BlockStream has launched simplicity with the Liquid Network, enabling smart contract programming with Bitcoin’s infrastructure.
According to Announcement on July 31stthe idea was first proposed in 2017 by researcher Russell O’Connor. Simplicity was designed as a clean slate smart contract language that is more expressive than Bitcoin Script, but more closely and secure than a general purpose platform.
With this launch, developers will win new venues for building financial applications on Bitcoin rails.
The announcement pointed out that simplicity is different from languages such as solidity and rust.
The program describes finite functionality, excludes unfixed loops, and avoids global variable states. These constraints are intentional and aimed at enabling static analysis, allowing you to know all execution paths and fee costs in advance, support for formal verification, and support compact programs that can be accelerated with an implemented “jet”.
The purpose is not open-ended calculations that invite hidden edge cases, but rather a predictable behavior of contracts that ensure real value.
This feature arrives on the liquid in the alpha phase. This blocks phrases as practical stepping stones to wider rollouts.
The announcement states that demand for Bitcoin’s programmatic nature is rising due to wider adoption, and Liquid aims to provide a production environment for the ship to provide audited, highly supported contracts.
High-level language
The company also said simplicity can be powered by contracts, safes and delegation schemes for enterprise control. The result is market primitives such as cash-held derivatives, pooled wallets, and exchange logic to avoid platform tokens.
Raw simplicity is intentionally low level, so BlockStream ships rebranded, rusty high-level languages from Simfony to SimplicityHL, allowing developers to write easy-to-read contracts to compile to officially designated cores.
Furthermore, the roadmap emphasized that the next main goal was activation on the Bitcoin test network, steering the ecosystem towards verifiable, resource-bound smart contracts, while maintaining the experiment from the mainnet.