As Cardano is on the rise, will Haskell be the next MOVE?
Quick fact: Cardano’s smart contract programming language and Marlowe, the domain-specific language for financial smart contracts, are both built on Haskell.
As the underlying custom language of Plutus-Cardano’s native smart contract language, Haskell was designed specifically for DApps. It is characterized by two keywords: “lightweight” and “secure”.
On September 22, Cardano’s Mainnet Vasil hard fork upgrade was successfully completed. The upgrade made significant improvements to Plutus, enabling the Cardano blockchain to offer more services in a better way and laying the foundation for a new wave of DApps, new users, and ultimately the growth of Cardano TVL.
With the emergence of diverse DApps on the blockchain network covering lending, trading, derivatives, synthetic assets, and even gaming, travel, shopping, eating, drinking, and living, the on-chain DApp ecosystem has accordingly become more and more segmented.
As a result, most of the popular wallets are not compatible with the Cardano network. This makes a major development obstacle for Cardano to further expand its ecosystem after entering the era of smart contracts.
Lace: a DApp connector in Cardano ecosystem
For this reason, the Lace Cardano wallet developed by the Cardano development team IOG is different from existing products on the market.
- Light wallet which has security and node running functions
- Transactions and payments
- Storing and viewing NFTsStaking
- Interaction with different DApps (every DApp that goes live with Lace will be carefully reviewed)
As an official Cardano-powered light wallet, Lace intends to leverage various Cardano products and combine a range of features to provide a unified user experience, including identity and personal data management integration with Atala PRISM and easy registration and voting with Project Catalyst (Cardano Public Fund).
To achieve these goals, integration with EVM Sidechain is required. Once integrated, Ethereum developers can easily leverage the Cardano infrastructure to help users and developers seamlessly migrate their assets from Ethereum to Cardano.
As the Vasil hardfork brings Cardano into the era of smart contracts, the wealth and liquidity of DApps is expected to increase tremendously. More and more DApps will be released on Cardano.
Therefore, developers can use Lace to access the Cardano ecosystem quickly and easily. It is easy to use and covers a wide range of features for developers, which significantly reduces the learning curve and time required.
In short, IOG aims to build a Web3 version of the Google Store/App Store by connecting the Cardano-based DApp ecosystem with Lace.
This means that Lace will be the ultimate traffic portal where users can view all DApps and NFTs. In addition, users will be able to access an unlimited world of DApps (DeFi, NFT, GameFi, DAO and even social, e-commerce and other Web3 apps) through Lace and Cardano. In this sense, Lace serves as an alternative to iOS and Android apps.
Developer-friendly: the core competency of the Cardano DApp ecosystem
A thriving DApp ecosystem depends on the public chain’s core competency of being developer-friendly. Be it lower development hurdles, freedom to design new DApps in the future, and freedom to migrate existing apps (similar to the rise of EVM-compatible public chains like BNB Chain, Polygon, etc.).
A forward-looking layered network
Ethereum congestion has proven the importance of Layer 2 for scalability. The new Layer 2 players are easily valued at hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
In fact, Cardano had the foresight to choose a layered design in its early stages. It was originally positioned as an open-source PoS underlying public chain based on the Ouroboros Paros consensus protocol. The system has a “dual-chain” structure with a settlement layer and a computation layer, where the settlement layer is responsible for simple transactions and mining services and the computation layer is responsible for interacting with various smart contracts.
A special arrangement of network layers combines the first and second layers while effectively solving the problem of scalability, the most difficult problem of public chains.
Layer 2 (the applied smart contract layer) uses the data from Layer 1 (the base currency layer) and provides a low-cost and high-performance DApp execution environment. Layer 1 is responsible for verifying the operational results of Layer 2 and providing basic support. That is, Layer 1 is both the security layer and the settlement layer of Layer 2. It is responsible for Layer 2 security and accounting for value over the network. In comparison, Layer 2 focuses on solving scalability and performance bottlenecks in applications such as asset transfer and exchange. Layer 1 and Layer 2 are organically integrated so that assets can flow freely, securely and efficiently.
