January 19th, 2024

Smart Contract Experiment Succeeds

CloudCoin has completed its Smart Contract experiment to see how difficult it would be to enable smart contracts using the RAIDA. Smart contracts are usually program that run on blockchains. Blockchains mix logic with data forcing them to need other logic to make them able to do anything special. CloudCoin separates data from logic so in theory smart contracts are not necessary because CloudCoins can be imported into any software using any programming languages and can do anything imaginable. 

However, blockchains do have one feature that CloudCoin does not. Blockchain smart contracts have data supremacy and cannot be knocked offline or tampered with. Programs using CloudCoin do not automatically have data supremacy and this means that people could tamper with the smart contracts. 

So our goal was to create a system that allows people to write programs that can run on all 25 RAIDA without posing a threat to the RAIDA and having the ability to move coins around. We also wanted to include some valuable features that blockchain smart contracts cannot do.

CloudCoin smart contract editor on the left and the Cardano smart contract editor on the right. They can create the same smart contracts but CloudCoin can send and receive messages.

What We Did

We did not want to reinvent the wheel so we choose to use an opensource smart contract system used by the Cardova crypto currency called Blockly. Blocky was created by Google and allows "codeless" programming of smart contracts. You don't need to know how to program to use the system, only how to drag and drop these logical blocks around. 

The big differences are that the code that is generated by the Cordan app in the back is Haskel and is really odd and difficult for programmers to change.  

Our code uses PHP which is one of the most common languages and can connect to SMS, webpages, emails and much more. 

This allows us to create logic such as:

The smart contract will send Jenny a locker code worth 1000 CloudCoins via SMS if Able, Bill and Charlie each send their secret codes. Able must send his code via email, Bill must send his by SMS and Charlie must enter his into a webpage generated by the smart contract. 

Blockchain smart contracts cannot do this.

Another decision we made is to not run smart contracts on the RAIDA but a separate Smart Contract RAIDA. 

What's Next

We have this system working but the difficult part is to make the code run on 25 RAIDA and have the RAIDA all agree on the outcomes. That will take many more weeks of work. We need to anylize the costs and benefits. At this time there is no plans to put CloudCoin Smart Contracts into production but now it will be much easier to do if we choose to. One reason we want to put it into product is so the RAIDA that can exchange CloudCoins for blockchain currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and many more.