Living in an open space or where there are fewer people around, could mean less security and safety for you and your family. That fence around your cabin won’t do much good against an intruder. Neither will you have any deterrence against an intruder, nor will you have any proof of anyone trespassing.
Surely then, you’d think of stringing some barbed wire around your home while also hooking up a CCTV monitoring system that would record and track an intruder’s movements. If someone does happen to get passed your barbed wire and fence, you’d still be able to pursue the individual thanks to your security camera recordings.
But all this is possible in the tangible world; how about implementing a traceable security setup for something that’s less tangible, such as a digital ledger in which you may have to account for thousands of dollars?
Today it’s possible to deploy a system that offers complete accountability, traceability, and improved security levels for digital assets. Such a system can be implemented for heightened financial security with ease. It can be applied to almost all your contracts once they are digitized; indeed, by using smart contracts you can secure your digital assets with higher traceability for every action on your digital ledger.
What are Smart Contracts?
Smart contracts are crucial elements of blockchain technology that provide authenticity and makes it a platform to trade. Today, smart contract use cases are being expanded across different industries to obtain security via mutual agreements.
Smart contracts function as a type of Ethereum account and store a user's balance and transactional information within the network. Moreover, it permits users to connect their accounts with it.
Smart contracts eliminate the need for intermediaries, resulting in smooth agreements and even transactions. They have become a significant element of the dApps ecosystem.
Want to integrate smart contracts with your software? Here's your ultimate guide to smart contract best practices.
General Guidelines for Smart Contracts Development
Simple Smart Contracts
Integrating smart contracts adds value to a simple contract agreement and tracks blockchain properties. Therefore, it is essential to build an uncomplicated contract logic for carrying out smooth and quick digital processes.
On the contrary, with complex contract logic can result in bugs and time consumption. Also, it would be a smart approach to utilize pre-written codes as it lowers the chances of errors during execution.
Moreover, simple, smart contracts enhance your user experience while performing transactions, especially with finance-related scenarios.
Potential Failure
Contract failures can result from errors; therefore, it depends on how efficiently you can tackle these failures. However, if you ever experience unexpected failures, the instant approach for smart contract security best practices could comprise:
Also read: Smart working with blockchain-based smart contracts
Ensure Regular Updates
Keeping a track record of contracts regularly counts under smart contract security best practices and helps you determine errors or weak points to be fixed. Moreover, utilizing smart security techniques can help strengthen security. Security checkups and frequent up-gradation to newer versions also help to increase the user experience and secure transactions.
Access Control Mechanisms
As blockchains are designed to function as open-source networks, hackers search for weak points to penetrate from and harm the verified users. To eliminate such consequences, design and build Ethereum smart contracts with a pre-defined access control mechanism with verified users or admin.
To add more value to the user security, ensure that the smart contract must comprise several authorization layers to confirm the authorized access.
Review Code
Thoroughly reviewing your code can result in identifying code vulnerabilities so developers can address the issues before deployment. Above all, reviewing code and fixing bugs enhance quality.
Best Practices for Ethereum Smart Contracts
Documentation and Procedures
Maintaining proof of work and procedures via documentation is crucial and helps launch your smart contract seamlessly. Creating documentation that comprises detailed specifications, diagrams, models, and further details helps reviewers and the community understand the system's insight and functionality.
Smart Contract best practices also comprise keeping track of the status of code deployment with real-time performance records. Moreover, documentation helps viewers understand the limitations, bugs, or risks that they may tackle to improve product quality accordingly.
Another factor n favor of documentation is that it can add value to the user experience with the procedures, which may prevent future confusion regarding product usage. For example, the "What to do" instructions can help when you face situations entailing bug discovery, emergencies, or other issues.
Moreover, product documentation is important because it lists the contact information of concerned authorities – developers or other important people – to report product-related problems or for further queries.
Development Best Practices
Smart contracts have added significant value to the tech industry as well as finance with their secure digital transaction services. As smart contract terms are executed on a blockchain, developers can build smart contracts in different languages while leveraging best practices for writing smart contracts with blockchain-provided security and reliability along with P2P service.
