Find answers to common questions about Marlowe. If you can’t see what you’re looking for, get in touch.
IOG has long believed in the power of community-led open-source projects to underpin and grow the Cardano ecosystem. With its recent success and strong community, IOG believes Marlowe has now reached the stage of product maturity to become a fully community owned and operated project. IOG is supporting this transition in the belief this will allow Marlowe to grow beyond the confines of one contributor and increase Marlowe’s impact in the community.
During this transitional period for Marlowe, IOG will provide interim resources to facilitate any essential bug fixes and necessary migrations throughout 2024, as well as funding the Marlowe infrastructure in the TxPipe Demeter environment until the end of the year. No further development work on Marlowe will be undertaken by IOG. This transitional support will enable the community to determine the direction of Marlowe.
The Special Interest Group (SIG) is being formed to ensure that builders using Marlowe, and any project that wishes to join can actively contribute to steering future enhancements and developments to Marlowe from within a clearly defined community forum. While a series of development milestones has been proposed as part of the Project Catalyst bid, we see this as just the beginning and look forward to collaborating with community developers on Marlowe’s future direction. A decision on when to formalize a Working Group under Intersect will be made once the SIG has been properly established.
Any Marlowe enthusiast is free to join this Special Interest Group. The distinction between the different types of members is the following:
To join the group as individual or organizational members, they should participate in one meeting and state their interest in joining the group. New members may not vote in the first meeting that they attend.
This group is a community-led initiative, therefore we encourage organizational and individual members of the Marlowe community to attend or bring representatives to Marlowe-SIG Discord channel, to follow all the updates and announcements.
To access #Marlowe-SIG channel:
None of these projects are affected by this transition. Projects like Plutus, Hydra, or Mithril continue to be steered by their potential to contribute meaningfully to the Cardano ecosystem and the developer community's needs. Plutus v3 has enjoyed significant contributions from the community, while Hydra and Mithril continue to be roadmapped and developed in collaboration with the wider developer community, building out capability along open-source principles.
Marlowe has demonstrated significant value to its builders and users, and the Marlowe 2025 Catalyst Proposal opens up new avenues for the community to shape Marlowe's development actively. Community members, developers, and businesses who see value in Marlowe now have the opportunity to contribute to and steer its progress. The Marlowe 2025 Catalyst Proposal is about continuing to develop and build out new features for Marlowe, in collaboration with a core group of community users. Whatever the result of the proposal Marlowe will continue to exist as an open-source toolset, maintaining its core functionality but no further development work will be instigated by IOG. Marlowe's resources, including the Marlowe language, tools, and educational materials, will remain open source and publicly accessible. This ensures that anyone in the community can contribute to and build upon these tools.
The repositories in Marlowe will be administered by an independent vehicle, a not-for-profit organization that is currently being set up by the transition team, and which will ensure community representation and stewardship. The relevant repositories are currently under https://github.com/input-output-hk/ and will be moved to https://github.com/marlowe-lang.
IOG will provide interim resources to facilitate any essential bug fixes and necessary migrations throughout 2024, as well as funding the Marlowe infrastructure in the TxPipe Demeter environment until the end of the year. No further development work on Marlowe will be undertaken by IOG. After this period, the Marlowe project will be entirely in the hands of the community and the Marlowe Special Interest Group.
During the transition period, IOG will provide interim resources to facilitate any essential bug fixes throughout 2024. IOG is also funding the TxPipe-hosted Marlowe infrastructure in the Demeter environment until the end of the year.
Marlowe 2025 Catalyst Proposal will focus on enabling DApp builders to use the Typescript SDK and the Marlowe Runtime. Marlowe Runner & Marlowe Playground will be hosted by IOG until the end of 2024, but no further development work will be instigated by the core Marlowe Team for 2024 and 2025.
The Marlowe Transition Team, consisting of experienced members like Nicolas Henin, Tomasz Rybarczyk, and Simon Thompson, guides Marlowe into its community-maintained phase. They are working on securing additional funding through a Catalyst Fund application and will be Marlowe Core Team Members that will set up the governance structure and support the community transition until the new model is fully operational.
To get involved in the future development of Marlowe, you can join the Marlowe-SIG Discord channel, which will serve as the initial hub for discussion and collaboration. Once the SIG has been properly established, Marlowe will be transferred to the stewardship of a non-profit and community-maintained organization. Your contributions and involvement will be crucial to shaping Marlowe's future.
