Core concepts
Toolblox lets you build a smart contract the way you'd sketch a business process on a whiteboard — as a series of steps that something moves through. You never write code: you describe the lifecycle of a thing, and Toolblox turns that description into a real smart contract you can run on a blockchain.
This page explains the handful of words you'll meet everywhere in Toolblox. Once these click, the rest of the product is easy.
How Toolblox works
You design a workflow. Toolblox assembles a smart contract from pre-audited building blocks, and your wallet deploys it to the blockchain you choose. Toolblox then generates an Asset Dashboard — a ready-made web app your users open to view items and perform actions. No servers, no code.
Workflow
A workflow is the whole smart contract, written as the life story of one kind of thing.
Think of a parcel delivery service. A parcel is created, then picked up, then in transit, then delivered. That sequence — the stages and the moves between them — is a workflow. In Toolblox one workflow manages one kind of thing, but any number of individual things can flow through it at once (thousands of parcels, each at its own stage).
Asset (also called the item or object)
Every workflow tracks one asset — the thing that moves through the steps. You give it a name (for example Parcel, Loan, Document, Ticket) and a short 3-letter symbol.
| If your workflow is… | …the asset is |
|---|---|
| A loan application process | Loan |
| An escrow payment | Payment |
| A car repair shop | Incident |
| An NFT sales portal | Image |
| A parcel courier | Parcel |
Each individual item is stored on the blockchain as a token (technically an NFT), so it can be owned, transferred and traced.
States (statuses)
A state is a stage in the life of the asset — Requested, Active, Shipped, Closed. At any moment every item sits in exactly one state, shown as a status badge. States are the columns you see in the editor's diagram.
Transitions
A transition is an action that moves an item from one state to another — Accept, Ship, Approve, Pay. Every transition becomes a callable function in the finished smart contract. A transition can do much more than change the status; it can take input, check who's allowed to run it, collect or send a payment, run calculations and more (see Transition basics).
Here is a small workflow for ordering 3D prints, drawn as states and transitions:
Properties (attributes)
Properties are the data fields carried by the asset — a Price, a Name, a Shipping address, a File. Each property has a type (Text, Money, Date, Image, a wallet User, and so on). Properties change as the item moves through its states. See Items for the full list of attribute types.
The stategram
The stategram is the visual state-and-transition diagram at the heart of Toolblox. You see it in two places:
- While building — an editable canvas where you add states and draw transitions.
- After deploying — a read-only version inside the Asset Dashboard that highlights an item's current state and shows which actions are available next.
Standards
Standards are optional compatibility layers you switch on at deploy time so your contract works with the wider blockchain ecosystem — for example making items tradable as ERC-721 NFTs, or accepting ERC-20 token payments such as USDC. When unsure, you can leave them at their defaults.
Asset Dashboard (your app)
The Asset Dashboard is the web app Toolblox generates automatically for every deployed workflow. Your users browse items, open an item to see its details and history, and run the available transitions — all backed directly by the smart contract. You can theme it, and even combine several workflows into a custom multi-page app with the DApp Maker.
A few more words you'll see
- Wallet — the account that signs and pays for blockchain actions. You sign in with an email, Google, or an existing wallet like MetaMask; see Accounts & wallets.
- Testnet vs mainnet — a testnet is a free practice network; mainnet is the real, live network. Always try things on a testnet first.
- Gas — the small fee a blockchain charges to run a transaction. Toolblox can even sponsor it for you on some networks (gasless).
Where to next
- Accounts & wallets — set yourself up.
- Create with AI — describe what you want and let Toolblox draft it.
- Build a contract from scratch — do it step by step.
- Deploy your smart contract — go live.