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#67: @StellarOrg introduces Soroban—scalable smart contracts for devs
Recorded: Aug. 11, 2023 Duration: 1:04:49Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey, yo.
Hey, yo. Sorry. I'm just sending out co-host invites.
How's it going?
Good, good. How are you doing?
I'm good. I'm good.
I can't believe it's already Friday. My goodness.
I know. This week has flown by.
It's insane. Insane.
Wow, room's filling up. Hey, everyone.
Okay, hang on. Handing out the mic here.
All right.
I think Battern is having some trouble connecting.
The fancy new iPhone isn't working, huh?
Ooh, got him.
Oh, hey, Bows.
Bows. Hey, bud.
Hey.
I see we have the Soroban official account on as well. Welcome.
And welcome, Tyler. Welcome, Justin.
Hi, thanks.
Hey, yeah.
Hey, how's it going?
Good. How about you guys?
I'm great.
I'm glad it's Friday.
And, you know, I'm also, I'm great.
I'm happy to be here.
Awesome.
I'm glad it's Friday, too.
But at the same time, I'm like, oh, man.
My to-do list for the week is still running.
Like, I'm not going to have time to finish everything I needed to do.
So, ay, ay, ay.
All right, gang.
Okay, we're just going to give Battern another couple seconds to try to connect.
But thank you all for being here.
And I see a lot of Bat Ambassadors in the audience today.
We've got Viking, Moonbeamer, Bows on the panel today, which I'm really excited about.
We've got Sam.
Heck, yeah.
Solid group.
Okay, Battern is back.
Let's give him a second.
He says he ditched his iPhone.
Oh, now we hear you.
Not great, but we do hear you.
You sound like you're on a windy beach.
Which is probably the truth.
Yeah, right?
That sounds good.
Probably accurate.
It's actually coming in perfectly.
Awesome.
Cool.
Well, now that our panel's all here and our guests are here, let's kick off.
So, welcome, everybody.
Today, we are in the Bat Cave with Stellar.
Thank you all for being here for another Friday space.
We always appreciate you taking time out of your day to hang with us.
And we're excited to dive into the discussion today.
So, for just a quick intro, and then we'll let, you know, Stellar give us their intro, too.
But just for a high level, Stellar is an open source, decentralized platform, transforming global finance by connecting financial systems for faster, cost-effective transactions.
From dollars to Bitcoin, Stellar ensures seamless financial integration worldwide.
And building on this vision, Stellar's latest innovation, Soroban, is a cutting-edge smart contracts platform designed for devs whose Rust foundation integrates effortlessly with Stellar, making a significant stride in the evolution of decentralized applications and Web3.
All right.
So, let's power through our intros here and then dive right into the discussion.
So, you know, whether you're a regular listener or a first-time visitor in the Bat Cave, we're thrilled to have you, like I said earlier.
So, we are the Bat Community, and we're all about Basic Attention Token, or Bat, which is an Ethereum-based rewards token integrated into the Brave browser.
And Brave, for anyone who is unaware, is a fast and privacy-focused browser that blocks YouTube and other third-party ads by default.
It rewards users with Bat for opting into seeing privacy-respecting ads and allows them to support their favorite content creators or causes with Bat tips or donations.
And the Brave browser also comes preloaded with a bunch of privacy features, like a private search and AI summarizer, private video conferencing, VPN, multi-chain crypto wallet, and so much more.
You can explore the full suite of features at brave.com slash features, brave.com slash download if you want to download the browser and give it a try.
And for more on Bat, you can head to basicattentiontoken.org, but please do so after the episode.
All right, let's go around the room and introduce the panel today.
So, since I have the mic, I'll just give you guys a quick one.
I am Jenny, and I am joining you from the Bat Community account today.
I have been immersed in Bat and Brave in the community since 2017, and now I also focus on running our Bat Ambassadors volunteer program
and building out partnerships that drive bats' growth and adoption.
So, during the event, if you have any questions or you have input or feedback, please feel free to request the mic or type your questions under the Twitter Spaces link,
and one of the Bat Community team members will be sure to address them.
So, yeah, that's it for me.
Let's get acquainted with the rest of the team.
I'm going to hand it off to Drew.
Hey, I'm Drew.
I'm happy to be here again today, this week.
I work with Jenny in the community and have been with Brave for about a year and a half or so, almost coming up on two years.
So, I'm loving every second of it.
You can usually find me here on Twitter or in our Bat Brigade Discord, which is gg.
Or discord.gg slash Bat Brigade.
Sorry.
And, yeah, super excited for the space, guys.
Tyler, Justin, glad you could be here.
Stellar was one of the probably early tokens that I was buying on Coinbase back in the day.
So, I'm excited for this one.
I'll let Batter, if he can speak from the beach over there, to go next.
All right.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, we can.
I'm Batter.
I make memes and ambassadors helping to spread the word of Bat and Brave across platforms and cultures.
And, yeah, glad to be here.
Thanks for coming.
Stunning.
And, today, we also have Bows, who is one of our incredible Bat Ambassadors.
Actually, he's a program leader also on the panel today.
So, Bows, do you want to give a quick intro?
Sure.
I'm Bows.
I'm the Bat Ambassador Lead for North America.
I'm also a fan of Stellar.
They were one of the first projects that caught my eye.
I still have all my Stellar from when I bought it back in 2017.
So, I'm excited to hear what y'all have going on.
Heck, yeah.
Thank you, Bows.
And, of course, last but not least, we have our amazing guests from Stellar.
We have Tyler and Justin in the house.
So, Tyler and Justin, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves and your backgrounds and your journeys to Stellar?
I don't know whichever one of you wants to go first.
Go for it, Justin.
Okay, cool.
I'm Justin Rice.
I'm the VP of Ecosystem at the Stellar Development Foundation.
The foundation supports the growth and development of the open source, ownerless, open participation Stellar Network.
I've been here for like four plus years.
And, I mean, my path to get here was pretty zigzag.
I did a lot of other stuff.
I was a musician for a long time.
I worked in film production for a long time.
