Agoric Smart Contracts: Where’s the Crypto?

Chief Scientist Mark S. Miller presents Higher Order Smart Contracts across Chains.
Where’s the Crypto? is discussed starting at 31:00 for two minutes.

One of the main reasons we say the Agoric Distributed Programming Platform makes defi development faster is:

Every novel cooperative arrangement of mutually suspicious parties interacting electronically – every smart contract – effectively requires a new cryptographic protocol. However, if every new contract requires new cryptographic protocol design, our dreams of cryptographically enabled electronic commerce would be unreachable. Cryptographic protocol design is too hard and expensive, given our unlimited need for new contracts.

Just as the digital logic gate abstraction allows digital circuit designers to create large analog circuits without doing analog circuit design, we present cryptographic capabilities as an abstraction allowing a similar economy of engineering effort in creating smart contracts.

That’s from the abstract of Capability-based Financial Instruments, written in 2000 using the E language for contracts. Through decades of work in JavaScript standards, features from E such as Promises and Proxies are now part of the toolkit of millions of working JavaScript developers.

We invite these developers to join us in realizing our dreams of global economic cooperation.