Charles
Hoskinson recently stated on Twitter that "that the term "smart
contract" is a misnomer when it comes to Cardano Instead, he proposes that
the community refer to the new functionality as "programmable
validators."
Matthias
Benkort, an IOG developer, was the first to notice the semantic error. In his
thread, he claims that Cardano's programmability is vastly different from that
of competing blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana due to its eUTXO
transaction model. As a result, Cardano cannot support smart contracts.
"Unlike
Ethereum, Solana, Algorand, and others, there is no such thing as
"deploying," he claims "a Cardano smart contract Instead, hashes
are used to refer to validators before they are used, and they are revealed
upon activation." He went on to say that the "community has a
tendency to mix up validators and smart contracts."
However,
he admitted that adopting other terms, such as "on-chain validators,"
will be difficult from a marketing standpoint.
Finally,
"smart contracts" appears to be an imprecise term. I'd rather use
more specific terms like "on-chain validators" and "off-chain
code." However, I believe this will be a difficult one to market.
