The Gnolang (GNO) programming language and Gno.land are smart contract platform, Gno.land (pronounced no-land) is a layer 1 smart contract platform created by Jae Kwon, co-founder of Cosmos and Tendermint. It intends to address a lack of transparency, auditability, and fairness when it comes to rewarding contributors to the blockchain. Gno.land aims to appeal to web developers, dApp developers, and blockchain builders to create solutions that help people improve their understanding of the world.
Gno.land offers succinctness, composability, expressivity, and completeness not found in any other smart contract platform; “we aim to challenge the regime of information censorship that we find ourselves living in today”.
By using Gnolang, an interpreted version of the widely-used Golang (Go) language, they want to make it simple for developers (particularly existing web2 developers) to write smart contracts without having to learn a language limited by design or exclusive to a single ecosystem
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For Web3 to grow in a sustainable way, we need technological solutions that are designed for the blockchain with programming languages that are universally adopted, secure, composable, and complete. The main programming language currently used for creating smart contracts, Solidity, is designed for one purpose only (writing smart contracts) and lacks the completeness of a general-purpose language.
Solidity, removes many of the complexities that blockchain programming requires (such as memory management, ensuring that the code is deterministic, and understanding how the entire tech stack is implemented) allowing developers to quickly build succinct smart contracts.
However, Solidity is only used for smart contracts on EVM-compatible blockchains (like Ethereum, Polygon, or EVMOS) and its design is limited by the limitations of the EVM. In addition, developers have to learn several languages if they want to understand the whole stack or work across different ecosystems.
Jae Kwon Said;
Gno is about 99% identical to GO, most people can code in Gno from day one, even minute one. The Gno.land programming environment comes with blockchain-specific standard libraries. Beyond object embedding, importing of modules, composability of programs, and interfaces that allow you to implement a specific set of functions, GO supports secure programming through exported/non-exported fields, enabling “least-authority” design reinforcing security
The composable nature of Go/Gno allows for type-checked interactions between contracts, making Gno.land safer and more powerful, as well as operationally cheaper and faster; smart contracts will be light, simple, more focused, and easily interoperable.
Beyond object embedding, closures, importing of modules, composability of programs, and interfaces that allow you to implement a specific set of functions, GO supports secure programming through exported/non-exported fields, enabling “least-authority” design. It is easy to create objects and APIs that expose only what should be accessible to callers while hiding what should not be simply by the capitalization of letters, thus allowing a succinct representation of secure logic that can be called by multiple users
Presently, Gno.land is the only blockchain instance in the world that supports Gno, but in the future there will be many chains with different names. Gno.land is the name of ONE chain and is not a name that will be used by other Gnolang-powered chains.
Utility of Gno.land
Managing cross-Gnolang-chain fees/licenses; To be the (or an) official home for the best smart contracts; To provide new models of governance (w/ DAO modules). There are four main ways to earn rewards through Proof of Contribution on the Gno.land chain which includes; Pre-defined tasks (technical or otherwise), Pre-defined bounties, Retroactive bounties and Vesting-style rewards for core members.
Gno.land is currently running its third testnet and there will be several more testnets before the platform is production ready. However, the next development, an incentivized testnet called ‘Game of Realms’, is scheduled for Q1 2023. Game of Realms will be similar to ‘Game of Stakes’ on the Cosmos Hub and will reward the earliest and best contributors.