Why did Facebook create the Move language for Libra? Calibra digital executive tells the inside story

Ben Maurer, digital director of the Facebook-owned Libra digital wallet creation company Calibra, introduced Facebook's Move programming language at the Stanford Blockchain Conference on February 19. Move was created by Facebook to provide a secure and programmable foundation for the Libra blockchain. Maurer explained that Move will make it easier and more secure to program financial applications that run on Libra. He says:

"Move is a new smart contract language built into the core of Libra, designed to bring a modern approach to today's financial system."

Maurer mentioned that Libra's mission is to solve the problem of lack of access to financial services, and noted that 1.7 billion adults worldwide do not have bank accounts, but that 1 billion of them have mobile phones. Maurer also noted that immigrants lose $ 25 billion annually due to remittance transaction fees. He explained that he had recently talked to someone who had to go to a brick-and-mortar store and pay a fee to send money to his family:

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"As technicians, we should be disturbed that someone has to go to the store and pay a certain remittance fee. Libra is trying to solve this problem by building a new global payment system supported by blockchain."

According to Mauer, Libra gives users and developers direct access to their platform, creating an inclusive financial system for everyone:

"With Libra, users don't have to rely on intermediaries to store funds. Libra provides direct access to the platform and creates a more inclusive system. Developers can also access the platform and build applications to help prepare for Services are provided by people excluded from the financial system. "

Why does Libra need a new programming language?

Although the goal behind Libra is clear, Maurer mentioned that many people still wonder why Facebook has built a brand new programming language to power the platform.

Maurer explained that the idea was to build a language to fit the paradigm used when programming in currency. Unlike many other blockchains that can be used for a variety of reasons, Libra specifically targets consumer payment and financial use cases. Having said that, Maurer pointed out that everything on the Libra blockchain is represented by Move. He explained:

"Libra's coin uses our Move language, which, like most mainstream languages, is agnostic. But in addition to representing Libra currency, we also represent such things as having to provide a signature in a transaction for identity verification Things like that. When building Move, we focused on creating a secure, flexible language that allowed us to express financial use case concepts that were easy to adjust and easy to analyze. "

Although Move is a completely new programming language, as mentioned earlier, Libra developers extracted some concepts from the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains when compiling the project white paper. Not surprisingly, one viewer did ask Mauer how much inspiration he got from Ethereum when building Move.

Maurer confirms that, like most technical systems, it is inspired by existing solutions. He noted that a lot of research was done when creating Move, but there are subtle differences between Move and other blockchains:

"We are building for financial inclusion, with a focus on building a financial ecosystem that serves people who have not yet received financial ecosystem services. Move represents assets and authoritative institutions."

According to a technical paper on the Libra blockchain, Libra "is designed to support a low-volatility cryptocurrency that will be able to become an efficient transaction medium for billions of people worldwide."

Maurer explained that Libra uses Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) to allow clients to submit transactions to the network of validators responsible for maintaining the database. BFT allows agreement on transactions on the ledger. Customers can observe the ledger to understand the current status of the network. Maurer explained:

"The Libra blockchain is designed to track a set of states, i.e. transactions. Each transaction is sorted using Byzantine fault tolerance and put into the ledger. This, in turn, changes the state of the blockchain. Someone in the database Building a financial ecosystem on top of it will make sense, because blockchain is derived from this approach. "

Maurer further states that Libra uses a growing Merkle tree to encode data and validate current and historical transactions. This is different from other blockchains that use linear linking of blocks.

How will Move work?

Although Move is still in its infancy, people are eager to learn about the performance of programming languages. Developers working for the startup Open Zeppelin recently discovered a vulnerability in Move. However, the team noted that the issue was discovered before the platform went live. Edward Felten, co-founder and chief scientist of Offchain Labs, told Cointelegraph that Facebook creating an new programming language is an interesting choice:

"Move has some innovations that may have real value. For example, this language handles coins and values ​​in a unique way. I have never seen anything like this before. They are working to officially verify all aspects of the financial system. I would love to See how it evolves and how it will be adopted. "

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