DeFi Development Starter Kit

Menlo One for starting your DeFi project

A few people in our community have reached out and mentioned they’re using Menlo as a starter kit to bootstrap their DeFi project. We’re pretty excited about that as Menlo One was designed with DeFi in mind.

Of course there is a lot more that goes into building a DeFi dApp than just the smart contracts. You have to build an interface, ideally caching and storage, you have to think about the user’s experience with a wallet like MetaMask, and of course do all this securely. There is really a considerable amount of things to build before you can launch your DeFi project.

Our goal is to bootstrap your project with everything you need to get started so you can focus on the heart of your project. Here’s some of our features that make Menlo a great place to start for DeFi, or any Ethereum dApp.

Front End Boilerplate React dApp

We give you a single page application built with ReactJS and Typescript. It includes development tools like hot reloading, babel, linting in solidity and JS, and other handy tools. There is a UI skeleton with Material UI, Bootstrap, and Sass. Just dive in and start customizing. Check out our docs.

UI Components for MetaMask & Blockchain status

We built in a bunch alerts and notifications for interfacing with MetaMask and smart contracts. You can view these notifications in block-overflow/src/components/TopNav.tsx.

Truffle & Smart Contracts

Menlo comes with the popular Open Zeppelin library as well as boilerplate smart contracts that have features common in many DeFi apps including token transfers, claims, timing events, and they’re designed for anything similar to the ERC-20 standard. And we integrated Truffle into the development pipeline with multiple environment configurations. Check out our docs. And check out our smart contracts.

IPFS Storage

Many dApps use IPFS for decentralized storage of data too big and expensive for Ethereum. Menlo comes with IFPS and Ethereum used together in a common “hash and stash” design pattern. No need to fall back to a centralized database. Check out our docs.

Web Server for Blockchain caching

Depending on your application you might want to store data from Ethereum and IPFS on a web server for a fast user experience. Menlo comes with a server side application we call a Content Node which caches data from these networks for the front end to consume. Check out our docs.

Web Sockets between front and back end.

Making users wait for a block to confirm for an update sucks. The web 2.0 trained users to expect things to happen in real time. So we connected the backend content node to the front end with web sockets. This is handy if you’re building anything that requires real time updates to users such as a DEX, order book, social feature, or chat.

A video of Menlo’s web sockets in action

Check out our docs to get started with Menlo

And we would love to hear about your DeFi project. Please jump in our Telegram or reach out directly.