I worked for a product on a dating app.
And then I ended up working for Stellar X, which is like an interface for the Stellar Dex.
But now that I've been here for a long time, I've been like working to help grow the ecosystem, grow the community, get people building on Stellar.
And most recently, I'm working to try to get people building on Sorbonne, which is the smart contracts platform that is built for Stellar that we're going to talk about today.
And that should launch pretty soon.
We're now on the 10th preview release and Sorbonne is now feature complete.
So, we're closing in on its actual launch.
And I'm very excited to be here.
Tyler.
Yep.
My name is Tyler Vanderhoeven.
I'm a lead developer advocate at the Stellar Development Foundation.
I've been here for close to three years, I think, maybe a little more than that.
But I've been around in the Stellar ecosystem since probably 2014 when I first discovered it.
My background is in front-end development and back-end full stack.
Worked on a bunch of financial applications for like on top of Stripe APIs.
And then moved into the community on the Stellar side, building out different applications.
And eventually made sense to move over to the developer advocate side here at the actual SDF.
And I spend most of my days writing documentation, building coding games, ensuring that people can build out applications and services,
particularly with a particular focus on solo early-stage development.
And now with the advent of Sorobon looming on the horizon, I've been learning a lot of Rust and smart contracts,
building out all kinds of tooling and ensuring that we build an ecosystem that's safe and maintainable for our ecosystem.
It's been a ton of fun.
That is awesome.
Thank you both for the great intros.
And Tyler, I don't know how much of the documentation you're responsible for on Sorobon, but I just want to shout it out.
I just clicked through it this morning and it's super organized.
There's loads of documentation.
And yeah, it's great to see that.
So kudos if that's all you or you.
It definitely isn't.
Our Sorobon documentation right now has 51 contributors.
So it is a group effort for sure.
That is awesome.
Well, hats off to you and to them.
So I know I gave you both and I gave Stellar a little intro earlier.
And I feel like most people here probably know Stellar.
It's pretty OG, but I'd love for you to provide a brief overview of Stellar and its mission in your words for anyone who, you know,
somehow has been living under a rock and isn't familiar with Stellar.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, Stellar is OG.
It's been around since 2014 and in its current incarnation since 2015.
So it's like older than pretty much every other blockchain.
Right.
It was designed originally like the foundation.
We support the growth and development of Stellar.
We have a mission.
Our mission is to create equitable access to the world's financial infrastructure.
So the idea is to build a technology that can sort of be a common platform for all currencies to connect,
to allow people to have access to financial resources that they might not otherwise have access to,
and to do it using like sort of the distributed ledger technology that can allow for different siloed payment systems to like interoperate.
And so, you know, a lot of what Stellar is designed for is like asset issuance.
It's very easy to issue an asset.
There are really clear ecosystem standards that allow you to connect that asset to existing financial rails to like make stable coins, for instance.
And then there's like a lot of tooling, a lot of applications, a lot of wallets, many of which do things like enable cross-border payments.
But also, Stellar has really good on and off ramps.
In other words, it's pretty easy to convert value onto the network into a digital version of that value.
Specifically, Stellar connects to MoneyGram.
So you can actually cash into Stellar at, you know, hundreds of MoneyGram locations and cash out back out whenever you feel like it.
So Stellar has a pretty amazing set of like access points.
And then more fundamentally, though, Stellar was built with all of that in mind.
And the initial design, it was like, look, we don't actually, well, actually, it was kind of before smart contracts.
But originally, it was like, well, we don't actually need smart contracts in order to do the things that most people want to do on Stellar.
But in the past couple of years, you know, looking around at all the stuff that happens with DeFi and with the sort of financial instruments, the novel financial instruments and innovation that people were building in various other blockchains, we realized that we do actually need to have smart contracts.
And so now that sort of classic Stellar that allows for interoperation asset issuance cross-border payments is about to connect to smart contract capabilities so that developers can, you know, create innovative financial products, all of which just circling back, like sort of connects to that mission, right?
So Stellar will allow for access through those great access points to like all kinds of financial infrastructure, including DeFi in the future.
So there you go.
Yeah, that was a really great overview.
Thank you so much.
And so to narrow in a little bit, like to have such longevity in Web3, you have to be doing something very right or very efficiently.
How do you think Stellar differentiates itself from other blockchain platforms and, you know, has been able to maintain such longevity?
I mean, Tyler, if at any point you want to take this one, go for it.
But I'll just say, like, I think part of it is the focus.
There's just always been a focus in Stellar on equitable access, on creating resources that are really easy for people to get a hold of, to get building on, on creating a validation system, like making it so that validators are actually pretty low resource requirements, have low resource requirements, so that network participation is open to people no matter where they are all over the globe.
And I think that this idea of just like interoperable money with equitable access as its core function has made it so that there's just like always been a lot of opportunity to like build stuff on Stellar.
And not only that, but like the heart of it feels very pure, right?
So people are building things that they believe in to solve real world problems, because that's the sort of culture, that's the technology that has enabled the creation of that culture.
And that's like sort of the mission of the foundation that's sort of helping to propel forward or support the ecosystem as it grows.
And so I think it's it's really is about like sort of the technology and the culture fit and the idea that like equitable access is something that is worth striving for that keeps people coming back in terms of like building more and more to grow up the ecosystem.
So that's beautifully put, you're a great orator, Justin.
Okay, a bit more of a surface level question.
So Stellar or Stellar Lumens has had an interesting naming evolution with the cryptocurrency originally known as Stellar and then later called Lumens or XLM.
Can you shed some light on the evolution of the name?
Um, yeah, so I actually originally when Stellar was created, it had a different consensus protocol at its heart.
And so for a very brief period of time, Stellar, the native currency was called Stellars.
Um, but when there was a new, a novel consensus protocol called the Stellar consensus protocol, which is a pretty amazing, um, sort of proof of agreement style voting based consensus protocol that doesn't actually use proof of stake or proof of work.
When that became like the heart or the engine of Stellar, um, there was a need to differentiate like that new Stellar network.
