Smart Contracts with Solidity Salaries and Rates in 2024

Smart Contracts with Solidity

What Is a Smart Contract?

It would be the self-executing program that gets us to do whatever is necessary to conclude an agreement or contract. Once it is completed, the record of transactions is logged and no reversal in activity is possible. Think of a vending machine – put in the right amount of money and hit the button for your item and the program (I like to think of it as a smart contract) turns on that machine to dispense the desired item.

Smart contracts let trusted transactions and agreements be executed among distributed, anonymous parties without some central authority, judicial system, or other external mechanisms needed to enforce the rules.

History of Smart Contracts

Nick Szabo, a US-born computer scientist who created a Bitcoin-like form of currency called ‘Bit Gold’ a decade before Bitcoin was invented, was the first to suggest smart contracts in 1994. He defined smart contracts as ‘digital mechanisms which perform the terms of a contract’.

Some of Szabo’s predictions are ones that we will take for granted in the seemingly near future, but which were not taken up at the time of publication of his paper, because the technology, essentially the distributed ledger, was not available.

The blockchain technology of Satoshi Nakamoto was published in a dated whitepaper in 2008 with Bitcoin – they could henceforth never be referenced in another block. Five years later, the emergence of sophisticated technologies themselves became the trigger for the growing smart contract era. One blockchain block could not be referenced in another one After five years, the Ethereum blockchain platform implemented smart contracts useable in practice. Ethereum remains one of the most popular platforms for implementing smart contracts today.

Smart Contract Uses

Since they encode agreements, smart contracts can be used for just about anything. One of the simplest pacts is to ensure contractual performance between two parties: if I send you something, you send me the payment. Let’s say a manufacturer needs a large shipment of raw materials and the supplier is demanding payment upfront. Both parties have to trust the other won’t swindle them. So, the manufacturing company sets up the payments in smart contracts, while the supplier sets up the shipment. Then the terms of the agreement – however the two businesses decide them – ensure that the money goes to the supplier after shipment or delivery.

Smart contracts could be used to conduct real estate transactions or stock and commodity trades, to settle loans or implement corporate governance mechanisms, and to handle supply-chain contracts or even arbitrate dispute resolution or healthcare scenarios.

Smart Contract Pros and Cons

The main advantage of smart contracts is analogous to the advantage embedded in the blockchain: they cut out the middleman. Other benefits of the technology are:

• Efficiency: They speed up contract execution
• Accuracy: There can be no human error introduced
• Immutability: The programming cannot be altered

Some of the downfalls of smart contracts are:

• Permanent: They cannot be changed if there are mistakes
• Human factor: They rely on you (the programmer) to get the code right so that the intended actions will indeed be executed!
• Holes: There are small openings in the code that present an opportunity for bad-faith contracts to be executed.

History of Solidity

If you’re active in the Ethereum community or blockchain space in general, chances are you have heard of Solidity, the most commonly used programming language for developing smart contracts on the Ethereum platform. But what led to Solidity becoming the programming language for contract development on the world’s second-largest blockchain? In this article, we’ll take a retrospective look into the history of Solidity and how it has evolved to become the leading programming language for blockchain developers.

The Origins of Solidity

Solidity was invented back in 2014 by Dr Christian Reitwiessner, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation. His intent with this language was to make it easy to learn and use while still being robust enough to develop complex dApps.

Solidity was developed specifically for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM): the runtime environment that, within Ethereum, does the process of executing smart contracts and allows developers to write and then run them. Through Solidity, a developer could program smart contracts that would run on the EVM and build respective decentralized applications that could then be deployed to the Ethereum network.

The Early Years of Solidity

In the early stages of Solidity’s development, it was used by a small group of enthusiasts who were keen on building dapps on Ethereum. The language was quite immature and there were not very many online materials for developers who wanted to learn it.

However, it still maintained a good deal of power, was easy for any developer who had ever used C++, Python, or JavaScript to learn, and offered quite a lot of flexibility as a tool for building decentralized applications. This resulted, almost immediately, in a rapid uptake of Solidity by developers as a solid, go-to programming language.

The Rise of Solidity

The more successful Ethereum became as a platform and a provider of decentralized applications, the higher the adoption became for Solidity as the preferred language to build those dApps. More and more developers adopted the language, more and more third-party resources became available, and more and more full-time jobs were being advertised that required an understanding of the language.

Finally, in 2016, the 0.4.0 release of Solidity included numerous improvements, including support for the new network protocol on Ethereum (EIP-150).

The Solidity of Today

Solidity is the most widely used programming language for smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain and is today used by thousands of developers worldwide to build a variety of decentralized applications, from cryptocurrency exchanges and voting systems to supply-chain management systems.

Solidity has matured greatly from where it was in 2014. Each version that’s released is a massive improvement over the last. New, major versions with new features and improvements come out regularly. At this point, solidity is a serious programming language with serious staying power.