Smart contracts have been in the crypto space for quite a while now, most recently debuting on Cardano. With the increase of decentralized finance (DeFi), smart contracts have actually ended up being much more crucial to the whole market. This is because they are required to build the protocols on which these decentralized applications (DApps) run on. As they have actually grown in appeal, smart contracts platforms like Ethereum and Solana have actually taped excellent success with them.
Cardano has been working on bringing smart contracts to its network for a while and on September 12th, that dream became a reality with the final launch of the Alonzo Hard Fork Combinator (HFC). The arrival of smart contracts ability on the network was commonly commemorated in the market. But now, Founder Charles Hoskinson does not believe the term does justice to what Cardano actually does.
The dispute with the term smart contracts follows a user pointed out that what Cardano does is actually very different from smart contracts. The user, @_KtorZ_, pointed out that the network deviates from what established smart contracts platforms do, referring to the network as “atypical.”
Cardano Does Not Have Smart Contracts
Hoskinson published a tweet where he concurred with the user mentioning that the term smart contracts do underestimate to what the platform does. Instead agreeing that a new term is needed instead of smart contracts to describe the network’s capabilities. This brand-new term which the founder had actually concurred with is programmable validators. Agreeing with the user who pointed it out, this term better describes Cardano’s programmability.
Explaining even more, the user explained that unlike existing platforms like Ethereum and Solana, one might not simply release a smart contract on Cardano. “Instead, validators are implicitly referred to by hashes prior to their use, and they are disclosed upon activation,” the user said. Meaning that the validators do not produce anything on the network. All they in fact do is “just validate.”
In closing, KtorZ explained that the term “smart contracts” felt like an imprecise term. ““I’d prefer more specific terms such as ‘on-chain validators’ and ‘off-chain code.’ If anything, ‘smart-validators’ sounds already much better to me,” they added.
