March 29th, 2023, Zug, Switzerland: Genius Yield, the all-in-one DeFi platform that combines an AI-powered yield optimizer with a concentrated liquidity DEX, is excited to announce the release and open-sourcing of Atlas, a state-of-the-art Plutus Application Backend (PAB) in Haskell. Atlas is an off-chain, backend tool that allows dApps to interface with the Cardano blockchain and execute Plutus smart contracts.

Genius Yield’s Atlas, or PAB, is open-sourced and available to any developer building on Cardano. A high-quality PAB will increase innovation and developer adoption on Cardano by significantly reducing the resources new developers would need to create dApps. While developing Atlas is another milestone in our journey to release the Genius Yield Platform, we believe everyone would benefit from its release by speeding up the creation and deployment of high quality dApps on Cardano.

“I’m excited about the release of Atlas, which is Genius Yield’s Plutus Application Backend. According to our best knowledge, it is currently the most mature, community-built Haskell Plutus framework available. What’s more, to show our dedication and support for the Cardano community, we decided to open source it! We are all builders of the Cardano ecosystem and only together we’ll grow.”

Marvin Bertin, CSO at Genius Yield

Even though smart contract functionality has been available on Cardano since September 2021, building dApps is a complex task because the developer ecosystem is still maturing.

Why? More on Plutus

Plutus, the native smart contract language for Cardano, is a Turing-complete language written in Haskell. Haskell is a general-purpose, purely functional programming language. Functional languages like Haskell allow developers to create more secure, precise code that is mathematically verifiable with a high assurance that the code will work as intended. Haskell has been renowned for decades for its robustness and correctness, being used by companies like Microsoft, Meta, and Standard Chartered. However, the number of developers using Haskell pale in comparison to the millions of developers using popular imperative programming languages like Javascript, Java, Python, or C++.

Today, there is a shortage of experienced Haskell developers that can build high-quality dApps on Cardano like decentralized exchanges (DEXs), lending/borrowing applications, or stablecoins. To increase the number of knowledgeable Plutus developers, experienced Haskell developers like Genius Yield’s Chief Technology Officer Dr. Lars Brünjes, who wrote the Plutus code for Genius Yield’s concentrated liquidity DEX and the Genius X Launchpad, has taught thousands of developers how to code in Plutus through IOG’s Plutus Pioneer Program.

Popular programming languages typically have a set of developer tools or packages that feature libraries, and frameworks that eases the process for developers to create applications. However, Plutus, being a new native smart contract language for Cardano, did not have these tools. The lack of these instruments significantly slowed the development of complex dApps for the Cardano ecosystem as developers had to create their own infrastructure to develop dApps.

Atlas is a Haskell dApp framework for Plutus smart contracts. It allows Cardano developers to build transactions, interact with scripts and interface with the blockchain.

Supporting Cardano Developers

Genius Yield’s singular mission is to “Unlock DeFi for everyone”. As part of this mission, Dr. Lars Brünjes, Genius Yield’s Chief Scientific Officer Marvin Bertin, Well-Typed, MLabs, and Plank teamed up in creating Atlas that would be open-sourced to the public.

Here is what Genius Yield’s PAB, Atlas, can do:

• Transaction building
• Transaction balancing (coin selection algorithm)
• V2 script Vasil functionalities (reference inputs, inline datums, reference scripts, explicit collateral output)
• Data provider agnostic (Maestro, db-sync, local node)

Genius Yield’s PAB is already benefiting the community. World Mobile Token, which is creating the first mobile network built on the Cardano blockchain, is utilizing Genius Yield’s PAB for its technology. We believe open-sourcing our PAB not only benefits the current Cardano community and dApp developers, but will increase adoption of Cardano by more people and developers.

Atlas Webpage & Documentation: https://atlas-app.io/

Atlas Open-Sourced Framework: https://github.com/geniusyield/atlas

Atlas Support: https://cardano.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/atlas