CardanoCrops: Cultivating Cardano Smart Contract Development Skills

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Michal Porubsky

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

Entity (Incorporated)

[GENERAL] Co-proposers and additional applicants

The rest of the Vacuumlabs Auditing team.

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

10

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language

No

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

Create a guided development experience where a developer can create an engaging on-chain game from scratch, learning the core components of Cardano smart contract development along the way.

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.”

No dependency.

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

All the outputs will be open sourced on Github under the open-source GPL-3.0 license.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

There is a serious barrier to entry into the Cardano development ecosystem. It is different from other types of smart contracts and it is arguably less intuitive to grasp at first. One solution to this problem is having more high quality education materials. There are simply not enough of them right now. We want to fill this gap.

Our previously created educational materials – Cardano Capture the Flag (CTF) – are related to smart contract security. It’s also very important to have an entry to the whole smart contract development process. Having it gamified increases adoption and makes the process easier.

We therefore plan to bring another educational resource to life; this time focused on beginner to intermediate developers. Players will have the chance to learn key skills during the participation, such as:

• The eUTxO model in and out.
• Time handling on Cardano.
• Easy to more complex minting policies.
• Security thinking and best practices.
• Testing the Aiken code.
• NFT minting.
• Simple bit commitment protocols.
• Interaction with the blockchain in Typescript and creating a simple UI.

These skills can be learned in a fun way by giving the tasks a continuous theme. The players will code a simple farming game! Players will grow vegetables, care for them, trade with other farmers, purchase farming equipment and more.

The players will develop the whole game by completing a number of bite-sized and testable tasks. There will be portions of code pre-written and portions that the player will have to fill. Initially, there will be enough pre-written such that the start is easy. Similarly to our Cardano CTF where we provided all the off-chain code, leaving just the fun part to the players.

The tasks will be in the form of filling portions of code, and working in small steps towards creating the game. The whole experience will be guided by an accompanying text. The text will also contain additional, more complex “extra-mile” goals that players can add into the game without our guidance.

Our main inspiration is the  Crypto Zombies game. It is the first step for many Solidity developers. We believe that games’ coding is a fun introduction for beginners, and the resulting complexity of smart contracts in the proposed farming game is around the same level of complexity as most deployed Cardano dApps. We will get there step by step, explaining along the way.

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

The impact of our project is to provide an easy and fun way for new developers to enter the Cardano space and for the existing developers to enhance their skills. More and better educated developers mean more activity on Cardano, more successful, more quality and more complex projects on Cardano. Last but not least, it means more innovation.

We will measure this impact by user engagement on our socials (Discord), the number of clones of the GitHub repository and the number of people growing, caring for and trading their crops.

We will share these outputs in our closeout report and make them available for anyone to check anytime.

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

As seasoned auditors of smart contracts on Cardano, we have lots of experience with audits and design reviews, conducted in Plutus, Plutarch, and Aiken languages. We have already uncovered a variety of vulnerabilities. Our audits can be seen at our public repository.. We are also releasing a series of blogs on common Cardano vulnerabilities which can be found at our Medium.

Furthermore, thanks to Catalyst 10, we have already developed and delivered 10+1 levels into the Capture the Flag game. Our timely delivery can be seen in the milestone module. The game itself is open source in a public repository. The project was finished exactly according to our original plan without any delays, proving our experience in delivering Catalyst projects.

Our team has experience in teaching C++, Python and complex computer science algorithms in a playful way to children preparing for various international competitions.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

Develop the design of the game and tasks

• Duration: 3 months
• Objectives:
• During the first milestone, our goal is to have a plan and to have it written down. That includes high level design of all the games' smart contracts and how this design translates into the higher-level tasks that players will solve.
• Create the framework of testing the small tasks.
• Create the first tasks of the game to test the framework.
• Outputs and Acceptance Criteria:
• A document describing the design of the game, the smart contracts, the timeline of their implementation and higher-level split into tasks.
• The smart contracts will be similar to the ones outlined in this proposal, but we will make minor changes where deemed beneficial.
• The design of the game will be split into three parts delivered over milestones 2, 3 and 4.

