Cardano’s parent company, IOHK, is working with Nervos to improve the security of smart contracts

IOHK, the company behind Cardano, has partnered with Nervos, a China-based multi-asset blockchain network. The two have jointly launched a research initiative on UTXO ledgers and intelligent contracts, which is intended to create a secure and scalable alternative to the Ethereum account model.

IOHK and Nervos announce an unlikely PoW / PoS partnership

Nervos, one of the largest open source blockchain projects in China, announced that it has partnered with IOHK, the company behind the Cardano blockchain. According to the company’s press release, the goal of the partnership is to reduce the security risks that smart contracts pose to the DeFi space.

The two companies will gradually expand their cooperation. In the first phase of the partnership, joint research on UTXo ledgers and smart contracts will be started. A dedicated team is tasked with developing an improved framework for other UTXO-based blockchains to create a scalable and more secure alternative to Ethereum’s current account model.

Romain Pellerin, technical director at IOHK, said that despite different approaches to blockchain technology, Cardano and Nervos are focusing on similar things – robust smart contract technologies, native token standards, cross-chain asset transfers and novel crypto primitives.

“It may come as a surprise that proof-of-work and proof-of-stake initiatives are merging, but we believe our industry needs to work more together if blockchain technologies are to become widespread,” he said in the press release .

Strengthening the foundation for all UTXO-based blockchains

The recent DeFi surge has exposed all of the weaknesses and issues that come with smart contracts. Nervos announced that it has partnered with Cardano to advocate the UTXO model, which they believe will create a safer and more sustainable infrastructure for digital assets.

In contrast to the account model used by Ethereum, which tracks the balance of a user account as a global status, a UTXO model tracks a receipt-like tracking of a user’s unspent transactions across all accounts. This makes it easier to authenticate transaction sequences and prevents double spending, while making the entire blockchain more secure.

Kevin Wang, co-founder of Nervos, said that working on UTXO standards will be a safe alternative not just for Cardano and Nervos, but for the entire blockchain industry.

“UTXOs are superior to account models in many ways, offering enhanced security, privacy, and scalability, all of which are critical to DeFi,” he said.

Nervos and IOHK will jointly write research on this topic and examine the creation of a universal standard for UTXO models. Any improvements companies make in the future will be open source.

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