Circle launches Web3 development platform for Web2 developers

October 19, 2023 Coin Telegraph

Avalanche

Circle announced the launch of a new platform that uses pre-vetted templates to make building Web3 apps easier for traditional developers.

Stablecoin issuer Circle has launched a new tool that it says will allow developers to “remove the complexity” of building Web3 apps, according to an announcement and accompanying social media post on October 19.

Called “Smart Contract Platform,” the new tool allows developers to deploy smart contracts using a set of pre-vetted code templates and either a console or REST APIs, making it potentially easier for traditional Web2 programmers to use.

Circle also released a Gas Station tool that lets developers pay for their users’ gas fees, which they claim may make onboarding users easier.

1/ Introducing Gas Station and Smart Contract Platform - built for #devs & available in beta!

Our two new #Web3 Services products provide solutions for devs & businesses to remove cost, complexity & friction for app users. Let’s dive in to learn how our Web3 services continues… pic.twitter.com/gZnpAvYepT
— Circle (@circle) October 19, 2023

When developers deploy smart contracts, they usually rely on Web3 developer tools like Truffle or Hardhat to perform the deployment. When using these tools, contracts have to be written in Solidity, a language that some conventional programmers do not know very well. They also require developers to create and run blockchain deployment or “migration” scripts, a process that some Web2 developers are unfamiliar with.

According to its documents, the Circle smart contract platform provides a set of pre-vetted templates that can be used to create a variety of smart contracts. For example, developers can use the templates to produce contracts for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), blockchain loyalty programs, and interactions with Uniswap or other decentralized finance projects or with Circle’s stablecoin contracts. This implies that a developer can use the platform to avoid having to create an entire Solidity contract from scratch, which may make it easier for Web2 developers to start building in Web3.

Once the contract is created, the developer can deploy it to Polygon using a “no-code” console provided as part of the platform, the announcement stated. This implies that the developer does not need to write a “migration” script to deploy the contract when using Circle’s platform. According to the announcement, the “no-code” console is not yet available for Ethereum or Avalanche.

However, the platform also provides a set of representational state transfer application programming interfaces (REST APIs) for use on these networks, and developers can use these to deploy or interact with their contracts. REST APIs are the standard means that developers use to interact with Web2 databases, making them more familiar to developers that have never built Web3 apps.

Circle plans to make both the “no code” console and REST APIs available for more networks in the future, the announcement stated.

According to the platform’s documents, developers can also use it to deploy a custom contract that doesn't use one of the templates, although in this case they must provide the compiled bytecode for it. Still, even in this case, the developer avoids needing to write a deployment script, since this can be handled either by the console or REST APIs.

Circle also announced a second developer feature called “Gas Station.” It allows Web3 app developers to pay for their users’ gas fees. This potentially allows developers to onboard users more easily, as it prevents users from needing to pre-fund their wallets with the native coin of a network.

Gas Station uses Ethereum’s account abstraction feature to implement these gas-free transactions. The Grab super-app has already implemented the new feature, allowing users to pay no gas when redeeming NFT vouchers, the announcement stated.

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Network outages have been Solana’s ‘curse,’ says co-founder

September 5, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Anatoly Yakovenko

The high-speed smart contract platform has suffered full or partial outages at least seven separate times over the last twelve months.

Network outages continue to be the Solana network’s biggest challenge, according to its co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

Launched in 2020, the Solana network has suffered a number of network outages, which have come from a number of different congestion and spam events, according to Yakovenko.

In a Sept. 2 interview with Real Vision co-founder Raoul Pal, Yakovenko said the network outages had been Solana’s “curse,” but said the outages have resulted because of the network's low-cost transactions.

"That's been, I guess, our curse, but it's because the network is so cheap and fast that there are enough users and applications that are driving that."

However, while the outages have “prevented users” from using the network, the Solana CEO said the network itself hasn’t been compromised. He also argued that each blockchain is built differently and has their own “failure case.”

For example, Yakovenko noted that when the Bitcoin network block production halted for two hours in the past, it was still considered normal.

“[Bitcoin] is designed to be extremely resilient [...] when a bunch of Chinese hash power shut down, there were times where there are two hours between blocks in Bitcoin. And that’s totally fine,” he explained, adding that the same production halt would be seen as a failure for Solana.

“If there’s two hours between blocks in Solana, the network’s dead because it’s designed to make a block every 400 milliseconds.”

Solana was built to be a high transaction speed, low-cost smart contract platform, which processes “30 million transactions per day,” making it “more than all other chains combined,” said Yakovenko

“Once you make a faster network, the failure case is different than one on something like Bitcoin or Ethereum.”

However, Yakovenko argued that the outages themselves aren’t entirely a bad thing “because all [of] these challenges are coming because we have users.”

“This is our biggest challenge, which is maybe the one that I like to have because of all these challenges that are coming because we have users on the chain on a daily basis," he added.

Solana has suffered at least seven network outages since its launch in 2020, with five of them coming in 2022 alone. One of the longest production halts lasted up to 17 hours in September 2021.

Yakovenko said the network outages resulted from the validators not being able to process transaction loads at peak periods:

“I think some people have seen 10 million packets per second being submitted to a validator. And if there’s a bug in any one of those validators where memory grows really [...] quickly, that validator could shut down.”

Among the most notable ones include a denial-of-service attack caused by bots spamming the Raydium protocol in Sept. 2021, another seven hour outage caused by bots on a nonfungible token (NFT) application in May. 2022 and a code bug halting block production on the network in Jun. 2022.

The Solana token, SOL, is currently priced at $32, up 3.83% over the last 24 hours.

Smart Contract Platform