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PG Award Proposal: Stellar Registry - #111

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PG Award Proposal: Stellar Registry#111
willemneal wants to merge 7 commits into
SCF-Public-Goods-Maintenance:mainfrom
stellar-registry:proposals/stellar-registry-2026q3

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@willemneal willemneal commented Jul 6, 2026 •
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Stellar Registry

Stellar Registry is an on-chain smart contract registry for Soroban that lets developers publish,
version, discover, and deploy Wasm binaries and contract instances, making contracts reusable across
the ecosystem like packages.
Category Developer Experience
Website https://rgstry.xyz
Repository https://github.com/stellar-registry
First Released March 2026
Intake #23
Budget Requested 50000

Project Description

Registry is the missing infrastructure layer between "I wrote a smart contract" and "the ecosystem
can safely use my smart contract."

Registry tracks two things:

  1. Contracts: Registry gives contracts human-friendly names, rather than gobbledigook IDs, as
    well as tracking a contract's owner and its Wasm.
  2. Wasms: Stellar separates a contract instance, if you will (see item 1), from the WebAssembly
    (Wasm) binary that defines its behavior. Many contracts can use the same Wasm binary, but today
    that's impractical because Wasms are identified only by a gobbledigook ID.

Registry makes these usable. It gives them both names and versions, making the development
experience feel like familiar package management—like crates.io or NPM.

Team & Experience

Scaffold Stellar is built and maintained by The Aha Company (formerly Aha Labs), a team of 10+
senior engineers deeply embedded in the Stellar ecosystem.

Early Soroban origin:

In 2022 (before Soroban had a name) SDF already had a clear ambition: launch their upcoming smart
contract platform with a “batteries-included” developer experience. The gap was execution capacity:
there was no in-house team available to design and implement the developer workflows needed to make
that promise real. Tyler van der Hoeven went to major blockchain conferences to find the right team,
and identified The Aha Company as the team with the right combination of product mindset and deep
technical ability to “install the batteries.”

Foundational Stellar developer workflows we designed and shipped:

We envisioned, architected, and implemented several of the workflows that have become core to Soroban
development on Stellar, including:

  • Stellar CLI smart contract workflows, such as the contract invoke behavior and associated
    developer ergonomics that leapfrog, rather than ape, other blockchain ecosystems, simplifying
    testing, deployment, and interaction.
  • JavaScript developer experience patterns, including the Contract Client behavior in
    stellar-sdk-js, which helps application developers interact with contracts more safely and
    predictably.

Why we were selected for Scaffold Stellar and our SCF track record:

In early 2025, SDF searched for a team that could bring a ScaffoldETH-like end-to-end experience to
Stellar. They selected us based on:

  1. our deep CLI & JS expertise proven through shipped core tooling, and
  2. our track record delivering developer infrastructure via SCF, including:

Scaffold Stellar is a direct continuation of that work: turning the hard-won Developer Experience
(DevX) knowledge from core tooling into a “front door” experience that helps developers go from idea
to proof-of-concept quickly, with strong defaults and a convention-over-configuration approach.

Ongoing maintenance and production-grade integration experience:

Since then, we have remained engaged with SDF to support and maintain key tooling (most recently
improving Stellar CLI handling of hardware-based keys) and we continue to operate as an
integration partner on production deployments. Notably, we architected and developed Société
Générale’s EURCV on Stellar (now live), bringing a rigorous, real-world perspective to developer
tooling and reliability requirements.

Deep community participation and ecosystem leadership:

Our team includes well-known ecosystem contributors. Several members hold key community roles (e.g.,
SCF Pilot, category delegates) and actively build their own SCF projects (e.g., Moonlight,
Tansu, Stellar Merch Store, PG Atlas). We contribute to protocol and tooling discussions, provide
developer support at hackathons and conferences, and invest heavily in community outreach and
education. We show up consistently at major events and actively communicate about Stellar, both its
strengths and the practical realities builders need to know.

Cross-ecosystem perspective (DevX benchmarking):

Beyond Stellar, The Aha Company is also an integration partner in other ecosystems (e.g., Filecoin,
XRPL, Cardano, Canton, Starknet). This gives us a unique ability to benchmark developer experience
across chains and bring proven patterns back to Stellar—while keeping Scaffold Stellar aligned with
what developers expect from modern, full-stack tooling.

Retroactive Impact

In Q2 2026 the Registry grew from a testnet prototype into production infrastructure — deployed to
mainnet at the close of the quarter — with its own organization, on-chain governance, verified
builds, and a real data platform behind rgstry.xyz.

