Scilla plugin for Hardhat updated to v3.7.1

The Zilliqa infrastructure team has released v3.7.1 of the Scilla plugin for Hardhat, the popular development environment for EVM applications.

Hardhat is a development environment designed to make it easy for builders to compile and deploy EVM-compatible smart contracts.

EVM, or Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a software platform that is used to build applications on Ethereum and other protocols that have implemented EVM compatibility, including the Zilliqa network.

The latest version of the Scilla plugin for Hardhat includes a number of general fixes and new features, the most important of which is the ability to interact with contracts that are already deployed on the Zilliqa network.

This feature is implemented in such a way that existing contracts can be interacted with without prior knowledge of the target contract’s source code. Developers can simply provide the address of an existing contract and receive a ready-to-use contract object.

Connecting to an existing contract can be easily accomplished through the “interactWithScillaContract” function, which takes a blockchain address as its argument and returns the relevant smart contract data as an object.

This is done by retrieving the code for the specified contract from the configured blockchain, parsing the contract code, constructing a proxy contract object and returning it.

Allowing applications created with Hardhat to interact with Scilla contracts running on the Zilliqa network is a major step towards improving the interoperability of EVM and Scilla applications on the blockchain, allowing those building EVM applications on Zilliqa to more easily leverage existing contracts within their applications.

The enhancements made to the Scilla plugin for Hardhat represent just one facet of the Zilliqa infrastructure team’s ongoing commitment to enhance the development experience on the EVM-compatible Zilliqa platform.

As development around EVM compatibility progresses, improvements will continue to be rolled out to improve the experience of deploying applications on the Zilliqa network.

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