Hashing It Out #6: Stuart Popejoy

This week’s episode features Stuart Popejoy, founder of the Kadena, creator of the Pact smart contract language, and engineer/designer of the Chainweb blockchain protocol. We go in-depth on design decisions for Pact, how language simplicity impacts the security and adoption of second generation blockchains, how formal verification can be used to improve certainty in smart contracts, and the over-emphasis of Turing completeness for a very domain-specific language such as smart contracts. We go into the design behind Chainweb, an unboundedly scalable Proof of Work blockchain architecture, which expects to reach a whopping 10,000 tx/sec (864,000,000 tx/day) on its first year of release.