This was back in 2015 from the sort of short lived earliest version of Stellar.
And so they wanted to actually use a different name for the currency in order to avoid confusion.
And so I think, you know, there was, it was actually before my time.
So I don't know exactly how they decided on Lumens or XLM.
I mean, I think there was something about the way that currency was named and they wanted it to be consistent with like sort of currency names.
But, um, I know that that's why they switched from STR or Stellars to Lumens was to avoid that confusion, but I don't know why they settled on Lumens.
So I don't know.
We've got to get a real historian to answer that question.
Maybe Tyler knows.
I have no idea.
I just remember there was a really cute astronaut originally called Stroopy.
And I don't ever know what happened to him.
He needs to come back though.
He lives in my heart.
Yeah.
So, anyway, so Stellar had a little mascot, a little astronaut mascot.
I don't think I ever knew that.
So you learn things in these spaces, guys.
I remember the astronaut.
Let's go.
Can I go dig that up?
Yeah, we got to dig him up.
Stroopy.
You know, the thing about astronauts is like they can't, it's, it's a really high pressure job.
So they can't like stick around for very long.
You know, they got to retire early.
So that's what happened to Stroopy.
Yeah, I guess that is true.
So I know we're complaining to talk about Sorban, which is, you know, about smart contracts on the network.
So I guess we can jump over to that.
And I guess if you guys want to give a little background on Sorban and, you know, what that means for the Stellar network and what that's going to do for, you know, holders of Stellar or other, you know, people working on Stellar.
I'd be happy to hear about it.
Justin, how about you give a sort of mission technical aspect and then I'm going to approach this from the builder's perspective.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, I think that as a foundation, we're always trying to listen to what the ecosystem wants and needs in order to build the kinds of products and services that they think their customers need, right?
And that they think the world needs.
And so, like, after years of not having smart contracts, it became pretty clear, as I kind of touched on earlier, that there was like a lot that people could do with smart contracts and that they wanted to be doing it building on Stellar.
And so, you know, it is important to be able to build like sort of DeFi protocols and governance protocols that open up possibilities for users.
You know, AMMs that allow people to provide liquidity to make frictionless cross-border payments or cross-asset payments are really important.
Lending and borrowing protocols that allow people to like sort of advance their capital and other people to borrow that capital in order to like get set up and improve the quality of their lives or do whatever it is that they want to do.
Those are all very important as are like governance protocols that allow decentralization of decision making, DAOs, these kinds of things.
And there was just like a lot of impetus for people to say, okay, if we connect what we have with Stellar, which is this platform for like sort of universal asset exchange, and we put in the middle of it this like sort of heart of smart contracts, I think that there will be so much room for innovation for developers to actually build novel products and services.
It will connect to like the access points that Stellar already has, and it will create this like opportunity to like actually realize Stellar's transformative potential.
And so I think, you know, based on like sort of ecosystem feedback, based on what was already happening, based on like sort of the potential that all of the access points had, it became pretty clear that it was worth it to like sit down and develop a smart contracts protocol.
Like the first thing that we did was that we looked at all the existing smart contracts platforms in order to just see, hey, can we use something that already exists, and did a pretty thorough analysis.
We looked at, you know, we looked at, you know, we looked at EVM, and ultimately, we decided that there wasn't anything that existed off the shelf that sort of met all the requirements that we had for a smart contracts protocol or platform.
And so we ended up building Sorobon from the ground up.
And I think at that point, Tyler, I'll pass it to you.
Yeah, so from a builder's perspective, I mean, I've been building on Stellar for ages, and it behaves like the classic Stellar protocol, the 19 different operations, things that you can do behaves a lot like just a traditional API service, where you've got a very finite number of things that you can do with a finite number of operations or methods.
And so it behaves a lot like just any other payment gateway, the nice thing being that it's decentralized.
The issue kind of pops up, though, where as an innovator or somebody who wants to, you know, create a startup and do something crazy, and you're not really sure exactly what pivots you might need to make, or I want to do anything, like I don't want to be limited, and why would I if there's other alternatives out there?
And that's where some of the competitors, particularly ones like Ethereum, had smart contract capabilities kind of from the very get-go, where you can do whatever you want, and sure, you might pay for it, but the innovative opportunity is pretty much limitless.
So that's really exciting as someone who's building on innovative technology.
We've seen all kinds of issues that come from when you don't exactly get it right, you're not exactly sure how this technology will be used over time, or what will kind of form as this is a good use case, this one doesn't really work that well, because it's too expensive, or too unstable, or just unnecessary.
But you have to have that first mover that comes in and just throws a bunch of stuff at the wall, some of it will stick, some of it won't, but Scylla didn't do that, maybe Ethereum did.
But what is definitely true is that innovation is very important, being able to have a lot of flexibility.
So that's the thing that really excites me about Sauravon, is you maintain all of the mission, the focus, what this needs to be used for, the problem we're trying to see solved in the world as a network.
We want to stay focused on that, but open up the door of opportunity for innovation.
So sure, it's still not maybe able to do absolutely anything, right?
There are resource constraints and not everything is free, but the focus of having a decentralized network that's custom built for cross-border payments of opening up financial access to those who don't have it, being able to innovate on a platform that's focused on that is incredible.
It still is nice, right?
I think a lot of people have treated blockchain as if it was like a programming language, where, you know, when I use JavaScript or Rust or any other programming language, there's no constraints, right?
You can do whatever you want.
And a lot of people have sort of treated Ethereum that same way.
The issue is that you've got databases and those are expensive and you have to run these machines.
And so there's an inherent cost that's associated with this technology that isn't associated with just any other programming language.
And you have to, once you kind of come to that realization, your ability to do whatever you want, even though like the language can support it, the actual blockchain itself cannot.
And that's where you start to see blockchains get a lot more expensive as the fees go up because these things are not free.
Storing things forever is not free.
Having anyone in the world able to borrow this supercomputer of connected machines, like that's not free.
It's actually pretty expensive.
And in many ways, it's more expensive because you have more machines that are doing work, more security involved because everything is public.
