Agoric: Hardened Javascript for Easy dApp Development

Introduction

For the crypto economy to reach its full potential, it must be able to lower the barriers of entry for all who want to participate. No participants are more important than the developers, for without them, the on-chain economy would be a barren wasteland of empty blocks. Solidity and the EVM were crypto’s 0-to-1 moment that enabled smart contract capabilities on-chain. Unfortunately, its limitations and overall lack of developer talent have arguably held crypto product development back thus far, leading to the growth of other platforms that leverage different virtual machines and languages to expand the design space for developers. Agoric, an IBC-compatible Proof of Stake (PoS) chain built with the Cosmos SDK, utilizes a modified version of Javascript, called Hardened Javascript, that aims to attract the 14M+ web2 Javascript developers in the world.

Despite a nearly 70x larger talent pool, Javascript today has no footprint in crypto, with Solidity, Vyper, Cairo, and Rust representing 99.3% of all TVL in crypto. With the right tools at their disposal, the Javascript community could be a bastion of growth for Agoric and crypto as a whole, creating new DeFi primitives and more intuitive user experiences that the internet-native general public is used to.

Agoric Overview

Agoric’s founders, Dean Tribble and Mark Miller, wrote some of the first foundational research papers to explore smart contracts in the late 80s. They are well-known in the Javascript community. With this expertise and network, the team raised ~$6M in a seed round from early backers in 2018, $32M in a private token sale in late 2021 led by Polychain Capital, and a $52.5M public sale at a ~$750M valuation in early 2022.