Developer migrates a Solidity perpetual futures contract to Soroban using AI tools, walking through the differences between EVM and Rust/WebAssembly development, contract simplification, and debugging with unit tests.
This tutorial demonstrates migrating a 2022 Solidity perpetual futures contract to Soroban, leveraging AI tools like ChatGPT to automate much of the translation work. The speaker covers key architectural differences: message.sender becomes env.invoker with explicit authorization checks, error handling shifts from require to panic, and storage uses key-value pairs. The contract implements a simplified perpetual futures system with margin requirements, liquidation mechanics, and funding rate concepts. After simplification to remove admin functions and external dependencies, the code is translated to Rust and compiled to WebAssembly. Unit testing reveals critical bugs in token approval flows and type mismatches with SEP-41 token transfers. The final contract compiles successfully with 15 passing tests, though the speaker emphasizes this is not production-ready without formal verification and security audits.