And so not everything works well in that environment.
But you discover those things over time.
You see what people are willing, kind of what the base market is willing to pay for, what use cases really make sense for crypto, like distributed, programmable money or programmable cryptography.
And then you begin to apply that to use cases.
And then you come finally to something like Sorobon that says, let's take inventory of what the world has done so far and the use cases that exist.
And let's custom build a smart contract protocol that will support those use cases and avoid those pitfalls to really support a use case that's most compelling and most useful to the world for the things that we're already seeing.
And to me, that's just incredibly exciting.
A big one, if we wanted to talk about it, would be something like state expiration, right?
It's the scary word in blockchain that you can't just store an arbitrary amount of information for all of eternity and expect it to just exist.
Like somebody has to pay for it.
Someone has to keep up the rent.
And Stellar through Sorobon is tackling those types of problems head on to ensure the stability to builders and innovators that this isn't just cool technology.
It's technology that is going to be around for ages because we're planning for it.
Yeah, yeah.
Thanks.
That was, you know, both of you guys did a great job explaining, you know, Sorobon and kind of where it's coming from.
That's a nice perspective to have.
So, I guess, the question I have to, and you were kind of getting to this, sounds like, Tyler, is that, or what, I guess, is going to be different or what's going to be kind of the, yeah, I guess the differences between something like Ethereum that has smart contract already and on, but just on Stellar, right?
Like, so what are going to be the incentives to draw people in?
Is it going to be, like, you know, faster network speeds, cheaper transactions, those kind of things, or, and what's going to drive that use on those?
Yeah, it's an excellent question.
I can answer it from a technical perspective, and then, Justin, you can fill in any gaps.
A big one is, yeah, like, from the ground up, you've got Ethereum building on top of the EVM, where Sorobon is being built on top of Wasm, WebAssembly through Rust.
So, already outside of the gate, you've got a pretty substantial decision that's been made on the actual language and virtual machine that's going to run the computation for these different smart contracts.
The EVM is custom built for Ethereum, and WebAssembly is custom built for the web.
So, already there's, again, a decision made on we're going to adopt web standards and step outside of just blockchain technology into a much larger realm of work that's being done around taking safe languages and make those able to compile down to something that can run on a virtual machine.
So, you're able to grab hold of the work that more people are doing.
So, that is going to reduce cost.
It's going to increase security, all by default.
So, that would be one aspect.
Another one is, yeah, like, Ethereum doesn't have an explicit use case mission.
So, it's kind of whoever's willing to pay the most is the one that can kind of take over the blockchain.
And thankfully, there are L2s that can come alongside and help alleviate some of that cost instability.
So, we'll see kind of where some of those things land.
But still, like, you're always going to be struggling with this.
If it's going to settle on L1, it's going to be running through an EVM.
So, with Sorob on Stellar, you've got the assurances that we have a purpose in mind that we're trying to solve for, something that we're trying to provide to the world, rather than just an arbitrary technology stack.
So, that can provide a lot of stability if your use case aligns with that, that the fees will be more stable.
The things that I do as they align with equitable access to the global financial system, so long as it's aligning in that same vein, you've got some assurances there.
Fundamentally, like, the way the blockchains operate and the governance structures around them are quite different.
Again, I don't know that one's better or worse.
It really depends on what you're trying to do.
Like, with any sort of competitive analysis that a CTO might do, you have to weigh your pros and cons for what your actual business purpose is.
I really like Rust.
It's a language that makes a lot of sense to me.
You also aren't trying to dig through just a bunch of, even just blockchain-specific, the breadth of knowledge is quite large, and it covers a large range of people that are using Rust for many, many different things, not just blockchain things, which can be really helpful as you start to think through optimizations or even just finding code examples to use.
I have found that to be quite useful.
And then you've certainly got, on top of Sorbonne, this very deep connection with Stellar, which is an asset, like a real-world asset network, where there's lots of anchored assets.
And all of those financial instruments or financial institutions, those assets that have been issued on Stellar immediately become available, so you can consider something like MoneyGram and the on-and-off access there that can now go straight into a smart contract protocol.
That's something that you can't just go and get somewhere else.
So all of the work that's gone into building up what Stellar is today, now kind of being given a superpower with Sorbonne and its composability to do things with those assets that you never could have done before.
Justin, I don't know if there's other things you'd want to add to that.
No, I think that was pretty much it has better developer experience in a lot of ways, I think, as you point out, because it's Rust-based, because it was built later and has like a second mover advantage where like we can look at things that went wrong in other blockchains and say, OK, let's not have, you know, reentrancy enabled by default.
Right. Like certain things that or as Tyler mentioned, state exploration, let's make it so that state, that unused state can expire.
So there's not like massive ledger bloat. So there are design decisions, I think, that make it develop a better developer experience that ultimately will probably keep it less expensive.
And then, yeah, access, cash to DeFi, right? Like you can literally cash in to Stellar in a way that is not necessarily possible with other blockchains.
And so I think as a builder, what's cool is that that opens up new markets that you can actually build for places where like people have access to to a MoneyGram location or to a cash in location, but don't necessarily have easy access to, say, bank accounts.
So there's like a lot of new possibilities there to reach new markets, I think, with cash to DeFi.
Yeah, sounds really good. And I know we got a few requests so far, but we'll kind of hold off on the questions till we get through a little bit.
But hold tight if you requested. I think Batern had a question. So go ahead, Batern.
Yeah. So you mentioned like going beyond the blockchain and like the focus on connecting to the real world.
I just wondered what Oracle are you going to be using for your smart contracts to make sure the data you've got in them is accurate?
Yeah. Well, I mean, just to be clear, like we are just building the platform that allows other people to write smart contracts.
So like we don't actually control the oracles that people use for the smart contracts that they write, nor do we control the oracles that integrate with Stellar or with Sorbonne.
Like, you know, I'd say that right now. So on the one hand, like I, I think the answer will depend on who's actually using the platform and what they're building.
And it will depend on what oracles integrate with Stellar.
