Sol2Ligo: Simplify Converting Ethereum Solidity Contracts To Tezos Ligo Contracts

Solidity To Ligo

Madfish Solutions has just launched the Sol2Ligo Interactive handbook. The Sol2Ligo handbook is an online interactive tool, developed for Solidity developers that want to migrate their smart-contract development knowledge to the Tezos ecosystem.

Solidity is the number one programming language used for creating Ethereum applications. It is an object-orientated, high-level language designed to target the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In 2018 it was stated that there were over 200,000 Solidity developers, however that figure is now expected to be much higher.

When you consider that Truffle Suite a key tool in developing Solidity smart contracts had over 8.5 million downloads and was relied upon by 1.3 million developers by 2020, you could now expect the number of Solidity developers to be in the millions.

The Truffle Suite recently integrated the Tezos blockchain into its offering and Truffle for Tezos is currently in the experimental stage.

LIGO is a high level, statically-typed language for smart contracts that compiles down to Michelson. Michelson is a domain-specific language for writing Tezos smart contracts.

The Sol2Ligo handbook includes a few different features to help developers with the switch. These include an integrated transpiler allowing experimentations with Solidity and LIGO constructions, a step-by-step guide, and a code launcher to create and test your code examples on Ligo.

It was stated by Madfish Solutions:

“Our transpiler understands Solidity so well that maker-dao is already compiling to Ligo.”

Cheaper deployments and transactions

With transaction costs on the Ethereum network spiralling out of control, it makes sense for Ethereum dApp developers to widen their horizons. Average transaction fees on Ethereum are around $20.- this month.

Basic transactions on Tezos will cost you 0.0004 XTZ (Currently $0.0016), which is over 12,500 times cheaper than an average transaction on Ethereum.

More complex transactions like interactions with smart contracts cost more (in the case of tzcolors, $0.01). That is about 2,000 times cheaper than an average transaction on Ethereum.

Higher capacity and quicker to evolve without sacrificing decentralization

Tezos has a higher tps (transactions per second) compared to Ethereum. Tezos has a max tps of ~120, where Ethereum has a max tps of ~30. This capacity does depend on the complexity of the transactions.

A simple transaction of funds will take less “space” in a block compared to a complex smart contract execution. So the type of transactions that take place at a certain time, influences how many transactions fit in a single block, which in turn influences the amount of transactions can be processed per second (tps).

So tps is always a tricky metric to use, but if we compare the max tps, we do get a good idea of the capacity of a blockchain. Tezos outranks Ethereum here, which makes it a lot less likely to clog up. In other words: transaction costs on Tezos would not be this high with the same amount of traffic that Ethereum handles today.

Additionally, Tezos’ on-chain governance system also enables faster evolution. That means that if Tezos faced the same issues that Ethereum is currently facing, it could be addressed and solved a lot faster without sacrificing decentralization.

In fact many low-hanging fruit scalability optimizations have already occured in past Tezos upgrade amendments. In the Delphi upgrade, smart contract transaction fees were reduced by 75% in just one upgrade.

Like Ethereum, Tezos is built as a true decentralized blockchain. No single entity, or small group of entities can dictate what happens on Tezos. Even protocol changes are implemented in a decentralized manner.

The way this governance system is designed means it can implement improvements and reach consensus on a core protocol upgrade within months. This has resulted in 5 protocol upgrades in 3 years so far.