Will Haskell Be the Next "MOVE" as Cardano's DApp Ecosystem Gains Momentum?
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Will Haskell Be the Next "MOVE" as Cardano's DApp Ecosystem Gains Momentum?
Will Haskell Be the Next "MOVE" as Cardano's DApp Ecosystem Gains Momentum?
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsOn September 22, the Cardano mainnet successfully activated the Vasil hard fork upgrade. This upgrade introduced significant improvements to Plutus, Cardano’s custom smart contract language, enabling the Cardano blockchain to do more and perform better. It aims to lay the foundation for a new wave of DApps, new users, and ultimately growth in Cardano's ecosystem TVL.
However, as diverse DApps covering lending, trading, derivatives, synthetic assets, and even gaming, travel, shopping, dining, and daily life emerge across blockchain networks, the on-chain DApp ecosystem has become increasingly segmented.
From this perspective, the fact that most mainstream wallets currently offer little or no support for the Cardano network represents a key development barrier for Cardano as it advances further into the smart contract era.
Connecting the Cardano DApp Ecosystem Through Lace
Precisely for this reason, Lace—Cardano’s native wallet developed directly by IOG, Cardano’s core development team—stands out with clear features:
- A lightweight wallet matching the security level of a full-node wallet;
- Transaction and payment capabilities;
- Storing and viewing NFTs;
- Staking;
- Interacting with various DApps (each DApp listed on Lace undergoes rigorous review);
As an officially endorsed lightweight wallet, Lace intends to integrate various Cardano products into a cohesive user experience. This includes integration with Atala PRISM for identity and personal data management, as well as seamless registration and voting within Project Catalyst (Cardano’s public funding platform).
It will also include integration with EVM sidechains, enabling Ethereum developers to easily leverage Cardano infrastructure and helping users and developers seamlessly migrate their assets from Ethereum to Cardano.
With the Vasil hard fork ushering Cardano into the smart contract era, the richness and liquidity of DApps on Cardano are expected to see massive improvement as more DApps launch on the network.
Thus, through Lace, developers can rapidly and conveniently access the Cardano ecosystem—offering simple operations and comprehensive functionality, significantly reducing learning and time costs.
In short, IOG aims to use Lace to connect the entire Cardano-based DApp ecosystem, building a Web3 version of Google Play Store or Apple App Store.
This means Lace will become the ultimate traffic gateway—users can view all DApps and NFTs via the Lace wallet, gaining access through it—and the underlying Cardano—to an infinite world of DApps (DeFi, NFTs, GameFi, DAOs, and even social, e-commerce, and other Web3 applications), serving as an alternative to iOS and Android app platforms.
Developer-Friendly: The Core Competitiveness of Cardano’s DApp Ecosystem
Building a thriving DApp ecosystem hinges on the blockchain’s core strength: being developer-friendly—whether by lowering entry barriers for new developers, providing forward-looking designs for future DApps, or allowing existing applications to migrate smoothly (as seen in the rise of EVM-compatible chains like BNB Chain and Polygon).
Forward-Looking Layered Architecture
Today, Ethereum’s congestion has proven the importance of Layer 2 solutions for scalability, with emerging Layer 2 projects achieving valuations in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Cardano, from its inception, adopted a forward-thinking layered design: initially positioned as an open-source PoS public chain based on the Ouroboros Praos consensus protocol, the system uses a dual-chain structure combining a settlement layer and a computation layer. The settlement layer handles simple transfers and staking, while the computation layer manages smart contract interactions.
Through this unique layered architecture, the two layers work together to effectively solve blockchain scalability—the long-standing "Achilles’ heel"—while maintaining security:
Layer 2 (application and smart contract layer) leverages Layer 1 (base currency layer) data to provide a low-cost, high-performance environment for DApps, while Layer 1 verifies Layer 2’s computational results and provides foundational support. The tight integration ensures value flows securely and efficiently.
In essence, Layer 1 serves simultaneously as Layer 2’s security and settlement layer—ensuring Layer 2’s security and handling network-wide value settlement, while Layer 2 focuses on solving scalability and performance bottlenecks in asset transfers and exchanges, enabling free, secure, and efficient movement of assets between layers.
