Using Soroban inside Zephyr

It was already mentioned that we have hardwired Soroban within the Zephyr Virtual Machine. But what does it actually mean in practical terms?

Working with contract types

On one hand, this integration allows you to use the same Soroban SDK you use for writing smart contracts to also develop Zephyr indexing programs! This introduces innovative tools and unique potential use cases for indexing, enhancing the experience of working with the chain's contract data types like never before.

In a few words, this feature allows developers to deal with on-chain data as they would when writing smart contracts, which is way better than accessing the nested types that result once this data is translated into its format for consensus. This is true for ScVals but also custom contracttype structures, which are much more complex to parse. Using Zephyr, everything is abstracted!

Invoking contracts

Another amazing feature that Zephyr enables thanks to Soroban host and VM abstraction is the possibility of invoking smart contracts, directly from your program. Integrating this feature in your program's flow enables limitless innovation in the development of off-chain blockchain data services as we know them. So many use cases for monitoring, automation, and more can be enabled.