Yieldly To Transition To Algorand’s TEAL 4: Here’s Why It’s a Game Changer

The DeFi market is evolving rapidly. Yieldly has been at the forefront of it, making it easier for Algorand users to navigate this ever changing industry. In line with this, Yieldly is now making its transition from the TEAL 3 programming infrastructure to TEAL 4 to further bolster its native protocol infrastructure, smart contract setup, and liquidity pools.

What exactly does TEAL 4 offer?

Most developers coming to Algorand already have experience operating within different blockchain environments, such as Ethereum’s Solidity programming language. TEAL 4 is the latest iteration. It is designed to be more user-friendly and intuitive, and is well on its way to becoming better suited to developers coming from languages such as Solidity and Javascript while still retaining much of its traditional TEAL/Assembly style roots. While TEAL 3 introduced many great Algorand-specific features, such as the ability to call upon the minimum balance of an account on program execution, it was still a fair way off in terms of being called a “user-friendly programming language,” especially for newcomers.

TEAL 4 changes all of this. It is jam packed with better features befitting of Algorand statue of the preeminent protocol. There are many examples where Teal 4 surpasses its competitors. Such features include the ability to perform 512-bit arithmetic operations (Solidity only allows for 256 bit), making it possible to write, formulate algorithms that utilize complex business logic and allow for more sophisticated DeFi products. Moreover, it is now possible to compute large numbers and facilitate optimizations related to resource-intensive programs and subroutines more easily — the implications here are that we can run more pools, more quickly and with more features.

Other great updates include the fact that TEAL 4 is now fully Turing-complete. As a result, TEAL 4 allows developers to gain access to a host of unique features, including recursion and the ability to jump up/down the script. The introduction of Turing completeness allows for a high level of operational flexibility and functional optimization, particularly when writing smart contracts. This, in turn, positively impacts security, allowing for more robust implementations when validating the security of transactions. So expect to see even faster, safer transactions.

What does it mean for Yieldly?

Yieldly will now enjoy seamless dynamic group checking of transaction security, since TEAL 4 performs much higher precision mathematics and complex operations with minimal code. This means no more redundant checks on every function or transaction logic check.

And while the platform’s prize game and staking contracts pushed TEAL 3 to the brink of its available functionality, it did force Yieldly’s dev team to develop some creative workarounds in order to get the contracts working.

However, with TEAL 4, Yieldly’s operations team has been able to develop programs that are much more sophisticated and complex in their design, all without compromising on functionality. In fact, the iterations currently being used to govern Yieldly’s staking pool contracts have delivered a much better user experience. With TEAL 4, when you stake in same token pools, you get second-by-second rewards and auto-compounding pools. These second-generation pools also give you more compact functionality, and a better distribution scheme (reworked mathematics).

Originally published at https://yieldly.finance on August 18, 2021.