Best Tools for Smart Contract Developers

If you’re a web3 developer, you’ll know that crafting efficient, secure, and reliable smart contracts is no small feat. Smart contract development can get complex! Depending on the smart contract you want to create and the features it may have, making a mistake can get costly, never mind what it does to your morale.

As such, having the right smart contract development tools at your disposal can significantly streamline your workflow, enhance productivity, and reduce the chances of these risks.

So, whether you're a seasoned Solidity expert or just starting your journey in Web3, let us dive into the must-have tools for writing, testing, deploying, and auditing smart contracts.

What are the best tools for smart contract developers?

As a smart contract developer, the tools you’ll need and which are the best really depends on what type of smart contract you’re developing and its purpose. However, most smart contract developers will need a few basic tools for understanding, writing, and creating smart contracts, including:

Wei Calculator

The Wei Calculator allows for seamless conversions between Ether and its smallest denomination Wei. This tool helps reduce the risk of incorrectly calculating the price of deploying a smart contract.

Hex Converter

A hex converter translates hexadecimal formatted numbers into decimal or binary and vice versa. Since blockchain addresses, transaction hashes, and data encoding rely on hexadecimals, this is a crucial tool for any smart contract developer.

Unix Time Converter

If you’re developing a smart contract with features such as time locks, expiration dates or scheduled actions, you’ll need a unix time converter. This tool helps convert between unix time stamps and human-readable date formats.

Keccak 256 Converter

The Keccak-256 converter is for generating cryptographic hashes—essential for keeping smart contracts secure. If you’re a smart contract developer, using this tool will help you verify and compute hashes for smart contract inputs.

What kind of tools are there for smart contract developers?

Of course, once you get start on your journey, there are countless tools you can employ as a smart contract developer. So, let’s dive into some of our top smart contract development tools you might need on your journey, from writing the contract, to testing it and deploying it.

Tools for Writing & Developing Smart Contracts

The first thing you’ll need to do is write or develop your smart contract, so here are some of the top tools for creating smart contracts themselves.

Pre-built Contracts

While writing your own contract is commendable, it can lead to deploying contracts with easily avoidable bugs, and possibly even costing you extra money to redeploy. One of the best ways to avoid this is to use an easily deployable smart contract template.

Via thirdweb Explore, you can access pre-audited, robust smart contract templates for all of your needs; whether you want to launch a simple token, an NFT smart contract, or more complex consumer app.

Hardhat

Hardhat is a versatile and extensible framework for Ethereum smart contract development. Hardhat is also a testing tool that helps with Integrated assertions, local blockchain environments, advanced debugging, and testing across networks.

Foundry

Foundry is a solidity-native framework, optimized for speed designed specifically for Ethereum smart contract development. Foundry is used as a testing tool as well using Solidity itself as the testing language, bypassing the need for JavaScript or TypeScript and being incredibly efficient

Tools for deploying smart contracts

Deploy

Deploy is a client-side smart contract deployment tool allowing users to deploy smart contracts securely on any EVM compatible chain. Deploy is free to use and is compatible with smart contracts created with any framework.

RPCs

thirdweb has built-in free RPCs via RPC Edge, offering high data reliability, throughput, and uptime — so that you can build production-grade web3 apps that scale.

Faucets

It is highly recommended to test out your contract on a testnet before deploying on mainnet. To deploy on a testnet, you will need to obtain funds from a free faucet to pay for the gas fees to deploy the contract.

Transaction Simulator

Once you’ve deployed your smart contract on a mainnet, you’ll want to make sure it does what you expect by using a transaction simulator. Of course, a transaction simulator is useful for all smart contract developers, whether interacting with your own contracts or someone else’s.

Blockchain Data and Analytics Tools

IPFS (Decentralized Storage Tool)

IPFS is a decentralized, peer-to-peer protocol for storing and sharing files using content-addressing. When it can be too costly to store all information onchain, IPFS is used as a decentralized storage option and the onchain data leads to the IPFS link. Via thirdweb you can upload and pin files to IPFS without the complexity of managing those files yourself.

thirdweb Insight (Blockchain Indexer)

thirdweb Insight is a fast, reliable and fully customizable way for developers to index, transform & query onchain data. Using its robust API and indexing infrastructure, thirdweb Insight can provide web3 apps with the data they need—lightning fast, and without any complexity to implement.

Engine (For Nonce Management, Automated Transaction Retries and more)

thirdweb Engine is a backend solution for apps that want to maximize throughput and eliminate stuck transactions. Think of Engine as the spirit of seamless blockchain actions: it handles nonce management, unlocks gas sponsorship and enhances your app’s user experience so you can concentrate on its features.

thirdweb: Smart tools for contract development

By integrating these powerful web3 tools into your development pipeline, you can focus on innovation and building impactful solutions without being hindered. With blockchain technology continuing to mature, staying equipped with the latest and most efficient tools ensures you remain ahead of the curve, delivering high-quality secure contracts.

So what are you waiting for? Get started for free with thirdweb!