Welcome
Soroban is a smart contracts platform designed to be sensible, built-to-scale, batteries-included, and developer-friendly.
Soroban is a pre-release. Breaking changes may occur.
While it works well with Stellar, a blockchain that shares its values of scale and sensibility, it doesn't depend on or require Stellar at all, and can be used by any transaction processor, including other blockchains, L2s, and permissioned ledgers.
Currently, Soroban is a preview release that includes initial versions of the smart contracts environment, a Rust SDK, A CLI, and an RPC server. Developers can write and test contracts on their local machine or deploy them to a special test network dubbed Futurenet.
What "preview release" means
We’re releasing this very early version of Soroban because we believe it’s important to share the development process, and we want Stellar ecosystem developers and smart contract developers from other ecosystems to have a chance to experiment and provide feedback.
Please test it out, see what you can do, and let us know what you think. Keep in mind a lot will change between now and the production release, so expect your code to break, and prepare for updates to shift things. Experiment, but don't build to last just yet.
How to leave feedback
Please feel free to file issues in the Soroban repos, or, if you prefer, to raise them in the soroban channel in the Stellar Developer Discord.
Why it's called Soroban
The Japanese soroban is the smallest and simplest abacus. Its design is intentionally compact and minimalist, focused on doing the essentials — and doing them well. It set the global standard for abacuses and is still in practical use today. The name aligns with the goals of this platform because we, too, want to build something that focuses on doing the essentials well, that sets a global standard, and that proves useful far into the future.