soropg

SoroPG is an open-source, browser-based Soroban IDE that lets developers write, test, run security checks, deploy, and interact with Stellar smart contracts with zero local setup.


Category	Developer Experience
Website	https://soropg.com
Repository	https://github.com/jamesbachini/Soroban-Playground
First Released	May 2025
Intake	https://github.com/SCF-Public-Goods-Maintenance/scf-public-goods-maintenance.github.io/issues/19
Budget Requested	$35,000

Project Description

SoroPG is a beautiful open-source web IDE for Soroban development that removes local setup barriers for Stellar builders.

It provides the only zero-setup Stellar workflow where developers can create, test, security-check, deploy, and explore contracts entirely in-browser, which makes it valuable for onboarding, prototyping, debugging, demos, and rapid iteration.

In a browser, developers can create Rust contracts, compile to WASM, run unit tests and Scout security checks in sandboxed containers, deploy to local, testnet, futurenet, or mainnet, and inspect or invoke contract functions through integrated Stellar SDK tooling. By combining coding, testing, deployment, and exploration in one maintained public interface, SoroPG shortens time-to-first-contract for new developers and speeds up iteration for experienced teams. It is neutral shared infrastructure for prototyping, debugging, reproducible examples, and future AI-assisted contract workflows.

Team & Experience

Just me, James Bachini, sole lonely maintainer of SoroPG. Although it’s open-source and contributors are welcome!

I’m a contract dev and content creator based in the UK. I’ve been building and experimenting with Stellar since around summer of 2024 just before the London Meridian. I have been contracted to create developer tutorials and video content for SDF since around that time. I built SoroPG originally just for myself as a pet project because I wanted something to demo contract code for the Stellar ecosystem. Over time it’s become slightly more refined and suitable for public consumption.

Profiles:

GitHub: https://github.com/jamesbachini
Discord: jamesbachini
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-bachini/

Additional Links:

Website: https://jamesbachini.com/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/JamesBachini

Retroactive Impact

1940 unique visitors in the last 30 days

Reference cloudflare stats (screenshot attached) https://jamesbachini.com/misc/soropg-stats-2026-03.png

This is with no advertising or promotion, it’s picked up organic traction due to it being the only online IDE available for Stellar devs

Past Deliverables

N/A - haven’t received a public goods/infra grant before

It’s been a self-funded passion project for the last year. There have been updates such as the recent one this week: https://x.com/james_bachini/status/2041531946116034786

Best proof of “deliverables” or consistent ongoing work would probably be this: https://github.com/jamesbachini/Soroban-Playground/graphs/commit-activity

Proposed Impact

Availability

Maintain and scale SoroPG to support the growing demand.

Academy

Build a learning platform with lessons for developers new to Stellar. I’ve started working towards this by implementing workspaces in the repo. This allows you to pull in complete code bases such as from Stellar’s Soroban Examples repo.

Documentation

Neglected to date but important for technical reference. I know how it works but it might be useful for others to know as well or at least have a place to find out and dig into the nuts and bolts.

General

For the best part of the last year it’s been, to my knowledge, the only viable option for an online IDE in the Stellar ecosystem. AI has and will continue to disrupt how we build software which has brought a lot of the development work to terminal UI’s like Claude Code and Codex. I think web IDE’s and even the humble text editor still have value in an AI assisted development world and SoroPG can become a Swiss Army knife tool for Stellar developers to experiment with Stellar smart contracts. It can also become a great onboarding and learning resource for new developers. Where as Remix introduced a generation of Solidity contract developers to Ethereum I want to do the same for Stellar.

Proposed Deliverables

Availability

Maintain SoroPG with ≥99% uptime
Ensure full compatibility with the latest Soroban SDK and external crates such as OpenZeppelin libraries

Ecosystem value: Deliver a competitive online IDE for smart contract developers.

Budget allocation: $25k

Academy

Launch an Academy MVP integrated into SoroPG
Publish 3-5 beginner lessons with live, executable Stellar contract examples. Concept idea: User opens up Academy from the left menu, selects from a series of tutorial style lessons. Each lesson opens up the required code in SoroPG, there’s a video walkthrough and written explanation of how the code works and what new developers need to know about building on Stellar.

Ecosystem value: Accelerates developer onboarding and education pipeline.

Budget allocation: $10k

Documentation

Publish core technical documentation

Budget allocation: $0k - I can probably get AI to do this, there’s very little cost involved.

Ecosystem value: Improves maintainability, transparency, and long-term reliability of shared developer infrastructure.

Legal Acknowledgements

As the project representative, I agree to the Legal Acknowledgements.