A Synopsis of Sorobanathon: First Light

Soroban is Stellar’s new smart contracts platform, currently in preview release. It is designed to be sensible, built-to-scale, and developer-friendly. Soroban is written in Rust and taps into a growing ecosystem of safe and efficient tooling. Although Soroban is built to work well with Stellar, it can be used by other blockchains, Layer 2s, and permissioned ledgers.

In October of 2022 at Meridian, the Stellar Development Foundation announced the Soroban Adoption Fund: a $100M fund to enable and encourage developers to build on Soroban, with First Light as the first program.

Sorobanathon: First Light was meant to be a fun, low-lift way to tinker with Soroban on Futurenet and accepted any kind of content, from video walkthroughs to practical tutorials to GitHub issues to anything in between. Each qualified submission earned a reward of 250-3,000 XLM. The content generated during this stage of Soroban helped us kickstart the ecosystem, made onboarding easier, and identified any bugs, issues, or blockers.

At the launch of Sorobanathon: First Light, we hoped to get 30 submissions. I’m happy to say that we greatly improved that number and received 59 technical submissions from 27 unique individuals and gave away a total of 93,600 XLM.

Here are some highlights of the Sorobanathon: First Light submissions:

christian-rogobete — AssemblyScript Contract Examples & Issues(3000 XLM ): Christian, AKA Soneso, is the creator and maintainer of the iOS and Flutter Stellar SDK. In this submission, he outlines nine example contracts using the Assembly Script SDK and discusses certain issues like adding strings. From Leigh’s feedback, this led to an issue submission to rs-soroban-env.

overcat — Invoking Soroban contract with Stellar Python SDK (3000XLM): Initial support for Soroban in the Stellar Python SDK with tutorial and example.

heytdep — Lottery Smart Contract (1000 XLM ): In this sample contract, an admin can set the parameters of a lottery (token, cost, total winners). A user can then swap a token for a ticket. And finally, the contract will run the lottery with a selected trigger to randomly select a winner.

heytdep — Dutch Auction Smart Contract (1200 XLM ): Dutch auction decreases prices over time until a bid is received. In this contract, you can set the starting price, the reserve price, and how fast you want the price to decrease over time. Once a bid is received, the buyer transfers the payment to the auction’s admin, and the contract sends all of its prize tokens to the buyer. Based on this contract heytdep made another submission in collaboration with itsfederico for a Paulette Law contract (1500 XLM).

rahimklaber — DAO Smart Contract (2500 XLM): In this example DAO contract, members can create proposals and execute them if enough members have voted. DAO members earn reputation for participating in the DAO and can use it to vote on proposals.

Skjaldbaka17 — Tic Tac Toe Smart Contract Tutorial (1500 XLM): A tutorial on how to build a Tic Tac Toe Contract invokable by two players. The contract stores whose turn it is and the board composition. Players take invoking to place their mark until there's a winner.

mootz12 — Experimenting with Soroban Auth (2500 XLM): Writeup and sample contract evaluating common authorization patterns on Ethereum. In the sample contract, users can deposit tokens into a pool, and the pool grants them collateral as credit for the deposit.

sreuland — Smart Contract as a Service in IFTTT (Freebie): Contract and video demonstrating interactions between the IFTTT automation service and a smart contract. As an SDF employee, Shawn did not receive a reward for the submission.

wildework - Soroban Dev Portal (Under Review): Wildework has written a dev portal to help onboard javascript developers by sharing his personal experiences. The current guides are currently available: Development environment, Basic Contract, Testing, Building, and Soroban CLI.

altugbakan - Stellar Quest Blog (Under Review): Step-by-step dev.to Technical blog on all six of the Soroban Stellar Quest Live.

markuspluna - Seven Seas Protocol (Under Review): A Pirates of the Caribbean-themed OHM fork to show useful DeFii concepts on Soroban. In his submission, seafarers pay for voyages to receive rewards. Rewards received at the end of the voyages can then be buried (staked) or spent on raids to steal the loot of someone else’s voyages.

Mid-Sorobanathon: First Light, we also opened up submissions for artists to create NFT art around Stellar Quest Live Series 5’s storyline. Stellar Quest is an SDF-run gamified educational program containing a series of challenges that teaches developers about the Stellar network and Soroban. Our most recent series also contained a narrative, and we got some pretty cool art submissions — check them out!

On the heels of Sorobanathon: First Light, SDF’s Anuhya Challagundla launched a new Twitch series highlighting Soroban tinkerers submitting to Sorobanathon: First Light. They’re definitely worth the listen if you’re interested in learning about getting started on Soroban. Here are a few recordings:

Soroban Talks | Join the conversation around Stellar SDKs

The one where Anuhya is joined by SDK developer, Chris, AKA Soneso, as they chat about all things Soroban. Chris walks through the Assembly Script SDK that he’s been developing.

Soroban Talks | DAOs on Soroban

The one where Anuhya is joined by Rahim to chat about his Sorobanathon submissions on DAOs and streaming payments.

We’re so glad you asked! We’ve got a lot of exciting things in the mix for Soroban’s future. Starting on January 13th, 2023 is our first Soroban-focused hackathon: Hacka-Soroban-athon! This event is a great opportunity for the Soroban development team to receive meaningful feedback on Soroban and encourage the first generation of ecosystem tool development. Stay tuned for more information about the event, but feel free to sign up for the hackathon and get pondering on what you’d like to build!

We’re so happy to consider Sorobanathon: First Light a success, and we’re excited to see what the community continues to build throughout 2023. Merry Soroban, everyone!