Autonomous Agent

Overview

Smart contracts embody voluntary relationships between two free equals.

However, there is another class of applications that are not covered by smart contracts: applications where an autonomous central counterparty interacts with multiple users and does so strictly according to the rules that are public, known in advance, and can never be changed. That’s what Autonomous Agents are.

An Autonomous Agent (AA) is a special address (account) on the ledger that acts according to a program associated with it. Its behavior is similar to that of a vending machine that receives coins and data entered on a keypad and in response, releases a cup of coffee, plays a song, or does whatever it was programmed to do.

This is the first major upgrade to the Obyte protocol. It has been under development for 9 months. It was released to Testnet 18 June 2019, where testing and development is expected to take 2-4 months.

Developer contest

To celebrate this massive milestone, we invite developers to join a running contest to build the most innovative, impressive, useful, exciting and spectacular Autonomous Agents.

Total Prize Pool worth $38,000 at current rate.

The contest kicks off NOW [July 18, 2019] and runs until mid-October. Every two weeks, a jury of Obyte team members led by the platform’s founder, Tony, will announce the best entries. Autonomous Agents are live on Testnet now, and the easy-to-use online editor is ready for developers to explore. It even has a few nice templates to help get everyone off to an easy start.

Results

Round 1, announced 4 August

• 1st place (140 GB / 422 GBB): Fabien — “A Simple DAO”
• 2nd place (70 GB / 147.7 GBB): Barborico — “Bank With Secrets"
• 3rd place (35 GB / 73.85 GBB): Pmiklos — “Lottery With Community Governance”
• Best guide/tutorial (55 GB and 116.05 GBB): Pmiklos — “Getting Started With Obyte Autonomous Agents”

Oscript editor

Autonomous Agents are written in Oscript — a new programming language developed specifically for this purpose. The editor offers everything you would expect from a modern editor. Syntax highlighting with tooltips and help, auto completion and the editor even has built-in code validation. In other words, a full fledged code editor ready for real world adoption.