Hello Contract

The simplest Covenant contract — record, action, view.

Every Covenant contract is a record: a typed bundle of persistent storage fields and the actions that modify them. This chapter builds the minimal contract — analogous to "Hello World" but running on an EVM chain.

hello.cov

record Hello {
    greeting: text;

    action update(new_greeting: text) {
        self.greeting = new_greeting;
        emit Updated(new_greeting);
    }

    view read() -> text {
        return self.greeting;
    }
}

Annotations

`record`	declares a contract with named storage fields.
`text`	is Covenant's built-in string type, equivalent to `string` in Solidity.
`action`	is a state-mutating function — it produces a transaction.
`view`	reads state without modifying it; no gas cost when called off-chain.
`emit Updated(...)`	emits a log event. The event type is inferred from the arguments.
`self.greeting`	refers to the contract's own storage field.

Key takeaways

Records are the primary contract abstraction in Covenant.
Actions and views are declared at the same level — no function keyword ambiguity.
The compiler infers ABI, storage layout, and event signatures automatically.