IOTA Finalizes Abra, Bringing It One Step Closer To Qubic Update

IOTA has published its monthly Qubic status update, announcing that the team has spent the past month finalizing its Abra programming language. This programming language will be used by Qubic, the protocol layer that will be used to implement smart contracts and payment gateways on the IOTA network:

“August was all about cleaning up details on the Qubic programming language Abra. We finalized many details associated with the syntax of the language and began understanding user experience implementation aspects of the project.”

The team expects to produce a proof-of-concept version of Qubic by the end of the year. In the mean time, the Abra programming language and compiler have been under development and are nearly ready to be used in testing. Following this, a dispatcher will be created to allow for the development of “much more complex programs”.

Abra programs will also be checked for incorrect syntax and other errors before they are packaged thanks to a feature called Handy. This is an improvement over the current Qubic Dispatcher and will make it easier to deploy programs to IOTA’s Tangle.

Suggested Reading : Learn more about IOTA’s Tangle in our beginner’s guide.

Can It Solve Volatility?

Community response to the Abra programming language has been both positive and speculative. After the update was published, a blogger on Medium suggested that Abra could be used to implement a variation on option writing. This would safeguard against price volatility:

“Financial instruments commonly used in stock and commodity markets [could be] built with Abra for hedging against high volatility in crypto.”

Simply put, Abra contracts could carry out different actions depending on whether the price of IOTA goes up or down:

“If you set up a Qubic Oracle using Abra language, you can build your contract to function as a security against larger fall in value (in this case the IOTA token).”

In other words, someone could use an IOTA smart contract to “bake [a] potential loss into the price of their services.”

Endless Possibilities

Of course, this is just one possibility. As IOTA’s update notes, “our main focus is on energy-efficient distributed computing for the Internet of Things.” Qubic integrates an oracle feature that can collect data from beyond the blockchain, which means that the possibilities for communication between IOTA and other platforms are endless.