Smarter Smart Contract Development Tools

Much recent work focuses on finding bugs and security vulnerabilities in smart contracts written in existing languages. Although this approach may be helpful, it does not address flaws in the underlying programming language, which can facilitate writing buggy code in the first place. We advocate a re-thinking of the blockchain software engineering tool set, starting with the programming language in which smart contracts are written. In this paper, we propose and justify requirements for a new generation of blockchain software development tools. New tools should (1) consider users' needs as a primary concern; (2) seek to facilitate safe development by detecting relevant classes of serious bugs at compile time; (3) as much as possible, be blockchain-agnostic, given the wide variety of different blockchain platforms available, and leverage the properties that are common among blockchain environments to improve safety and developer effectiveness.