Blockchain Smart Contracts

New institutions, and new ways to formalize the relationships that make up these institutions, are now
made possible by the digital revolution. I call these new contracts "smart", because they are far more
functional than their inanimate paper-based ancestors. No use of artificial intelligence is implied.
A smart contract is a set of promises, specified in digital form, including protocols within which the
parties perform on these promises.

Smart contracts are contracts whose terms are encoded in  computer language instead of legal language.
Smart contracts can be executed by a computing network such as RSK, so that the terms of the contracts
are automatically enforced by a protocol that all nodes in the network follow.

A smart contract can be fully autonomous if all the objects referred (such as currency, payments,
obligations, property titles, assets, licenses) have a digital representation in the platform. 

 

Platform name Engine Contract language Live? Origin Inc. in Est. Pub. rel.
Aeternity HLM, FTWVM, AEVM Sophia, Varna, Solidity no FL Liechtenstein 2017
Bitcoin Bitcoin script Ivy-lang, Balzac Yes USA USA 2017.12 2017.12
BitShares ? ? Yes



Byteball Byteball JSON Yes RU
2016.12 2016.12
Cardano IELE Plutus (Haskell inspired) no HK Switzerland 2015
Counterparty ? ? Yes



Corda ?





DFINITY EVM? Ethereum compatible (aka Solidity, Serpent, etc.) No



EOS EVM / eWASM C/C++ (compiles to WASM) Yes


2018.06
Ethereum EVM Solidity Yes CA Switzerland 2014.04 2015.07
Ethereum Classic EVM Solidity Yes ^^^ no ^^^ ^^^
Exonum ? Rust. Java bindings TBD No UA Netherlands
2017.07
hyperledger Sandbox ? ?



Lisk N/A Javascript




Nem Offchiain ? ?



Neo NeoVM 1st batch: dotNet; 2nd: Java,Kotlin; 3rd: C,C++,GO,Py,JS (TBD) Yes China China 2014.06 2016.10
Neblio ? REST-API, Python,JS, .NET(C# & VB.NET), Objective-C, Java, Node.js, GO, PHP Yes USA USA 2017.01 2017.07
NXT ? ? Yes



OmniLayer ?





Qtum EVM Solidity Yes Singapore Singapore 2016 2017.09
quorum ? ? ?



Radix ? Scrypto (Based on JavaScript/TypeScript) Yes UK UK 2018
Rootstock EVM Solidity no Argentina Argentina 2015.11
Snax EVM / eWASM C/C++ (compiles to WASM) no

2018.12
Tezos ? Michelson no



Ubiq EVM Solidity Yes CA CA ?
2017.01
Universa ?





Urbit ? Hoon Yes



Waves ? NA Yes RU ? 2016 2016.11

 

Ethereum

Ethereum is a gold standard in smart contracts and has biggest capitalization among other platforms. Majority of token sales go on Ethereum platform, with recently standartized token format ERC-20.

Founded by son of russian expats in Canada Vitalik Buterin. Incorporated in Switzerland.

Docs:

Contract examples:

Ethereum Classic

Classic appeared as a fork of main Ethereum chain (right after famous DAO hack) by a community that disagreed to alter the blockchain to get back stolen funds. ETC is still in search of its place in smart contracts world. Some engineering changes are still going under the hood (like, changing the emission and difficulty retarget algo), and developer tools are being developed. No major token crowdsales were made yet, but the community is looking forward to it.

Not incorporated.

Neo

NEO (formerly Antshares) is a Chinese answer to Ethereum. Neo is a major player in SmartContracts world and often compared to Ethereum.

First batch of supported languages is ready for production use. Second is partially ready, and third is planned.

Docs:

Contract examples:

Ubiq

Ubiq functions as a fork of Ethereum codebase, with several adjustmens, fully compatible with EVM and Solidity.

Governed by Ubiq Technology Inc.

Urbit

Contract examples:

Rootstock

Rootstock is a Bitcoin sidechain, adding Turing-complete language (enabling smart contracts) and ability to scale up to 20k transactions per second (eventually). Sidechain shall be secured by a merge-mining with regular Bitcoin pools.

Rootstock is very well received by community, and among all 2nd layer solutions for Bitcoin is considered to be one of the closest to completion.

Language used shall be Solidity, and RSK VM is fully compatible with Ethereum VM.

Docs:

Cardano

Cardano claims it is the first Blockchain to use a provably secure, proof of stake algorithm. Cardano is designed in separate layers, where the 1st layer (aka Settlement Layer; PoS blockchain) is already live (as of 2017.10), and internal currency (Ada) being added to exchanges.

Second (aka computational) layer will run smart contracts using a Haskell-inspired scripting language, called Plutus, and is scheduled to release in first quarter 2018.

Governed by The Cardano Foundation, IOHK and Emurgo.

Docs:

Contract examples:

Exonum

Exonum is an extensible open-source framework for creating blockchain applications. It is designed to allow you, your company or your government to build a tailor-cut private or permissioned blockchain.
Thus, there's no public Exonum network or traded Exonum tokens.

Exonum is developed and supported by the Bitfury Group.

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