Off-chain code

Since the main purpose of this example is to introduce Plutus Tx and Plutus Core, we walked through only the on-chain code, which is responsible for validating transactions (in the sense of determining whether a transaction is allowed to spend a UTXO).

In addition to the on-chain code, one typically needs the accompanying off-chain code and services to perform tasks like building transactions, submitting transactions, deploying smart contracts, querying for available UTXOs on the chain, etc.

A full suite of solutions is in development. See the plutus-apps repo and its accompanying Plutus tools SDK user guide for more details.

Some other alternatives include cardano-transaction-lib and mesh. All these are based on the Cardano API, a low-level API that provides the capability to do the off-chain work with a local running node.