Why is it important?

Developer adoption is a fundamental prerequisite for the adoption of Plutus smart contract functionality and Cardano as a whole.

What does success look like?

Dev teams & dApp companies build generalized open-source developer tools, easy to interpret documentation, iterating based on user needs

Key Metrics to measure

• Developer activity on Github repos of developer tools: # of views, feature requests, issues, discussion posts/questions/comments, downloads.

• # of activity on Github repos of sample dApp templates: views, feature requests, issues, discussion posts/questions/comments, downloads.

• # contributors to open-sourced developer tools.

• # users of developer tooling Github repos.

  Challenge brief

To fully utilize the potential of Cardano, we need a vibrant and healthy developer ecosystem. Developers form the foundation of a thriving dApp ecosystem which end users subsequently benefit from.

For any developer ecosystem to flourish, it must offer a pleasant developer experience. We need a wider selection of tooling that is inclusive, fuss-free to set up, and most importantly, allows for the dApp to seamlessly scale. We also desire to offer multi-language support, to be inclusive of developers whose native language is not Haskell, and to drive adoption amongst larger developer ecosystems.

The Plutus Challenge invites the community to build tools that make the developer experience of building dApps and smart contracts on Cardano 100x more awesome. Developer tools, platforms to significantly reduce the time it takes to go from zero to hero while building and deploying dApps, and products to boost developer adoption. It should be possible for an otherwise experienced engineer to come to a 2-day hackathon and build a baseline prototype dApp, test it, and iterate on it.

IOG submits this challenge proposal to ensure that necessary resources are available for the community to help realise this vision.

Additional success criteria

A multitude of teams in the Cardano ecosystem are building their own custom tooling. This can make for challenging redundancy, if new entrants to the ecosystem have to build their own new tools time and again. Developer teams and dApp companies encouraged to build generalizable open-source developer tools, make existing tools open-source, add thorough and easy to interpret documentation, while continuing to improve tools based on user needs, these include:

• Platforms, products, or mechanisms that significantly reduce the time-to-dApp. This allows for developers to get off the ground running with building, testing, and deploying their dApp whilst decreasing the complexity and time required to set up their developer environment and cutting down infrastructure costs.
• Multi-language support or integrations for building dApps and smart contracts.
• Ability to read data from the Cardano blockchain, super fast and at scale.
• Ability to write to the Cardano blockchain, with high integrity and at scale.
• A wide array of developer tools, libraries, API’s, and plug-ins including tools for debugging, testing frameworks, formal verification etc.
• Sample template dApps of popular use cases like DEX’s, provenance, NFT marketplaces. These samples will be used as a template for building more complex applications.
• Developer tools are open-sourced.

Guiding questions

• What aspects of development are underserved by existing tooling?
• How can developers get up and running effortlessly to start building dApps?
• How can we decrease the time it takes to set up development environments?
• What prerequisites and costs does a developer need to enter the ecosystem? How can we lower these? How does an otherwise experienced developer enter this ecosystem, if their background is not in Haskell?
• What does the end to end development process of creating a dApp look like?
• How can we improve the process of debugging a smart contract script?
• How can we provide a seamless way for developers to interact with external tooling and integrations? Can we provide these tools as-a-service?
• What key pieces of developer infrastructure are missing? (e.g. look at a classical web2.0 stack and think what elements we have to reproduce it with decentralized principles in mind)
• People interact with the digital world via various mediums (laptop, mobile, AR/VR, etc). Can Plutus dApps be built in these environments?

Inspirational Potential Directions

Platforms, products, or mechanisms that significantly reduce the time-to-dApp. This allows for developers to get off the ground running with building, testing, and deploying their dApp whilst decreasing the complexity and time required to set up their developer environment and cutting down infrastructure costs.

• All kinds of developer tooling - a full suite that takes developers through the entire end-to-end development process for building a dApp.
• Solutions which bring about significant scaling abilities for basic operations, such as reading from and writing to the blockchain.
• Sample dApp templates or reference apps with step-by-step tutorials and well-commented code of various use cases and market verticals, built using several existing developer tools and integrations.
• A solution to improve debugging of smart contract scripts.
• Solutions to greatly lower the barriers - time, effort, and costs - of entering the ecosystem as a developer.
• Programs to incentivize developer adoption and iteratively user-test tools and developer products.