Welcome
Soroban is a smart contracts platform designed to be sensible, built-to-scale, batteries-included, and developer-friendly.
Soroban is currently a release candidate. While some changes may still occur before Mainnet launch, it can be considered relatively stable.
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 release candidate that includes 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 Testnet.
What "release candidate" means
We've been releasing very early versions of Soroban since the earliest days of its existence. We have moved on from having "preview releases," and the current state of Soroban is now a feature-complete release candidate. Development is still ongoing, but you can expect the current version of Soroban to be pretty close to what is officially released into production.
We still believe it's important to share the development process, and we want Stellar ecosystem developers and smart contract developers from other ecosystems to continue experimenting and are listening for feedback. Please keep testing it out, see what you can do, and let us know what you think. Keep in mind some changes may still occur between now and the production release, so your code may break, and further updates may cause some things to shift. 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 channels 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.