Ontology v1.8.0 Goes Live with Wasm Contract Support

In a Medium post published on October 29, 2019, public blockchain project Ontology (ONT) announced the release of Ontology v1.8.0. According to the announcement, the latest version of the project comes with the highly anticipated Wasm functionality.

Wasm Contracts Come to Ontology

In what comes as major propulsion for the Ontology ecosystem, the Wasm function has officially been launched on the project’s MainNet. With the release of Ontology v1.8.0, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) venture will – with the help of its hybrid virtual machine architecture – be able to support three types of contracts: Native, NeoVM, and Wasm.

While Native and NeoVM contracts were already compatible with the Ontology blockchain infrastructure, the introduction of Wasm contracts holds the potential to open a whole host of new opportunities for the project’s developers.

Per sources close to the matter, Wasm contract development will give developers the opportunity to fiddle with myriad advanced development languages including C++, Rust, Go, and Assembly Script, among others. Notably, all these programming languages support Wasm bytecode which essentially means that developers will now have the freedom to use the programming language of their choosing to build products on the Ontology platform.

Ontology has also become the first DLT initiative to extend support for Wasm contracts, the blog post reads.

NeoVM Optimization

The upgrade to v1.8.0 also includes a complete and exhaustive semantic verification of variables and contexts of the Neo Virtual Machine (NeoVM) at the system level to mitigate the possibility of potential bugs. The upgraded MainNet also brings about an array of improvements to the Virtual Machine bytecode. The post reads in part:

“The performance of the virtual machine bytecode has been improved by 240 percent, the memory allocation has been reduced by 5.5x times, the memory consumption has reduced by 29 percent and the overall node stability has been effectively improved.”

Ontology Pushing the Envelope

As previously reported by BTCManager, Ontology and open-source dApp platform NEO had joined forces in July 2019 to develop an open cross-chain platform to serve as a foundation for the next-gen internet.

On a similar note, BTCManager reported on July 3, 2019, Ontology partnered with the Opera web browser to facilitate the growth of decentralized finance (DeFi) and decentralized applications (dApps).