I'd say that right now we're still in preview release. So the actual mainnet production launch of Sorbonne hasn't happened.
And so we're still in early bootstrapping of like an ecosystem of like tools, including oracles that are building on Sorbonne.
And right now there's about four different oracles that are in the process of building.
But, you know, I think until they, until they launch, it's sort of up to them to tell the story of their integration with Sorbonne.
It's not something that I can necessarily do. If that makes sense.
Yeah. Makes perfect sense.
Speaking of, so Sorbonne is still in testnet.
When can we expect it to make its debut to the world?
That's tricky. I mean, so, you know, I would say that what's interesting about it being in testnet, as I dodged this question, hopefully somewhat artfully, but the fact that it's in testnet is interesting because it's been, we've been sharing public preview releases.
And there's been a lot of people building in conjunction with the platform development itself, which is actually pretty cool, right?
Like we have a lot of projects. There's, I don't know, there's 70 or so projects that have gotten grants so far this year to build in as like sort of early Sorbonne developers.
And they do include things like oracles and indexers, block explorers, but also DeFi protocols and wallets and sort of all of the building blocks of the ecosystem are there in place.
So even though it has not yet reached like production or started to hit the actual stellar mainnet, there is a lot of activity that's happening in the ecosystem already.
And so I think that when we do launch, it's not just going to be the platform that launches, it's going to be kind of like an object in motion, right?
The ecosystem as a whole will be like sort of launching in conjunction with the platform.
So it should be quite lively from the very beginning.
As far as when that's going to happen, the answer to that has a lot to do with what, like what happens with code audits, what happens with like sort of developer experience,
what happens as we keep testing Sorbonne in its testing environment, we just released preview release 10, which is feature complete.
And so now we're in the part of the development cycle where we're sort of hardening and testing the code.
And, you know, it is very likely that the, the, that what will be, it will be with this year, right?
I can say that, but it's hard for me without getting sort of murdered by our engineering team to pick a much more specific date than that,
because there's still a few just like open questions.
So that was a really long winded way of saying within, but before the end of the year, but I can't get super exact.
Of course, Jenny asking the hard questions there, but actually one thing I wanted to mention that I forgot to mention earlier is that we always do a PO app for people that attend these spaces that we do each week.
And those can be claimed in our discord. Like I said, it's discord.gg slash Bat Brigade.
You can go in there. You can ask how to claim it in there.
I just wanted to throw that out there and mention that since I forgot to mention that earlier.
Thanks Drew. Um, yeah, I actually had another question.
So, um, I asked earlier about the, the history of, of, of the naming of Stellar, um, and I tripped you guys up a little bit at the end,
but since Soroban is a newer innovation, um, do, do either of you know, or can explain the significance behind the name Soroban?
Yeah, sure. A Soroban is a, is a, an abacus. Um, it's like one of the simplest forms of abacus. It's, it's Japanese.
It's actually still used, um, today because of its like sort of purity and simplicity.
And so when we were looking for a name for a very sort of functional, um, ergonomically simple and, uh, uh, smart contracts platform that was built for longevity, we, we pulled the name from that abacus.
Oh, that's interesting. That's actually quite poetic, um, and fitting. Thank you for explaining that. I love it. Um, and I'm not sure whether we addressed, uh, the issue of scalability yet, but how, um, will Soroban ensure scalability, especially, you know, in comparison to other, uh, smart contract platforms?
I can start and Tyler, you might have stuff to add. I mean, there are a couple of different ways that Soroban will ensure scalability. Um, first of all is something that Tyler mentioned. And I think I mentioned too, which is the idea of, of state expiration. So, um, one of the things that can really prevent blockchains from scaling in the long run is that, you know, when you add information to the database, to the state that validators have to keep in order to process
transactions. If that, if, if there's no boundary to the growth of that state, in other words, if you just keep adding new accounts, new assets, new balances, new smart contracts to that state, and it grows unbounded at some point, it becomes actually really, really difficult for validators to keep up. And so there's like this wall of scalability that a lot of blockchains will eventually hit because they don't deal with like unbounded state growth. And so the first thing that Soroban has built from the beginning is state expiration to prevent unbounded state growth, um, which will allow like longevity.
It will allow, um, TPS, uh, to continue to go like sort of stay at the rate that it's at. And it will prevent this like fundamental sort of physical problem from limiting, um, the scalability of the network. The second thing that Soroban has going for it is that it has a novel fee design. So rather than like actually just charging sort of a one size fits all fees for anything that's getting submitted to the blockchain. Um, Soroban actually breaks down a smart contract into the resources that it consumes. So like CPU, IO,
reads and writes to, to the led to the, um, ledger and like data size, all these kinds of things. It actually looks at those meters for those, and then it charges fees accordingly. And the advantage of that is that a lot of the times, if you're just charging one size fits all fee for like block space, you end up actually wasting a lot of block space because you'll hit the fee limit when you're not actually using all of the resources that contracts could use.
And so Soroban basically like by using this sort of scalpel to, um, allocate the block space, it actually increases the amount of contracts that you can put into a given block. So state expiration, um, fees and metering. And then finally, um, this is not actually launching in V1 of Soroban, but in sort of V2 of Soroban, there's some ideas about how to allow Soroban to take advantage of concurrency.
So that it's actually taking like, there's like sort of multi-threaded architecture that a lot of, um, hardware has, and there, there are plans to actually allow, um, to, to allow Soroban to take advantage of that when, when, when computing or when dealing with smart contracts.
And so by doing that, it will actually like sort of allow, um, computers as they exist today, it's like sort of maximize their throughput.
And so it's those sort of three things right now that are, that are going to help with scalability at the layer one level. Tyler, I don't know if I missed anything.
Nope. I was just going to make sure you mentioned the, uh, the parallelization. That's been a, a core tenant from the very beginning, which I am extremely excited about for when, whenever that goes live again, won't be, won't be there for launch.
But it'll be a primary focus after V1.
If I may, um, I'd like to slip in a question or two, Jenny.
