Allow invoking ephemeral contracts

[kalepail]

Original discussion on Discord

As far as I’m aware contract code and contract instances must be persistent entries. Would it be possible to allow for these to be temporary entries? I’ve already noticed a few occasions where I’m deploying and invoking an ephemeral contract. Either for a test I really want to execute on mainnet or more legitimately there’s a function I want to run once or at least really infrequently such that redeploying a new contract or wasm later on would be acceptable.

Idk if others feel the same or have additional use cases but here are a few that come to my mind:

• Running tests on mainnet
  • Traditionally this wouldn't be feasible but given we can expire entries running mainnet tests would now be feasible and affordable.
• Single use functions
  • Rather than having to have every contract be reusable and agnostic you could more feasibly and reasonable build single use, special purpose, hard coded contracts that are meant to only execute once. Things like specific agreement or term based transfers. aka escrow.
  • I like the idea that contracts don't have to be businesses but more just actual peer to peer ephemeral special case contracts.

Temporary entries are significantly cheaper than persistent and being able to leverage that for code and contracts I think would incentivize more experimentation and exploration of use cases we've never seen on chain before due to it's typical permanence and subsequent high costs.

[tomerweller]

I agree with what @dmkozh said in the thread:

for truly 'ephemeral' contracts it could be nicer to just upload wasm in a tx that invokes it, i.e do something like 'static' functions
this way you don't write anything at all, and you probably don't care about the contract-owned state

And yes, I think that developers should be able to orchestrate a set of invocations atomically in a simple way without having to upload contracts and think about lifetimes at all.

(Changing the title a bit to match the requirement)