Marlowe (Cardano)

Marlowe is a domain-specific language for writing financial smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain, developed by the engineering company Input Output with academic collaborators. Instead of a general-purpose programming language, it offers a small set of building blocks for financial agreements, such as deposits, payments, choices, deadlines and conditions, which can be combined into loans, swaps, escrow arrangements and options. Contracts can be written in a visual block editor, in JavaScript or TypeScript, or through Haskell, and simulated in a browser tool before use. The design deliberately limits what contracts can do: every contract has a finite lifetime, funds cannot be locked forever, and contracts can be analysed to check every possible outcome in advance. This makes Marlowe easier to audit than general smart-contract code, at the cost of flexibility. Amounts of ADA in Marlowe contracts are counted in lovelace.