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Today, we're excited to share the second preview release of Soroban™. Soroban is a new smart contracts platform designed for scalability and sensibility. We shared the first preview release last month. Since then, we've heard a ton of great feedback from developers experimenting with writing smart contracts. This has helped us to continue to refine the platform and add new features to extend its functionality. This is still an early version of the platform, and future updates may shift things around and break code you write today. As you'll see by looking at the list of changes below, we've made significant progress, and we're eager to hear what you think.
Here's what's new in this preview release:
To make things easier for developers, Soroban will support a small number of built-in contracts designed to be fast, cheap to run, and provide useful core functionality. This release implements the machinery for deploying them, and includes an initial pass at the first built-in contract, the standard token contract. It's still in early development, but you can find details about its current state in the docs.
This release expands metering to cover most of the contract environment’s functionality, 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. The measured cost-model inputs can be observed when running a contract via the CLI by passing the {% code-line %}--cost{% code-line-end %} option.
A new SDK included in the release contains functionality that most contracts will need to verify invocations to their contracts are signed by the 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. This SDK is under heavy revision, so expect improvements in the next preview release. Read more in the docs or take a look at an example.
The soroban-sdk now has an improved user experience and some new functionality. Specifically, it includes:
The soroban-cli also gained some user experience improvements, and several new commands. Specifically:
The more we hear from you, the better. Over the next few months, as we work to shape Soroban into a batteries-included smart contracts platform that is sensible, developer-friendly, and built-to-scale, we could use your input. So whether you're a grizzled Soroban veteran or just getting started, head over to the docs. These resources are updated to match this new release, where you'll find detailed information about the nuts and bolts of Soroban, along with a getting started guide, tutorials, and examples.
If you've played around a bit and you're ready to join the conversation about continued development, head to the Soroban channels on the Stellar Dev Discord, where SDF and ecosystem engineers are working in the open, together, to build the future of smart contracts.
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