Exploring SIDAN Lab Tools
Join Hinson Wong, Co-founder & CEO of DeltaDeFi / SIDAN Lab, for a walkthrough of the developer tools built by the SIDAN LAB team, and demonstrate how developers can leverage them to build more efficiently in the Cardano ecosystem.
Friday, 27 March
09:00 – 10:00 UTC
Perfect for developers interested in exploring new tools and expanding their Cardano development stack.
Stay updated with our events!
You can subscribe directly to the calendar here: https://www.addevent.com/calendar/TG807216
Join the discussion below! We’ll update this thread with the recording link as soon as it’s live.
Update:
Summary: Exploring SIDAN Lab Tools
In this edition of the Developer Office Hours, host Darlisa Consoni from the Cardano Foundation speaks with Hinson Wong, co-founder and CEO of DeltaDeFi and SIDAN Lab. They discuss a suite of open-source developer tools built by SIDAN Lab that help developers build more efficiently in the Cardano ecosystem.
The Motivation: Overcoming Development Blockers
When the team started building the DeltaDeFi exchange, they ran into several roadblocks. They needed fast, zero-fee order placements using transaction chaining, which required off-node transaction evaluation. At the time, the existing TypeScript landscape did not support this. They began building their own solutions in Rust and eventually created a suite of open-source tools named after different types of alcohol, alongside a highly useful code editor extension.
The SIDAN Lab Tool Suite
- Whiskey: A robust transaction builder written in Rust. It functions very similarly to MeshJS but incorporates low-level WebAssembly packages and handles critical tasks like off-node transaction evaluation and standard serialization.
- Focal: An Aiken utility library divided into two parts. “Cocktail” provides reusable on-chain utilities. “Mocktail” is an off-chain unit testing framework that mimics production transaction builders, allowing developers to test smart contracts rapidly. This unified workflow reduces the development cycle from one to two months down to just one to three days.
- Rum and Gin: DeltaDeFi uses a microservice architecture spanning TypeScript, Golang, Rust, and Python. Rum and Gin ensure that data structures, like a UTXO, can be seamlessly passed across these different programming languages without losing their shape or requiring manual translation.
- Cardano Bar: A Visual Studio Code extension that reads an Aiken smart contract blueprint and automatically generates the compliant data types for Rust and TypeScript. This prevents manual typing mistakes (“fat fingers”) and saves countless hours of debugging.
Next Steps and Call to Action
Hinson Wong invites developers to use the tools and provide feedback. Since the team primarily maintains the features they use heavily in production, they encourage the community to open GitHub issues for any bugs found in less-tested areas, such as governance actions. They are also open to ideas for securing funding to sustain the long-term maintenance of these libraries.
Top Five Q&A (FAQ) about SIDAN Lab Tools
Question 1: What motivated SIDAN Lab to build these open-source tools?
Answer: While building the DeltaDeFi exchange, the team hit technical roadblocks, such as the need for off-node transaction evaluation and cross-language compatibility for their microservices. Instead of keeping their solutions private, they open-sourced them to help the entire ecosystem build faster and more efficiently.
Question 2: What is the Whiskey library used for?
Answer: Whiskey is a robust Rust transaction builder. It uses the exact same API patterns as MeshJS but handles heavy lifting under the hood, including serialization, deserialization, and off-node transaction evaluation.
Question 3: How does the Focal library speed up smart contract development?
Answer: Focal provides a unit testing framework called Mocktail for Aiken. It allows developers to build mock transactions using the exact same structure as their production off-chain code. This drastically reduces the smart contract development cycle from a few months to just a few days.
Question 4: How do Rum and Gin help with multi-language architectures?
Answer: The team uses a microservice architecture involving TypeScript, Golang, Rust, and Python. Rum and Gin ensure that complex data structures are seamlessly passed and understood across these different languages without requiring repetitive and manual translations.
Question 5: What is the Cardano Bar, and how does it prevent coding errors?
Answer: The Cardano Bar is a Visual Studio Code extension. It reads an Aiken smart contract blueprint and automatically generates the exact data types required for Rust and TypeScript. This eliminates manual typing errors that previously caused developers to waste hours or even days debugging code.