Stellar Lumens launches smart contract platform Soroban

• Last month, a preview was released and was met with feedback from developers writing the smart contract.
• In response to the feedback received from the previous updates, Stellar has decided to introduce a small number of built-in contracts.

Stellar Lumen is still working on its Soroban platform – a new smart contract platform designed for scalability and sensibility. Last month, a preview was released and was met with feedback from developers writing the smart contract. In the latest preview, Stellar has released several updates on its smart contract with a brief statement on its next move.

In response to the feedback received from the previous updates, Stellar has decided to introduce a small number of built-in contracts. This is expected to provide useful core functionality, cheap to run, and fast. The machinery to deploy them including an initial pass of the first built-in contract has been implemented in the latest release. The latest update has also made provision for the expansion of metering. This is to ensure that most of the contract environment’s functionality is covered. This will be done in the form of “inputs to abstract cost-models”. 

This release also improves the code used to calibrate cost models to true CPU costs. Currently, the cost models are not calibrated, nor are they subject to any limits. In the future, the cost models will be fully calibrated and when run on production networks, subject to limits and fees. 

New commands introduced on Soroban

Soroban-SDK has also been updated to have an improved user experience and to have some new functionality. Similarly, The soroban-cli has been updated with new commands to have an improved user experience. The added commands are the soroban-cli serve command, the soroban-cli read command, soroban-cli gen command, and soroban-cli completion. 

In addition, a new Auth SDK (soroban-auth) has been added with functionality to enable most contracts to verify invocations to ensure that they have been signed by appropriate signers. 

Contracts on Soroban can implement the authentication scheme they prefer, but this SDK will provide a default option that is compatible with Stellar accounts, Ed25519 signatures, and cross-contract calls.

The report discloses that this contract is under serious revision and so may be improved in the next preview release.

The developers aim to design Soroban to be a batteries-included smart contracts platform in the next few months. In doing so, they would heavily rely on feedback to make it developer-friendly, sensible, and built-to-scale.

The project has relied on the input of users from the onset. In June, the team settled on Soroban as the name of the project after starting a thread on the Stellar Dev Discord and asking for suggestions. Even though it is new, it is built on prominent technologies namely: WASM and Rust. 

In the next few iterations, we will be introducing an events system, indexing service, better gas metering, a Stellar Core integration, and much more.