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At Kadena, smart contract technology is something we’re very passionate about — so we’re excited to announce the release of Pact 3.0. It’s our biggest Pact release in over a year and delivers significant new features designed to make Pact the premier standard for smart contract authoring in both public and private blockchains.

In this post, we’re going to focus on three new and related features we’ve shipped with Pact 3.0: Capabilities, Module Governance, and Guards, and how our Formal Verification system can help you eliminate bugs. Other major enhancements, like integrated SPV support and *namespaces*, will be covered in future posts.

The features discussed in this post are all available for you to try out — no downloads necessary — in our web editor today!

Smart contracts are all about securing operations on the blockchain, and the details matter. In the secure computing world, capability-based security has emerged as the way forward for programmers to “get security right” the first time, in everything from networking libraries to entire operating systems like Fuscia from Google.

In the larger world of secure computing, capabilities offer a huge improvement over the current state of affairs in operating systems like Windows and even Unix, where privilege escalation can result in a situation where total administrative control is granted in an insecure fashion. The very notion of a “root user” is an example, whereby simply typing in a password can you get access to every sensitive function in a system. This is a model most of us are familiar with, but it isn’t the most secure path forward.

In a capability system, any resource or function can only be accessed by presenting some token that was specifically granted for that particular purpose, and will be likewise managed or revoked according to the specific requirements of the resource or function. That means a user called “root” can no longer simply do whatever they want, but would instead be required to provide particular unique credentials to install a device driver, or launch a new process.

Capabilities in smart contracts have a long history. In fact, the first “smart contract language” precedes blockchain systems and uses capability-based logic! Even in a system like Bitcoin, the similarities to capabilities are evident: Bitcoin has no “root user” that can spend all the money. UTXOs require the presentation of a specific credential or hashed secret to release funds, which expires immediately (thanks to the UTXO system).

Kadena’s Pact allows the programmer to specify and parameterize a “capability” that is then used to “bless” a particular body of code to be able to perform sensitive tasks. Once that code section exits, the capability is released. As such, Pact is a unique capability system, in that the capabilities are not “handed around,” but are instead invoked over a limited body of code to ensure that this code can only be accessed by passing the right “test.”

Meanwhile, those “tests” can be whatever the programmer desires: checking a keyset, examining the database state, enforcing some timeout (see “Guards” section below for how these tests can be themselves modeled as data objects). Finally, you can “label” functions to require certain capabilities in a way that won’t actually try to acquire it, which is an important way to protect functions from improper access.

For a deeper dive, check out the Pact Reference Docs for Capabilities.

Another new feature in Pact turns something that was already awesome — upgradeable smart contracts controlled by keysets —into a game changer: generalized module governance. Now you can implement any governance scheme imaginable, right in your smart contract code, and leverage Formal Verification to ensure it does what you want.

Before Pact 3.0, defining a module required the definition of a keyset, which is a very flexible scheme in its own right. The keyset can be single or multi-signature. This means that even if one of your dev or devops leads is unavailable, another can sign to allow for a bug fix or upgrade. This authorization also allows you to directly upgrade the smart-contract data, not just the code, so you really have the power to respond to any exploit, bug or migration scenario.

There are other governance models that can’t be expressed with keysets. An important one is decentralized governance: keysets are centralized in that only the parties declared in the keyset definition can obtain “module admin.” While keysets can be rotated (we strongly recommend this), even that rotation requires the credentials of the original keyset, and still just introduces a new authority based on the identities in the new keyset.

With Pact 3.0, you can choose to specify a governance capability instead of a keyset, to enforce whatever scenario you can express in code. You can, of course, simply enforce a keyset in the capability definition, to replicate the old keyset logic. But you can do much more than that now.

For example, you can craft a governance scheme in which you tally a vote on an upgrade to the smart contract itself. The proposer would submit the hash of the upgrade transaction, and stakeholders would vote on it, perhaps weighted by their relative stake. The governance function then simply tallies and enforces some majority.

Clearly, this becomes an important feature to test and prevent bugs. A bad governance function can make your contract unable to upgrade. This is where Formal Verification really shines, now with the full support of our capability logic: you can really cover all your bases and craft a truly secure governance function (along with the rest of your smart contract).

Keysets are one of Pact’s flagship features, making multi-signature, key rotation and other sophisticated security practices easy and safe. However, there are other schemes that can fulfill the same goal — that is, the goal to specify a test that a transaction must pass to access a resource or perform a function.

We’ve already seen this kind of flexibility in Bitcoin and Litecoin: while P2PKH and related single-signature scripts dominate, layer-two solutions like the Lightning Network are powered by atomic swaps, which use special scripts to reveal a hash secret and enforce a timeout while also checking a public key.

Pact 3.0 introduces Guards, which generalize the keyset concept to include powerful new tests, like allowing access to a resource to only one particular smart contract, or even just a multi-step process (a “pact”) defined in that smart contract. You can even define your own guards (“user guards”) to implement functionality like atomic swaps.

Like everything else in Pact, the Guards concept means that you can use all of these techniques easily and safely. Guards can be stored in the database and shared among smart contracts. And of course, all of this can be verified in our Formal Verification system.

Pact 3.0 is full of compelling new features that will make writing smart contracts a breeze on a public or private blockchain (or both, in the new hybrid blockchain world):

Namespaces: group your smart contract modules under a single namespace.

SPV support: verify an SPV proof inside your smart contract code. In Kadena’s public blockchain Chainweb, this is the central mechanism for managing the single currency across multiple chains. But it’s also the way to massively scale your smart contract logic over any number of chains! Support for effortless interoperation with external private and non-Chainweb public blockchains is on the roadmap.

Multiple Signature Curves: with Pact 3.0, support for Ethereum ECDSA keys arrives, which can be used alongside our native (and technically superior) ED25519 keys. Support for quantum-resistant ED448 curves as well as other formats like BLS are on the way.

To learn more about writing safe smart contracts in Pact, check out PactLang.org, which has numerous videos and help resources. You can start trying out Pact 3.0 on our web repl, and if you’re interested in beta-testing contracts on our Chainweb Testnet, get in touch. Don’t forget you can also take our private blockchain for a spin, for free, on the AWS Marketplace.