Unlocking the Power of Smart Contracts
Smart contracts have revolutionized the way we think about agreements and transactions. Popularized by Ethereum, these self-executing programs have the potential to transform industries and create new opportunities.
The Blueprint for Ideal Security
A smart contract is a program stored and executed on a blockchain, governing the relationship between parties when an event occurs using code. This makes it vastly secure and predictable, just like the code itself. The term “smart contract” was coined in the late ’90s to provide a blueprint for ideal security.
Smart Contracts vs. External Accounts
While smart contracts have addresses and can hold and transfer funds, they are bound to a single network. External accounts, on the other hand, can connect to any number of blockchain networks. Smart contracts can augment or replace real-life contracts due to their transparent nature and the immutability of the system they run on.
Introducing Solidity: The Language of Smart Contracts
Solidity is a compiled, object-oriented programming language created by the Ethereum team. With JavaScript-like syntax, it’s strongly-typed and makes great use of inheritance. Solidity compiles source code into deployable byte code and an Application Binary Interface (ABI) to interact with the byte code using other smart contracts or programming languages.
Writing a Smart Contract with Solidity
When writing a smart contract, it’s essential to specify the license of your code in the first line after SPDX-License-Identifier. The pragma directive tells the compiler which version of Solidity to use. Our smart contract can be compiled against version 0.4 or higher, but not version 0.9.
Contracts: The Building Blocks of Smart Contracts
Contracts in Solidity are similar to JavaScript classes, holding variables and methods that interact with each other. Unlike classes, you don’t need a “this” keyword to access a variable in Solidity. Our Storage contract holds integer data and exposes two functions that can change and display it.
Initializing Variables in Solidity Contracts
To initialize our data variable with a value, contracts can provide a constructor function that takes zero or more arguments. Inheritance allows a contract to inherit from another contract through the “is” keyword.
Solidity Functions: The Power of Accessibility
Solidity functions have different types that govern visibility and access to the state. Public functions can be called by anyone, while private functions can only be called by the contract holding the function. Payable functions can accept payment when called.
Deploying Using Remix: Simplifying the Process
Remix is a Solidity IDE used to compile, deploy, and manually test Solidity code. It can interface with an array of Ethereum test networks, as well as the main network. By creating a new contract under the contracts directory and copying over our contract code, Remix will automatically compile our code, creating a bytecode that gets sent to the network, as well as an ABI to interact with the deployed contract.
Taking it to the Next Level
From here, we can take it a step further and use a real environment using Ganache and Truffle. With the basics of Solidity contracts under our belt, the possibilities are endless. Happy hacking!