Multi-Currency Support On Cardano

Developers
1

IOHK just released a doc on multi-currency support on Cardano going into relative detail (with a few things here and there skimmed over) about how it will work. They cover both fungible and non-fungible tokens, and introduce a novel concept into the fray with having a 2 currency model (main currency and a reserve currency) which solves some technical problems they were facing.

As stated in the proposal:

We can think of c as paper notes and c* as a gold bar that we keep in our vault. Every unit of c is a claim to some of our gold bar. We can trade this claim away but we always keep the gold (although now the amount of gold that is available is smaller).

I’d recommend checking it out, though there’s a lot of Haskell & implementation details, so it may be a bit rough to get into. Nonetheless, very interesting.

https://github.com/input-output-hk/plutus/blob/master/docs/multi-currency/multi-currency.md

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2

So far, tx costs are paid in Ada, and Ada only. Do I read the code in the right way ?

3

Indeed that is the case, though if they implement everything in this proposal it shouldn’t be too hard to add using other currencies in the system to pay for tx costs at least from a technical standpoint. How to make a system where nodes will willingly accept other currencies, and how to gauge equivalent values between currencies, and other such questions are probably still up in the air at least from what I’ve seen.

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4

If there will be possibility to issue some tokens on Cardano (let’s call them c coin) and to pay fee for c coin transaction in c coin then:

  • Positive part: we can actually think on possibility to swap bitcoins from Bitcoin blockchain into Cardano and make Cardano as bitcoin’s sidechain :smiley:
  • Questionable part: what is point of Ada then? Where is it’s exclusivity? Why not just to use Bitcoins on Cardano blockchain? Fist answer is: staking. Ok, but still I fee ada less valuable in such case.

Any contra arguments are very welcome.

5

Hi all, a few clarifications.

This is just a proposal, it’s not “released” in any sense.

Fees are going to be in Ada for the foreseeable future. Since payments across an epoch are shared between all the slot leaders, everyone would have to agree to accept payments in some other form. So that would be a governance issue. But there’s nothing in the proposal that would prevent it.

I suspect Ada is likely to remain the “administrative” currency of the chain for quite a while.

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