Spedn, a new high-level smart contract programming language specifically designed for the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network, has been announced by developer Tendo Pein. In a blog post, Pein stated that Spedn is built for explicitness and safety, featuring a syntax similar to the C programming language while embracing pure functional programming principles. The release marks a significant step toward expanding BCH's smart contract capabilities.
Background and Design Philosophy
Bitcoin Cash's native scripting language, Script, is stack-oriented and similar to Forth, making complex contract development cumbersome. Inspired by the Haskell data processing syntax, Pein decided to create Spedn. "Today, I'm pleased to announce Spedn — a high-level smart contract language for Bitcoin Cash," Pein declared. "It is designed for explicitness and safety, statically typed and detects many errors at compile time, explicitly typed with no guessing to what the expression is supposed to return. It is purely functional — free of side effects, the common source of bugs, and it has a familiar C-like syntax."
Pein emphasized that Spedn is not an "out-of-the-box" solution but a safer, more readable way to write smart contracts for BCH developers. The language is still in its infancy with potential breaking changes ahead.
Key Features and Documentation Overview
The Spedn documentation is publicly available and includes a syntax overview, contract templates, lexical scopes, math functions, hashing functions, cryptographic checks, and a command-line interface for compilation. It also provides a quick-start guide and a write-up on understanding Bitcoin Script to help developers transition from traditional Script. Core features include static type checking, no side effects, explicit type declarations, compile-time error detection, and C-like syntax, which lowers the learning curve for many programmers.
Use Case Examples: Zero-Conf Forfeits and Chainbet
The specification includes two practical examples. The first is a zero-confirmation forfeit contract, based on a proposal by BCH developer Awemany to secure zero-confirmation transactions. The second is the Chainbet protocol, originally created by Jonald Fyookball, a decentralized on-chain betting protocol. Pein explains, "The flow of the bet consists of several steps that can be expressed in Spedn." These examples demonstrate Spedn's potential for payment channels and decentralized applications.
Project Status and Call for Contributions
Spedn is currently in early development. Pein acknowledged, "Many breaking changes may come and it’s far from being an 'out of the box' solution for smart contracts developers." He is actively seeking contributors for syntax ideas, code reviews, unit tests, and bug reports. Similar to Ethereum's Solidity, Spedn is tailored for BCH, but its ecosystem maturity still lags behind. Pein hopes community collaboration will gradually refine Spedn into a go-to tool for smart contract development on BCH.
Overall, Spedn introduces greater programmability to Bitcoin Cash. While it needs further polishing, it offers a new path for BCH to compete with platforms like Ethereum in the smart contract space. Interested developers can explore the Spedn documentation and participate in testing.