The case for PACT, from an aspiring blockchain developer.
As the world is quickly trying to look past the COVID-19 pandemic, bitcoin’s meteoric rise is turning heads and breaking necks. The most interesting fact is that retail interest hasn’t even reached the levels we saw during the 2017 mania.
What this tells me is the recent increase in overall crypto market cap is from institutions and billionaires are literally throwing their money into space because they realize the deflationary benefits of the technology. Countries around the world are responding to the pandemic’s devastating economic impact by printing trillions of dollars. All this money-printing is diluting the value of all paper currencies and that is very bullish for cryptocurrency.
As an aspiring blockchain developer, this presents an extraordinary opportunity to start building in the space. COVID has created a variety of new use cases for blockchain and smart contracts, like the app Kadena launched to track COVID-19 tests. Money flowing into cryptos will inevitably be used to hire developers due to increased demand in the field.
As I am finishing the first year of my cybersecurity master’s degree I must admit that picking up a new programming language is a time-consuming endeavor. I’ve been debating whether it’s best to dedicate my time to learn Solidity, the most traveled path, or PACT, the road less traveled. If my experience investing in cryptocurrencies for four years has taught me anything the road less traveled is usually the best for long-term returns. Especially when the road less traveled involves a beautifully engineered proof of work blockchain like Kadena’s Chainweb.
Will Martino, Kadena’s founder, said the moment Chainweb was scaled at the base layer and didn’t compromise decentralization or throughput was earthshaking. Ethereum has been trying to do that for years with only failed or extended deadlines to show, there’s a lot of parallels between Ethereum’s rise and the rise of Theranos (You can’t spell Theranos without ETH).
Likely, in 10 years Ethereum won’t be in the ranks it is today if it fails on more of its promises. Kadena’s achievements have not gone unnoticed.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/kadena-launches-blockchain-app-to-verify-covid-19-tests-2020-06-25
Dedicating the time to learning solidity is a liability for the following reasons:
The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is a mess. As an aspiring blockchain developer, I don’t want my apps to be potentially compromised due to no fault of my own when the problem is the platform itself. My reputation is on the line.
You can read more about it here:
Gas fees continue to be a problem. I don’t want to lose an arm and a leg spending gas all over the place to deploy my code on the main net.
When you compare gas costs on both platforms, transacting on Chainweb is basically free. Not to mention Kadena successfully deployed the first crypto gas station to offset computational costs for new users.
From an engineering standpoint, Solidity is also inefficient in that it compiles code to a lower level on a raw CPU in a language that is not human-readable like PACT. That alone makes me not want to touch it. My blockchain code should execute directly on a blockchain as PACT does.
The case for PACT:
The main reason I’m looking to build with PACT is that it’s really easy to learn. It’s designed with the intention of technical lawyers or business owners being able to easily read it. It aims to become the standard language for smart contracts like SQL is the standard language for databases.
The fact that it is Turing incomplete:
Some of the benefits of Turing incompleteness for building smart contract code:
No recursion, no unbounded loops. Cheaper
No catching of exceptions. Faster
Our apps will always terminate. Safer
PACT is specially designed for the things blockchains can efficiently do.
Technical grant opportunity
https://medium.com/kadena-io/announcing-kadena-technical-grants-31c4a88284f9
Developing is a time-consuming endeavor, good ideas should be funded. The more quality apps that are funded and deployed the more people will become aware of PACT and Chainweb.
NFT’s
NFT’s are hot right now. The team at Kadena is making it really simple for developers to deploy NFT smart contracts and not miss out on the fun.
So what are you waiting for?
This link will help you get started. Good luck!
