The PC application V1.6.0-preview3 was just released by Antshares.org. The new beta version updates Antshares’ core protocol, and adds smart contracts 2.0.

Antshares smart contracts 2.0 is important and valuable to the diversity of the community as the underlying technology of smart contracts has rarely been seen in the community over the past 3 years.

High finality, high performance and high scalability are the features of Smart contracts 2.0, which is part of Antshare’s technology roadmap this year. The main types of smart contracts it supports includes: verification contracts, function contracts and application contracts.

Antshares smart contracts use the lightweight AVM (Antshares Virtual Machine) for their runtime environment. The features of AVM will help improve the performance of Antshares’ smart contracts 2.0 as the AVM can start quickly and consume fewer resources. Therefore, making them suitable for light applications like smart contracts. The just-in-time compiler also leads to better results of the static compilation and cache from hot smart contracts.

Further, the efficiency of the cryptology algorithm used in smart contacts can be optimized by the set of encryption instructions provided by AVM. Also, the data operation set supports array data and complicated data structures.

Antshares’ smart contracts achieve scalability via high concurrency and dynamic sharding, due to its low coupling design. Therefore, most of the updates of the smart contracts can be achieved through increasing the API at the interaction layer.

The programming language of Antshares’ smart contracts is another distinctive factor as the developers of Antshares’ smart contracts can use any advanced language they prefer. Currently supported languages include C#, VB, .Net and F#.

The languages that will be supported in the future include JAVA, C, C++, GO, Python and Javascript. The extensive support of the programming language from Antshares’ smart contracts is to greatly speed up the adoption of blockchain technology.

Finally, Antshares is also more convenient as it supports debugging functions in the AVM.

Antshares’ smart contracts 2.0 will be released officially in June of 2017. Together with Innospace, Antshares will also hold a Blockchain Start-up Competition in late May, sponsored by Shanghai Science and Technology Committee.