Introduction

This chapter will give you an overview over CosmWasm from a contract developer perspective, its capabilities, and guide you through initializing your first smart contract.

💡 Tip

We assume you have a basic knowledge of Rust and Cargo (Rust's standard build system). If not, have a look here. No worries, you don't need to be a Rust expert to write your first smart contract.

What is CosmWasm?

CosmWasm is a platform for writing smart contracts for Cosmos chains using Rust and WebAssembly. Meaning CosmWasm is your one-stop shop for developing, testing, and running smart contracts on enabled chains.

What does CosmWasm provide?

For you, a contract developer, CosmWasm provides a set of high-quality primitives through our standard library. These primitives include:

• extended precision arithmetic (128-, 256- and 512-bit integers),
• cryptographic primitives (for example, secp256k1 verification),
• interaction with the Cosmos SDK,
• IBC connectivity.

What does CosmWasm NOT provide?

• Storage abstractions (for this, check out cw-storage-plus.
• Testing framework (for this, check out cw-multi-test.