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Marlowe: Financial Contracts on Blockchain

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice (ISoLA 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11247))

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Abstract

Blockchains allow the specification of contracts in the form of programs that guarantee their fulfilment. Nevertheless, errors in those programs can cause important, and often irretrievable, monetary loss. General-purpose languages provide a platform on which contracts can be built, but by their very generality they have the potential to exhibit behaviours of an unpredictable kind, and are also not easy to read or comprehend for general users.

An alternative solution is provided by domain-specific languages (DSLs), which are designed to express programs in a particular field. This paper explores the design of one DSL, Marlowe, targeted at the execution of financial contracts in the style of Peyton Jones et al. on blockchains. We present an executable semantics of Marlowe in Haskell, an example of Marlowe in practice, and describe the Meadow tool that allows users to interact in-browser with simulations of Marlowe contracts.

This work is part of the Cardano project and is supported by IOHK, https://iohk.io.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Named after Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan poet, dramatist and spy, who was born and educated in Canterbury, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe.

  2. 2.

    Marlowe is available from https://github.com/input-output-hk/scdsl.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Pablo Lamela Seijas & Simon Thompson

Authors
  1. Pablo Lamela Seijas
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  2. Simon Thompson
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Simon Thompson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Lamela Seijas, P., Thompson, S. (2018). Marlowe: Financial Contracts on Blockchain. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice. ISoLA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-03426-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-03427-6

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