Blog Article
Author
Anke Liu
Publishing date
Soroban
Ecosystem
Smart contracts
Back in February, the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) published a blog post that emphasized the importance of and vision for building Soroban's Minimum Viable Ecosystem (MVE). An effective MVE includes essential building blocks such as financial primitives, developer tools, and educational resources that can help attract new developers and quickly get them up to speed on the platform.
Today, we’re excited to provide an update that shares the progress that’s been made along with a revised strategy, including how both builders and community members can actively participate in shaping Soroban’s future.
Gathering developer feedback on Soroban’s design and documentation at the early stages has been imperative in building the ecosystem’s foundation and shaping the platform’s development. With help from the Stellar community, we conducted research by analyzing other smart contract ecosystems to determine what tools and services were essential in making them successful. From this research, we’ve identified several priority categories that contribute to a robust ecosystem.
The highest priority categories include:
Financial building blocks
Data access tools
User interfaces
Compatibility enabling tools:
Learn more about these smart contract building blocks here.
Well, with these building blocks in place, new developers and companies can enter the Soroban ecosystem and quickly build more sophisticated and advanced projects that leverage the power of these tools in combination. A developer could build a decentralized money market that uses a price oracle to determine a user’s borrowing or lending capacity without needing to integrate the oracle from scratch. A dev could likewise build an analytics dApp that lets a user interact with and explore the chain via a block explorer that has already been built into the digital wallet and integrated with various DeFi protocols.
And what’s better, Soroban projects will be able to leverage the Stellar network’s already-established on-chain assets and extensive anchor network, furthering equitable access to wealth-generating DeFi services like never before.
The first half of 2023 was focused primarily on just this: attracting builders and entrepreneurs to experiment with Soroban’s preview releases and provide feedback through the $100M Soroban Adoption Fund. The fund is an umbrella for several programs including Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control (FCA00C), Sorobanathon, and the Stellar Community Fund (SCF): an open-application awards program to support teams building on Stellar and Soroban with up to $150,000 worth of XLM awarded for three-month long projects. In the past 6 months, SCF alone has processed:
Soroban is expected to launch on Mainnet this fall. For the platform to thrive, the ecosystem needs to be inundated with strong foundational projects, including those listed in the MVE categories above. It’ll be important to ensure that each priority category is filled out with high-quality projects ready to flip the switch to Mainnet come launch.
Here’s where we’re at so far:
SDF is actively working to onboard established companies by encouraging them to create key projects and submit them to SCF — however, the program is open-application. Any talented builders are welcome to apply for funding by submitting their project or project idea to the program!
Soroban is a greenfield and open to innovation. Developers and entrepreneurs have the unique opportunity to contribute to a revolutionary decentralized financial system by building the projects and infrastructure needed for Soroban to succeed.
Unsure of where to start? Here are a few ways to get started building on Soroban:
*The USD valuation in XLM is calculated using the CF Stellar Lumens-Dollar Settlement Price on the day of payment as administered, maintained, and reported by the cryptocurrency index provider CF Benchmarks Ltd. (using the ticker “XLMUSD_RR”) (available at https://www.cfbenchmarks.com/indices/XLMUSD_RR).