Mind the Gap: Application-driven evaluation of Smart Contract languages
Duration: 00:29:11
Speaker: Andrew Miller
Type: Talk
Expertise: Advanced
Event: Devcon
Date: Jul 2026
How can we quantify the expressiveness of smart contract programming languages? In this talk I’ll present research conducted over the past two years that answers this question with an application driven approach. We take several well-known applications as case studies (a random coin flipping gadget, fair off-chain multiparty computations, and payment channel networks), and attempt to implement them in both Bitcoin script (UTXO-based) and in Ethereum (contract-based). In each setting, we find that the UTXO-based framework requires additional asymptotic overhead compared to Ethereum (either time, computing power, or locked-up collateral). These case studies can therefore serve as a benchmark suite for evaluating new languages as well.
