Guides

Deploy a Smart Contract on Astar

Avneesh Agarwal

Aug 16, 2023 • 4 min read

This guide will show you how to deploy any smart contract and build a web3 app on the Astar network.

By the end, you'll learn how to create a simple NFT Drop smart contract, deploy it to the Astar network, and mint an NFT on the smart contract.

Let's get started!

What is the Astar Network?

Astar is the largest smart contract platform in the Polkadot ecosystem, supporting both Wasm and EVM. While providing native access to the Polkadot ecosystem through its para chain slot, Astar also has bridges into other major ecosystems — including Ethereum, BSC, Cosmos, Polygon, & more.

Create a smart contract on the Astar Network

To begin, head to the Contracts page in your thirdweb Dashboard and hit Deploy Contract:

You will be taken to the thirdweb Explore page — where you can browse smart contracts built by the top protocols in web3 and deploy them in just a few clicks!

Note: You can also use the thirdweb CLI to set up a smart contract environment by running the below command from your terminal:

npx thirdweb create contract

This will take you through an easy-to-follow flow of steps for you to create your contract. Learn more about this in our CLI guide.

Otherwise, let's get back to Explore:

Here, select your smart contract of choice. For this guide, we're going to use the NFT Drop (ERC721) contract to create our NFT collection:

Set up your smart contract with an image, name, description, etc., and configure which wallet address will receive the funds from primary and secondary sales:

Our smart contracts are deployable to any EVM chain, so let's deploy this to Astar!

Add the Astar network to your dashboard & wallet

To deploy a smart contract to Astar, we first need to add it as a network to the Dashboard.

To do this, click on the chain dropdown.

Search for "Astar" and select Astar:

Once you have selected the network, this will prompt you to switch your network to Astar.

Now, let's deploy the smart contract on Astar!

Deploy a smart contract to the Astar blockchain.

Let's go back to the thirdweb Dashboard where we were building our NFT Drop contract.

We have already filled out the metadata so click on "Deploy Now" after selecting the chain. It will prompt you to two transactions, you have to approve them.

Confirm the transaction to deploy the contract

And you're done! You have just deployed to Astar.

Calling Smart Contract Functions

Let's see how we can use the smart contract by calling some functions on it, such as minting an NFT into our collection!

From the Explorer tab, you can view all of the available functions on your smart contract and execute them directly from your connected wallet:

Calling the Read name function from Explorer

Setting Up Our NFT Collection

In our example, we created an NFT drop smart contract, so we'll quickly set it up and mint our first NFT by performing the following steps:

Lazy mint a batch of NFTs
Configure the claim conditions
Mint an NFT from the drop!

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We won't go into too much detail about this process in this guide, check out our other NFT Drop Guides for more information!

Once we've set up our NFTs, we can click the Claim button in the NFTs tab to mint our first NFT, and voilà! We just minted an NFT on the Zora testnet!

What's Next?

Now that you've deployed your smart contract, you can use our SDK to build a web3 application! Where users can connect their wallets and interact with the functions of your smart contracts. Learn more from our guide below:

Need help?

For support, join the official thirdweb Discord server or share your thoughts on our feedback board.