VSC - Hive Smart Contracts Now In Testnet!

Greetings fellow Hive community! We are pleased to officially announce the launch of the VSC testnet and for the first time ever, the ability to create smart contracts on Hive. For the last several months, our team has been working tirelessly on building VSC: The next-generation smart contract system for Hive! Today, we are happy to announce this goal has come to fruition. VSC only started out with myself (@vaultec), and since then has grown to a team of five bringing this vision to reality. This would not have been possible without the amazing support and encouragement from the community. This accomplishment has not been met with huge challenges and setbacks, but we are now successful in breaking through and making VSC a real project!

There have not been any previous projects on Hive were able to build modular and open smart contracts on Hive, and much less L2 smart contracts with native FREE lite accounts. VSC opens Hive to many doors from onboarding to code in any language smart contracts. VSC will become a central force on Hive, bringing together many facets and filling many gaps we are lacking. Today, we will continue building and adapting to the needs of the community and developers!

We thank the SPK network team for their unwavering supporting, along with our friends at InLeo, WOO, and especially anodemadsoul and crimsonclad for help on Twitter Spaces. Lets not forget everyone who was involved in HiveFest, because without HiveFest, VSC would have never had a public platform to begin with. Another thanks to our over 50 node operators, supporters and community developers; without your support, this project would have never happened!

Next Steps

📄 Build Clear Documentation & Tutorials
🐜 Bug Fixes
🔧 Hackathons
⚒️ Continue Building
💲 Phase 2 DHF Proposal

The testnet launch is an exciting time for the VSC Project, but even more so an exciting time for Hive. Hive has never had smart contracts before. With this, there are still a quite bit of work ahead of us and there is still several bugs ahead of us to fix, including lots of documentation to write. Documentation is one of the most important front facing ends developers look at. Having great documentation is critical to attracting our first outside developers and involving them with building on Hive. If we are successful, any developers should be able to come in and begin working with VSC and Hive without a lot of direct involvement from the team.

Dedicated Frontend for VSC

As previously showcased, we have built a dedicated UI for handling VSC DeFi, such as swaps and wraps/unwraps. We will continue developing this frontend, and in the future, start trading the first Liquidity Pair on VSC (more on that in later blog posts). The frontend will become one of the first UI on Hive to support direct login with Metamask and most importantly, enable direct ownership of Hive using your Ethereum Wallet. We invite other frontends to integrate with VSC and would like to see @beeswap, peakd, and ecency integrate VSC into their respective frontends. The more UIs that integrate VSC, the better! VSC will also explore the possibility of building toolkits for integration of a platform.

How can I start using VSC?

While the VSC testnet has been online for a few weeks now, we are still in the process of enabling smart contract deployment for all and fixing bugs. Do not worry, smart contract deployment is online and working. Two contracts have been deployed by our team, and more continue to arrive. We are focused on streamlining and tutorializing smart contract dev and making it very easy to understand. Some of this work is already shown in our explainer videos on our 3Speak channel available here. Our first major release of documentation and tooling will happen within the next 1-2 weeks maximum. If you would like to gain early access to our documentation, tooling, and direct help from the VSC team, join our Discord and let us know!

VSC makes a strong effort in excellent tooling and developer documentation. We nearly completed the build out of a combination of a contract template and testing library for developer use. This contract template includes all of the basic boilerplate code, such as compiling, and deploying your contract plus testing your contract. This is the equivalent of hardhat for EVM chains. The most important part of our development suite is the ability to mock contract execution. Even top blockchains struggle to properly simulate the execution environment, making contract development difficult as a result. VSC comes with a ready to use execution environment for easy contract development and testing.

Another important topic includes the ability to use standardized smart contracts. VSC will work on a variety of standard contracts to cover Tokens, NFTs, DEX, liquidity pools, and more. We are currently working on building a basic DEX using VSC and we will continue to build out a variety of standardized easy-to-use contracts in the near future. The standard contracts being built will become the ERC equivalent of Hive! VSC also provides a SDK for smart contract development so you can create your own contracts and standards.

Aside from all the excellent work mentioned above, please keep in mind that VSC is new and may rightfully include some bugs. As per issues faced in the past, these bugs encountered will continue facing improvement and resolved to build the best smart contracts that Hive has to offer!

Multi language smart contracts is the future!

A little known secret about VSC is our smart contracts use Webassembly. To the average person, this does not mean anything. Though, what you need to know about this is that it enables development of smart contracts in any coding language. This is rather new in the smart contract ecosystem, with most smart contract blockchains being EVM based with little variety of language support. With VSC, you can develop in a variety of languages, starting with one similar to JavaScript, to Golang, and Rust in the future.

This single feature alone is incredibly important in both usability and making Hive standout from EVMs. Especially for Web2 developers that can leverage their already existing skills in traditional languages to write smart contracts without learning a whole new language, as for an example, solidity. This also allows us to leverage already existing libraries and tools from traditional programming languages, something EVM cannot do.

The exciting part is that this is available right now. This is not just a promise or a cool idea, but VSC has support for this from the very beginning. Our goal is to continue building on this and expand language support. We want to support many of the top languages with ready made smart contract SDKs and testing utilities.

Smart contracts will play an important role in many projects on Hive

Arguably, Hive smart contracts has been one of the most asked features from developers for many years; now, that day has finally came. We have already received a large amount of interest from developers and projects about integrating with VSC smart contracts. Many dapps will need smart contracts in some way or form. Whether that is NFTs, communities tokens, DEXs, DeFi, lite accounts, or many others, VSC will be involved in many projects on Hive in some way. For some, having smart contracts is not considered novel in todays world of crypto, and they are correct, as it is the bare minimum. We are just getting started with bringing smart contracts and more to Hive in the future!

VSC Lite Accounts fixes Hive onboarding and much more

VSC has support for native FREE lite accounts, which allow for access to VSC and Hive. VSC Lite Accounts do not cost anything to create and fully self custody. There are no centralized service in-between the user and L1 assets on chain. Lite accounts are not just entries in a database somewhere, as accounts are real self-sovereign identities. The amazing part about this technology is that it can be leveraged to allow Ethereum wallets to own L1 Hive; no wrapping or bridging. This enables a Hive user to easily send Hive/HBD to and from any Ethereum address.

As a side note, VSC Lite accounts must interact on the VSC L2, which does have some tradeoffs compared to using the Hive L1. In the future, with cooperation with @blocktrades, we plan on integrating VSC Lite Accounts to the L1.

The road to mainnet

The immediate question that arises from many of you reading this “wen mainnet”. For us, mainnet is an eventual transition from the testnet to a fully mature and stable network. There will be no mainnet; the testnet will slowly be upgraded to meet the standards of mainnet, but not an entirely separate network. Mainnet is more of a milestone than an entirely separate network. We will work on renaming the terminology to be more clear in the future.

With all of the above in mind, the testnet will deliver a minimum quality of service but like all technology it may have unexpected bugs. The VSC team will be steadfast in advancing the testnet and fixing any bugs encountered by users and developers. The testnet will also deliver minimum viable security for safe production use and over time will continue to improve.

Final Thoughts

It has been quite a journey over the last year of building VSC. From a very simple prototype, to a much larger vision within Hive. I never thought this project would become so important and such a large contribution to the Hive community. The future of VSC continues to look bright with support from the community and our efforts to continue building. This is no easy road, but it must be done for Hive to succeed in the modern crypto world. Keep an eye out for our next DHF proposal that will keep us building!

If you have any questions on the VSC testnet launch, please drop it down below!