Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, said on Oct. 18 that he is personally building a programming language of his own for the blockchain, with one other developer helping. He has not released a name, code or a timeline for it.
“I’m actually personally developing a programming language for Cardano,” Hoskinson wrote in a reply on X. He called it “the first of its kind, enabling intents and PCD via Groth16 proofs,” and wrote in the same post that @rvcas was building it with him.
That handle belongs to Lucas Rosa. The credits page for Aiken names him as one of its maintainers and links his name to the rvcas GitHub account, and Aiken’s project manifest lists him as an author with an rvcas.dev email address. His personal website, rvcas.dev, gives his current role as tooling architect at Midnight.
Cardano developers today write most smart contracts in one of two languages: Plutus, a platform derived from Haskell, or Aiken, which Rosa co-created and helps maintain.
Hoskinson’s comment came in response to a community member who had asked him to restate the case for Cardano as the most decentralized root of trust, and whether he believes that still holds.
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What He Described
Groth16 is a zero-knowledge proof scheme that cryptographer Jens Groth published in 2016. Each proof consists of only three group elements, which keeps it compact and quick to check on a blockchain.
Proof-carrying data, the PCD in his post, is a framework from computer science research in which each step of a distributed computation attaches a proof covering all the steps before it. A party at the end of a long chain of work can then confirm the whole history by checking one proof.
An intent describes the result a user wants and leaves the exact transaction steps to someone else. A user could, for instance, ask for funds to arrive on another chain without choosing the bridge or route that gets them there.
Hoskinson did not say how the language would combine those pieces, or whether it would replace or sit alongside the tools Cardano developers use today.
The disclosure follows other recent development work on the network. Earlier this month, Cardano’s programmable token standard went live on mainnet, letting issuers build controls such as KYC checks and freezes directly into native tokens.
Hoskinson has not said when more details about the language will be published.
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