financial smart contracts for the blockchain

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

Developer challenge: using blockchain to support the UN’s sustainable development goals

IOHK has set up a $10,000 fund to invest in ideas for sustainable development based on Cardano.

6 October 2020 Eric Czuleger 3 mins read

Developer challenge: using blockchain to support the UN’s sustainable development goals

Creating a decentralized financial and social operating system for the world is the core mission of Cardano. But it’s not one that we can accomplish alone. That’s why we are always on the lookout for relationships which help us build a global foundation for growth. So, we’re thrilled to announce our hackathon challenge to support the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs…

Being lazy without getting bloated

Haskell nothunks library goes a long way towards making memory leaks a thing of the past

24 September 2020 Edsko de Vries 25 mins read

Being lazy without getting bloated

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

Haskell is a lazy language. The importance of laziness has been widely discussed elsewhere: Why Functional Programming Matters is one of the classic papers on the topic, and A History of Haskell: Being Lazy with Class discusses it at length as…