What is Agoric?

Agoric is a Cosmos-based Layer 1 blockchain for building cross-chain smart contracts in JavaScript. The platform’s asynchronous, multi-block architecture uniquely enables developers to orchestrate liquidity and services across the growing multi-chain universe, making Agoric ideal for building software with seamless user experiences. The native token BLD is used for staking and governance. The over-collateralized IST stable token is used to pay network fees.

The Agoric blockchain is built on the CometBFT consensus system with native Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) support. Smart contracts can seamlessly integrate 3rd party libraries, so a contract could invoke an operation on Avalanche via Axelar’s GMP the same way it does on Osmosis via IBC. Agoric smart contracts are long-lived processes that can execute across multiple blocks by default, so it’s easy to design contract logic that makes a request over IBC to another chain, awaits the result, then reacts to it. With on-chain timers, developers can program Agoric smart contracts to take actions across time with scheduled, long-term, and periodic actions (e.g. subscriptions, mortgages).

Agoric’s hardened JavaScript makes blockchain programming accessible to the 17+ million JavaScript developers around the world. Hardened JavaScript provides the safe, stable environment that developers need to build, deploy, and operate sophisticated applications, NFTs, and DeFi markets. Beyond the JavaScript programming language, the Agoric platform introduces Zoe, a “first of its kind” escrow service that enables safe economic composition between smart contracts. Zoe brings to web3 developers on the Agoric platform the kind of modern, pluggable component framework that has dominated web2 development, the same kind of exponential composability that led to the explosive growth of the Node.js, React.js, and other JavaScript ecosystems.