At this point, we have learned the ins and outs of Solidity and we have even built fullstack Web3 DApps interacting with those smart contracts and last but not least, we have also deployed everything to both the local hardhat network and testnet like Goerli. We used Rainbowkit and Wagmi libraries to make our development lives easier. In this section, we’re going to make our lives easier developing our smart contracts by using high-level libraries in Solidity. As such, we’re going to be looking at Openzeppelin in this section and what it is capable of, and why so many developers use Openzeppelin in their smart contracts.

Solidity is a general-purpose programming language for the Ethereum blockchain and as such, while it is very versatile in that you can pretty much do anything, it doesn’t mean it is easy to write safe code and efficient code. For that, you need a lot of effort, experience, and testing. Because a smart contract cannot be changed once deployed to the blockchain, it is essential for you to use everything at your disposal beforehand to ensure your smart contracts are well-tested, reusable, and efficient. Openzeppelin is one of the most popular and one of the most widely used libraries for Solidity smart contracts. These smart contracts from openzeppelin are fully tested to follow the best practice security patterns and the framework is maintained by the Zeppelin company. 

So, is Openzeppelin a contract? Well, yes and no. Openzeppelin provides smart contract libraries for a variety of things such as the implementation of ERC-20 and ERC-721 standards, role-based permissions scheme with higher flexibility, and reusable solidity components for developing complicated decentralized systems. Openzeppelin contracts also offer access control, crowd sale, cryptography, introspection, life cycle, math, ownership, payment, tokens, and utilities. These libraries are community reviewed and have battle-tested the test of time. 

In this section, we’re going to be looking at how to create our own ERC20 and ERC721 tokens, how to create pausable smart contracts, and how we can use some utility libraries in our own smart contracts that make our lives even easier. Without further ado, let’s get started.