Category Archive: smart contracts

Microsoft Smart Contracts: a working group to improve security

microsoft_smart_contracts
Today the tech giant announced it is working on a project to improve Microsoft smart contracts security.
Called Kinakuta, this working group aims at making it easier for companies to use and develop smart contracts based on the blockchain.
Even if more and more businesses are increasingly expressing interest in blockchain based smart contracts, concerns about this kind of use case grew after the DAO collapse.
Since then, Microsoft decided to improve smart contracts security to avoid further issues in the future.
Marley Gray, Microsoft’s director of business development and strategy, in fact, believes that their project could reduce future risks.
“We feel there’s a huge opportunity here to involve the community. Kinakuta is the community building around Microsoft best practices and elsewhere, to collect best practices and tools and involve developers in creating these best practices.”
Gray explained that there are 35 developers and companies that the company decided to call for the Microsoft Smart Contracts group. These include the Ethereum Foundation, R3CEV and BlockApps.

Vitalik Buterin on Microsoft Smart Contracts

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Creator, commented that he doesn’t believe that this new project could necessarily stop future collapses like DAO.
“There will be further bugs and we will learn further lessons,” he explained in a blog post.

Microsoft Smart Contracts: a whitepaper with Harvard

Previously, Microsoft released a research realized with Harvard that explained how ethereum smart contracts will work.
This whitepaper proposes a method called “formal verification”, or the way to prove the correctness of a smart contract; also it proposes two tools to help verify smart contracts: Solidity and EVM.

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Smart Contracts through Rootstock, Ethereum and Bitcoin thanks to RSK Labs

smart contracts bitcoin ethereum blockchain
Some days ago Rootstock received $1m in seed funding for its own blockchain startup called RSK Labs who provides smart contracts through the bitcoin distributed ledger and compatible with the Ethereum platform.
The funding came from the bitcoin mining company Bitmain Technology and from the bitcoin companies Coinsilium and Digital Currency Group (DCG).
During a recent interview, Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar, CEO at RSK Labs, commented they aim at building a blockchain platform for bitcoin miners and for developers.
Zaldivar said to CoinDesk:
“Our idea is to leverage everything that has been built by the community so far. Not only on the network effect of bitcoin, because the miners will have an additional revenue stream by merge-mining Rootstock, but by providing Ethereum developers a place to build their applications.”
Probably RSK Labs will launch its platform within the end of 2016. 


Smart contracts with the Blockchain

Even if the RSK Labs is very good news, the most important thing we can learn from this event is the interesting development of contracts managed through the blockchain. 
Smart contracts were originally proposed 20 years ago by the famous cryptographer Nick Szabo
A decentralized blockchain with smart contract applications can allow a global financial inclusion, new democratic political systems and the improve of the Internet of things. 
In fact, smart contracts are technology protocols that verify and ease the stipulation of a contract. 
This way smart contracts can provide a better security compared to a traditional contract and allow a significant reduction in transaction fees. Also, smart contracts can provide a service with less risks and without central counterparties. 
To know more about smart contracts and RSK, read this article.

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Amelia Tomasicchio