Food for thought

Every smart contract is kinda its own app, with every function / feature being a button you can press

Some buttons are put on websites, miniapps, etc., but the large majority of them are never(or no longer) surfaced

There should be some sort of universal markup language for every smart contract (that isn't an ABI) that allows anyone to easily interact onchain.

Wonder if this is solved via a smart contract markup language + generative AI, or just plainly via LLMs

Publishing an app to the onchain app store becomes simply deploying a smart contract

OpenZeppelin has been cooking 🧑‍🍳 

Introducing the Contracts UI Builder! 

builder.openzeppelin.com

- Select your network
- Paste in your contract address
- Create an interactive form for your contract
- Export as a Vite React App

Still in the early phases with many more features and improvements to come, but I'm excited as I've wanted something like this for a long time! As always, open sourced with repo linked below :) 

https://github.com/OpenZeppelin/contracts-ui-builder

Technically the ABI is the universal language for smart contracts but you’re right that it’s missing the context as to what each function or state does. Even with the original code you can only get so far. You need instructions left by the creator to truly understand. A natspec gets you halfway there in that the developer can leave comments in the code explaining how it all works, but since that’s not included in the ABI it’s only half way there. Extending ABI would be awesome. 

On a related note we are building some tooling around the concept of easy contract interaction which you can check out here:

Technically the ABI is the universal language for smart contracts but you’re right that it’s missing the context as to what each function or state does. Even with the original code you can only get so far. You need instructions left by the creator to truly understand. A natspec gets you halfway there in that the developer can leave comments in the code explaining how it all works, but since that’s not included in the ABI it’s only half way there. Extending ABI would be awesome. 

On a related note we are building some tooling around the concept of easy contract interaction which you can check out here: https://farcaster.xyz/stevedylandev.eth/0xcbd728a6

a description field in the ABI + this / AI would be sick

DX Engineer | DevRel at OpenZeppelin | Building orbiter.host & bhvr.dev | opinions are my own

It turns out NatSpec actually does have this to some extent and it builds into the ABI! I had claude write a simple spec for the default foundry Counter contract and this was built into the ABI at compile time https://snippets.so/snip/h-wAADnQFe It's still JSON and you need an app to parse that, but still pretty close. The only limit is how well the dev documents it.

Yup somewhat what I had in mind 

Like an extension of the ABI that makes inference much easier, with common abstractions baked in like tokens, user, etc..

We’ve been doing something like this for surfacing complex DeFi balances, feels like there’s something with a standardize write interface for smart contracts

a description field in the ABI + this / AI would be sick 

https://markdown-ui.com/chat/