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Smart Contracts

Since the introduction of Ethereum in 2015, the ability to control digital assets through smart contracts has attracted a large community of developers to build decentralized applications on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This community is continuously creating extensive tooling and introducing standards, which are further increasing the adoption rate of EVM-compatible technology.

Whether you are building new use cases on DEP or porting an existing dApp from another EVM-based chain (e.g. Ethereum), you can easily build and deploy EVM smart contracts on DEP to implement the core business logic of your dApp. DEP is fully compatible with the EVM, so it allows you to use the same tools (Solidity, Remix, Oracles, etc.) and APIs (i.e. Ethereum JSON-RPC) that are available on the EVM.

Leveraging the interoperability of Cosmos chains, DEP enables you to build scalable cross-chain applications within a familiar EVM environment. Learn about the essential components when building and deploying EVM smart contracts on DEP below.

Build with Solidity​

You can develop EVM smart contracts on DEP using Solidity. Solidity is also used to build smart contracts on Ethereum. So if you have deployed smart contracts on Ethereum (or any other EVM-compatible chain) you can use the same contracts on DEP.

Since it is the most widely used smart contract programming language in Blockchain, Solidity comes with well-documented and rich language support. Head over to our list of Tools and IDE Plugins to help you get started.

EVM Extensions​

EVM Extensions are precompiled contracts that are built into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). Each offers specific functionality, that can be used by other smart contracts. Generally, they are used to perform operations that are either not possible or would be too expensive to perform with a regular smart contract implementation, such as hashing, elliptic curve cryptography, and modular exponentiation.

By adding custom EVM extensions to Ethereum's basic feature set, DEP allows developers to use previously unavailable functionality in smart contracts, like staking and governance operations. This will allow more complex smart contracts to be built on DEP and further improves the interoperability between Cosmos and Ethereum. It also is a key feature to achieve DEP' vision of being the definitive dApp chain, where any dApp can be deployed once and users can interact with a wide range of different blockchains natively.

To enable the described functionalities, DEP introduces so-called stateful precompiled smart contracts, which can perform a state transition, as opposed to those offered by the standard Go-Ethereum implementation, which can only read state information. This is necessary because an operation like e.g. staking tokens will ultimately change the chain state.

View a list of available evm extensions here.

Oracles​

Blockchain oracles provide a way for smart contracts to access external information, such as price feeds from financial exchanges or carbon emission measurements. They serve as bridges between blockchains and the outside world.

Head over to our Oracles section to find out how smart contracts can make use of oracles on DEP for real-life activities such as insurance, borrowing, lending, or gaming.

Deploy with Ethereum JSON-RPC​

DEP is fully compatible with the Ethereum JSON-RPC APIs, allowing you to deploy and interact with smart contracts on DEP and connect with existing Ethereum-compatible web3 tooling. This gives you direct access to reading Ethereum-formatted transactions or sending them to the network which otherwise wouldn't be possible on a Cosmos chain, such as DEP.

You can connect to the DEP Testnet to deploy and test your smart contracts before moving to Mainnet.

Block Explorers​

You can use block explorers to view and debug interactions with your smart contracts deployed on DEP. Block explorers index blocks and their transactions so that you can search for real-time and historical information about the blockchain, including data related to blocks, transactions, addresses, and more.

Contract Verification​

Once deployed, smart contract data is deployed as non-human readable EVM bytecode. You can use contract verification tools that publish and verify your original Solidity code to prove to users that they are interacting with the correct smart contract.

DEP Features​

The core protocol team is continuously building features that enhance the experience of smart contract developers on DEP. Head over to our Mainnet sections to learn more about these functionalities, e.g. how to earn revenue with your smart contract or register your ERC-20 token to be used cross-chain.