Composable contracts for correctness and profit

Inspiration

We have spent many years working in finance, including derivative finance. We have seen that even the most complex financial instruments can be broken down into simple pieces. In our work in the blockchain space, we regularly see people build clunky and insecure smart contracts across both the DeFi and institutional spaces. Like many long time finance people also into functional programming, we have always been inspired by the Simon-Peyton Jones paper from 2000 about composing contracts using Haskell. We would now love to use those ideas to bring down costs, reduce errors and build the next generation of decentralized markets.

What it does

Allows for the building of complex financial instruments from smaller ones with very low overhead. Using very simple formally verified blocks and combinators, build rich smart contracts which can serve multiple purposes. Bring transparency to the valuation of second generation DeFi products and enable a two-layered decentralized economy to take hold.

How we built it

We gave a lot of thought to how it would work on two Cosmos chains, one public one for holding P2P contracts and another semi-private one for derivatives.

Challenges we ran into

Due to our commitment to our other project and the complexity of the Cosmos solution, we were not able to work on a concrete implementation of the project beyond basic setup and prototyping.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Coming up with an exciting idea

Finding a solution that could be useful to many people around us

What we learned

Reduce a grand idea to a thin PoC before implementing it.

What's next for Composable contracts for correctness and profit

A small prototype in Solidity or SmartPy to develop the idea further. Engaging in conversations with industry experts to vet the feasibility of the larger vision.