Turing-Complete Smart Contract

Turing-complete smart contracts open the door to numerous use cases in video streaming and beyond, from token investments in streamers, to automated splits of TFUEL rewards between platform/streamers/users, to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) representing top content creators. The Theta Virtual Machine is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM Constantinople fork plus a couple key Istanbul features, including the chainid opcode, and alt_bn128 gas cost reduction). Thus, porting over existing Ethereum-based contracts is simple and thousands of smart contract developers can easily jump to building on Theta.

Theta's July 2021 v3.1.0 release, along with the Theta/Ethereum RPC adaptor project, provides support for the Ethereum RPC API similar to Binance Smart Chain and Polygon. The Theta/Ethereum RPC adapter software translates the Theta RPC endpoints into the Ethereum RPC APIs. With it, Theta now supports the entire Etherum DApp dev stack including Metamask, Hardhat, Remix, Ethers.js, Web3.js, and Truffle Suite. Ethereum DApps that are ported over to Theta can use the same API calls to interact with Theta blockchain. This means Ethereum DApps can be deployed to Theta with no or minor modifications and tap into the growing Theta user and capital base.

Before diving into more detail, we note that on the Theta Blockchain, TFUEL takes the place of ETH in all contracts. Just as you need ETH to deploy or interact with smart contracts on Ethereum, you need TFUEL to do so on Theta blockchain. All TFUEL used to deploy or interact with smart contracts would be completely burned.

In this guide, we will walk you through the following topics:

Theta support for the Ethereum RPC API suite.
Use Metamask with Theta.
Support for smart contract development tools, including Truffle, Hardhat, and Remix.
Support for libraries such as Web3.js, and ethers.js (checkout our Hardhat demo with ethers.js).