Blockchain Startup ‘Chain’ Announces ‘Ivy’ Language for Bitcoin Smart Contracts

San Francisco-based blockchain tech startup ‘Chain’ is currently working on an interesting project to make it easy for developers to write smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. The company has recently announced the launch of Ivy - which is a programming language that helps to write smart contracts on the blockchain.

Chain has also released an open-source compiler that translates between Bitcoin Script, which is a low-level programming language of the Bitcoin blockchain and Ivy, which is Chain’s own high-level smart contract language.

As Chain explains in its blog post, “Ivy helps you write custom, SegWit-compatible Bitcoin addresses that enforce arbitrary combinations of conditions supported by the Bitcoin protocol, including signature checks, hash commitments, and timelocks.”

With Ivy, it becomes easy to manipulate value just like you manipulate data in other programming languages. The term “smart contract” is more commonly heard for Ethereum which is a key feature of its blockchain and differentiates it from Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin’s blockchain allows developers write smart contracts even by using the low-level programming language Bitcoin Script.

However, unlike Ethereum, the limitations of Bitcoin’s existing virtual machine has made it difficult to write the language and Chain says "Bitcoin Script development is considered somewhat esoteric.” Hence, the company has developed this Ivy - high-level programming language to write Bitcoin smart contracts with ease and convenience.

While commenting on the significance of Ivy, Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song told Cointelegraph “Ivy makes SCRIPT easier to handle. It doesn't change Bitcoin fundamentally, just makes coding it easier. ETH is Turing complete, which BTC cannot have without some sort of soft fork at a minimum. I don't see the "smart contracting" ability of ETH as a "feature", but more as a vulnerability. The attack surface on the ETH smart contracting platform is much greater. The fundamentals haven't changed, this is more like a nice tool for developers.”

On the other hand, Matej Michalko, the CEO of Decent expressed a positive outlook for Ivy saying “Ivy is an excellent example of the multifaceted development of blockchain products. Cross chain referencing is proliferating and it is on its way to dominate the ecosystem. Bitcoin can now be on par with Ethereum as a great smart contracts prototyping tool for a full range of Blockchain applications. Both platforms, however, remain fundamentally different in their architectures and market adoption. It remains to be seen what blockchain use cases and platforms are going to be adopted by masses. Scalability will be one of the decisive factors. 2018 is going to be a Blockchain year.”

Note that Ivy is still currently in the research and development phase and has a long way to in order to catch up Ethereum’s existing status of writing smart contracts.