This month, Chain announced a Bitcoin Script extension of their smart contract language, Ivy, called to provide Bitcoin Script developers a high-level language to develop smart-contracts. Apparently, their research on EVM & K framework got the attention of IOHK since a few months later in October, the Runtime Verification (cool name btw) team *announced *that they have been awarded a research contract from IOHK to focus on a next-generation VM (IELE) and a universal language framework (K framework). Along IELE, their research on K framework aims at providing smart-contract languages K semantics including IELE itself, Plutus (a strictly typed pure functional language for Cardano’s smart-contracts) and even Solidity* (which is currently used to develop smart-contracts on Ethereum).