Blockly2Hooks: Smart Contracts for Everyone with the XRP Ledger and Google Blockly
Lucian Trestioreanu, Wazen Shbair, Flaviene Scheidt de Cristo, Radu State
TL;DR
Blockly2Hooks tackles the challenge of making smart-contract development accessible to non-experts by leveraging Google Blockly to create visual, drag-and-drop hooks for the XRP Ledger. The framework maps XRPL Hooks, typically written in C, into a visual programming environment, compiles them to WebAssembly via a remote compiler, and enables deployment on a testnet, enabling learning and experimentation without deep programming expertise. The work demonstrates a proof-of-concept architecture and discusses security considerations of remote compilation, while outlining future directions such as Mainnet deployment, templating, and broader usability studies. This approach could significantly reduce entry barriers and development time for repetitive or educational smart-contract use cases on XRPL, with potential applicability to other blockchains that support non-Turing-complete hooks.
Abstract
Recent technologies such as inter-ledger payments, non-fungible tokens, and smart contracts are all fruited from the ongoing development of Distributed Ledger Technologies. The foreseen trend is that they will play an increasingly visible role in daily life, which will have to be backed by appropriate operational resources. For example, due to increasing demand, smart contracts could soon face a shortage of knowledgeable users and tools to handle them in practice. Widespread smart contract adoption is currently limited by security, usability and costs aspects. Because of a steep learning curve, the handling of smart contracts is currently performed by specialised developers mainly, and most of the research effort is focusing on smart contract security, while other aspects like usability being somewhat neglected. Specific tools would lower the entry barrier, enabling interested non-experts to create smart contracts. In this paper we designed, developed and tested Blockly2Hooks, a solution towards filling this gap even in challenging scenarios such as when the smart contracts are written in an advanced language like C. With the XRP Ledger as a concrete working case, Blockly2Hooks helps interested non-experts from the community to learn smart contracts easily and adopt the technology, through leveraging well-proven teaching methodologies like Visual Programming Languages, and more specifically, the Blockly Visual Programming library from Google. The platform was developed and tested and the results are promising to make learning smart contract development smoother.