A New Startup Has Zooko and Naval Betting on Better Crypto Contracts

If a series of high-profile vulnerabilities weren't enough to persuade you that today's smart contracts are insecure, a group of computer scientists that have been researching the tech since the 1980s just might.

According to the team, the language will allow programmers to code in a more intuitive and secure manner, while allowing for the kind of formal verification processes that can be a struggle in smart contract testing today.

"We have security and smart contracting approaches that can address that, and make it so that typical application programmers can program their typical application problems using smart contracting technology."

Miller continued, saying that the new language should also facilitate communication between smart contracts running on different networks, potentially in the future enabling peer-to-peer trades of different cryptocurrencies.

During CoinDesk's Consensus 2018 conference last week, zcash creator Zooko Wilcox could not praise Miller enough because of his foresight into what issues could arise within distributed smart contract development.

Tulloh and Tribble were both involved in the first smart contracting system, AMiX, while Warner co-founded decentralized cloud storage protocol, Tahoe-LAFS. But with the new project, the founders are setting their sights on improving what they see as weaknesses within the dominant smart contracting languages of today.

"There's an essential part of the ethereum architecture that leads developers into writing smart contracts with certain vulnerabilities."

Researchers have estimated that there are 34,000 vulnerable smart contracts active on the ethereum mainnet today, a problem the founders attribute to fundamental flaws with Solidity.

"What we're doing is we're preserving the basis of authorization-based access control up through all the layers of abstraction, so that all the derivative rights created by smart contracts are as transferable as the tokens."

Those toolkits will help expand the team's own vision for smart contracts as well, whereby complex machine-human interactions over the Web can happen with ease.