Cardano [ADA]’s Founder discusses the goals for Marlowe and Plutus

On 7th September, Charles Hoskinson, the Founder of Cardano and the CEO of the science and engineering company IOHK streamed a video updated on his official Twitter handle for the community. In the update, Hoskinson spoke about UTXO [unspent transaction output] and Cardano’s inclination towards developing on it.

He initiated by talking about the utilization of UTXO in earlier times when the community wanted to fork Bitcoin. However, accounts came into the picture and people made a paradigm shift in that direction as the latter is simpler to work with. He revealed that the team including himself reimagined the UTXO as an extended model and built the entire smart contract model to achieve that, namely, Plutus and Marlowe.

Discussing Marlowe, Hoskinson explained that it is a templating language of a sort. The CEO said that the financial DSLs are not new and have existed for decades. For instance, Barclays, Microsoft and others make them. Regarding the goal of Marlowe, he added:

“The goal of Marlowe is really about saying – I have a collection of financial transactions and what I want to do is to write those transactions up in a very careful way with the DSL [Domain Specific Language] and because it’s a DSL, I’m gonna be able to write them in a very concise way and a very fast way and I’m gonna be able to test and verify that my intent matches what I’ve actually written.”

Subsequently, the CEO went deeper into the goal of the blockchain language. He explained that the plan is to create a periodic table of financial elements like it exists already for molecules. According to Hoskinson, the table will be useful in organizing insurance contracts, derivatives and other complex financial relations between entities. Furthermore, the entities will share common elements.

“…and if you can get to a periodic table what you can do is implement a base collection of things and then you can combine these templates together to replicate what a hedge fund or Wall Street or insurance company would typically do.”

This, he stated is going to be one of the priorities of the Marlowe projects as it will leave the laboratory and enter the production stage. If done correctly, this step will enable a safe execution of the contracts that would seamlessly move between permissioned private system to a public ledger, he stated.

Next, Hoskinson spoke about the second blockchain language by Cardano, called Plutus, which is an attempt at understanding the triangle – the client, the server and the blockchain side. Lastly, he stated that Plutus is expected to enable a model where everything can be run on Haskell or any other specialized language.