Haskell: a universal functional programming language
Programming languages can reflect the core positioning of a blockchain project.
As the underlying custom language for Plutus, Haskell was designed specifically for DApps and is focused on two keywords: “lightweight” and “secure.”
It provides a theoretical framework for describing and evaluating functions, where each function is a mathematical function with a high degree of safety.
In Haskell, functions perform low-level tasks and specify what the program must accomplish. It is a statically typed language where the code is simply evaluated during compilation. Type-checking ensures that the code is concise, clear, and correct.
Compared to existing blockchain programming languages, Haskell focuses on improving the DApp development process and enables developers to create and manage DApps on the chain in a more flexible and secure way.
With a comprehensive and simple infrastructure, developers can access the Cardano EVM sidechain and develop rich DApps with very little learning. This will create a thriving Cardano ecosystem and realize the value of the Cardano ecosystem.
Haskell: the next programming language to bring huge wealth?
MOVE is the first programming language adopted by new public chains like Aptos and Sui, and has recently become their new favorite. There are even tantalizing stories about MOVE programmers making thousands of dollars per hour.
Even “Solana” Labs’ GitHub page shows that it has added the Move language to its Github codebase or plans to support it in other ways.
The blockchain world is a great platform for tech talent to make a name for themselves. From Solidity to Rust to MOVE, their prosperity is closely tied to the rise of public chains like Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, and Aptos.
And today, Cardano ranks 8th in the cryptocurrency industry with a market cap of $25 billion. If all goes well, Vasil’s mainnet release this year will set the stage for a new wave of DApps, new users, and ultimately Cardano’s TVL growth.
That means more DApps will emerge after the Vasil hard fork. Industry leaders and venture capitalists will invest in Cardano and launch their projects. This change will directly lead to many hiring opportunities in the Haskell programming language.
Overall, as Cardano enters the era of smart contracts, the demand for Haskell skills will continue to increase, and the salaries of Haskell developers will surely keep on rising.
Moreover, Haskell is very useful in data-intensive industries such as finance, medicine, and biotechnology. Its systematic expressive type and abstractions simplify big data infrastructure and make code reusable. Banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions use Haskell extensively for their back-end projects.
Also, from the perspective of a developer’s career opportunities. Haskell plays a critical role in creating high-quality software, even though there are only a handful of Web3 developers using the Haskell programming language by 2022. Haskell is showing its momentum of replacing MOVE and becoming the next opportunity for developers to earn thousands of dollars per hour. It is thus definitely easier for developers to make their mark with additional Haskell skills.
These strategic moves by Cardano are also supported by Adaverse — Cardano’s global incubation investment fund. With first-hand resources and investment capital, Adaverse focuses on incubating and investing in projects deployed in the Cardano ecosystem by bringing more developers into the Web3 ecosystem. In this way, it will help them use their imagination and creativity to build an extensive Web3 DApp ecosystem based on Cardano’s blockchain infrastructure.
About Adaverse
Simply put, Adaverse is designed to help developers avoid the complicated workload on Cardano infrastructure and focus entirely on the business logic of the products. This makes development and operations more effective, reduces development costs, and creates synergies with other DApps in the Cardano ecosystem faster.
At the same time, Ken Kodama, CEO of EMURGO (Cardano’s commercial incubation company and venture capital organization), said Emurgo will invest more than $200 million over the next three years to support the growth of the Cardano ecosystem. The funds come from Emurgo’s own capital and will go directly to Cardano projects and other networks whose products will be integrated into the Cardano network.
Overall, Web3 will give rise to a new global digital economy in which business models and markets are radically different. The monopoly of platforms like Google and Facebook will be disrupted and as a result there will be a lot of bottom-up innovation. These changes will create the next generation of potential Internet giants and investment opportunities.
Among them, the developer community and the DApp ecosystem will play a crucial role.
