Global blockchain engineering company IOHK has today announced the launch of KEVM, the first of three planned smart contract developer environments (devnets) for Cardano – KEVM, Glow and IELE. KEVM will allow developers to deploy any smart contract written in Solidity – the programming language used to implement smart contracts on Ethereum, on the Cardano blockchain platform.
The KEVM devnet utilizes a version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (the runtime environment for smart contracts in Ethereum) which has been verified by K – a framework used to create formally verified software. This allows developers to define or implement the formal semantics of a programming language in an intuitive and modular way. It will allow Ethereum developers to write decentralised applications (DApps) in Solidity, EVM or Glow ;a ‘high-level’ language designed to allow the development of highly secure financial contracts in an intuitive way developed by IOHK partner MuKn. They can then be deployed on Cardano, allowing users to take advantage of lower fees, higher speeds, enhanced functionality and formally verified security. The company also announced that it is scheduled to add Truffle integration, further increasing developer usability.
The devnets play a similar role to developer kits for games consoles or other software environments, where manufacturers provide a development environment, allowing developers to start creating their games and applications ahead of launch. The Devnets will comprise a full suite of development tools, allowing developers to begin building smart contracts for Cardano. This means that once smart contract functionality is launched on the Cardano mainnet, the Dapps written using the development environments will be available on Cardano via dedicated sidechains. Smart contract development for Cardano has begun.
The devnet will be launched as a standalone network, and will then be connected as sidechains to the Cardano mainnet in the first half of 2021. This is a crucial stage in IOHK’s ongoing Goguen rollout, which began in November this year with the launch of multi-asset functionality and the Marlowe Playground Alpha release.
“With the launch of the KEVM devnet, smart contract development for the Cardano platform has now begun,” IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson said. “Our deep commitment to interoperability is what has led us to develop a series of ‘on-ramps’ into developing applications for the Cardano platform, allowing developers proficient in blockchain development languages not native to Cardano to continue to write, or to port their existing smart contracts into the platform. Large-scale adoption of blockchain will be dependent on interoperability, and that has driven our development of tools that allow developers to continue to write smart contracts in development languages they are familiar with. This is just a first step, as that functionality will be further extended soon, with the launch of our IELE devnet, which will allow smart contracts to be written for Cardano in the world’s most popular, non-blockchain, development languages.”
