George from SDF's Horizon team demonstrates how to use Stellar SDKs by building a game that decodes XDR transactions, claims claimable balances, and streams payments as incoming attacks. The talk covers the three-layer SDK abstraction pyramid: cryptography/XDR, transaction building, and Horizon API querying.
George, JavaScript SDK maintainer at SDF, presents a technical deep-dive into Stellar SDKs through a gamified example. He explains the SDK architecture as a three-layer pyramid: cryptography and XDR abstractions at the base, transaction building in the middle, and Horizon API querying at the top. The talk walks through decoding a mystery XDR-encoded transmission to discover claimable balances, then uses the transaction builder to claim them. In mission two, he demonstrates streaming payments from Horizon to detect incoming attacks in a tower defense game, where bomb positions and damage are encoded in payment operations. The example showcases how all three SDK layers work together to build interactive applications beyond traditional finance use cases.