Stellar Community Fund

Advanced Debugging for Soroban Smart Contracts

SCF #41

Description

This project delivers advanced debugging for Soroban smart contracts through a precise low-level debugger that inspects execution inside the Soroban runtime. Soroban contracts compile to WASM and execute in a constrained environment where interactions occur through host functions under strict resource limits, making traditional debugging ineffective. Devs rely on simulation and logging, which provide only partial visibility, making failures hard to diagnose and increasing development and audit costs.

To address this gap, we propose a debugger that lets developers step through execution at the WASM level, inspect VM state, observe host function interactions, and track storage and authorization to understand contract behavior precisely. Building on Komet and WASM semantics, we'll extend them with execution tracing to record step-by-step execution and full VM state. We'll package semantics into a local execution backend that reproduces real runtime behavior and emits rich traces, implement a Debug Adapter Protocol server, and distribute integrations for VS Code and Cursor.