Shade is a decentralized payment gateway built on Stellar/Soroban that lets merchants accept invoices, subscriptions, event tickets, and crowdfunding pledges in crypto, with fee, escrow, KYC, and governance logic enforced entirely on-chain. This is the documentation home for the shade-stellar-contract repository: everything you need to build, integrate with, operate, or extend the protocol lives under one of the sections below.
- Everyone, first: Getting Started → Introduction explains what Shade is, who uses it, and how a payment flows end to end. Every other page assumes it.
- Contract contributors (writing or reviewing Rust/Soroban code): after the introduction, set up your toolchain with Prerequisites, then Building and Running Tests, then read Architecture and the Glossary before diving into Contracts.
- Merchant integrators (building an app or backend against Shade): start with Getting Started, then Guides for task-oriented walkthroughs and Reference for the full contract interface.
- Protocol operators (running deployments, admin/governance duties): start with Operations and Security.
| Section | What lives here |
|---|---|
| Getting Started | Installing tooling, building the workspace, running a local deployment. |
| Architecture | How the contracts, factories, and components fit together. |
| Contracts | Per-contract reference pages (Shade, Account, Escrow, Subscription, Ticketing, Crowdfund, and their factories). |
| Concepts | Deep dives into individual mechanisms (fees, escrow, vesting, dynamic pricing, governance, KYC, etc.). |
| Security | Threat model, access control, reentrancy protections, and audit-relevant notes. |
| Reference | Glossary, error codes, storage key layout, and other lookup material. |
| Guides | Task-oriented how-tos for common integration and contribution tasks. |
| Operations | Runbooks for deploying, pausing, upgrading, and administering live contracts. |
Domain and Soroban terminology used throughout these docs is defined in docs/glossary.md. Link to it on first use of a term, per the style guide.
See the Documentation Style Guide for tone, formatting, and terminology rules, and docs/contributing/templates/ for the page templates to start a new page from.