Mutant-Driven Test Generation for Ethereum Smart Contracts via LLMs

Abstract

Bugs in Solidity smart contracts caused millions of dollars in losses in the past year alone. Mutation testing can expose weaknesses in test suites that simpler coverage metrics often miss, but the effort required to generate test cases for live mutants remains a major barrier to adoption. To address this, we present Alchemist, a framework that generates test cases from Solidity mutants via LLMs. Alchemist incorporates the scientific method into its test generation process, enabling the systematic refinement of test cases through hypotheses. Evaluation on Solidity projects demonstrates that this method improves test quality over direct prompting while reducing developer effort.