NexScript Update.

We have a great update for you all. We have now released NexScript 1.0. This is a major update. It contains two major advances that will contribute significantly to contract author’s ability to write complex and powerful smart-contracts with ease. The first is an upgrade to the ability to interact with smart-contracts using the NexScript SDK. The second is an upgrade to smart-contract storage.

Advance Transaction Builder

We have upgraded to the NexScript SDK to offer more advance transaction building. This is the final piece of the puzzle of my original plan for Multiplex contracts. The new feature allows you to build transactions that use multiple different smart-contract UTXOs as inputs to a transaction. Previously, although it was possible to use multiple UTXOs as inputs, these had to use the same smart-contract code in each input. With the new upgrade it is now possible to interact smart-contracts in almost limitless ways. This is an incredibly powerful feature, as thanks to introspection functionality, smart-contracts can simulate communication between each other.

See the documentation for more details: https://nexscript.org/docs/sdk/transactions-advanced

Huge Smart-contract Storage

This is a big one! NexScript smart-contracts can now manage their own databases where the actual data is stored off-chain. This brings Nexa smart-contract capabilities a large step closer to EVMs. Smart-contracts typically have access to the amount of storage contained within the data of a transaction that spends them on UTXO chains. This is typically very limited and smart-contract authors generally do not have the ability to write contracts that allow the smart-contracts to manage their own storage, other than for very simple use cases. We have changed this paradigm. It is now possible to easily write advanced smart-contracts that have storage which can updated only as allowed by that smart-contract. The smart-contract can then use this data to constrain other on-chain behaviours.

MAST contracts are a non-generalised version of this technology, where a contract author could create a database of contract code and lock a contract such that only contract code from that specific database could be executed by the smart-contract. Our new implementation is a generalised version of this and it allows the same functionality, but the data can be used for anything, and the database is even updatable with access to it permissioned by the smart-contract itself. We have allowed the smart-contracts to create databases with up to 1,048,576 data entries, but in theory you could chain multiple databases hierarchically for more space if you needed it.

One incredible thing about this technology is that the databases are not even stored on-chain. Only a commitment to the storage is stored on-chain. This means that it is incredibly efficient on the UTXO set data size.

One obvious use case for this is for whitelists. A smart-contract could easily be created that has rules along the lines of “If you send X amount of NEXA to this address, then you can add your address to this whitelist database as a new entry”, and that whitelist could be used to automatically allow mining a new NFT for example.

The possibilities of this technology are practically endless. I don’t believe any other UTXO chain now has the same level of smart-contract capabilities now easily accessible on Nexa using NexScript.

You can find more details at: https://nexscript.org/docs/guides/merkle

A big thanks to Pat for all the work he did on NexScript. We look forward to seeing what you all can build with it. Go start playing around with it!