Introduction:

Entering the blockchain era, what we talk most is about its tamper-proof and trustless features in the multi-party asset transaction. When it comes to blockchain’s decentralization, smart contract is a must talk.

Before blockchain, the concept of smart contract was first proposed by Nick Szabo. In 1996, he described a smart contract as “a set of promises specified in digital form, including protocols within which the parties perform on these promises”. The basic logic of smart contract is a contract (special transaction) written into lines of code which could be self-executed (event-driven) on blockchain.

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Since the creation of Ethereum smart contract, more than 90% of the contracts are used for token issuing. What is the future of smart contracts? Here is a look at Bytom who just released its smart contract. As the first public chain to release AI-friendly Tensority algorithm in MIT, Bytom has released the UTXO-based smart contract yesterday on July 26 after the successful launch of its mainnet in April.

Different from Ethereum’s account-based smart contract, Bytom is among the first batch of public chains to build smart contracts on UTXO model, in addition, Bytom has innovated and deepened the UXTO model to enable it for multi-asset operations. Moreover, Bytom smart contract adopts Equity language, a Turing-complete and interpreted high-level language, which could handily operate asset on bytom chain and flexibly help realize business scenarios.

Apart from that, Bytom has released several contract templates which come with clear business implications and offer a direct sight of business implementation in the future.

Contract of token-to-token transaction

Users can trade multi assets with counterparties via this contract on Bytom blockchain without the involvement of centralized organizations. Part of the asset will be locked by the contract and unlocked until counterparty transfers specified asset.

For example, to build a decentralized exchange on the basis of this contract, via which parties who want to exchange assets in different cryptocurrencies/tokens will be directly matched with fast transaction speed and low transaction fees.

Custody contract of third party trusts

On this contract template, users can transfer specified asset to the account of a third party and it is up to the third party to decide whether to transfer asset to a specified account or return it to the original account. This trusts’ custody contract stipulates that a third party is required to either transfer asset to a designated account or return it to the original account, which eliminates the possibility of “inside jobs” in the third party account. To make it bigger, an asset custody platform could be built based on this custody contract. A trusted third party and contract will together secure users’ asset custody, transaction and circulation.

Mortgage contract

Debtor’s mortgaged asset and creditor’s loan will be regulated in the contract, and if the debtor fails to return the borrowed money at certain block height, the mortgaged asset will automatically go to the creditor.

Contract of call option

In this contract, asset issuer can sell a particular asset for a certain price, and the buyer can buy the asset at this price. The asset will automatically return to asset issuer when set block height is reached.

From the design of bytom smart contract above, we could see some advantages as follows:

First of all, multiple contract templates with business implications make it easy to build Dapp on the top layer, and there’s no need for much development to implement some core business; Secondly, bytom provides standardized templates for smart contract related to asset issuing. The security risks under standard templates are much lower if they were written by different developers. In addition, the calling contract is included as a sub-contract when the smart contract is created, any future change or error in the calling contract template will not affect all the completed smart contracts, which is of high security value for the smart contract in the early stage.

Put it this way, bytom, adopting the extended UTXO model BUTXO to interact with assets in the new UTXO form, not only avoids vulnerabilities like data overflows that exist in Ethereum’s account-based model, but also featured by flexibility, diversity, and controllability.

For bytom, the release of smart contract also marks the cement of its core, which will further promote the commercialization and implementation of the project. As a dedicated public chain on asset management, the current development pace of Bytom is more low-key and consolidated, and there have been no safety problems so far. In this sense, bytom is promising to go further on the road of becoming a world-class security blockchain project, which of course has yet to be verified in time.