You might recall Fractal Tribute, the NFT game hosted on Holo from November 2023? It used Rainlang to simultaneously mint NFTs on Polygon while cryptographically signing them to a Holochain DHT. Now they’ve released Raindex - a genuinely smart contract compiler.
The majority of smart contracts are written using Solidity, the coding language created by several Ethereum Virtual Machine core developers. It’s the language that spawned The DAO, multi-signature wallets, and the ERC-20 NFT. Conceived in 2014, Solidity is regarded as a difficult language to master, even by Web3 developers! This led David Meister, Rainlang’s co-founder, to consider; if smart contracts are meant to be decentralising, should their implementation be left to such a small number of Solidity capable coders?
“Unless you make it approachable, you haven't really achieved decentralisation” - David Meister
When creating the programming language the Rainlang team specifically framed it using human concepts rather than the machine-centric approach of languages like Assembly and Solidity. Consider token ‘ownership’ is a human concept, while addition and subtraction to a token balance is math and therefore a machine concept.
To help demystify the code used to write smart contracts, Rainlang expands the syntax (or number of words in the coding language) to a higher level where it starts to replicate human concepts more closely. Similar to the plain language movements that campaign for public bodies and companies to use jargon-free language, Rainlang allows those of us who don’t ‘speak’ code to better understand what’s being written!
Inevitably Rainlang is still code, it doesn’t read like an airport kiosk novella, but the logic is expressed much more clearly and can be understood by orders of magnitude more people than Solidity. In fact, David confidently stated:
“If you know your way around a spreadsheet, you can learn Rain.” - David Meister
So what can you do with Rainlang? Well, last week the team launched Raindex, an onchain order book creator that allows users to deploy complex token trading strategies. Flexibility is a key tenet of decentralisation and Raindex allows users to write contracts according to their own requirements and strategies.
As the contracts themselves are deployed ‘onchain’ they are immutable and permissionless: they cannot be changed and they are publicly verifiable by querying the ledger status.
Raindex achieves this by using ‘vaults’ to store tokens which act like virtual accounts and can be defined for input or output. This means a trading strategy can be written with multiple input and output orders, between vaults. Designed to remain live until removed by the user these vaults can also be addressed by different contracts. So, users’ vaults can be utilised to trade tokens, by multiple contracts at once.
Users are required to define the maximum amount of tokens that can be traded and the price ratio for each trade. To take care of the gas fees generated by the trades, Raindex encourages users to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities between tokens to settle them.
This flexible and persistent model allows meta-strategies of increasing complexity to be built without user interaction until they’re retired from the chain. Pretty smart!
So what’s the key difference between agent-centric Rainlang and machine-centric Solidity? Solidity requires each and every hardware input to be written. Users literally have to define how to complete each step of their contract, how to handle each variable. It’s overwhelmingly complex for most users.
As Rainlang users we get to define our contract’s intention and leave it to handle the complexity of how to deliver the strategy at the machine level.
David shared his thoughts on the future for Rainlang with us, describing, trading strategy libraries distributed amongst communities and groups who could use them as templates, group vesting strategies deployed in such a way that participants can see for themselves if there is a backdoor or vulnerability, and DAOs where all the members can actually read the ‘rules’ they are agreeing to before signing them.
By making smart contracts accessible to those of us outside of the small number of blockchain brahmins, we now have the power to utilise ledger technologies at the edges, for ourselves.
If you’d like to try Raindex you can download it here. The team have created an in-depth guide, with videos, about how to use Raindex as well documentation for Rainlang. Plus they’ve shared an invite to their telegram channel where you can discuss the protocol, Raindex and give feedback to them about your experience using it. It’s time to dance in the rain together!
Useful Links:
Blog - Raindex - our new, Rainlang powered DEX
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