Abstract

Abstract

Blockchains have come a long way since Bitcoin first went live early in 2009. At the time, the blockchain was designed as an ingenious way for digital value to be transferred between participants without the need for trust, while preserving security. Now nearly 15 years later, blockchains are expected to support decentralised finance, collectible images and objects, gaming and reward economies, identity management solutions, and a plethora of various decentralised apps in a new era of "Web3" technologies.

The entirety of these operations are based on one common blockchain technology – the smart contract. On Ethereum alone, there were 6.2 million smart contracts deployed between January and July of 2023 . However, the smart contract hasn’t evolved substantially since its creation. Even today, we see smart contracts as a packaged product of an underlying native distributed ledger technology. Ethereum smart contracts are programmed in Solidity and Solana contracts are called Program Libraries and are primarily coded in Rust. Each smart contract technology inherits the technology of the underlying layer it is built upon.

Public blockchains are purpose-built to maintain the ethos of distribution and decentralisation to foster the trust-less and semi-anonymous transaction of digital value between parties. But they suffer immensely in scale, performance, speed, reliability, and cost as a result. Solana has suffered from 17 outages in the 4 years it has been in market, and Ethereum gas fees once ballooned to thousands of dollars per transaction during peak congestion times. Certainly, there is a better approach to building decentralised applications (dApps).