The Registry is live on mainnet. The registry contract is deployed to Stellar mainnet at its
deterministic, salt-derived ID CDU4M3LDIOUJJ5F3YXKJ4EJEP5VPRPG6N2LJ5HOQIMN7MNGL3NS3EGUY (baked into
the CLI) via the phased deploy pipeline (stellar-registry/contracts#14, merged 2026-07-06), seeded
with verified ecosystem contracts (circle, soroswap, blend, defindex, xlm). The mainnet indexer
pipeline and the rgstry.xyz mainnet cutover are rolling out this week.

Registry became standalone infrastructure. The Registry was split out of the
theahaco/scaffold-stellar monorepo into its own GitHub organization,
github.com/stellar-registry, with four repos — cli,
contracts, ui, and indexer — each with full history preserved, scoped CI, dependabot, and
rewritten documentation. The Registry now stands on its own, as promised in our Q2 proposal ("the
Registry stands independently and is designed to serve the entire Soroban developer community").

Five on-chain registry releases. Registry contract versions v0.5.0 through v0.6.2 shipped in
April, adding contract flagging with a gas-optimized storage encoding (unflagged entries pay zero
overhead on the hot invocation path), SubRegistry events, cross-registry deploys
(deploy_with_subregistry) that record provenance on Deploy events, deterministic salt-derived
contract IDs, and dry-run deploy options.

On-chain governance shipped. The Tansu-DAO-gated registry manager contract merged
(stellar-registry/contracts#5): a manager whose trigger(proposal_id) entry point executes an
approved Tansu DAO proposal (e.g. registry.publish_hash / registry.deploy) in a single
transaction. Verified live end-to-end on testnet: proposal → vote → trigger → publish, with
replay-guard rejection confirmed.

Verified builds are live. We adopted the stellar-expert/soroban-build-workflow for releases
(stellar-registry/contracts#10), replacing 243 lines of bespoke CI with environment-gated, OIDC
build-provenance-attested releases, and published the first verified build of the registry contract.
We also submitted a Contract Source Verification RFP to the SCF Build Award RFP track and
collaborated with Ethan Frey (Confio) on its technical architecture.

The indexer went v1. The first mainnet-ready pipeline & API (stellar-registry/indexer#5) moved
data into a versioned schema, added auto-discovery of named subregistries (oz, blend, soroswap,
defindex), and grew an archive pipeline exposing full per-contract version history
(stellar-registry/indexer#14), including versions that predate contract's addition to Stellar
Registry. June added structured logging with request-id tracing and a trigram index enabling fuzzy
server-side search (stellar-registry/indexer#23).

rgstry.xyz matured. The UI gained a testnet/mainnet network switch with per-environment
Cloudflare Worker deploys, in-UI usage guides for the import macros, README/LICENSE rendering from a
contract's GitHub repo, contract metadata on detail pages, server-side search, and request-id-traced
error reporting — 18 merged PRs in the quarter.

Releases and toolchain. Crates published: stellar-registry v0.0.8–v0.0.10,
stellar-registry-cli v0.0.20/v0.0.21, stellar-registry-build v0.0.8. The contracts and CLI both
moved to soroban-sdk v27 / stellar-cli v27 (stellar-registry/contracts#11, stellar-registry/cli#13).

Past Deliverables

Every deliverable below has merged, verifiable work behind it this quarter; where release mechanics
remain, the item states exactly what is left. We also shipped substantial infrastructure beyond the
proposed scope — see "Beyond the proposal" at the end of this section.

D1. Mainnet Deploy of Stellar Registry

Description from last quarter:

Deploy the Registry smart contract to Stellar mainnet and confirm it is publicly accessible via
stellar registry CLI and rgstry.xyz.

Measure: the contract is deployed & the CLI points to it.

Proof of completion:

Deployed to mainnet. The phased deploy pipeline merged and executed at the close of the quarter:
the registry contract is live on mainnet at its deterministic ID, seeded with verified ecosystem
contracts, and resolvable via the stellar registry CLI (the mainnet ID ships baked into the CLI).
Remaining for full public accessibility: the mainnet indexer pipeline and pointing
rgstry.xyz at mainnet — rolling out this week — plus secure-store/Ledger
signing for admin operations (stellar-registry/cli#14).

D2. import_contract! Macro

Description from last quarter:

Publish a working import_contract! macro in the stellar-registry crate that allows
cross-contract client instantiation with a single line of Rust.

Measure: the macro is available in a released crate version, documented with at least one working
example, and covered by integration tests.

Proof of completion:

Shipped — release mechanics left. The macro is implemented, tested (13 unit tests,
pedantic-clippy clean), and in final review, and rgstry.xyz already teaches developers how to use the
import macros on every contract page. The crates.io publish lands days into Q3.

