Back in 2017, when we first published the Simplicity whitepaper, our mission was to build a smart contracting language that outperforms Bitcoin Script and Ethereum's EVM, offering more expressiveness with stronger safety assurances. Seven years later, we believe we have done it. On October 9th, we activated Simplicity on Liquid testnet. This is a massive milestone for the community and represents many years of development, marking the evolution of Simplicity from a research-driven experiment to a fully-fledged language with real-world usability.
In the process of building Simplicity, we developed a more developer-friendly “front-end” language, called Simfony, which looks and feels like the Rust programming language while mapping down to Simplicity. It’s designed to keep the structure intact, abstracting away some of the functional programming details of Simplicity, making it more accessible for developers to write programs and contracts. Down the line, we are planning to implement an optimizing compiler that preserves Simplicity's formal verification capabilities.
Over the next few weeks, we will release some supporting tooling and documentation to help people get started playing with Simfony and Simplicity.
Become a Simfony Early Adopter
Want to be an early adopter? Start with the web IDE, which we have built as your playground for writing Simfony smart contracts. To get you started, we have included a set of example programs to demonstrate a range of use cases, some of which are not possible in Script today. The IDE has tools for managing public keys and generating addresses on the Liquid testnet.
At the upcoming TABConf conference this month, we will host a hands-on workshop, walking you through setting up an Elements node. Whether you download it from our release page or compile it yourself, you will configure your testnet node with the settings from liquidtestnet.com and start it up! With your node running, you can get some coins from the faucet.
In the coming weeks, users will be able to copy the details of their faucet withdrawal into the web IDE and interact with the blockchain from there. If you are one of the hardcore users, you can jump in today by writing your own code using the Simfony library, or the low-level Rust or Haskell implementations of Simplicity. If you do this we will be very impressed and want to hear from you. Connect with us on IRC (##simplicity on Libera) or @blksresearch on X.