Starknet is an ecosystem that made a bold decision: it launched with its own custom language—Cairo. That means, among other things, it had to build everything from scratch. Cairo devs couldn’t rely on any of the existing blockchain tooling available for Solidity, Ethereum, or other blockchain ecosystems.
Indexers, nodes, testing frameworks—every piece of developer infrastructure had to be built separately by the Starknet ecosystem or its community.
In August 2024, the Starknet Foundation conducted an in-depth survey targeting its developer community to assess the current state of development and identify areas for improvement. The survey garnered responses from 92 Cairo developers, with a significant portion (61%) having 3–5 years of coding experience.
When asked about the tools they most desired, 36.8% of developers prioritized the development of an online debugger and profiler for Starknet, surpassing other tools like a Cairo package registry and documentation generators. This emphasis on debugging tools indicates a pressing need for better developer support in the ecosystem.
The survey also delved into security tooling preferences. In that category, transaction debugging emerged as the top priority, with 32.4% of respondents selecting it over other options such as formal verification, static analysis, and code coverage tools. This consistent demand across different tooling categories underscores the critical role of debugging in the development process.
These insights from the Starknet developer survey highlight a clear and pressing demand for robust debugging and simulation tools within the ecosystem.
In traditional software, monitoring and debugging have historically been the cornerstone of development. It’s no different for blockchain or smart contract devs.
What’s happening in Starknet isn’t unique. Every rollup and chain—Optimism, Arbitrum, Miden, Fuel, zkSync, you name them—faces the same barrier. Without great tooling, devs struggle to build.
That’s why we’re working with ecosystems like Starknet, Arbitrum and Optimism and many more to bring modern debugging and simulation tools to their communities. It closes the loop faster, surfaces bugs earlier, and gives teams the confidence to move fast.
If you’re building a new chain or rollup and want to raise the bar for your dev experience, we’d love to talk. We’ve done it before—and we can help you do it too.