Ethereum Time Machine: A New Era for Smart Contracts and Future-Based Transactions

• Smart Transactions, or STXN, along with its leader Vlad Zamfir presented a platform that allows for transaction triggering depending on events in the future.
• With this development, developers and users alike see Ethereum as an avenue of many prospects—-even more versatile and dynamic.

Ethereum, one of the leading blockchains known for its programmability and extensive layer-2s, has introduced a new capability that allows a temporal dimension to its transactions. This Wednesday, Smart Transactions, or STXN, along with its leader Vlad Zamfir presented a platform that allows for transaction triggering depending on events in the future.

The “Ethereum time machine” further extends the blockchain’s capabilities by enabling smart contracts to conduct transactions based on events that are uncertain or not yet guaranteed. With this development, developers and users alike see Ethereum as an avenue of many prospects—-even more versatile and dynamic.

“For example, a user could stipulate that a trade execute at a specified day and time conditional on a set of prerequisites,” the STXN team said in a press release provided. Those conditions can be absolute – for instance, an asset reaching a specific dollar value – or relative, such as one asset becoming more valuable than another. 

STXN Partners with Consensys to Revolutionize Smart Contracts

The launch of the Ethereum time machine comes after STXN announced a partnership with Consensys, one of the largest firms building on Ethereum back in July. It’s a collaboration to do complementary research, essentially using Consensys’ Metamask wallets to supercharge the platform.

STXN co-founder Anuj Das Gupta called it “like a time machine” in that, for smart contract users, it provides certainty around what that smart contract will do in the future. He remarked:

It allows us to travel backward in time as well, in the sense that Ethereum smart contracts are no longer limited by what was known at the time they were written. We believe this is an important solution to the tension between flexibility and immutability when it comes to blockchains.

This innovative solution will address one of the key challenges of blockchain technology: the need for flexibility with the ledger’s inherent immutability. STXN bridges the gap by allowing smart contracts to add new data and modify conditions concerning future events.

STXN CEO Sees “Time Machine” as Web3 Game-Changer

Comparing Blockchain’s permanent nature to the early days of email, Boris Mamlyuk, newly appointed CEO of STXN, said that just like Gmail developed an “undo” feature for sent messages, Smart Transactions bring that same type of flexibility to the web3 scene.

STXN intends to implement the time machine feature into CleanApp, which was founded by Mamlyuk in 2013. Such a feature would allow, as would be the case, reversing a transaction if malicious behavior is detected, enhancing security and trust within the blockchain environment. Mamlyuk stated:

If there’s malicious use of the app, we can go back and claw back the blockchain rewards someone gained through that malicious use. So it’s a force multiplier. It opens up utility,

Moving forward, STXN intends to extend the functionality of the time machine for a number of other dApps, including one similar to Uber. Both Das Gupta and Mamlyuk said, in general, that STXN can be combined with any kind of decentralized matchmaking platform, which is a broader use of the Ethereum blockchain.