Glow on the PAB

Glow simplifies DApp development, but right now needs the EVM. We propose porting Glow directly to Plutus using the PAB.

We built Glow on the KEVM, and have a proof of concept for the PAB.

Current Status

Glow was released in beta on the Cardano testnet (using EVM emulation) in February 2021. Since then we have developed a proof of concept for running a simple smart contract (buy_sig) written in Glow directly on Cardano via the PAB. We are now ready to expand this proof of concept to support the full Glow language and improve the usability of the end-user tooling. All Glow code is licensed under the Apache 2 license.

Technical Goals

High-level DApps written in Glow will be able to run directly on Cardano via the PAB. To make that happen, we need to implement a few things missing from our proof of concept.

First, we will need to ensure that Glow is able to send transactions to the Cardano blockchain as the DApp runs. This will be needed to deploy on-chain code and share data with other users. This will be done by extending parts of the runtime to dispatch transactions to Cardano via the PAB.

Next, we will need to watch for and respond to blockchain events as contracts run. This also will be done by extending the runtime to fetch data from the Cardano blockchain via the PAB.

Finally, the on-chain code must support interpretation of all Glow consensus primitives. Our prototype supports a minimal subset, which we need to expand and test more thoroughly.

Timeline

Updating the Glow Runtime code to interface with our PAB will take us 4 weeks.

After that, we'll update the Glow Runtime code to observe the Cardano Blockchain for consensus events. That step will take 3 weeks.

Then we'll spend 4 weeks updating the interpreter of consensus code.

At last, we'll run integration tests during 3 weeks.

The length of this project will be 14 weeks total (a bit more than three months). We anticipate that after three months it will be ready for testing. After six months, it will be ready for commercial deployment, and after 12 months, it will have a significant number of smart contracts deployed.

Budget and Resources Required

We anticipate this work taking the efforts of two senior engineers whose combined cost is $21,000.00 per month.

Deliverables

Users can install Glow and necessary PAB dependencies with nix.

Users can run standard Glow contracts (buy_sig, rps, etc.) on Cardano with the PAB.