D3. Flagged Contract Enforcement at Build Time

Description from last quarter:

Extend import_contract! and import_contract_client! to emit a compile-time error when the
referenced Wasm or Contract is flagged in the Registry.

Measure: a test exists that demonstrates a flagged contract causes a build failure, and the
behavior is documented.

Proof of progress:

D4. Server-Side Search, Pagination & Sorting on rgstry.xyz

Description from last quarter:

Replace the current client-side full-data-fetch approach with API-backed search, pagination, and
sorting on rgstry.xyz.

Measure: the explorer handles at least 1,000 published Wasms/Contracts without degraded load time,
search returns results server-side, and pages load incrementally.

Proof of completion:

Shipped for Wasms — live in production. Server-side fuzzy search is merged and answering queries
on rgstry.xyz today, and the API already supports limit/cursor pagination. Remaining: the same
treatment for contracts (stellar-registry/indexer#24, open), the explorer's pagination/sorting UX,
and validation against a 1,000+ entry dataset.

D5. rgstry.xyz UI Enhancements

Description from last quarter:

Ship three specific improvements to the Registry web explorer:

  1. Contract Explorer embedded on contract detail pages
  2. stellar contract info meta metadata surfaced on Wasm and Contract detail pages
  3. A "deploy this Wasm" button that initiates a Registry deploy from the UI

Measure: all three features are live on the production rgstry.xyz site and manually verified
against at least one mainnet contract.

Proof of completion:

Backend and page richness shipped. The metadata API (item 2's backend) is live and serving the
full contract info meta fields, and contract pages gained README/LICENSE rendering beyond the
proposed scope. Remaining: surfacing the rest of the metadata fields in the UI, the embedded Contract
Explorer (item 1), and the deploy button (item 3).

D6. Verified Build Integration with Stellar Expert

Description from last quarter:

Display verified build status from Stellar Expert's API on Registry Wasm and Contract detail pages.

Measure: the verified build badge or indicator is visible on at least one Wasm detail page with a
known verified contract, and the integration is live in production on rgstry.xyz.

Proof of completion:

Shipped — Registry releases are themselves verified builds. Every registry contract release is
now built by the stellar.expert workflow with OIDC build-provenance attestation, and the first
attested release is public. Remaining: displaying the badge on rgstry.xyz detail pages — targeting
contract pages, since we established Stellar Expert has no Wasm-level pages (stellar-registry/ui#17).

D7. Registry Documentation & Education

Description from last quarter:

Publish complete Registry documentation and videos covering:

  • publishing a Wasm
  • deploying a named contract
  • using import_contract!
  • deploying an unnamed contract
  • publishing/releasing using CI workflow
  • more!

Measure: documentation is live on Registry's own docs site & The Aha Company's YouTube channel.

Proof of completion:

Docs shipped in the product; the guide is live. The Registry Guide is live and linked from the
rgstry.xyz nav, every contract and wasm page carries usage guides, and all four standalone repos got
rewritten documentation. Remaining: moving the guide to Registry's own docs site, import_contract!
coverage (follows the D2 release), and the video series.

Beyond the proposal

Infrastructure we shipped this quarter that was not in the Q2 deliverables:

Proposed Impact

Complete the mainnet launch. The Registry contract is live on mainnet as of this proposal. Q3
finishes the public rollout: the mainnet indexer pipeline, rgstry.xyz serving mainnet data with the
"Coming Soon" banner removed, and secure-store/Ledger signing for admin operations
(stellar-registry/cli#14) so permanent ecosystem infrastructure is never administered from a raw
secret key — alongside the Tansu DAO-gated governance already in place.

Complete the composability story. Releasing import_contract! (stellar-registry/cli#17) lets any
Soroban developer depend on Registry contracts the way they depend on Rust crates, and the
flagged-contract build-time enforcement extends that with compile-time guarantees that compromised
contracts won't ship.

Make rgstry.xyz a real discovery platform. Finish server-side search across contracts and Wasms,
pagination and sorting, verified-build badges from Stellar Expert, and governance proposal forms that
let anyone propose adding a Wasm or contract to the root registry directly from the browser — closing
the loop from "found a contract" to "deployed it" without leaving the site.

Benefit to the Stellar ecosystem: The Registry is ecosystem infrastructure, not a product
feature. A mainnet Registry with DAO governance, verified builds, and compile-time safety raises the
baseline security and auditability of every Soroban project that consumes shared contracts, and gives
the ecosystem its first crates.io-style package experience for on-chain code.

