In this article, we will go through the top web3 tools for programmers as well as the platforms and strategies a smart contract developer needs to be familiar with to succeed.
Before getting started, if you're looking to level up your web3 career, go to Cyfrin Updraft and get access to 95+ hours of industry-leading web3 development courses, completely free.
OK, let’s start with the most important element - the programming language.
In this list of the best web3 tools for developers, we must first mention the most popular smart contract programming languages.
Solidity remains the dominant language, with over 85% of all smart contract value flowing through it. This is actually down from last year’s 94%, which is not surprising considering the advancements Rust, Bitcoin Script, and Vyper made in the past year.
As far as languages go, Solidity and Rust continue to dominate, and we expect Vyper to continue gaining traction. Unfortunately, in 2024 Vyper had an issue with reentrancy locks, but it resulted in a massive community turnout to support and improve it. We’ve also seen some PRs introduced for stateful modules, they have started doing competitive audits, and other major improvements seem to be in the works.
Personally, I’m a big fan of Vyper and believe it will play a huge role in shaping web3’s future. That’s why we released an introductory, intermediate, and advanced Vyper course on Cyfrin Updraft.
Foundry and Hardhat return from last year's best web3 developer tools leaderboard as our top 2 frameworks.
Hardhat still has the most repos using it, but this year, we saw most new projects launch with Foundry. Why?
But really, the speed of Foundry is pushing it to the top. At Cyfrin, we’ve seen most new projects looking for security reviews using Foundry, and most projects looking for competitive audits also using Foundry.
Foundry is going to be the go-to tool for new projects in 2025. And I’m talking about both developers and security researchers.
But now there is a new kid on the block called Moccasin. It is a Python-based smart contract development framework that I developed to help you create, test, and deploy Vyper contracts. Using the Titanoboa infrastructure, it offers a Pythonic environment tailored for blockchain developers. Let’s explore some of Moccasin’s key features:
It streamlines smart contract development, especially for deployment on platforms like ZKsync, and it’s featured in our Vyper courses for hands-on experience.
Chainlink and OpenZeppelin continue to be among the top web3 tools every developer should know. They both continued to ship great products this past year:
So, they continue to be the go-to resources for Solidity extendable contracts (OpenZeppelin) and oracles (Chainlink). Chainlink CCIP, in particular, should be paid very close attention to, as it’s going to bring about a new age of cross-chain decentralized applications (dApps).
Solady has been building for over two years for other essentials and should not be discounted. While its contract library is smaller than OpenZeppelin’s, it has a ton of gas-optimized contracts that new projects should check out as an OZ alternative.
We are also seeing an uptick in:
And we expect to see more development here as well.
Web3 wallets have been getting an upgrade for dApp developers, too. Not only that, but we are seeing wallets level up in general:
And finally, everyone should be using a multi-sig like Safe. It boosts security by requiring multiple transaction approvals, making it great for team collaboration, and works smoothly with lots of dApps and blockchains.
If you want to learn more about the right wallet for you, take a look at our guides on the best cold storage wallets and best hardware wallets to store your assets
In the past year, we saw massive strides in security.
Competitive audit platform CodeHawks released an update, giving auditors a place to level up and protocols a place to squash bugs!
Additionally, we saw the release of tools such as Aderyn. It’s an open-source, Rust-based static analyzer that helps protocol engineers and security researchers spot vulnerabilities in Solidity smart contracts.
Certain techniques also got more exposure.
Cyfrin security researcher Dacian did a deep dive on fuzzing tools.
According to him, the top tools (in order) are:
Fuzz tests are a requirement for all web3 projects in 2024. If you don’t have any, your codebase is not done.
We are also seeing FV get the love it deserves with tools like:
Projects are also starting to use FV and treat smart contracts like hardware. If they break, it’s not okay!
So those are our five top tools that you need to be aware of for this year. I hope you learned something and are using the tools that best get the job done.
We made a lot of progress this year, and it's time to go even further. If you’re also ready to level up your skills, check out Cyfrin Updraft!
