In this webcast, Jon Moss from Cardano Foundation’s Marketing & Community team caught up with Grigore Rosu, president and CEO of Runtime Verification. Grigore answered questions from the Cardano community about the research and development happening over at Runtime Verification for the Cardano protocol.

IOHK has partnered with Grigore and his startup, Runtime Verification, to develop new technology, based on formal semantics for Cardano, including a new virtual machine. Together they have recently launched two Cardano smart contract testnets, the KEVM testnet, a correct by construction version of the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) specified in the K framework and the IELE testnet, a register-based virtual machine.

Questions raised in the webcast and their timestamped answers:

In your opinion, what would be a better solution for deployed code? Either allow the use of any imports and K resolves them transitively or only allow “native” built-in syntactic structures for a language, without allowing any imports, so developers would manually add any required utilities with each contract?

Skip to Question Building on the previous question, but now about K in general (without blockchain). Is there already a known solution on how to map ‘native’ calls to one VM or OS into calls to another VM or Runtime?

Skip to Question Cardano is planning to have (at least) two computational layer VMs - KEVM and IELE. If K allows to automatically generate semantic-translators for any supported languages, and Solidity is a supported language - does it mean that any other supported language may be translated into Solidity and also executed on KEVM?

Skip to Question There are online tutorials for Solidity programmers on how to optimize gas-cost in their code. How, in your opinion, are K, IELE, and multiple-level semantic translations compatible with such practice? Do you think it would be possible, to estimate GAS-costs for a contract in any language, without moving it thru the levels of compilation first?

Skip to Question Is there a way to run a private testnet node?

Skip to Question Is there any way or what is the best way to report any errors?

Skip to Question Would it be possible to have some realtime dashboard with key metrics for the testnet and timestamped status updates?

Skip to Question Where will compilation from source to K to smart-contracts happen? On the deploying client or on CL nodes?

Skip to Question Are there any tutorial or introductions how to actually verify a EVM smart contract and how to deploy it to the Cardano testnet?

Skip to Question Can you please tell us about your general impression from your work with Cardano or any other blockchain projects and smart contract technologies - What will the future of smart-contracts look like?

Skip to Question

Learn more about Grigore and his background: https://runtimeverification.com/team/

Try out the KEVM and IELE testnets here: https://testnet.iohkdev.io/

Also check out the following blog posts from IOHK and Runtime Verification: