MARLOWE OPEN TOOLS & USE CASES

Smart contracts are fundamental to real world use-cases of blockchain. Anything contractual will likely require smart contract capabilities.

A creator community of developers and builders is engaged and actively contributing to Marlowe adoption enabling real-world business models

Funded-project set metrics that demonstrate the success criteria have been achieved:

• Quality and deepness of engagement
• Comprehensiveness of solution (documentation, implementation, innovativeness)
• Security of solutions (risk assessments, edge cases etc.) 
• Responsiveness to developer needs 
• Diversity of real-world contracts running on public testnet/mainnet
• Increase in size and engagement of the Marlowe community based on this proposal
• # of open tool proposals
• # of discussions discord
• # of Dapp specific projects  
• # of activity on github repos: views, feature requests, discussion posts/questions/comments, downloads

Marlowe’s roadmap has entered a phase in which it is moving from technology-driven development to user-driven development. This requires a community of pioneers, early adopters, power users and builders to contribute to: 

• Building open tooling, expanding Marlowe’s compatibility, documentation and tutorials for making it even easier to build smart contracts 
• Feeding into the roadmap to gear Marlowe’s domain-specific language (DSL) and suite of products to enable the creation and experimentation of real-world use-cases that go beyond what we see in the cryptosphere today 

This Marlowe challenge aims to reveal community and developer priorities, business models, functional and non-functional requirements that catalyze the adoption of Marlowe smart contracts within the Cardano ecosystem. This doesn’t need to be limited to solely the Cardano blockchain, it could lend itself to sidechains, cross-chain capabilities, or even development of novel approaches for Cardano.

Right now it’s extremely difficult to experiment with smart contracts let alone come up with real world applications. We know that low code solutions to create or implement smart contracts are just not mature enough. The complexity of transposing real-world processes and use cases onto smart contracts is hard to conceive owing, in part, to a lack of supportive tooling. IOG submits this challenge to focus resources towards this priority area.

We need to reduce the burden on creating software so that builders (whether financial engineers or DApp developers) can focus on business logic and policies. This will help us create bridges between the worlds of DeFi, TradFi and RealFi while also enabling experimentation within these worlds. 

There are several safety requisites and additional components that are required for all realistic applications in any domain. For now, there is a lack of standards which increases the disjointedness of the efforts. Marlowe paves the way to providing audits, proofs, simulations and static analysis as built-ins and would like to support standards in the future as well with, for instance, ACTUS contracts and other reference implementations.

Guiding Questions

• What are the main challenges developers and builders will face when trying to integrate Marlowe smart contracts into existing solutions? How can we make it easier for them to surmount these? 
• What are some of the key tools, components or libraries that will encourage the adoption of Marlowe smart contracts? 
• What compatibility issues will service providers, institutions or applications face when attempting to design Marlowe-powered solutions? What can be done to address these issues? 
• How can we enhance the flow of creating and deploying Marlowe contracts within existing or new interfaces? 
• How could Marlowe be used for social/economic impact, addressing financial inequality or in general creating more equitable RealFi infrastructure?

Inspirational Potential Directions 

• Interfaces to Marlowe compatibilities 
• E.g. Python library, SDK, or APIs 
• Open tooling for developers, builders and pioneers 
• Debugger 
• Marlowe-aware exploration of the blockchain 
• Rendering contracts as diagrams or text
• Offline tooling beyond Marlowe playground 
• Standalone Simulator and static analysis tools for any contract
• Tutorials or educational material 
• Wallet integrations 

• Running real-world Marlowe contracts (case studies, business models, use-cases and reference implementations) 
• Marlowe for DApps for example, but not limited to
• Finance (DeFi, TradFi, RealFi – complex financial instruments – derivatives, lending, payments, settlements, oracle feeds, governance, micropayments)
• NFTs – novel use of the concept 
• Real-estate or property related 
• Legal contracts 
• Any other use cases are welcomed
• Djed or stable coin integration 
• Requirements, development, integration and use of oracles 
• Documentation and tutorials for token minting and contracts
• Any other ideas are welcome 

Additional success critera

• This community is diverse, value-driven and empowered to work on the wicked problems that are long standing in the crypto and blockchain world – namely, real world application with safeguards. 
• Marlowe’s roadmap is user-driven and supports scalable business models. 
• Developers and creators have the necessary resources off-the-shelf to create and deploy Marlowe smart contracts on Marlowe Apps or their own DApps. 
• Builders can easily focus on business logic of real-world processes while transposing them onto smart contract logic.
• Commercial solutions using Marlowe smart contracts are encouraged to begin deployment