Dapper Labs Announces Tech-Sharing Partnership With Libra

The team behind CryptoKitties and the Flow blockchain, Dapper Labs, has revealed a partnership with Libra to share technology between the two projects.

Dapper Labs, the team behind CryptoKitties and the Flow Blockchain, has revealed a partnership with Facebook’s Libra stablecoin project to share proprietary technology.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Dapper Labs’ CTO Dieter Shirley revealed that Dapper’s Flow blockchain will adopt Libra’s Move as it’s virtual machine (VM), while Libra will utilize Dapper’s smart contract programming language Cadence in a technology-sharing partnership. 

Shirley stated that Flow will benefit from Move’s performance efficiency, while Libra benefiting from Cadence’s developer-friendly design.

Both teams found inspiration in linear type theory

Dapper Labs had been developing Cadence for roughly a year before launching the language through its developer playground. The language is designed to facilitate optimal ease of use and performance for smart contracts and is based on linear type theory.

Dieter states that the Move team “is the only other production blockchain that had actually been incorporating these ideas taken from linear type theory and applying them in a smart contract context,” adding:

“Move was the first resource-oriented programming language, but it is designed for performance rather than readability and ease-of-use. Cadence, on the other hand, was designed for usability first, with syntax inspired by Swift and Rust.”

Libra and Dapper Labs complement each another’s tech

Shirley said that Move and Cadence are “great compliments to each other.” He described Move as “a highly performant VM starting from the bottom up” that is “very concerned about efficiency and compact representations, speed, and throughput,” while Cadence was built “from the top down” with a “focus on developer ergonomics readability, and functionality”: 

“The Libra team started with performance optimization, [however,] knew that eventually they were going to need an ergonomic syntax that was easy to understand but were going to do that second. We knew that we were going to need a highly efficient runtime with a low-level, highly optimized VM. But we were going to do that second. And so we’ve each done the other’s second-half.”

Since launching the Flow Playground four weeks ago, Dieter reports that 566 projects built using the Cadence language have launched, and more than 1,000 users are actively contributing in the project’s Discord.