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After a lot of hard work by the team at Kadena, we are pleased to announce the release of Pact 3.1! This new version of Pact brings significant additions to the language, including expanded Formal Verification coverage for our interfaces and governance, and our new cross-chain features in defpact, which makes it dead simple to write cross-chain multi-step transactions.

These features continue to reinforce Pact as the premier standard for smart contract authoring in both public and private blockchains. You can try the latest version of Pact out by downloading from our Github.

Pact 3.1 pioneers new features that make the more complex parts of writing smart contracts as easy as possible. Along with these features, we’ve continued expanding our Formal Verification coverage.

Interfaces were introduced into Pact in 3.0 as a way to allow users greater flexibility when layering behaviors in module code. These constructs act similarly to the interfaces in Java, or traits in Rust and Scala, with one big difference. In Pact 3.1, users can now write Formal Verification properties and even define their own custom models in the bodies of interfaces and their function signatures!

When a module implements an interface containing these properties, those properties are inherited by the module. If a module implements more than one interface, every interface’s properties are imported together, to provide the module with that much extra security. This allows users to write the specifications and laws for a module. Interfaces can thus provide robust hierarchies of safe, secure, and reusable smart contract behaviors with the help of Formal Verification. You can read more about interfaces and see example code here.

For the Pact 3.0 release, we debuted an exciting new set of features in Pact: guards and capabilities. These primitives allow you to create robust and flexible security metaphors as a native feature of the language. With Pact 3.1, we are proud to announce that we have Formal Verification analysis for guards and capabilities, allowing you to not just write secure and flexible code, but prove that it is secure and flexible code.

When writing formal verification properties for a function, users can combine a security predicate for a guard or capability such as(authorized-by ‘my-keyset)with the new governance-passes property to enforce their requirements. You can even analyze governance over database operations guarded by security protocol.

One of the killer features in Pact is its ability to support generalized, multi-step transactions (e.g. escrow transactions) built directly into the core of the language via the defpactconstruct. Formal Verification in Pact now allows you to specify properties for each step in a defpact so that users can make each step sound and secure.

This is just one aspect of some of the updates we’ve made to defpacts this release. On top of this, we’ve added an incredible new feature: cross-chain transactions.

One of the boldest new features in this version of Pact comes as part of our ongoing work on the testnet for our public blockchain.

Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum are traditionally single-chain, so their currencies naturally live on one chain. But what happens when you have a whole bunch of chains working in consensus, like in our Chainweb protocol? A currency is defined on a per-chain basis, so there would be as many currencies in the network as there would be chains. However, at Kadena, we have solved the problem of unifying disparate currencies in a multi-chain network with the power of two pre-existing standards in both Pact and the blockchain ecosystem: simple payment verification (SPV) and multi-step defpact transactions.

The Kadena coin contract allows users to transfer any number of tokens from an account on one chain to an account on another chain using the power of SPV. In fact, it looks the same as your standard single-chain transfer, except now users can specify an extra parameter: the target chain to which they want their tokens sent.

Defpacts already had yieldand resume to securely forward data between steps. As of Pact 3.1, cross-chain transactions are as simple as specifying a target chain you’d like to yield some data to in the following step. For a user to perform the second step on the target chain, they simply provide the correct SPV proof data as part of a continuation request, and theresume call in that step will perform the proof and retrieve the data automatically.

Coin transfers are a simple example of the more general concept of cross-chain multi-step transactions: the ability to execute multi-step transactions, of which each step can occur on a different chain. Pact now supports this by default!

To learn more about writing safe smart contracts in Pact, visit our educational resources: