Create a Rust project

As smart contracts are Rust library crates, we will start with creating one:

$ cargo new --lib ./contract

You created a simple Rust library, but it is not yet ready to be a smart contract. The first thing to do is to update the Cargo.toml file:

[package]
name = "contract"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"

[lib]
crate-type = ["cdylib"]

[dependencies]
cosmwasm-std = { version = "1.1", features = ["staking"] }

As you can see, I added a crate-type field for the library section. Generating the cdylib is required to create a proper web assembly binary. The downside of this is that such a library cannot be used as a dependency for other Rust crates - for now, it is not needed, but later we will show how to approach reusing contracts as dependencies.

Additionally, we added one core dependency for smart contracts: the cosmwasm-std. This crate is a standard library for smart contracts. It provides essential utilities for communication with the outside world, helper functions, and types. Every smart contract we will build will use this dependency.