This article highlights an overview of the origin and transition of smart contracts, the possibilities that current blockchain technology makes available and problems of current smart contract platform. A set of machine instruction stored in the blockchain ledger and executed in virtual machine are called smart contract. They are code written contracts that can be modified. On-chain smart contracts go through a three-tiered workflow, which enables permissionless transactions between any network participants: construction, storage, and execution.
Bitcoin script and its inadequacies. “Script” is a combination of instructions. The scripting system used by Bitcoin in trading is somewhat akin to assembly language and is based on a coding vocabulary that most people cannot understand. Due to language limitations, the development of Bitcoin’s smart contract capabilities is limited. There is lack of Turing completeness; that is no loop statements which poses as an obstacle to smart contract programming. The indivisibility of UTXO scripts do not provide fine-grained control over the number of withdrawals from the account. Bitcoin only has two states: the spent and the unpaid. This leaves no space for other internal states of contracts, which makes it hard to implement multi-stage option contracts. Ethereum platform has goals such as simplicity, no ambiguity of results, space saving, safe and friendly environment free of hackers and so on which serves as an advantageous principle or solid foundation for the implementation of smart contract in reality. However, like any technology ethereum still has serious problems which include
1) The use of 256 bit integers that cause degradation of performance. Most processors support mainly 32 or 64 bit integer arithmetic. Therefore those devices unable to support 256 bit operation delays computing speed drastically.
2) Ethereum developers discovered missing standard and tool library.they could only copy and paste codes from open source software of which security of these codes cannot be ascertained. They can be modified for smaller Gas consumption and this action poses further threat to security.
3) Lack of data object support widely used in object oriented programming has made solidity burdensome to process data input and integrate with external APIs
4) Problem of debugging and testing presents a design flaw of EVM and also relates to its difficulty of implementation. No support for floating and fixed point operations ,unnecessary billing, No consideration for secure docking of external resources e.g IPFS and lastly poor security
Many public chains that have been launched now support smart contracts after careful analysis of their structure, majority is yet to overcome the defects of Ethereum, let alone true innovation. Some “blockchain 3.0” projects have smart contract platform that can’t measure up to the defects of Ethereum such as DAGs or sharding projects. They aim to solve the problem of transactions per second (TPS), but their smart contract platforms only superficially address the complicated technological problems been faced, and do not solve the profound and diverse needs of smart contracts.
Cypherium is the only decentralized technology that meets these real-world requirements of a third generation smart contract platform by introduction of Cypherium Virtual Machine (CVM). Features of CVM are:
1) Cypherium uses java virtual machine architecture. Java language has the largest developer community in the world with large third party libraries for quick development and use. CVM supports java instruction sets and can integrate with other java APIs e.g android. Operation on java allows high portability, support for floating operation and ease of CPU optimization.
2) Hierarchical calculation: presently, all known blockchains handle smart contracts in unified deployment, with unified computing and consensus processing. In reality, due to the different application scopes, the power of all of our computing devices varies. Cypherium separates the calculation of the smart contract from the consensus of calculation results, which allows the network to categorize computation according to the power of the particular device. Nodes are responsible for PBFT consensus on all computation results which allows the Cypherium chain to adapt to a wide range of application scenarios, and apply smart contracts at multiple layers
3) The CVM has been implementing native acceleration processing on 64-bit integer and fixed-point operations based on the different CPU types.This improves the computing speeds of all smart contracts.
4) CVM provides support for runtime and compile-time security checks. To evade problems facing Ethereum, CVM provides an automatic security check mechanism during both compile and execute phases to checks for buffer overflows, stack overflows, excess computation, excessive memory consumption, and unsafe external requests. Therefore, the reliability and security and robustness of the whole system are guaranteed to a large extent.
5) Cypherium uses a transparent billing mechanism ;only charges the computing workload, memory consumption, and storage capacity. Users can calculate the GAS cost without accessing the network.
6) Smart contracts can be updated. The smart contract containing breached vulnerability can be deprecated, and newly deployed contract can inherit the relevant status and data of the prior contract.
7) Enhanced security
Conclusion
The team behind Cypherium Blockchain project is highly experience in blockchain industry and at personal level they have established different blockchain project and research of implementation.