Yes, Marlowe is available to run on mainnet today. You can do this by installing Marlowe Runtime and connecting it to the mainnet.
Marlowe is also available on pre-production and preview testing environments. You may want to test your Marlowe contracts on pre-production and preview networks before running them on mainnet.
Both the pre-production and preview networks are useful for prototyping and previewing.
The pre-production network is very close to mainnet in terms of its protocol parameters and versions. Use this network for staging and testing your contracts in a real-world environment before deploying to mainnet.
The preview network is more of a development environment. It can be used for early prototyping, experimenting and learning.
We have prepared the following resources to help you get started. If you already are familiar with the Marlowe environment, take a look at the following:
This depends on your level of expertise. However, to make it easier for you to get started, we recommend that you check out demeter.run made by TxPipe. They are deploying Marlowe solutions to simplify the process of getting started.
Marlowe is platform agnostic. While Marlowe has not been developed with mobile devices as a focal point for implementation, individual DApps may or may not be designed and enabled for mobile devices. Some DApps that are based on Marlowe will work on mobile devices, depending on the specific DApp. It depends on how a particular DApp was designed and how it is intended to be used.
Generally speaking, from the point of view of a developer, we recommend working with Marlowe with a desktop or laptop computer on Linux/Ubuntu, Docker on any OS, Nix on any Linux OS, or via a cloud-hosted service such as demeter.run.
To install Marlowe, please see the Marlowe starter kit. It provides guidance on using the demeter.run extension for Marlowe Runtime. It also provides guidance on deploying Marlowe Runtime locally with Docker. The Marlowe starter kit includes detailed documentation and video demonstrations.
Yes, you can use Marlowe without installing anything on your computer. Demeter Run is a zero installation solution for Marlowe. Please see the Marlowe starter kit for more information.
See the contract gallery to access the gallery of Marlowe contracts on Cardano mainnet. The Marlowe team will be adding to the gallery over time as more examples become available.
There are multiple available resources. Please see the documentation here.
Use Discord for broad open-ended questions. Marlowe team members monitor this space. Discord is also a good place to go for feedback, reporting a bug, or if you're experiencing an error.
To report an issue, use GitHub issues.
If you are seeking community help on a contract you are designing, post it on Stack Exchange.
You may also find valuable discussions on the Cardano Forum for Marlowe.
Before running a Marlowe contract on mainnet, it is wise to do the following to avoid losing funds:
See also the Essential Cardano FAQ.
Marlowe has been audited by Tweag. The report, ‘Technical review of Marlowe, Final report,’ is dated March 24, 2023. We encourage you to read it and make your own independent conclusions. We have addressed the report’s findings. Tweag will also post the report in due course.
No, once a Marlowe contract has been deployed to the blockchain, it can no longer be modified unless terms of modification were already designed into the contract. Marlowe smart contracts are designed with certain logical conditions built in. This ensures that an acceptable outcome is guaranteed to occur according to the terms of the contract. A properly designed and tested Marlowe contract cannot ‘hang’ indefinitely.
Marlowe and Plutus are both languages for writing smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain. Because Marlowe is easy to use, it is often worth trying to write your smart contract using Marlowe. If you should discover that Marlowe isn’t well suited for it, you may want to look at Plutus or another language. You can transfer what you learned while trying to write it in Marlowe to whatever language you end up using. Plutus is a general-purpose language that can handle any type of logic, and is intended for developers who are familiar with the Haskell functional programming language.
Marlowe, on the other hand, is a domain-specific language that is based on Plutus. The Marlowe language is designed to be accessible by both non-developers and developers. It has many advantages, such as:
The team is currently reassessing the strategy to educate and support Marlowe pioneers. Some pioneers did not complete the program, so the team will be investing in educational courses, programs, and workshops tailored to specific audiences.
To best shape the educational programs to your needs, please send your input to tell us what you think would be most helpful for you.
To hear about more upcoming educational opportunities as they emerge, please monitor Discord announcements and explore IOG Academy resources.
Please send your FAQ suggestion through Discord and the Marlowe team will work on addressing it.
To access #Marlowe-SIG channel: