How Do Plutus Smart Contracts Work?
You may know of the new functional programming language that IOHK released at the end of last year named Plutus, however few have heard of the Plutus Platform.
The Plutus Platform in a nutshell is the developer’s toolkit for writing smart contracts in Plutus. Normally when you write smart contracts on other blockchains you run into the problem of having a sub-par experience switching between very different programming languages to manage off-chain with on-chain code. Furthermore you tend to have to deal with the testnet and all the slowness and hassle that goes along with that. Instead of all of that, the Plutus Platform unifies and simplifies the whole experience.
In short the Plutus Platform is made up of 3 parts:
- Haskell libraries for writing off-chain code
- PlutusTx library for writing on-chain code
- A ‘Mockchain’ for testing smart contracts without even the need of a testnet
With all three of these put together the developer experience for writing smart contracts is severely improved and streamlined. This is why IOHK is dedicating the time and effort in moving forward in this direction, and with time it will only get better.
Now that you have a general overview of the Plutus Platform, in the whiteboard video below I go over in much more detail how the smart contracts themselves actually work in a nutshell: