Plank: The New Best Way to Develop Smart Contracts | Philippe Dumonet at Pragma Lisbon 2026

Wed, Sep 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

Plank EVM creator Philippe Dumonet presents Plank as a new smart-contract language designed to improve developer experience, security, and tooling. He argues that Solidity’s large, rigid language core and limited support for generics, metaprogramming, libraries, documentation, testing, and editor tooling create repeated “foot guns” throughout development. Slow or incomplete tooling is not merely an inconvenience: it increases review costs, delays features, and makes it harder for teams to build reusable safety patterns. Dumonet connects language design to the repeated failures he saw while auditing and supporting smart-contract teams. Projects lacked tests, documentation, reusable abstractions, or effective editor feedback, and those weaknesses made security reviews slower and more expensive. Solidity’s missing generics and metaprogramming capabilities also make it difficult to package safe patterns in libraries. Teams often repeat complex code or depend on compiler features that cannot be extended by ordinary developers. Plank takes the opposite approach by shrinking the core language and moving important capabilities into an extensible standard library. Dumonet compares this design with modern languages such as Rust, Zig, and Python, where a small core supports powerful reusable abstractions. The current compiler produces real EVM bytecode, supports features such as reusable encoding and EIP-712 patterns, and compiles much faster than Solidity in early tests. With version 0. 2 approaching, the project aims to give teams a practical path to safer contracts, richer tools, and a language that can evolve without continually expanding its compiler. Plank aims to make experimentation happen in libraries rather than inside an ever-growing compiler. A small core is easier to analyze, document, and support with static tools, while standard-library authors can add encoding, typed data, and domain-specific abstractions. Dumonet reports that the compiler already converts Plank into EVM bytecode and has shown major speed improvements in early testing. Version 0. 2 is intended to combine the language, tooling, and library model into something teams can begin using. The goal is a language ordinary developers can extend while reducing the burden placed on the compiler. 00:00 Introduction to Plank EVM 00:28 Five Years Building With Solidity 01:01 Developer and Auditor Friction 01:29 Repeated Footguns and Missing Tests 01:58 How Weak Tooling Raises Audit Costs 02:40 Solidity Extensibility Limits 03:00 Missing Generics and Metaprogramming 03:15 Security Problems in Basic Building Blocks 04:04 Slow Evolution of the Solidity Language 04:36 How Optimization Caused a Vulnerability 05:29 What the Solidity Compiler Contains 05:52 Comparing Rust, Zig, and Python 06:19 Moving Features Into Standard Libraries 07:12 Shrinking the Core With Plank 07:42 An Extensible Smart Contract Stack 08:28 Reusable EIP-712 Implementations 09:27 Compiler Speed and Gas Benchmarks 10:05 Plank Version 0.2 Roadmap 10:28 Next-Generation Compiler Improvements 10:49 Formally Verifying the Compiler 11:23 Closing Resources for Plank Developers _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 🇵🇹 *Pragma Lisbon 2026* Pragma Lisbon 2026 was held on June 25th at the Carlos Lopes Pavillion in Lisbon, Portugal and was an in-person summit for builders and leaders in the web3 ecosystem. Watch the full Pragma Lisbon 2026 YouTube Playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMxB4xW8JYdk ETHGlobal's Pragma series takes place in cities around the world, and is designed to be a different kind of event. Pragma is a one-stage conference with founders-only on stage, bringing together a small group of curated attendees and speakers to discuss the future of web3 and reflect on the past. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ✅ Follow Philippe Dumonet X: https://x.com/real_philogy ✅ Follow Plank EVM X: https://x.com/plankevm ✅ Follow ETHGlobal X: https://x.com/ETHGlobal​ Warpcast: https://warpcast.com/ethglobal Website: https://ethglobal.com YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@UCfF9ZO8Ug4xk_AJd4aeT5HA _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Are you interested in Ethereum development and entrepreneurship? 👉 Sign up for the next ETHGlobal event: https://ethglobal.com/events 🎁 Get exclusive access and perks with ETHGlobal Plus! https://ethglobal.com/plus 📣 Want us to throw an event in your city? Tell us where! https://ethglobal.com/city