Show HN: Find any smart contract on Cookbook

I can’t be the only one that doesn’t understand what any of this means.

Can someone ELI5? Or, ELI am a software engineer with no web3 knowledge, at least?

Smart contracts are just pieces of code that run on "the blockchain". They can be pretty much anything: currency-like tokens, NFTs, marketplaces like opensea, exchanges like uniswap, etc.

Once they're uploaded to the blockchain, they're there permanently. That's really scary, because it's very difficult to write complicated code without bugs. When smart contracts have bugs, you can have massive hacks where literally billions of dollars are stolen.

Because the consequences are so high, people end up paying developers a ludicrous amount of money to write and deploy (i.e. upload to the blockchain) these contracts. A lot of projects also pay auditors thousands to read/review the smart contract code. This is pretty wasteful, because most contracts end up being the exact same thing: I'm making it up, but probably 80% of the code on ethereum is for NFTs.

This site seems to be aggregating all of the most common contracts and audits so people can reuse code that has already been approved.

This is exactly it. The way to think about it is that smart contracts are effectively server-side code that is specialized to run on blockchains. They use many of the same building blocks and can often be reused. When I want to build Auth in Nodejs, I might use Passport.js, and I often use Express.js. Often I'll use mongoose.js as well. That's effectively what we're providing with cookbook, a way to find and utilize solidity packages created by the community.

Thanks - great explanation.

Smart contracts on blockchain scare me, because I just don’t think humans are capable of writing (or auditing!) perfect code.

> Step 3. Customize it from our user friendly nocode UI and deploy

What is a real world example where someone with no experience deploying smart contracts would use something like this to deploy a smart contract?

I just don’t see it. If you don’t even know how to deploy something, how could you possibly have any place deploying something, let alone modifying or vetting the source?

The majority of web3 developers only just recently entered the space, and are looking for simpler tools. We discovered this from a long series of interviews. The goal is to build cookbook in a web2 dev accessible way, and present all of the stats and audits and information so that they are more able to make dapps.

This is the kind of project needed to make web3 accessible to a much wider scope of participants.

Any plans to support vyper?

Definitely plans to support different smart contract languages over time. For the short term we're focusing on Solidity as most web3 devs use it.

Yeah, Vyper would be nice, it's the late bloomer but is so nice to work with

If someone else than cookbook uploads a contract, how can I be sure it's safe for me to deploy on my project? Is there a failsafe of some sort? (code review/approval, community ranking etc)

Many of the contracts have their audits listed, you can read through the audits to see whether its safe to use or not. But as always, you should make sure to do your own testing before deploying to production.

Amazing good job. Will be testing everything out in the next few days.

I think this is very valuable for web3 founders bootstrapping and with limited access to blockchain development resources.

Thank you! That's our goal. We want to make building in Web3 significantly faster and easy with Cookbook.

I am building a platform on Web2 and wondering if cookbook has a tool where I could Integrate a Web3 wallet integration to it ? if this is something achievable ?

It really depends on what you're after, we do have a widget to embed web3 functions into any site, it's in early beta.

Cookbook makes getting smart contract super easy, love it!

thank you!!

How does this compare to OpenZeppelin? Aren't they already the default for free smart contracts?

Openzeppelin provides a very limited number of templates. Great for importing into a smart contract and extending from, but requires a fair bit of work to get there. With cookbook, people can use/deploy completed contracts from other projects for many more usecases than openzeppelin.

Got it - seems like you can just directly deploy contracts

>Currently it is extremely difficult to find good talent when building on blockchain

Hm, I wonder why that is.

Software engineers tend to follow demand, with some lagtime. Since crypto goes through these manic bull/bear cycles, demand dramatically spikes and falls. Hard to make a career change when the next bear cycle can wipe out your prospects. As crypto stabilizes, there should be a wave of immigration into web3 engineering. You can already kind of see who these engineers will be, they're often the web2 developers who just happen to be working on web3 projects (and don't know solidity)

What a great platform, love this idea. Super innovative, can't wait to use CookBook.

Deploying with cookbook is completely free? How do you guys make revenue?

We work with SMBs and Startups for advanced contracts, analytics and tooling. That's really how we're able to sustainably keep Cookbook free for individual developers

This is super cool, but what if I can’t find a contract like NFT staking?

Feel free to request one or contribute one, we're adding new contracts every day

Looks really good!

What’s been the most interesting use case you’ve seen so far?

Someone was actually building a decentralized commodities exchange, and used a couple of Cookbook contracts to build out their infrastructure

Has there been a security audit done on these Smart Contracts?

it looks like contracts that have audits for them have it on their page. Should make the audits more obvious and noticeable, I missed it at first

Just deployed a token. Super easy

Just out of curiosity, What did you call your token? And what chain did you use? Did you deploy it on testnet?