Smart contract upgrade on Hedera brings high-speed programmability to tokenization

Hedera Hashgraph, the enterprise-grade public network for the decentralized economy, today announced an upgrade to its smart contract service, which will soon allow developers to harness the speed and scalability of the Hedera Token Service (HTS) for fungible and non-fungible tokens with the flexibility of fast, low-fee, and industry-standard Solidity smart contracts.

The upgrades will include integrating the Hyperledger Besu EVM and a unique virtual Merkle data structure to more efficiently manage state changes on the Hedera network, as well as creating a new and highly performant database for state storage. These innovations enable new use cases that have been too slow and expensive to function well on existing smart-contract-based platforms.

“Smart-contract-driven applications today are powering an ecosystem of users, capital, and applications, driving trillions of dollars in economic activity. In Q2 2021 Ethereum settled $2.5 trillion in transactions, but this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of commerce that can be pushed through Solidity-based contracts if they can be made orders of magnitude faster and more scalable. With these enhancements, we are enabling the large and growing ecosystem of hundreds of thousands of Solidity and Vyper developers to make Solidity contracts extremely fast and highly scalable.”
– Atul Mahamuni, SVP of Products for Hedera

Since its launch in February 2021, the Hedera Token Service (HTS) has seen broad adoption for use in apps leveraging both fungible and non-fungible tokens (NFT). HTS offers users the ability to issue and configure tokens on the Hedera platform, taking advantage of Hedera Hashgraph’s native performance, security, stability, and governance with the ability to scale to thousands of transactions per second.

With the enhancements to Hedera’s smart contract service – which will be scalable to hundreds of transactions per second with finality in seconds and low, predictable fees – developers will be able to also enable programmability of those tokens, to enable DeFi and other applications, which require payments based on certain actions being taken or conditions being met. Smart contracts only have to be called as-needed, not during ordinary transfers, thereby taking advantage of the native speed of HTS, and offering the most flexible way to achieve programmability.