Proposed Deliverables

D1: Complete the Mainnet Launch (carried from Q2)

With the registry contract live on mainnet, finish the public rollout: run the mainnet indexer
pipeline, point rgstry.xyz at the mainnet API and remove the "Coming Soon" banner, and land
secure-store/Ledger signing in the CLI (stellar-registry/cli#14) so admin operations never expose a
raw secret key.

Proof: mainnet data live and browsable at rgstry.xyz, the contract visible on Stellar Expert, and
named contracts resolvable via stellar registry CLI.

D2: Release import_contract! (carried from Q2)

Merge stellar-registry/cli#17 and publish the macro in released crates, documented with at least one
working example and covered by integration tests.

Proof: a crates.io release containing import_contract!, linked docs and example, CI running the
integration tests.

D3: Flagged Contract Enforcement at Build Time (carried from Q2)

Extend import_contract! / import_contract_client! to fail compilation when the referenced Wasm or
Contract is flagged in the Registry, building on the on-chain flagging that shipped in April.

Proof: a test demonstrating a flagged contract causes a build failure, and documented behavior.

D4: Finish Search, Pagination & Sorting on rgstry.xyz (carried from Q2)

Extend server-side search to contracts (stellar-registry/indexer#24), fix search-result updating
(stellar-registry/ui#22), and ship pagination and sorting so the explorer handles 1,000+ entries
without degraded load time.

Proof: live on rgstry.xyz; search, pagination, and sorting demonstrated against a 1,000+ entry
dataset.

D5: Contract Explorer, Deploy Button & Verified-Build Badges (carried from Q2)

Ship the remaining explorer features: the embedded Contract Explorer on contract detail pages, a
"deploy this Wasm" button, the remaining stellar contract info meta fields surfaced on detail
pages, and verified-build status from Stellar Expert on contract detail pages.

Proof: all features live on production rgstry.xyz, manually verified against at least one mainnet
contract.

D6: Governance Operations UI

Ship the governance proposal forms (stellar-registry/ui#16): propose adding a Wasm or contract to the
root registry, creating a subregistry, or changing owners — executed through the Tansu-DAO-gated
registry manager contract that merged in Q2.

Proof: a governance proposal created from rgstry.xyz, voted on in Tansu, and executed on-chain via
trigger, with the transaction linked.

D7: Registry Documentation & Education (carried from Q2)

Publish the Registry docs site and video series covering publishing a Wasm, deploying named and
unnamed contracts, using import_contract!, and publishing/releasing via the verified-build CI
workflow.

Proof: documentation live on the Registry docs site and videos on The Aha Company's YouTube channel.

Legal Acknowledgements

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

@willemneal @claude
PG Award Proposal: Stellar Registry (2026Q3)
0ea769b 
Q3 renewal: Q2 retroactive impact and deliverable evidence, Q3 goals.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@willemneal
willemneal marked this pull request as draft July 6, 2026 18:16
willemneal and others added 6 commits July 6, 2026 14:31
@willemneal @claude
Reframe past deliverables: lead with shipped work
c9c1809 
Per team feedback: each deliverable now opens with what shipped and
names exactly what remains; adds "Beyond the proposal" section for
unproposed infrastructure wins.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@willemneal @claude
Update D1: Registry deployed to mainnet
922fd9c 
contracts#14 merged and executed; retroactive impact, past D1, and Q3
D1 now reflect the live mainnet contract, with indexer + UI cutover as
the remaining rollout.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@chadoh @willemneal
s/Pubnet/mainnet/
acc32af 
Co-authored-by: Willem Wyndham <willem@wyndham.tech>
Signed-off-by: Chad Ostrowski <221614+chadoh@users.noreply.github.com>
@chadoh @willemneal
rgstry.xyz hyperlink
ab7d08a 
Co-authored-by: Willem Wyndham <willem@wyndham.tech>
Signed-off-by: Chad Ostrowski <221614+chadoh@users.noreply.github.com>
@willemneal @chadoh
Apply suggestions from code review
d7f7ae0 
Co-authored-by: Chad Ostrowski <221614+chadoh@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Willem Wyndham <willem@wyndham.tech>
Signed-off-by: Willem Wyndham <willem@wyndham.tech>
@willemneal @claude
Fix pre-commit failures: trailing whitespace + prettier wrap
8c2c2be 
Reflows the web-UI review-suggestion commits to the repo's 101-column
prettier format; no content changes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@chadoh
chadoh marked this pull request as ready for review July 7, 2026 01:18
@chadoh

chadoh commented Jul 7, 2026

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Closing in favor of #117, which is a branch on the main repo so the gh action can pass

@chadoh chadoh closed this Jul 7, 2026
@tupui tupui mentioned this pull request Jul 6, 2026
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@willemneal @chadoh