ryanreich / fae

A functional smart contract system

Fae, a functional smart contract system

Fae is a smart contract system and blockchain definition with equivalent power to Ethereum but with the following additional benefits:

• Transaction execution is parallelizable and each network node need only execute transactions it wants.

• There is no virtual machine, but rather a minimal execution environment that can run an existing, general-purpose programming language.

• There is no native currency, only a simple token awarded to the participants that mine blocks.

• Scarcity policy is left to the discretion of each smart contract.

We provide an implementation of this system in Haskell, for which we have included the haddocks. Prose documentation for various design aspects of Fae can be found in the documentation directory as HTML files. As of version 2.0.0.0, there are docker images for the two executables faeServer and postTX that comprise a playground environment.

For the curious, the name "Fae" is inspired by an element of the setting of Patrick Rothfuss' The Kingkiller Chronicles: an otherworldly realm that periodically verges on the natural world. This and other metaphorical parallels suggest the relationship between Fae and the physical world, or Fae and Ethereum. A more direct comparison lies in the acronym "Fae: functional alternative to Ethereum".