Cardano [ADA]’s Marlowe complexities, drawbacks and solutions unraveled

On 4th September, the blockchain based company Emurgo, which is also the venture partner of Cardano’s native firm Input Output released an official medium blog about its project, Marlowe. Marlowe is a programming language used for writing financial smart contracts.

In the process of writing contracts, certain steps are involved in the contract to achieve progress. At the final state, the contract becomes empty indicating that the purpose of the financial contract was fulfilled and it has terminated. All the steps in the process are concrete and make the contract more advance.

Since writing financial contracts involves the visual composition of well-known building blocks, every block in the blockchain acts like a step. The constituents of the output produced are updated contract and contract state. The inputs required for these outputs are the contract, user transactions, the current position of the contract and the environment.

In the blog, Emurgo also explained the drawbacks and the solutions required to fix them for the business world to integrate Marlowe into their ecosystem. Furthermore, it can add value to businesses where the work is concerned with escrows and other types of financial contracts.

Emurgo stated that the problems that can occur in Marlowe’s case are difficulty in hiring a developer even for simple contracts, as the cost of hiring is high. Secondly, convincing the parties of the fact that the code matches the contract they agreed to is hard.

As a solution, a simpler approach to writing these contracts is required, where it does not involve complex coding to include sophisticated security programs. Lastly, it should also be simple enough to be understood by different parties.

Charles Hoskinson also tweeted the blog post by Emurgo intending to share it with his followers and the Cardano community. Here, many took to the thread to drop comments.

Bertalan Vecsei, a Twitter user and a blockchain expert on the blog commented:

“I see complex Observables as a challenge when you want Capabilities like you have in complex event processing (CEP) having complex patterns over multiple event streams with a short time window of a momentum when you want to trigger a Smart Contract. It will all come down to this.”

Another cryptocurrency space follower, WokeCrypto inquired:

“Thanks Charles. Great reading and following IOHK/ADA as always. It was great to see you in SA earlier this month. // Should one want to get involved in Cardano development what sort of skills would you be looking for?”