Bullish wins US patent for debugging WebAssembly smart contracts

Bullish Global has been granted a US patent for a method that lets developers debug WebAssembly smart contracts interactively, without interrupting the code that is already running. The patent, US Patent No. 12,321,772 B2, targets one of the less glamorous but more persistent pain points in blockchain development: figuring out why code misbehaves without breaking it further in the process. What the patent actually covers The core idea is parallel construction. Bullish’s method generates a native code version of an existing WebAssembly implementation, and that native version runs side by side with the original Wasm code. WebAssembly, usually shortened to Wasm, is a compact code format designed to run inside a virtual machine. “Native” code, by contrast, is built to run directly on the underlying hardware, which is typically where the mature debugging tools live. The key word in the filing is non-disruptive. The primary execution environment is meant to stay untouched while the debugging happens elsewhere. That matters because smart contracts are not ordinary software. Once deployed, they often handle real value, and halting or altering them to hunt for a bug can carry real consequen...