AlgoMove: Typed Abstractions for Algorand Smart Contracts

As Distributed Ledger Technology and smart contracts continue to grow in popularity, there is increasing interest in developing more expressive programming abstractions for digital asset management, along with verification tools that ensure safety and correctness before deployment on blockchain platforms. Addressing this challenge, we introduce AlgoMove, a framework designed to improve smart contract development on the Algorand blockchain. While Algorand is widely recognized for its high performance, scalability, and secure consensus protocol, it still lacks high-level programming abstractions and strong language-based verification mechanisms. AlgoMove brings the Move language, renowned for its robust support for secure digital asset management, to the Algorand platform, adapting its abstractions to the underlying execution model. The result is a high-level, resource-oriented programming model that preserves the core principles of Move while adapting them to Algorand’s unique environment. We present a formal specification of AlgoMove and its encoding into TEAL, Algorand’s native assembly-level language, along with a proof of the soundness of this encoding. To demonstrate the practical value and expressive power of the framework, we provide a prototype implementation consisting of a Move-to-TEAL compilation system and an accompanying library for writing smart contracts. Beyond enhancing the Algorand smart contract ecosystem, AlgoMove is significant in its own right as part of a broader effort to bring advances in programming language theory and formal verification into the blockchain space. By balancing expressiveness, ease of use, and strong compile-time guarantees, we seek to meet the distinctive requirements of secure and reliable blockchain applications.