7. Smart Contract
Put simply, a smart contract allows complex business logic to be executed within virtual machines. There are different kinds of VMs in the blockchain world; they’re designed with different focuses and priorities. Some may put more emphasis on transparency, for example, while others prioritize confidentiality or security.
On all blockchain networks, the smart contract is platform-dependent. This makes it virtually impossible for any given smart contract to be seamlessly transplanted between platforms without explicitly rewriting everything. It is also very difficult for developers to apply their knowledge and development experience accumulated on one platform if they move to another.
Arcology is changing this by introducing the concept of the generic VM container. An Arcology VM container is encapsulated as a stateless transaction execution unit (EU) for processing state transitions.
Smart contracts written for other platforms, in different language, developed in other environments can be seamlessly embedded into Arcology. For example, Arcology supports Ethereum solidity and its development environments transparently. This means that smart contracts written for Ethereum can be used on Arcology with minimal or no modifications.
7.1 Integration
What’s more, because different smart contract languages may use different interfaces to interact with state data, we designed a generic state storage. Arcology’s state storage module is platform neural and consists two major components:
Executor: An executor is collection of EU together with a set of supporting modules. Arcology can have multiple executors and each executors usually has multiple EUs. All the EUs within the same Executor must be homogeneous, although different executors may have homogeneous EUs.
EU: An EU is an abstraction of any VM capable of processing transactions and generating some state transitions.
Adaptor: A VM specific adaptor to separate the VM from Arcology components, state queries made to VM’s native state storage will be redirected to the Arcology’s state storage module by this layer.
Language Specific APIs: The APIs are the library connecting the smart contracts directly to the underlying concurrency control framework. It helps developers write concurrent smart contracts.
7.2 EVM Compatibility
EVM is the first smart contract platform integrated into Arcology because its popularity. Arcology support all Ethereum standard RPC APIs, developers may continue using their Ethereum toolchain on Arcology.
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