Rob Durst announces Digicus, a visual block-based IDE for Soroban smart contract development that aims to lower the barrier to entry for developers. The tool allows developers to visualize, understand, and edit Soroban contracts without requiring deep Rust expertise.
Rob Durst reflects on his 2018 article about emulating smart contracts on Stellar using primitive operations, and celebrates the launch of Soroban with real Turing-complete smart contracts. He demonstrates how the same service contract problem can now be solved elegantly with Soroban. Recognizing that becoming a competent Soroban developer requires knowledge of blockchain, smart contracts, and Rust, Durst and the Spaced Out Thoughts Development Foundation have created Digicus—a visual, block-based IDE inspired by Scratch. The alpha version is now live at ide.digicus.dev, featuring contract visualization, real-time code generation, and edit mode capabilities. The tool is powered by a novel intermediate representation format called DTR (Digicus Textual Representation) and a backend architecture using compiler plugins. Future plans include native Digicus contract development and broader SDLC tooling.