Developers who are new to smart contract development must follow the best practices for writing smart contracts, which can primarily be achieved by harnessing smart contract development environments. One example of this is Truffle. Using a development environment quickens the process of recurring tasks like compilation, launches, upgrading, or unit testing contracts.
Use security analysis tools to determine smart contract-related issues or vulnerabilities at the pre-deployment stage. It’s better to do this asap because it gets difficult or almost impossible to upgrade live smart contracts. You can use pre-commit hooks that enhance the developer's experience. Also, failing to secure smart contracts can result in a tremendous financial crisis.
Moreover, Eth transactions cost money and take time to confirm transactions. Therefore, it’s best to use a local blockchain that helps speed up the development process and helps you run your contracts while you enjoy free and instant transactions.
Read More: Blockchain game development – paving the path to heightened security and traceability.
QA Check Best Practices
Use static analysis tools to pinpoint style inconsistencies and also help determine code errors and vulnerabilities that might be missed by the compiler. Running QA cycles to check the best practices lets you discover bugs and misbehavior. Use a test framework that could help interrupt tests to debug the test flow and validate the state of your contract.
Moreover, high test coverage measures your development and testing efficiency. You may have test coverage results that are very low or undetected bugs (almost zero) and vice versa. Another testing aspect comprises security audits that help determine the knowns and unknowns through manual security audits.
Smart contracts are the digital transactional gateway, and unlike any other transactional gateways, they offer you more security and reliability. Therefore, you must dive deeper into your codebase to uncover security requirements. To do so, use open-source static analysis tools like Ethersplay that permits source code matching, binary diffing, recovery method, and dynamic jump computation.
Smart Contracts Security Best Practices
Allow your users and Ethereum community to start bug bounty that could help them identify real-time, missed critical flaws in the protocol.
Code smart contracts by keeping the security vulnerabilities upfront and by understanding the design patterns, which might include access restrictions, secure Ether transferability, emergency Stops, check effects interaction, and more.
An unfortunate incident occurred in the year 2016, June, when a hacker found a loophole or security vulnerability in the coding that paved the way for him to steal 3.6 M ETH worth $70 M at that time. Today, the responsible authorities need to be very cautious with the fastest-growing DeFi space worth almost $1B.
Moreover, the use cases of blockchain technology been increased due to their reliability and scalability. As a result, hundreds of thousands of dApps from various industries such as gaming, media, finance, real estate, and legal industries – all are using smart contracts or aiming to harness them soon.
DeFi dApps, along with smart contracts, have eased the limitations for those entering the financial world through providing trading, lending, borrowing, and other digital financial opportunities. In addition, the usage of smart contracts has been seen in blockchain-powered NFT-based games built with the play-to-earn model.
Thanks to smart contracts and blockchain-enabled games, you can sell or purchase in-game assets and NFTs through other players via a mutual agreement – making the process smooth while providing verified ownership.
Conclusion
Blockchain technology has become the fastest-growing tech that has empowered the development of NFTs and P2E games, decentralized finance (DeFi) dApps, and more with its multiple futuristic advantages.
Moreover, AI-powered smart contracts can also be developed by combining AI data-intensive processing with secure and immutable blockchain technology. However, AI-based smart contracts comprise high complexity.
Experts believe that the combination of AI and smart contracts could leverage the computational capabilities and offer high security for sharing and storing confidential machine learning data on the internet.
To that end, smart contract development demands a highly secure development and rigorous testing process as compared to other software development like web development, etc.
Build smart contracts with the aim of secure development that cannot be hacked or attacked, resulting in higher user security and reliability.
Read More: 5 Key Blockchain Protocols You Need to Know
Get Your Smart Contracts Developed by Experts
Cubix serves as a full-fledged blockchain development company and has enabled many leading projects in the market. The company has been home to a highly skilled and experienced tech team for the past 14+ years.
Currently, it has partnered with popular clients and aims to build them NFT and blockchain-based projects. A team with expertise understands the cruciality of building strategies before product development, and this is why Cubix stands prominent in the software development world.
If you have decided to build smart contracts for your project, get in touch with the experts at Cubix for a quick consultation and development.
