In our increasingly automated and digital epoch, it should be no surprise that blockchain developers are rapidly climbing up the ladder of in-demand job skills, taking a spot as rank two in fastest-growing freelance skills of Q3 2017. It is very clear that developers simply cannot keep up with the exploding demand, especially in smart contract design, which is becoming adopted more and more each day with the enormous savings and efficiency the technology can provide to businesses.
However, problems emerging with such a low distribution of these developers should be obvious: businesses are in competition for hiring experts; which leads not only to inflated salaries – but also puts companies that cannot compete at a technological disadvantage.
With such competition, low-quality devs might start being hired because of panic or fear that a company is getting left behind, which could be a very dangerous move if there are security flaws made in a smart contract’s code – in fact, we’ve already seen this happen, when a bug caused $1M in Ethereum to be lost, permanently.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that many of these industries require job-specific expertise to write secure and coherent smart contracts. Having the added cost of hiring a professional developer (if one is even available,) may not only be time-consuming or frustrating when ideas get miscommunicated, but it becomes an excess expense which would otherwise not exist if the programming limitations were removed. Companies and small businesses without these financial privileges or multi-talented experts will lose the race before it even starts.
So what immediate solutions are being offered to this gaping hole in the market? Very little in the scope of a long-term scalable solution. Considering the problem needs to start being solved now, and it needs to be done the right way from the very beginning.
The current dilemma which is not unique to this blockchain sector alone, is that there is a dichotomy of either: a) taking on too much too fast, and b) not planning to adapt for the future (come on, seriously?). With regards to smart contract development barriers, we need a solution that erases the obstacles entirely, and has an intuitive plan moving forward. We need a platform that even your mother could write a smart contract on.
Projects like Matrix are an example of category a, they appear to be tackling a hefty plate of different challenges in their project. While being this ambitious is absolutely respectable and has its advantages, choosing not to specialize slows the progress of solving a principal problem in an increasingly urgent demand. They’ve yet to incorporate natural language processing for writing contracts, and while an AI solution may be perfectly acceptable for non-commercial contracts, the potential for bugs and errors is unacceptable in professional areas such as law and insurance. So arguably, complex smart contracts should primarily be written and audited manually.
On the other end of the spectrum in category b, we have projects like Fabric or BlockCAT. Their goals seem geared towards providing niche-audience solutions to people who aren’t interested in accessing underlying functionalities allowing more versatile flexibility and customization. This is great for someone looking to start their own ICO, but it doesn’t holistically satisfy the abstract needs of the market-in-general.
There appears to be a pattern in these platforms, none of them are addressing the core problem, they are avoiding it by building around it. The real obstacle with writing smart contracts is a language barrier, not a technical one. To be fair, it sounds easier said than done, and the fact that it’s being avoided suggests there is no simple solution… or is there?
A solution equally elegant as it is linguistically fascinating, iOlite emerges, equipped to dispel all worries. iOlite’s white paper is an extended release pill that reveals more clever insight every time you read it – the core innovation is its FAE, the solution to the language barrier.
This unique engine allows smart contracts to be written in any language, programming or natural (like spoken English). This almost sounds too good to be true – but it gets better – the proof-of-concept is publicly available to try right now, and the testnet is expected to launch on March 5th. That alone is pretty rare for most ICOs, a working product before the public sale even launches.
With its blockchain mainnet rapidly rolling out around April 18th, iOlite’s roadmap aims to have a baseline English-to-Solidity translation by May 7th, and a high-usability version around September 2nd. That combined with a goal to have Solidity translations for Chinese, Russian, and Japanese before the end of 2018 – it’s clear that the iOlite developers are fully aware of delivering relevant solutions ASAP to the current problems preventing people and businesses from entering into the blockchain and smart contract world.
iOlite takes things miles further, still. The platform is absolutely free to use, but will also have a built-in market-system which will allow people to buy and sell their own contracts. Advanced developers (contributors) who create new library expressions (structures) will be able to receive fees every time their code is used in someone’s smart contract. If it passes the cleverly designed staging process and becomes manually approved (by iOlite Foundation members) into the main code-base, their structure will enjoy a status of being the single best, only solution for a particular problem, effectively becoming copyrighted, however the contributor will only receive rights in the form of ‘royalties’ based on usage.
Even if you aren’t a developer or someone interested in writing smart contracts, you can still help promote contributors in the staging process by locking iLT tokens (the currency of the platform) on their structures. If their code is approved, promoters will also be awarded usage-royalties, based on PoS rules.
This model excellently fosters a healthy community comprised of academics, researchers, businesses, and everyday people. It has a remarkably simple but efficient staging process that creates market-driven results for finding the best solutions to problems. So it should be easy to see how this will quickly become the one-stop shop for smart contracts in all areas of work and study (finance, law, insurance, etc.)
Because of the modular nature of iOlite’s FAE, it will not only be used for translating into smart contracts, it will be able to translate any language into any target-machine language. Of course, this will happen in due time (remember, too much too fast is not very wise), but it is important to know that this modularity is what will keep iOlite around for a very long time, it is designed to adapt, and will thrive in changes of market demand. The team definitely reflects this ethos as well.
Even if iOlite’s perfect solution for smart contract adoption is taken aside, the strong community and internal relationships it forms between the users of various backgrounds is something that is unfortunately not very common in blockchain ecosystems, so hopefully it becomes an example for others to live up to.