General-Purpose Functional Programming Language: Haskell
At the same time, a blockchain project’s programming language reflects its core ethos.
As the underlying customized language for Cardano’s smart contract language Plutus, Haskell is essentially purpose-built for DApps, centered around the keywords “lightweight” and “security”:
It provides a theoretical framework for describing and evaluating functions, where each function is mathematically pure, offering high levels of security.
In Haskell, functions perform low-level tasks and define what the program must achieve. As a statically typed language, code is easily evaluated during compilation, so type checking ensures code is concise, clear, and correct.
Compared to existing blockchain programming languages, Haskell strengthens the DApp development process, enabling developers to create and manage DApps on-chain more flexibly and securely.
With robust and accessible Cardano infrastructure, developers can easily enter the Cardano EVM sidechain and build rich DApps, fostering a flourishing Cardano ecosystem and unlocking its full value potential.
Haskell: The Next $1,000-per-Hour Programming Language?
“MOVE,” the programming language adopted by new blockchains like Aptos and Sui, has recently gained immense popularity—becoming the darling of new chains and even spawning stories of MOVE developers earning over $1,000 per hour.
Even Solana Labs’ GitHub page indicates they’ve added Move to their repository, suggesting plans to support the Move language.
The blockchain world remains a prime arena for technical talent, where the evolution from Solidity to Rust and now to MOVE reflects the successive waves of blockchain innovation—Ethereum → Polkadot/Solana → Aptos.
To date, Cardano ranks 8th in market capitalization within the cryptocurrency industry, valued at $25 billion. If all goes smoothly, the Vasil mainnet launch will lay the groundwork for a new wave of DApps, new users, and ultimately growth in Cardano’s ecosystem TVL.
This means that after the Vasil hard fork, more DApps will emerge, and leading companies and venture capitalists will invest in and launch projects on Cardano—directly creating abundant job opportunities for developers skilled in Haskell.
Overall, as Cardano moves deeper into the smart contract era, demand for Haskell expertise continues to grow, ensuring Haskell developers’ salaries will remain on a stable upward trajectory.
Moreover, in data-intensive industries such as finance, medicine, and biotechnology, Haskell proves highly valuable—the expressive type system and abstraction simplify big data infrastructure and enhance code reusability, leading banks, credit unions, and financial institutions to widely adopt Haskell in backend systems.
Meanwhile, as of 2022, Web3 developers using Haskell were extremely rare, yet Haskell plays a crucial role in producing high-quality software—making proficiency in Haskell a strong differentiator for developers.
Therefore, even from a career development standpoint, Haskell may well represent the next “MOVE” opportunity worth focusing on—a potential path to $1,000-per-hour developer roles.
As Cardano’s global incubation investment fund, Adaverse—like Lace—also benefits from official backing by the Cardano team:
With direct access to resources and funding, Adaverse focuses on incubating and investing across all sectors of the Cardano ecosystem, bringing more developers into the Web3 space and helping them unleash their imagination and creativity to build a broad Web3 DApp ecosystem atop Cardano’s blockchain infrastructure.
In short, Adaverse aims to help developers build on Cardano’s architecture, minimizing overhead so they can fully focus on product logic—making development and operations more efficient, reducing costs, and accelerating synergies with other Cardano ecosystem DApps.
At the same time, Ken Kodama, CEO of EMURGO—one of Cardano’s commercial incubators and venture capital arms—announced that Emurgo will invest over $200 million to support the growth of the Cardano ecosystem over the next three years. This funding, drawn from Emurgo’s own capital, will go directly to Cardano projects and other network projects whose products integrate with the Cardano network.
Overall, Web3 will give rise to a completely new global digital economy, creating novel business models and markets, breaking monopolies held by platforms like Google and Facebook, generating vast bottom-up innovation, and nurturing the next generation of internet giants and investment opportunities.
Within this transformation, developer communities and DApp ecosystems will be the decisive factors.
About Adaverse
- Official Homepage: adaverse.co
- Twitter: @Adaverse_Acc
- Facebook: Adaverse Accelerator
- Instagram: @adaverse_acc
- Medium: Adaverse Accelerator; Adaverse Asia
- LinkedIn: @Adaverse
- Telegram: @Adaverse Founders Group
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