Scale By The Bay 2020: James Aman, Multi-language Runtime Environments for Smart Contract Execution

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference The recent interest in distributed ledger technologies has spurred the development of a number of new programming languages to meet the challenge of decentralized state maintenance. A well-identified concern with such development has been the sluggish growth in the number of experienced decentralized application (dApp) developers in the space as well as their relative lack of familiarity with how these novel languages behave under adversarial execution environments. In this talk, we will present our realization and subsequent performance analysis of a multi-language runtime for smart contracts in a Scala based blockchain client using the polyglot capabilities of GraalVM. Furthermore, we will explore the security implications inherent in such a setting and our recent work developing a smart contract system for our application-specific blockchain network. James Aman Topl CTO Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Topl, a blockchain startup focused on empowering social impact projects around the world. Previously, served as CTO with Corporate Partners in Education, a startup building a continuous fundraising mechanism for K-12 schools. I received my PhD from Rice University in experimental atomic physics where I studied Rydberg and halo molecule photoassociation processes in ultracold and quantum degenerate neutral gases.