A smart contract developer is an expert who specializes in creating, deploying, and maintaining smart contracts and related infrastructure. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts driven by pre-defined rules and conditions encoded on the blockchain platform. These agreements automatically enter into contractual terms without the need for intermediaries or third parties if specified conditions are met.
In theory, real-world smart contracts are fully decentralized, requiring developers to understand a new infrastructure for storing data, managing transactions, and enforcing identities. In practice, most smart contracts involve a mix of traditional and decentralized infrastructure to strike the right balance between performance and usability. Smart contract developers have a deep understanding of blockchain platforms and protocols and can write code that interacts with these platforms to deploy and execute smart contracts.
Sanjiv Maewall, CTO of Blockchain and Digital Assets at Deloitte Consulting, said smart contract developers should learn blockchain fundamentals, master smart contract programming languages such as Solidity and Clarity, and understand the security risks associated with smart contracts. said that it is necessary to understand Additionally, gaining hands-on experience by practicing smart contract development, participating in open source projects, and participating in developer communities that foster continuous learning and collaboration will dramatically advance your career development journey. increase.
Why Pursue a Career in Smart Contract Development?
Pursuing a career in smart contract development has some compelling benefits.
- Emerging field. Blockchain technology, including smart contracts, is still relatively new and evolving rapidly, making it an ideal opportunity to learn about decentralized technology.
- High demand and competitive salaries. Smart contract development and blockchain development are high paying jobs. The average smart contract developer salary is around $125,000.
- Progress in decentralized technology. Decentralized technology has the potential to revolutionize various sectors such as finance, supply chain, and healthcare.
- Join the next big wave. Smart contracts enable the automation and execution of contracts without relying on intermediaries via a decentralized infrastructure that many see as the next wave of computing.
- new opportunities. Smart contract developers can learn the skills to create their own decentralized applications (dApps) and blockchain-based projects.
Requirements to become a smart contract developer
Smart contract developers require a whole new set of skills. It is important to determine how new concepts and tools relate to what you already know. It could be like learning a new programming language and how to write programs at the same time, said his Hyperledger FireFly maintainer and senior full stack at Kaleido, his platform for his blockchain-based Web 3.0 application. Engineer Nicko Guyer said.
“You might even be able to write smart contracts using languages you already know,” explained Guyer. “But even if they can’t, developers of all skill levels will find their existing experience invaluable as they learn how to write their own smart contracts.”
The main requirements to become a smart contract developer are:
- Basic programming knowledge in languages such as JavaScript, Python, and C++ as a foundation for understanding programming logic.
- Understand the basics of blockchain, including decentralized networks, consensus mechanisms, cryptographic algorithms, and the structure of blockchains.
- Familiarity with smart contract development frameworks and tools such as Truffle, Brownie, and Remix.
- Experience with the Solidity programming language and how it facilitates blockchain transactions.
- Experiment with blockchain platforms such as Ethereum to understand the workflow and development process.
- Smart contract security awareness to understand how smart contracts and dApps can be compromised and how to mitigate these issues.
- A distributed testing and debugging experience where you can create tests and fix issues.
Steps to become a smart contract developer
It’s important to start by understanding the principles of object-oriented development. Developers experienced in object-oriented development can learn the basics of smart contracts in four to six weeks, said Lata Varghese, managing director of digital assets and cryptocurrencies at IT consultancy Protobiti. said there is. She also recommended learning her Solidity, the most popular blockchain programming language for the Ethereum virtual machine and widely used in various of her EVM-compatible blockchains. Other options include Vyper and Rust.
Learning how to design, develop and test smart contracts is not fundamentally different from learning any other kind of programming, Geyer said. It helps you understand the basics of the execution environment in which your code runs. It’s also important to understand how serverless platforms differ from traditional long-lived server he-daemons, which differ significantly from mobile he-apps. Each of these different paradigms has constraints that affect application design.
Additionally, learning a programming language for writing smart contracts is important. Many blockchain platforms let you use languages you already know, such as Go, JavaScript, and Java. Guyer said that smart languages like Solidity aren’t hard to learn, even for contract-focused languages, because the languages themselves tend to be small.
Familiarizing yourself with new blockchain platform tools is also important. Different types of blockchains have different sets of tools and frameworks. Learning how to use them effectively will help you develop and test smart contracts. “Creating comprehensive tests for a contract is an absolutely critical part of development and will prevent costly mistakes down the road,” says Guyer.
The future of smart contract development
Many of the foundational principles of smart contract development also help capitalize on opportunities in privacy-enhanced computing, trustworthy AI, decentralized finance, and generative AI. Decentralized infrastructure is expected to play an increasing role in the financial, supply chain, real estate and healthcare industries by finding new ways to streamline processes, reduce costs and increase transparency. .
Smart contracts tend to be developed for specific blockchain platforms. As the industry evolves, developers create applications that run on multiple platforms. Our experience with complex smart contract infrastructures also helps developers find ways to reduce transaction costs and speed up dApp confirmation times.
The growth of generative AI has increased scrutiny over the privacy aspects of the data used to train and run these new algorithms. Smart contract developers will be able to take better advantage of medical and financial opportunities.