Absolutely. Take it away.
So I know Stellar doesn't have an ambassador program, but I was wondering if you actively have like reps go out, speak to local groups to try to boost the community.
I know in the ambassador program, we've been having people meet, but like college groups, other local crypto groups, you know, technical groups.
And I mean, if y'all do have a rep in North Carolina, you know, I wouldn't mind networking with them.
I know some student groups who I'm sure would love to have Stellar come and, or have a rep come from Stellar to Tossedale.
So I was just curious if y'all have anything like that.
I'll say it's definitely stuff that we've, we've thought a lot about again, traditionally Stellar could only do so much and, uh, it was very, very payments focused.
But as we've added on top Sorbonne and a lot more programmability, and it's far more attractive to innovators and tinkerers, protocol developers, tool builders, um, the, uh, breadth to which, uh, we can provide, uh, service and tooling and software that's interesting for, for folks.
This is something that I know we've been thinking a lot about, um, it's a lot of, it's a question of scaling carefully, making sure our tech is, um, solid.
Uh, I know I initially had a bit of caution, um, around producing a lot of content or teaching, uh, a lot of stuff for a protocol that was still quite in flux.
Um, I've seen this happen with a couple other, uh, tech stacks where they jumped the gun a little bit too early and all of their SEO and articles and stuff is, is all for outdated protocols.
So you, you start searching something and all of the tutorials and code snippets you get don't work.
Um, did not want that to happen, but as we've hit, uh, um, uh, feature completion, uh, where we're not adding a bunch of new stuff now is, is definitely the time to begin thinking about that more directly.
So, um, it's definitely on our, on our radar, Justin, I assume you'd probably have more things to add on that front.
Yeah, we need an ambassador program.
Um, like we don't really have one and I'm, you know, sitting here in this, in this space and I'm like, this, this, this is what we need more of.
I mean, so I think it's, it's time for us to really double down, make that happen.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
I also wanted to know, is there any chance that we might see stellar supported by Debrayball at some point?
I know that question also kind of goes out to some of the Brave staff on this call.
I've asked for it in community calls with Brave before.
Oh, yes, I'll hop in on that, pal, and I don't know if Jenny wants to go, but, um, because I have asked about this too.
So, um, yeah, obviously that would take some work and, uh, yeah, it would be a matter of kind of Brave and still kind of getting together and hashing that out.
So, uh, but maybe the, maybe this can be the beginning of getting those, uh, talks going or something like that.
And I don't know if you guys had more to share on that, Tyler or Justin.
I'm so for it.
I'm so for it.
Let's connect those dots.
You heard that, Jenny?
Oh, I heard.
I heard.
I love it.
Oh, I love hearing that too.
Did you have any other questions, Bows?
No, those were my main two.
Okay, awesome.
They were great.
Um, Tyler and Justin, what is the Sorbonne Adoption Fund and how does it support developers?
Knock them dead, Justin.
Cool.
Yeah.
So we, at the foundation at the beginning of, or at the end of last year, we allocated a hundred million dollars to the Sorbonne Adoption Fund, which is like pretty much just like a big umbrella where we have taken that funding.
And now we're figuring out that that's a lot of money to allocate, right?
And it's a lot to give away.
And so we have to be pretty thoughtful about the best way to like actually distribute that amount of money in order to help bootstrap the ecosystem and to sort of like build it step by step so that we're giving it away to the right people at the right times.
And so essentially, that is like a big sort of umbrella.
And underneath it, there are different programs that we're launching that sort of help to grow the ecosystem at the right times.
And it started out with, you know, it started out small.
At the very beginning, there were sort of Sorbonne Adoptions, which were content bounties for people to tinker and sort of share ideas, write tutorials.
And those still exist.
And then on top of that, we built out some more like sort of project-based competitions like hackathons, as well as some like sort of learning through game, gamified learning with incentives programs.
And then at the sort of, once we got beyond that, we started to get an ecosystem of actual tinkerers.
We launched the Stellar Community Fund, which over the course of this year has already allocated about $5 million worth of lumens.
I think actually a little bit more.
It's given away about 70 grants to projects that are building on Sorbonne.
And, you know, those grants tend to be about $100,000 worth of lumens.
And so the basic idea there is that there is a very high-velocity grants program for people that are building, the early adopters, the early developers, the first wave that's coming into the Sorbonne ecosystem.
And that's the beginning of the Sorbonne Adoption Fund.
So, you know, sort of content bounties, gamified learning, hackathons, this initial development grant that we're giving to a lot of different people.
And as we progress, right, as Sorbonne launches in the mainnet, there will be more and different and bigger programs to continue to allocate that fund to, like, sort of get the ecosystem, to buoy the ecosystem.
And so, short answer, it's a massive amount of money that we're giving away through a lot of small different programs, some of which have launched and are live right now, some of which are still to be announced.
That's amazing. Where can developers go to, you know, keep up with these programs and get involved in these various initiatives?
There's a Stellar Developers Discord, which is probably the best place to go.
But in order to just find that, you can just go to sorbonne.stellar.org.
And if you go to sorbonne.stellar.org, like, that's the landing page that will lead you to the Discord.
It will also, like, list the different programs.
And so, you should be able to, like, find your way pretty well there.
And we're trying to keep it updated, right?
So, like, if something new unlocks, if there's, like, a new program or a new potential or a new sort of, like, call for entries, that's where you'll find it.
Sorbonne.stellar.org.
Okay, cool.
My audio is chopping a little bit, but I think I caught it.
Sorbonne.stellar.org, if I'm wrong, correct me, please.
And John James has been waiting patiently.
So, John, come on up.
Hello, everybody.
I'm John from the UK.
Nice to meet you, so.
Hey, John.
Welcome.
Yeah.
Great information that I've been receiving.
What is it?
I just wanted to get off topic a little bit.
What is it?
I'm a big holder.
I'm a fanatic with XLM.
I'm absolutely, I'd sell a kidney if I could get more XLM.
But what is it?
Hello, hello, hello.
Is this working still?
Can you hear me?
