Introducing Nostra Devs, a technical content series where you can learn directly from the developers and engineers building Nostra.

In this first post, you’ll find:

✨ What is Cairo?

✨ Where to Start?

✨ Resources and Tools

Let’s jump right in!

What is Cairo?

Cairo is a programming language for writing provable programs. Cairo and similar proof systems are used to scale blockchains. 

For example, StarkNet Contracts and the StarkNet OS are written in Cairo. You can follow CairoLang for updates.

Learning Cairo from scratch can be challenging, but fear not! We’re going to share our experience to help bring in a new wave of Cairo builders.

Where to Start?

The best place to quickstart and learn the basics is the Cairo documentation page, and the official docs have very extensive references.

This is very useful during all stages of development. While learning Cairo you can get some tokens on top by doing exercises in this repo.

This repo contains lots of practical smart contracts. You’ll find a collection of examples like:

🧲 ERC20

🧲 ERC721

🧲 L1<->L2 communication bridge

And much more! You can also earn tokens completing these practical tasks.

Resources and Tools

What would blockchain development be without OZ libraries? You can find docs for OZ contracts here.

Don’t like writing tests in Python? Perhaps you’re just used to Ethereum tooling? No problem!

ShardLabs have implemented hardhat plugin and starknet-devnet. Here’s a good starting point for setting it up.

Formatting tools

Cairo formatting is tricky right now, especially because of implicit arguments. But there’s a tool called cairo-format. 

It’s highly recommended using it from the very beginning to learn the format of the code.

For advanced testing, Trail of Bits developed amarna, a static analyser for #Cairo contracts. Quickstart by reading this article.

Risk Disclaimer

Cairo and many other tools/libraries are under heavy development. Iterations are fast, and code changes quickly. 

Do your own research and use all of it at your own risk. Stay tuned for more Nostra Devs posts about practical uses of Cairo.

Read More

Our Nostra Famiglia Fund just went live! We’re allocating 5 MILLION DAI to build on top of Nostra and StarkNet. Read more here.

Join La Famiglia 🌹👉 https://bit.ly/NostraDiscordInvite