Stellar Community Fund

By Digicus

Digicus

SCF #26

$50.0K

Legacy v5.0 Activation Award

Awarded

Digicus, Scratch for smart contracts, simplifies contract creation & modification via an intuitive, Lego-like graphical interface.

Products & Services

While smart contract development on Stellar has taken many leaps forward since I wrote about it six years ago, the barriers to entry are still numerous... it's an intimidating field only the most technically savvy (or at least the most curious learners) can break into. Put simply, developing smart contracts is hard.

Specifically:

While Rust (the most well supported Soroban SDK) is one of the most admired languages, it is far from one of the most popular.

More mature and seasoned smart contract platforms are complicated and error prone.

Thus, how can we help existing developers succeed? Even more importantly, how can we lower the barrier to entry for community newcomers? And as a stretch, how easy can we make it for non-technical folks to participate and even create their own smart contracts?

With the above problem in mind, consider the following:

65% of the general population are visual learners.

Scratch is an incredible first language, in fact it’s also more popular than Rust.

Digicus is a block-based Soroban smart contract programming language complete with an easy to use, low-code IDE. It attempts to leverage the existing programming on-boarding paradigms to give folks an opportunity to get their hands dirty while also requiring only the minimal amount of technical expertise to get started; we want Stellar developers to be writing contracts without requiring them to understand Rust, investigate WASM binaries, etc. Many schools use Scratch as their coding 101 class for exactly this reason!

Once folks become familiar with smart contracts via Digicus, there are two paths forward:

Transition to using the SDF supported Rust SDK (Digicus can target the Rust SDK so this transition can initially be a hybrid). This is akin to CS-201 where folks begin to use languages like Python and Java to learn data structures and algorithms.

Adopt Digicus as the IDE and programming language of choice for Soroban smart contract development. In this case, we will work to adopt and integrate into the IDE other community initiatives, projects, and efforts such as vulnerability analysis frameworks, auto-complete tooling, etc.

There are a few audiences we target:

[primary] net new members to the Soroban developer community

[primary] existing, less technically savvy members of the Soroban developer community

[secondary] existing, technically savvy members of the Stellar developer community who have only just started experimenting with Soroban

While we might see Soroban power users adopt our tooling, we are not (at least initially) developing with this community in mind.

Digicus is a developer tool for Soroban smart contracts for the Stellar Network.

Requested Budget

$50.0K

Team

Senior software engineer who strives for clean, discoverable, simple code. Past experience in blockchain world includes a couple years with SDF (‘18-‘19) and co-leader of largest developer only blockchain meetup in San Francisco (‘17-‘18).