Join Us For The First Community Smart Contract Challenge With $50,000 In Prizes!

We are thrilled to collaborate with the Stellar Development Foundation to introduce the community to blockchain technology.

Running through August 18, the Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge provides an opportunity for web devs to learn all about decentralization, wallets, consensus, interoperability, and all the other lingo you may have heard floating around but never quite understood. This is your signal to dive in and unlock those a-ha moments!

We’ll share all the resources you need to learn the fundamentals, and you’ll come out of the challenge knowing how to build with Soroban, Stellar’s smart contract platform designed for scale and sensibility.

We have two prompts for this challenge, but six ways to win. Did we mention the $50,000 prize pool? And a free trip to London to attend the Meridian Conference?! Our biggest offering to-date, thanks to the generous Stellar Development Foundation.

Ready to get learning and building? Read on to learn about the prompts and how to get started.

Our Prompts

Build a dApp

Build a decentralized app (dApp) that leverages one or more Stellar smart contracts. The main requirement is that users should be able to interact with the application. Other than that, you are free to build whatever you want!

Prize Categories

In addition to our overall Build a dApp winner, we have two additional prize categories you could win for this prompt:

Glorious Game: Awarded to a top game dApp
Super Sustainable: Awarded to a top dApp that focuses on real-world positive impact

Here is the submission template for anyone that wants to jump right in, but please review all challenge and prompt-specific rules on the official challenge page before submitting.

Submission Template for Build A dApp

Create a Tutorial

Create a tutorial that explains some part of the Stellar developer experience. Your submission does not need to be long and involved, or super polished, but it should be coherent and easy to follow.

Prize Categories

In addition to our overall Create a Tutorial winner, we have two additional prize categories you could win for this prompt:

Wonderfully Written: Awarded to a top written tutorial
Vivid Video: Awarded to a top video tutorial

Here is the submission template for anyone that wants to jump right in, but please review all challenge and prompt-specific rules on the official challenge page before submitting.

Submission Template for Create a Tutorial

Prizes

We’ll be splitting our $50,000 prize pool six ways. Here is what our prompt winners and additional prize category winners will receive:

Prompt Winners (2):

$13,000 USD
An invitation to Meridian, Stellar’s annual conference in London (October 15-17, all travel expenses paid for).
Exclusive DEV Badge
A gift from the DEV Shop

Prize Category Winners (4):

$6,000 USD
Exclusive DEV Badge
A gift from the DEV Shop

All Participants with a valid submission will receive a completion badge on their DEV profile.

How To Submit Your Project

At minimum, you will need to take the following steps to submit a valid entry:

Fill out this form on the Stellar website. Make sure the email address you sign up with matches the email address associated with your DEV account so we can verify your submission.
Publish a post using the submission template associated with each prompt.

All participation guidelines (i.e. judging criteria, links to contest rules, etc) can be found on the official challenge page so be sure to review that information thoroughly before submitting.

Getting Started

We know it can be a bit intimidating to jump into web3 and blockchain, so the Stellar team has published a companion guide that covers all the topics you need to get started:

Build Better With Stellar Smart Contract Challenge: A Companion Guide

Julian Martinez for Stellar Development Foundation ・ Jul 9

#rust #smartcontract #web3 #stellarchallenge

Additionally, we encourage all participants to join the dev-hack channel in the Stellar Dev Discord, a community server for asking questions and meeting the community of developers building with Stellar.

Stellar Livestreams

The Stellar team will host a series of livestreams right on DEV throughout the course of the challenge. Just visit our homepage at 12pm EDT on these dates:

7/23 - Intro to Stellar: Getting started in Rust, setting up your environment, and writing your first smart contract. Watch the recap:

Intro to Stellar: Get Started in Rust, Set Up Your Development Environment, and Write Your First Smart Contract

Julian Martinez for Stellar Development Foundation ・ Jul 25

#stellarchallenge #rust #web3 #blockchain
7/30: Build a dApp
8/1: Intro to Passkeys
8/6: Migrating from Web2 to Web3
8/8: Stellar Community Fund

Need Inspiration?

Below are a few ideas for both prompts to get your creative juices flowing.

Your smart contract dApp could be related to:

A game where players interact on-chain to compete against each other
A public goods application where interactions with the dApp could result in real-world positive impact.
A DAO or governance-related dApp
Identity Tooling
Financial services, like a wallet or payment dApp

Your tutorial could focus on:

Code examples (i.e.Solidity by Example)
Fun dApp tutorials (i.e. Pet Shop Tutorial)
Soroban for X developer (X = another smart contracts platform, such as Ethereum, Near, or Solana)

We can’t wait to see what you come up with.

Additional Resources

For building DeFi protocols:

Getting Started with Writing Smart Contracts: a comprehensive tutorial that acts as the gateway to the Stellar smart contract developer experience
Soroban Quest: complete interactive challenges to understand the fundamentals of smart contract development
Okashi: get started building your own Stellar smart contracts right from your browser
Liquidity Pool: a complete Liquidity Pool example dApp with smart contracts and UI elements
Circle Stellar USDC Faucet: get Testnet USDC to use in your development efforts
Create Soroban dApp Boilerplate: Create your dApp with just one command line.
- Video Walkthrough & Tutorial

For building wallets:

Stellar Wallet SDK: a collection of SDKs enabling you to take advantage of the pre-existing deposit/withdraw capabilities of network anchors
Stellar Quest: interactively learn and understand the fundamentals of interacting with the Stellar network: transactions, operations, accounts, etc.
Build Applications Tutorials: a few written tutorials focusing on JavaScript implementations of common wallet functionality
Stellar Design System: components and styles that can make your frontend development easier

Tools

Explore the Network

Stellar Laboratory: interacts with the network and queries network activity
Stellar.Expert: Block Explorer to view ledger entries, accounts, assets, analytics, etc.
Data Indexers: services and infrastructure available for you to query and monitor network state and activity

Connect to the Network

Freighter Browser Wallet: a wallet developed and maintained by SDF
Stellar Wallets Kit: a community-built library that integrates multiple browser wallets into a frontend project
@soroban-react: connects ReactJS frontends with wallets like Lobstr, Freighter, Xbull. Help you create the messages that users will sign.
Simple Stellar Signer: a plug-and-play tool to integrate your solution with multiple wallets at once
Account Viewer: a simple wallet, with available source code, that can be used to interact with a Stellar account on Mainnet or Testnet

Build on the Network

Developer Tools: an organized list of available tools, services, etc. to jumpstart or enhance your development experience
SDK Library: Stellar boasts an impressive collection of SDKs you can use to interact with the network in almost any language you could ever want
Beans POS Merchant SDK: an SDK powered by Beans Wallet to help developers implement Point-of-Sale functionality into their app using Stellar
Create Soroban dApp Video Workshop: tutorial and walkthrough on how to create a dApp
Sorochat: Creating a chat dApp on Soroban (tutorial):
- Part One
- Part Two
How to Start Developing on Stellar (video workshop)
Build your first wallet on Stellar (video workshop)

Important Dates

July 10: Build Better on Stellar: Smart Contract Challenge begins!
August 18: Submissions due at 11:59 PM PDT
August 27: Winners Announced

Questions about the challenge? Ask them below.

Good luck and happy coding!

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