Applications
In Essential, User Data combined with the flexibility of Pint allows users to create complex expressions of their preferences over multiple, potentially unrelated on-chain states. This is a significant shift from platforms like the EVM, where transactions need additional smart contracts to act on behalf of users to interact with multiple contracts atomically. Essential’s approach reduces chain bloat by only requiring fundamental application logic to be persistently deployed on-chain. This logic is both modular and reusable, enabling common interaction patterns to be deployed once and utilized by everyone.
Time-Dependent Constraints
Applications in Essential can also define time-dependent constraints. For instance:
- A user wanting to rebalance a portfolio of tokens can express this logic in a contract.
- Alternatively, if a user wishes to dollar-cost-average from one token to another over time, this can be encoded in Pint. Solvers can gradually satisfy this requirement without the user’s ongoing input.
Implicit Composability
The declarative approach in Essential brings an advantage through implicit composability. Unlike the imperative paradigm, where applications must explicitly implement each other's interfaces, the declarative model allows any two applications that constrain the same state to be implicitly composable. In this case, the solver provides the abstraction, bridging different applications without requiring them to be aware of each other’s interfaces.
Efficient Computation and Verification
The declarative design also enables greater computational efficiency:
- In imperative systems, complex on-chain business logic can be costly, as the network needs to execute this computation.
- In Essential’s declarative design, the correctness of application logic is ensured through solution validation on-chain, while solvers are compensated for finding valid state updates.
This model allows solvers the freedom to choose their optimization approaches, enabling competition in solving business logic efficiently. Essential leverages the fact that some problems are hard to compute but easy to verify, enabling efficient and scalable application logic validation.