Develop the first third of the game

• Duration: 2 months
• Objectives:
• Create the first third of the game (according to the split defined in the Milestone 1’s output).
• Create tests and specific tasks that the user will have to solve.
• Create a document describing the order of the tasks for the user, how the user should test whether they are completed correctly, hints and links to related reading. 
• The first third of the game will be focused mostly on the eUTxO model, tokens and time handling on Cardano.
• Outputs and Acceptance Criteria:
• The code for the first third of the game.
• The accompanying documentation.

Develop the second third of the game

• Duration: 2 months
• Objectives:
• Create the second third of the game (according to the split defined in the Milestone 1's output).
• Create tests and specific tasks that the user will have to solve.
• Create a document describing the order of the tasks for the user, how the user should test whether they are completed correctly, hints and links to related reading. 
• The second third will be focused on smart contracts where multiple users interact.
• Outputs and Acceptance Criteria:
• The code for the second third of the game.
• The accompanying documentation.

Develop the final third of the game

• Duration: 2 months
• Objectives:
• Create the final third of the game (according to the split defined in the Milestone 1's output).
• Create tests and specific tasks that the user will have to solve.
• Create a document describing the order of the tasks for the user, how the user should test whether they are completed correctly, hints and links to related reading. 
• The third part of the game will focus on more advanced topics, s.a. Hashing, bit commitment, advanced security, testing etc.
• Outputs and Acceptance Criteria:
• The code for the final third of the game.
• The accompanying documentation.

Assessment, Promotion and Future Roadmap

• Duration: 1 month
• Objectives:
• Release the game to the Cardano community
• Share the game on Twitter, Reddit and Medium.
• Add channels for the game to our discord and communicate with the users.
• Provide more ideas that could be added to the game in the future.
• Project closeout report and video.
• Outputs and Acceptance Criteria:
• Links to our posts.
• Link to our Discord.
• Link to a comprehensive project completion report + video.

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Vacuumlabs Smart Contract Auditing Team: website

Michal Porubský is the Lead Smart Contract Auditor at Vacuumlabs. As a founding member of the smart contract auditing and consultancy division, he specializes in providing expert consultation to find the optimal design of decentralized applications and conduct comprehensive Cardano smart contract audits to ensure their robustness and security. He previously worked for WingRiders, NuFi and in the traditional finance world. During high school he competed at several national and international competitions where he won several regional and national ones. Later at the university he helped to organize and prepare tasks for similar programming competitions.

Michal Sládeček is a Smart Contract Auditor, a security consultant and an ethical hacker with a very wide range of experience ranging from web exploitation to reverse engineering and cryptography. He is a holder of the OSCP certificate with experience in programming C++, C, Javascript and Python code, and a good theoretical background in algorithms. One of his biggest accomplishments is a bronze medal from the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). During his university studies, he also helped organize national competition in programming.

Michal Anderle, also a Smart Contract Auditor at Vacuumlabs, honed his problem-solving skills through competitive programming during his studies. His achievements include a bronze medal from the IOI, participation in the ACM ICPC finals, and organizing programming competitions. Currently, he teaches an algorithmic course at a university. In his role, he employs these skills to identify potential vulnerabilities, enhancing the efficiency and security of his clients' products.

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

The work will be conducted by the Vacuumlabs Auditing team, leveraging their deep understanding of the underlying primitives essential for achieving high-quality results in this project.

Breakdown:

• Research and Design Document (3 months): 60,000 ₳
• Development of design by our smart contract auditors.
• Wallet and dApp Interaction Research (2 month): 40,000 ₳
• Development work, writing the documentation.
• First Proof of Concept Development (2 months): 40,000 ₳
• Development work, writing the documentation.
• Two More Proofs of Concept Development (2 months): 40,000 ₳
• Development work, writing the documentation.
• Final Analysis and Roadmap (1 month): 20,000 ₳
• Fixing bugs, polishing, interacting with users; writing, proofreading and promoting blog posts; game promotion.

[VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Our proposal answers one of the fundamental problems of smart contract development on Cardano. Every developer that will finish our course and stay on Cardano will bring an enormous value back into the community.

We need more projects. For that, we need more quality developers. In order to have them, we need easy ways to educate them. Having quality educational materials is essential to do this. The value for money is tremendous.