Best Practices for Ethereum Smart Contracts

An Ethereum smart contract is a type of account executed as a program with a code and data collection. It resides at a particular address on the Ethereum blockchain.

Functioning as a type of Ethereum account, smart contracts can hold a balance and send transactions over the network. However, it is noteworthy that they are deployed to the network instead of being controlled by a user. They run according to how they are programmed, and user accounts can interact with them by submitting transactions according to the specific smart contract functions.

General Best Practices for Ethereum Smart Contracts

1. Be ready for failure.
All significant contracts are always prone to errors. Hence, you must be ready to deal with them and your contract must have the ability to respond to them. You can do so by:

• Pausing the contract or ‘breaking the circuit’ whenever things go wrong.
• Formulating an effective upgrade strategy with improvements and methods to fix bugs, loopholes, etc.
• Effectively managing the money at risk by limiting the maximum usage rate and managing the total amount well.

2. Ensure careful rollouts.
Careful rollouts can help you to detect and resolve bugs before the full production phase. It can be done by:

• Thoroughly testing contracts.
• Rolling out the contract in incremental phases with increased usage and testing in each phase.
• Providing bug bounties from as early as the alpha testnet releases.
• Adding tests at the discovery of every new attack vector.

3. Always keep the contracts simple.
If you make your contracts complex, you can expect more potential errors and bugs. Hence, keeping them simple is a sure shot way to reduce the chances of errors. You can keep contracts simple by implementing the following practices:

• You can make sure that the contract logic is simple.
• Wherever possible, use code or tools that you have already written before.
• You can modularize the code to make the contracts and functions small.
• Use blockchain only for those parts of your system that need decentralization.
• Wherever possible, give preference to clarity over performance.

Security Tools Best Practices for Ethereum Smart Contracts

Choosing and implementing highly efficient security tools is a great way to ensure that your smart contract is secure and functioning well. Here are a few great tools with different functionalities that you can leverage for Ethereum smart contracts.

1. Visualization

• Surya – offers several visual outputs and information about the smart contract’s structure and supports querying the function call graph.
• EVM Lab – A tool package that helps you interact with the Ethereum virtual machine (EVM).
• Solidity Visual Auditor – An extension that contributes a security-centric syntax with advanced Solidity code insights and semantic highlighting.
• Ethereum-graph-debugger – An EVM debugger that is graphical and displays the entire program control flow graph.

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