Yeah, I can hear you.
So, just, what would, if Elon came to Estella or...
It's not a space if it doesn't have some kind of technical difficulties.
Okay.
Is everything all right?
Should I speak?
Yeah, keep going, John.
Yeah, if Elon or Jeb met up, yeah, and Elon says to Jeb or to Stella Loomans, what can Stella at XLM do for me?
My question is, if they, if Stella Loomans, XLM, got an opportunity to work with Elon, because I think they're very close.
I think they're talking, because they're both in, they're both in Ukraine.
I think Elon was doing a Starlink to help Ukraine out with mobile phones, and XLM were doing payments.
So, they both worked over there, which is a bit of coincidence.
But what I want to know is, what can Stella do for a project that Elon may be doing with X?
Because I think he's going to build a lot on X.
And what, if they were asked, what could they provide assistance with?
That's it.
That's for anybody.
That can hear me or heard me.
Yeah, I did hear that.
I mean, I guess, you know, if the question is, what could X do with Stellar?
You know, it's, it's interesting, because, like, Stellar is an open network, right?
It allows anybody to develop projects on top of it.
And certainly, like, applications have a big role in the ecosystem.
So, you know, in the simplest form, like, anyone, including X, could build a wallet that integrates with Stellar.
And when they do, they would suddenly have access to, like, all the assets that are on the network, and all the on and off ramps that allow people to get those assets via cash.
And so, in the simplest form, like, I think that something that X could do is that they could build a wallet that integrates with Stellar.
They don't actually need to talk to anyone, right?
It doesn't actually have to be, there's no, like, permission required to build that integration.
Certainly, they could talk to the foundation, but, like, it's just, it's open architectures, permissionless for builders.
And it is designed so that, like, everything's interoperable from the get-go.
So, the cool thing is X, or really anyone, could build an application that integrates with Stellar.
And then suddenly, they'd have access to, like, all the different payment capabilities that are built into the network.
Well, that's good to know, because I'm just, I'm just a massive supporter of Stellar Lumens and XLM.
So, I just, like, I know, I got my nine cents.
I know it's not all about the prices, but for me, it's because that's why I invest.
But, I just think it's going to be massive.
I just think it's going to be so big.
Like, it's going to, like, XRP will be, XLM will follow, but I'm telling you, if there's any XRP people out there, I'm sorry, but I think XLM has got something there what XRP hasn't.
And this is why Jeb moved away from XRP, because he's seen something in XRP that he could fix with XLM.
That's what I'm thinking.
But I know Jeb and Elon don't know, but I'm guessing that they're talking, because it's a coincidence how the two of them was involved in Ukraine.
Starlink helped out the mobile phones.
Great job.
Love Starlink.
And Estella Lumens, XLM, helped brilliantly with the Ukraine people.
Helped them.
That could have been life or death.
And this is what it's all about.
This not only, it probably saved lives.
XLM probably saved lives.
Put food in people's mouths.
Heat.
So, the user space is brilliant.
Emergencies, XLM came through.
So, that's all I've got to say.
Thanks very much.
And I'm going to buy, I'm going to sell a kidney now.
And I'm going to get some more.
But thank you very much for listening to me.
Thanks, John.
Man, you just got a true believer right there, man.
Appreciate it.
Good stuff, though.
Gina, are you back on?
Yeah, yeah.
I think I'm all right.
Can you guys hear me?
Yep.
I hear you, man.
Yep.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, no, those, thanks, John James, for that.
I do have another question, though.
So, we talked a little bit earlier about how y'all are developing Sorban, the ecosystem, with, you know, developer demand and feedback in mind, right?
What, if any, feedback have you received from devs in the preview release stages that surprised or delighted you or that challenged the team?
I know that's kind of a broad question.
That's a fantastic question.
That's something that I spend a lot of time working on and thinking about is collecting feedback and then ensuring that it becomes actionable for developers.
As far as surprising feedback, I don't know that there's been anything that's been terribly surprising in that, like, oh, goodness, we missed something or there was some big gap, right?
We do a lot of research and we do a lot of research and we don't get too far down the road before we're presenting things to the ecosystem.
One thing that I was nervous about initially was building a smart contract protocol in Rust, like not being EVM compatible, being very intentional towards not being EVM compatible, but trying to do something better.
I thought that that hurdle would be a little bit more painful, that it would be hard to get developers to write code in Rust.
It's a beloved language, but the learning curve is notoriously steep.
But we didn't have too much of that difficulty.
We have found developers are able to onboard into our flavor.
It's all Rust, but there are certain things in normal Rust, right?
You've got a standard library that we don't include by default.
The contracts are much, much smaller.
So your Sorobon Rust is a bit of a pared down version of normal Rust.
So I think for that and some other reasons where just testing is very good and the EVM ecosystem is just has had so much tooling built around it to try and remove a lot of the pain.
And not having all of those pieces in place because you just don't need them if you've got a good Rust testing library, it actually isn't that hard to write a smart contract to get started.
We've got great documentation writers and really good example dApps and Discord that's very, very helpful where the community is very involved, where core devs are very involved in answering questions and providing solutions.
And I think, if anything, the thing that surprised me the most is we haven't had more Rust questions or people that really get stuck in the Rust of the thing.
That was a pleasant surprise for sure.
I was surprised that people were surprised about the sort of fuzzing and unit testing that's kind of already built into Sorobon.
Like, I guess I just didn't realize that a lot of young smart contracts protocols put that off, like, put off adding those features until later.
But, like, I think Sorobon has a pretty good, like, built-in environment for developing.
And, obviously, we have the FutureNet where you can deploy, which is the name for the test network.
But in all of that, it seems quite easy to, like, actually test deployments to test your code.
And people seem pretty psyched about that, which I didn't realize they would be.
That's great to hear.
It sounds like you all have some pretty positive momentum going already from the developer community.
We're coming up on time, but what advice would you give to devs looking to start building on Sorobon?
You know, aside from, I guess, familiarizing themselves with Rust and with Sorobon's documentation.
