Legalese gets funding to fix smart contracts

Rage Comment : The DAO crowdfunding project once carried a lot of expectations, but the loopholes in the smart contract led to the theft of funds and the system crash, which greatly hit the blockchain community. Although repair plans have been proposed many times since then, it is difficult to reverse the decline. In order to avoid similar situations in the future, the community actively seeks technical improvements. The startup Legalese has received sponsorship from String Labs to improve the smart contract programming language. In the future, String Labs will continue to provide more sponsorship to the blockchain community.

Translation: Annie_Xu

The mantra of “move fast and break things” may work for traditional software, but as The DAO heist shows, that approach may not work for experimental financial technology.

However, after The DAO incident, some people began to try to solve the challenges faced by smart contract developers; smart contracts are the core block of this project, and its vulnerabilities are the main reason for the failure of the project.

These include startup Legalese, which participated in the JFDI Asia accelerator and was joined by JFDI’s prominent co-founders.

Legalese is an open source project co-founded by Virgil Griffith and Wong Meng Weng to write a new programming language specifically for smart contracts. This language is called L4 and is designed to help coders complete rigorous checks before the contract goes into effect.

Griffith said that autonomous finance project String Labs provided Legalese with a $8,888 grant so that the company could work with industry leaders to advance the project. "The basic concept is that we want to write a programming language for law. It's basically about describing relationships and responsibilities in a mathematical way."

Wong and Griffith built the mailbox infrastructure RFC4408. This time they used the modal mu-calculus argument system to beat more than 30 other applications and won this sponsorship.

New programming languages

Legalese’s flagship product is the L4 formal language, which allows programmers to easily publish public smart contracts without having to check the contract content in advance.

Coders can program in L4, which is then converted into Solidity, ethereum’s new programming language, the project’s director said. The language is then compiled into bytecode that can be read and interpreted by the ethereum virtual machine (EVM), the protocol component that reads and processes dynamic instructions.

The project’s first product is a software-as-a-service application that helps entrepreneurs complete the paperwork required for seed rounds or angel investments, including encrypted shareholder agreements, corporate resolutions, corporate resolutions, and declarations of rights.

Tom Ding, co-founder of String Labs and Blockchain University, said that in the future Legalese will avoid releasing vulnerable code to prevent hacker attacks.

“When writing a contract, we want to avoid loopholes. Lawyers use their education experience to catch loopholes. The same should be true for smart contracts.”

Long-term sponsorship projects

String Labs announced that Distory, an on-chain credit record startup, also received $10,000 in sponsorship to build an internationally accepted credit record system.

Smart contracts can then use these records to conduct online and offline lending.

“The ultimate idea is to reduce transaction costs,” Ding said.

Legalese is one of the first sponsors of Distory, and Ding hopes that String Labs can become a mid- to long-term sponsorship project for the public blockchain.