The Playground

What the Playground is

The Valdium Playground is an in-browser IDE for writing, deploying, and interacting with Valdium smart contracts without installing anything. It lives at playground.valdium.xyz and ships three starter templates, a connect-wallet button, and a live testnet endpoint. You can take an idea from blank file to deployed contract in under a minute — and you can do it from a phone if you have to.

It exists because the gap between "interested in Valdium" and "ran your first transaction" used to be a CLI install, a Node version check, a keystore unlock, and a faucet visit. The Playground compresses that into one tab.

What's inside

Editor. Monaco — the same editor that powers VS Code. Full JavaScript syntax, autocomplete on the Valdium contract intrinsics, and inline error markers from the type checker.
Templates. Three starters: an ERC-20-shaped fungible token, a simple counter, and a multisig wallet. Pick one, modify, deploy.
Compile button. Runs the contract through the type checker and the SES lockdown analyzer before letting you deploy. Errors land in the bottom panel with line numbers.
Deploy panel. Connects via the Valdium Wallet browser extension, sends the deploy transaction, and shows you the address as soon as the block lands.
Interact panel. Reads and writes against any deployed contract. Function signatures are inferred from the source you typed, so you don't paste an ABI.

Walk-through: deploy a counter

Open the Playground, pick the Counter template, and you'll see:

export class Counter {
  #count = 0;

  increment() {
    this.#count += 1;
    return this.#count;
  }

  get() {
    return this.#count;
  }
}

That's a complete Valdium contract. The class is the contract; private fields are persistent state; public methods are callable from transactions or RPC. There's no separate language, no compiler artifacts to ship around, no separate ABI file. Click Compile — the bottom panel should say OK · 0 errors. Click Deploy — the wallet pops up with the deploy tx, you sign, the deploy lands within ~2 seconds, and the deployed address shows up in the right panel.

Now switch to the Interact tab. Click increment(), sign the tx in the wallet, watch the panel show returned: 1. Click again — returned: 2. Click get() — no wallet prompt this time, because get() is a read; the result comes back instantly.

Sharing and persistence

Each Playground session has a shareable URL of the form playground.valdium.xyz/s/<id>. Click Share and the current editor contents plus the deployed-contract addresses are packed into a snapshot and stored on the Valdium IPFS gateway. Anyone with the link gets the exact same editor state — useful for bug reports, tutorials, and "look at this contract I deployed."

Snapshots are read-only when opened by someone else; they get a Fork button instead. Forking gives them a fresh editable session with the same starting code.

What it can't do

The Playground is a thin tool by design. It is the right place for:

Learning the contract API.
Prototyping a single contract end-to-end.
Sharing reproducible examples with collaborators.

It is the wrong place for:

Production deploys. Use the CLI and a hardware-backed key.
Test suites. Use the testing framework locally.
Multi-contract systems. The Playground holds one file; real systems need a project structure.

Limits and quotas

The Playground talks to a dedicated, rate-limited RPC. Free-tier limits are 60 deploys per IP per hour and 600 reads per IP per minute — generous for human use, restrictive enough to keep bots from soaking it up. Heavy users can connect their own RPC endpoint from the settings menu.

Build · Testing Contracts → Build · Writing Contracts →