Galactic Playground provides a drag-and-drop visual interface builder specifically designed for Soroban smart contracts. Soroban contracts expose a limited and well-specified function signature, and this allows us to provide UI components that match this signature. The drag-and-drop builder offers UI elements tailored to Soroban's type system, like address input elements that validate formats, numeric inputs that handle stroops, and buttons that can trigger contract invocations. When users arrange these components on the canvas, they're not just designing layouts; they're creating data bindings that directly map to contract functions.

With the ability to link with a wallet, users can directly invoke contract functions from the UI. After the UI is finished, users will have the option to publish it and share it with everyone.

Galactic Playground is a great opportunity for people without software development experience to get exposed to Soroban contracts and build something on top of them. At the same time it is useful for developers that are writing contracts in Rust and would like to build a UI for them. The main goal of the project is to introduce a much wider audience of people to build on Stellar.

Yes

$150.0K

The main goal of the project is to make building applications on Soroban approachable to a broader audience. After the mainnet launch, I would like to have already onboarded 50+ GalacticTalk users to the playground.

The playground is also useful to experienced Soroban developers to quickly build UIs for their contracts, either for testing purposes or for production use. The goal after the mainnet launch is to have 10+ developers that use the playground daily to test the contracts they are working on.

Long term, I would like the Galactic Playground to also provide low-code tools for contract building itself. Including a library of contracts and common patterns that can be reused and linked together. Eventually becoming an integral part of the “building on Soroban” experience and an alternative to the current Rust toolchain.

Galactic Playground will leverage GalacticTalk’s existing community of 8000 users as the primary growth channel. Many of them are already developers that have built something previously on Stellar and would make great first users.

Another channel would be the Stellar Developer Discord. Especially the many people that are interested in stellar, but lack the technical skills to build complex solutions from the ground up. The Galactic Playground would give them a great opportunity to build a proof of concept from existing Soroban contracts.

GalacticTalk is a forum dedicated to Stellar. It has around 8000 registered users, 17.000+ posts and gets more than 40.000 unique visitors each month. Many of the users are developers and participated in the previous Stellar Build Challenge and Community Fund, that were directly hosted on GalacticTalk: https://galactictalk.org/t/scf-archive.

This gives us access to a very big base of developers and users that have a strong interest in Stellar. The forum was mostly in maintenance mode for a long time, but I’m actively working on making it again a vibrant place for discussions around Stellar. The Galactic Playground is part of this effort, to invite more users to build on Stellar.

Deliverable 1: Core Visual Builder Interface

• Description: Implement a drag-and-drop canvas with 5 essential UI components (text input, number input, button, paragraph and sub-layout) that can be positioned on a responsive grid layout

• Completion Measure: Successfully create, save, and reload a functional UI layout

• Budget: $30,000

Deliverable 2: Contract Specification Parser

• Description: Build automatic extraction and interpretation system for Soroban contract interfaces

• Completion Measure: Successfully parse and generate bindings for 100% of standard Soroban primitive types (u32, i32, i64, u64, i128, u128, Address, Bytes, String, Symbol, Vec) and complex contract functions

• Budget: $10,000

Deliverable 3: Basic Project Management System

• Description: Implement persistent storage layer for UI projects including save, load, versioning, and draft management capabilities

• Completion Measure: Demonstrate full CRUD operations for projects with SQLite backend

• Budget: $10,000

Target Completion: March 2025, Total Budget: $50,000

Deliverable 1: Backend Integration Layer

• Description: Implement a backend service in Rust to bridge the frontend with Stellar's RPC server, handling contract queries, transaction preparation, simulation, and submission

• Completion Measure: Successfully fetch contract state, simulate transactions, and submit a testnet transaction

• Budget: $20,000

Deliverable 2: Wallet Integration (Albedo)

• Description: Integrate Albedo wallet for secure transaction signing, including connection flow, account management, and signing delegation

• Completion Measure: Wallet connection widget fully integrated into UI builder with transaction signing flow

• Budget: $10,000

Deliverable 3: Contract Inspector Component

• Description: Develop interactive UI panel that displays parsed contract metadata, available functions, parameters, current state, and real-time event history

• Completion Measure: Contract Inspector successfully displays and allows interaction with all functions and events of a testnet contract

• Budget: $10,000

Deliverable 4: End-to-End Publishing Platform

• Description: Complete integration of frontend builder and backend services enabling a full workflow, from UI design to live deployments

• Completion Measure: Successfully publish a unique UI projects bound to testnet contracts, accessible via public URLs

• Budget: $10,000

Target Completion: May 2025 , Total Budget: $50,000

Deliverable 1: Advanced Component Library

• Description: Expand UI component offerings to include data tables, charts and tabs

• Completion Measure: All components tested with mainnet contracts, supporting complex data visualization and multi-step transaction flows

• Budget: $20,000

Deliverable 3: Event Streaming & Real-time Updates

• Description: Implement WebSocket-based event subscription system for real-time contract state updates and event notifications with automatic UI refresh

• Completion Measure: Successfully stream and display events from a mainnet contract

• Budget: $20,000

Deliverable 5: Multi-Wallet Support & Mobile Optimization

1. Description: Extend wallet support to include 2 more wallets

2. Completion Measure: All three wallets fully integrated

3. Budget: $10,000

Target Completion: July 2025, Total Budget: $50,000

• Bernard Kolobara (linkedin)

  • Bernard founded a startup in the developer tools category (Lunatic Inc.) and raised funding from famous Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator. As part of the company he built an open-source product that is loved by developers and received over 4.800 stars on GitHub. He also built a discord community of more than 900 people around that product.

  • Before Lunatic Inc, Bernard worked for CERN, where he helped push the boundaries of science.

  • He is also the creator of GalacticTalk, one of the biggest Stellar forums, and has been involved for a very long time with the Stellar community, wrote many tutorials and organised events.

• Luisa Nogueira (linkedin)

  • Luísa previously worked as a front-end developer at Workflow, Kurier and Kununu, creating amazing user experiences. She has more than 6 years of experience as a front-end developer, complemented by 3 years in UI design.

  • She also holds a master’s degree in law.