Stipula Workbench: An Integrated Environment to Design, Analyze, and Execute Stipula Code

The Stipula language offers a powerful formal framework for defining digital legal contracts, but its syntax and concepts can represent a barrier for non-specialized users, such as legal professionals. This thesis presents the development of the Stipula Workbench, a web-based integrated development environment (IDE) designed to bridge this gap. The Workbench abstracts the complexity of Stipula’s syntax through a guided, form- based graphical interface, which allows users to build contracts by visually defining legal components like ‘Parties‘, ‘Assets‘, and ‘Functions‘. The environment provides immediate feedback by generating the corresponding Stipula code in real-time. Furthermore, it integrates static analysis tools to verify crucial properties such as liquidity and clause reachability, and it includes an interpreter to simulate contract execution. The project’s objective is to lower the entry barrier for creating secure and formally correct digital contracts, making the power of Stipula accessible to its target audience and promoting greater adoption of formal languages in the legal domain.