Hi everyone, I’m Valisthea. I do security research and build developer tooling at Kairos Lab.
For the past few months I’ve been building Covenant, an open source declarative smart contract language (written in Rust, compiles to EVM bytecode). I’m sharing it here because it already runs on Orbit chains, and I’d value feedback from the people building and running them.
What it is
Instead of writing the mechanics by hand, you declare intent. You write a construct like token, vault, or ceremony, and the compiler synthesizes the boilerplate for you (for example, the full ERC-20 surface from a token declaration). The core design rule is fail-loud: if the compiler cannot produce provably correct bytecode for something, it raises a compile error instead of emitting code that merely looks right. The goal is to close the gap between what the source says and what the chain actually does.
Why it’s relevant to Orbit
Because Orbit chains are EVM compatible, the same Covenant source that runs on Ethereum deploys to them with no changes. I took it beyond Ethereum testnets and deployed a contract to Robinhood Chain testnet: a small token exercising mint, burn, and an onchain fee transfer. It’s live and verifiable:
In practice this means one contract targets any EVM Orbit chain out of the box, which felt worth surfacing to this community.
Honest status
I want to be upfront about where this is:
- Testnet only. Deployed tokens have zero value and exist as compiler evidence, not as products.
- The privacy primitives (FHE, ZK, post-quantum) are currently mocked. Real cryptography is a later milestone.
- It has been adversarially reviewed by our own internal tooling, but has not had an external audit yet.
- Solo builder. Open source (Apache-2.0 for the compiler, CC0 for the specs).
What I’m looking for
Feedback from anyone building on or operating Orbit chains, in particular:
- What would make contract authoring easier or safer on your chain?
- Are there Orbit specific concerns (custom gas token, permissioning, precompiles) a compiler like this should account for?
Repo: GitHub - Valisthea/covenant-language · GitHub
Site: covenant-lang.org
Thanks for reading. Happy to answer anything.