Please describe your proposed solution.
This proposal suggest to introduce a program that incentivizes removing bugs from the OpShin tool chain by prizing out the resolution of issues. But what is OpShin?
This is OpShin: a toolchain that lets developers construct Cardano smart contracts in Python. Why Python?
The problems of Haskell
Haskell is hard
As an exotic language, Haskell has very few people able to work on it, ranking only the 25th most used language on GitHub, with only 0.39% of the userbase actively using it. Very few people are proficient in Haskell, and even fewer can help you out with the peculiarities of PlutusTx: with how to implement smart contracts on Cardano.
Instead of building in the language you already know and use in everyday work and life, you have to learn a completely new language – and peer support for it is limited.
On-chain code doesn’t integrate smoothly with off-chain code
Whilst the on-chain part of a dApp handles the transactions on the blockchain, the off-chain part often handles the rest of the dApp. Developers are forced to use two completely separate tools, often in separate languages. This costs Focus - and introduces unnecessary friction at integration and potential security issues.
Instead of working on how to best solve a problem to serve your users’ needs, you’re pulling your hair trying to make the two halves of your dApp work together.
Smart Contract size is limited, and PlutusTx is hefty
Smart Contracts have tight constraints on size and execution steps. PlutusTx and other tools often translate type constraints to expensive and unnecessary on-chain transactions, limiting developers in the complexity of what they can build.
Instead of building the best solution possible, you’re hamstringing yourself just to make sure the most critical parts of your smart contract can be executed on the blockchain.
How OpShin frees you
The OpShin Toolchain comprises several projects that aim to facilitate the development of Smart Contracts and dApps on Cardano. They are largely based on Python, or integrate well with it for maximal accessibility.
Python has a wide and growing community
At the time of writing, Python is the second-most used language on GitHub, with 14.75% of the active userbase working with Python, and enjoys a 22.5% year-over-year increase in users; this is driven in part by its utility in data science and machine learning.
Everyone who knows Python can leverage the toolstack available for Python development to build on Cardano; and that is a lot of people, with a lot of tools.
OpShin natively integrates with Python Cardano tooling
Developers can build both off-chain and on-chain tooling in just Python, and are able to directly import definitions and functions that are defined in the on-chain contract, into their off-chain tooling. This reduces the friction that is naturally-induced by Cardano’s design when building combined tools.
Everyone who knows Python can develop fluently and without interruption, without the cost of constantly having to change gears and mindsets just to build dApps.
OpShin is light, fast, and maintains security
OpShin enforces strict typing on the high-level programming: it implements a type system on top of Python type hints. However, all traces of typing are erased during compilation, for a maximum efficiency program. OpShin beats many programming languages when taken to the test for real use-cases.
Everyone who knows Python can build a dApp that runs faster, costs their users less, and executes more.
How does OpShin perform?
How much does OpShin save?
Testimonials
“ImperatorLang makes smart contract development the easy part of dApp development. I have spent far longer on off-chain code than on implementing smart contracts.” - @while0x1, SPO
“My experience was very positive. As a python library, eopsin does well at performing as expected. It's clear when things don't work and the language is intuitive.” - Julius Frost, Full-time Python dev
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
The OpShin toolchain is and will always be fully open-source. This is a necessary property of a Smart Contract language that requires widespread trust and inspectability.
The impact on Cardano is already huge - within 5 months of the initial release, 3 dApps have been released built on OpShin. We are expecting that this will grow even more with additional funds to foster the development of documentation, developer experience improvements and educational content.
We want to make sure that the code quality of OpShin will remain high and hence want to offer rewards to developers that discover and fix issues in the code base. This will make sure that the project can provide the required security for software as critical as Smart Contract programming languages.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
We intend to measure future success in terms of resolved issues per month in the OpShin code base (on GitHub) and teh number of fewer newly opened issues per month (currently around 50 and 20 each)
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
The output of OpShin has and will continue to be shared continuously through
- commits, PRs and issues on the OpShin Github repository
- explanatory Tweets through the @OpShinDev twitter account