Stellar resources

A short set of starting points for readers new to the Stellar network. Payflow sits on top of three Stellar building blocks you do not need to implement yourself: the base ledger (accounts, assets, fees), the Soroban smart-contract runtime, and the off-chain services that expose them. Most of the time this document is enough; the links are the places to go when you are not.

Accounts, assets, and fees

Stellar Protocol specification
- the canonical definitions of accounts, assets, and the fee model. Read this first; Payflow’s economics page (protocol/economics.md) assumes you know what a ledger and a stroop are.
Stellar Development Documentation
- operator and developer reference: how to send payments, fund a test account with Friendbot, and read your balance.

Soroban (smart contracts)

Payflow’s mandates live in Soroban contracts. These cover the language and the runtime you will be reading the contract reference against (reference/contracts.md):

Soroban learning material
- Soroban’s own tutorial track, from a hello-world contract to production.
Rust Soroban SDK
- the SDK the Payflow contracts are written in; its doc comments are the closest thing to an API reference for what the contracts call.
Soroban examples
- small, runnable contracts for reading state, defining functions, and wiring up auth. Good to read before debugging a mandate flow.
Soroban
- the Soroban home page, linking out to the docs, the explorer, and the testnet faucet.

Networks, services, and tooling

Stellar Core / Horizon (the Go SDK)
- the reference services behind the Horizon REST API that Payflow’s backend talks to. The REST endpoint surface is documented in developers/api.md.
Soroban developer tooling
- the soroban CLI for deploying, funding, and inspecting contracts on testnet; that is where you point Payflow’s deployments/testnet.env.

Testnets, not mainnet: everything above has a testnet counterpart. Do not put mainnet contract ids or funded accounts in a PR; link to deployments/testnet.env instead.