This grant proposal is related to an open-source Soroban Smart Contract Catalog for the Stellar blockchain. The catalog will be a standalone and free tool. It will contain a list of audited Soroban smart contracts for different use cases (ex. NFTs, SBTs, DeFi, GameFi), which companies and developers can use or refer to to create their web3 application on Stellar.

Today, the coding and auditing of smart contracts is still one of the major barriers to entry for companies and developers to launch any blockchain application. It shouldn't be that way. Our goal with this project is to provide templates of functional and secure smart contracts that can (1) be used as-is for deployment, or (2) modified to fit specific needs, or (3) simply consumed for educational purposes.

We realize that the state of the Soroban platform is still in the early stages and we want to contribute to its testing and development for the ecosystem.

Down the line, we plan to also have integrations with our new Tenzing product, a smart contract management product designed to help companies and small teams of developers build web3 projects, deploy smart contracts on the blockchain, and manage the interactions with them. The video demo uploaded below showcases these future functionalities as well, but this project proposal is specifically related to the Smart Contract Catalog portion of Tenzing.

Here are the major updates on our progress since our last submission:

• We conducted extensive research on the nuances of Soroban and the existing smart contract landscape
• We develop a first version of our open source catalog and made it publicly available here: https://tenzingai.com/catalog
• We onboarded the first Stellar smart contract on the catalog. The onboarded smart contract is a template for a crowdfunding smart contract, and it allows users to donate tokens to a project, with the goal of reaching a specified target amount before a certain deadline.
• We created a smart contract specific interface, showing the smart contract code and analyzing the major functions the smart contract contains
• We integrated with GPT4 to explain in plain English what the contract does (almost function by function) and what the potential security vulnerabilities or improvements to the contract are

Smart Contract Catalog - companies’ pain points and value proposition

Right now, launching a web3 project is fairly hard, regardless of whether we’re talking about an NFT project, a Soulbound one, or a DeFi application. There are multiple items that a company who want to launch a web3 project needs to consider, from proper access control and key management, to day-to-day operations and monitoring.

While our broader product suite can help with a lot of those items, on this proposal we’ll only focus on what is relevant to the Smart Contract Catalog portion:

• Coding of the smart contracts: smart contracts are the business logic of any web3 application and are generally immutable once deployed on a blockchain network. The contracts in the Tenzing catalog will be able to be deployed as is or quickly customized based on specific needs.
• Smart contract auditing: since smart contracts are immutable once deployed and they often handle real money transactions, the best practice is to conduct a 3rd party security audit before deploying any smart contract on-chain. Pricing for this alone usually ranges from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. We have been auditing thousands of smart contracts in the past few years and we come from a cybersecurity background. All the smart contracts in the catalog will be rigorously audited and ready for deployment, eliminating the need for additional expensive audits.

Extensive research on the nuances of the Soroban platform and development of the infrastructure and skeleton of our open-source smart contract catalog

1. Identify the key features and capabilities of the Soroban platform to better understand the platform's potential and limitations

• Analyze the ability to create custom smart contracts and the range of SSC language supported
• Evaluate the user interface and experience of the Soroban platform
• Explore the security and privacy measures in place on Soroban

2. Conduct a thorough analysis of the existing smart contract landscape on Stellar to identify any gaps or opportunities for improvement

• Review existing smart contracts available on Stellar
• Identify which smart contracts are the most relevant to be developed upon completion of the first milestone

3. Develop a comprehensive plan for the infrastructure and skeleton of the open-source smart contract catalog

• Define the scope of the smart contract catalog on Soroban
• Determine what types of contracts will be included in the catalog
• Design a user interface tailored to Soroban’s specific features

4. Define the requirements for the open-source smart contract catalog in a way that will benefit the Stellar ecosystem

• Ensure the catalog is designed to be interoperable with other platforms and services on Stellar
• Prioritize the development of smart contract that will be most useful to the Stellar community

5. Onboard the first smart contract onto Tenzing open-source catalog

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How can a reviewer check you completed your first deliverable?

To demonstrate the completion of the first deliverable, our team will onboard the very first smart contract type on Stellar and provide an MVP version of Tenzing open-source catalog. This MVP version will be pushed to production, allowing the Stellar team to review the interface and provide feedback.