Verifying and Displaying Move Smart Contract Source Code for the Sui Blockchain

Abstract

Smart contract development presents additional challenges beyond traditional software workflows, e.g., locally in IDEs. For smart contract developers to understand and trust code execution, they need to write and use software libraries with a comprehensible code representation---i.e., source code. However, blockchains do not typically store the original source code of smart contracts, but a condensed bytecode representation. Thus, when developers consult smart contract source code, they need to be sure that it corresponds to the same bytecode on the blockchain. Depending on available developer tools, this process can be ad-hoc, cumbersome, or opaque. In this paper we present our design and implementation of a new tool that serves to verify Move smart contract source code against its bytecode representation on the Sui blockchain. We demonstrate the user-facing shift where developers now benefit from seeing source code in their browser instead of bytecode. We further highlight future features and research directions that verified source availability brings to smart contract developer experience.