Maybe anything a little more insightful?
Yeah, so, I mean, yeah, you, apparently I'm not allowed to say documentation, but that's a really good place to start.
Not just, like, reading the documentation to familiarize yourself with the semantics.
Like, I don't know.
I think that, like, a really important thing to keep in mind for me, like, particularly when you're learning anything new,
is don't worry too much about learning the thing.
Learn, focus on doing something.
So come up with some project you want to build or use case.
And it doesn't have to be something that changes the world to be tic-tac-toe on Sorobon.
That's a real, that's, like, probably the best way to learn is just to have some objective in mind that I'm going to try and reach.
And I'll use documentation and other resources and the Discord to help me solve any bugs I run into.
But I do have an objective.
I have a goal.
I'm trying to accomplish something.
And that's probably the best thing would be to come up with something.
But then through the documentation, we've got great course material, right?
We've got what's called Sorobon Quest is a coding game that you walk through.
We've got another game called the RP Siege, which is another coding game that you can kind of walk through if you're having trouble finding an idea.
You could get started there where there's these very objective, digestible tasks that you can go and accomplish
that will teach you a lot of the fundamentals of Rust and smart contract development.
One of the things I love the most about developing in Rust is it can be really hard to, like, pick a blockchain language.
Like, why would I pick one over another one?
But the nice thing about picking Sorobon is, A, it's a really good smart contract protocol just from its,
you'll learn great fundamental, like, smart contract fundamentals that will be valuable anywhere.
So whether you end up sticking on Sorobon or going somewhere else, the things that you learn about working in a very adversarial environment,
right, every line of code you write is going to be attacked if it holds any sort of value.
So you need to be in that mindset of how safe is this?
It'll teach you everything is resource constrained.
I can't run big loops or just store a bunch of information arbitrarily on chain.
I need to think about resource constraints.
All of that's valuable no matter where you go.
But then also you're writing in Rust, which is a very popular and up-and-coming language that, well, this is great.
I can take this Rust knowledge and go somewhere else with it if I want to.
So Sorobon really providing this good landing pad for just learning smart contract development.
I'm obviously going to advocate for it.
It's also just a really good one, so you can stay here.
But even if you end up migrating to something else or expanding out your interest to other chains,
it'll provide you really good fundamental foundational smart contract blockchain knowledge with the Rust programming language.
So, yeah, all of that to say documentation is great.
We've got some good code example or coding games you can do.
And then obviously, yeah, there's a lot.
You can ask questions in Discord and other places.
But pick a project, pick something objective, and use the documentation as a resource rather than, like,
I'm going to read all of the documentation.
That's going to be boring.
Building a project, that will be fun.
And the one final thing I'd say is, like, realize that it's not a done deal, right?
Like, if you're building and you're like, this doesn't make any sense, like, raise your hand, go into the Discord, talk to people, give the feedback.
Because, like, you can actually, as a developer right now, whatever experience you're having is very, very useful to actually shaping the future of the platform.
So you can have a voice.
It's not like some distant, carved in stone, like, sort of thing that you have to work with.
Like, if you're developing now, you can actually contribute to the shape that Sorobon takes.
Beautifully put from both of you.
And I guess final question would be, how can the community here, which consists of developers, of course, but also non-dev Web3 enthusiasts and Web3 users,
get involved and contribute to the growth and success of Sorobon?
I think a good one for non-devs.
I mean, it depends on how non-dev we're talking.
Like, there are people that can understand the fundamentals of how something works, even if they can't necessarily write a smart contract.
They could still help to answer questions in the Discord or help people do wayfinding inside of documentation.
We have a Stellar Community Fund, which is a grant program where funds are allocated through feedback provided through the community.
And there's a process to become a voter.
But, like, there is a community that's heavily involved in just evaluating projects.
So there's opportunity there.
It really just depends on where your involvement level is and what interests you.
But there's lots of different things to do, from building projects to evaluating projects to just helping people have their questions answered, like wayfinding.
Yeah, so I just wanted to say, yeah, thanks, you guys.
Appreciate you coming on.
I am looking forward to the smart contracts coming on.
Maybe we can get some bat over there on the Stellar Network, and especially as Brave kind of tries to go to a, you know, decentralized rewards platform and stuff.
Maybe that'll be one of the options.
Who knows?
But I also wanted to really thank Moonbeamer, who is here, that kind of set this all up for us and got us connected, talking to you guys.
So thank you so much, Moonbeamer.
Another great project for us to talk to you this week.
So thanks again.
Awesome.
Thanks, Drew.
And Justin and Tyler, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us here today.
Everyone, please give it up for our fabulous guests from Stellar and also for our back community team co-hosts by showering them with Emoji Reacts.
If you like the space here.
Awesome.
And thank you, Moonbeamer, of course, for setting this all up.
If there were any questions that we didn't get to today, please leave them in the thread beneath the spaces on Twitter.
And we'll make sure that we address them or we bring them to the Stellar team to address.
And, you know, we'll get better at bringing people up a little sooner.
We're still working on, you know, balancing all the voices in the room.
But thank you all so much for your interest and attention and your questions.
Please follow everyone in the room that you'd like to stay connected with and hop into the Bat Brigade Discord if you are not there already.
Our Discord URL is discord.gg slash Bat Brigade.
And then Stellar team, do you have a separate Discord for Soroban or is it all under the Stellar?
It's all under the Stellar one.
All right.
Perfect.
So I'm guessing it's discord.gg slash Stellar?
Oh, Stellar.
Stellar Dev.
Stellar Dev.
Right.
There you go.
There you go, everybody.
So thank you guys so much.
We really appreciate it.
And everyone in the room here, you're invited to join our weekly Bat Community calls every Tuesday if you want to learn the latest developments around basic attention token and you want to do some Q&A with the team.
And in the meantime, yeah, just want to say thanks again to the whole group here for showing up and to the Stellar team.
Thank you guys so much.
Thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Y'all have a great day.
Thanks.
You too.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
And remember, it's all gravy, baby.
Take care.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
Bye now.
