After deploying your contract you might realize that you need to maintain it, either to fix a bug or add new functionality.
Let us here guide you on how to deploy, update and finally lock your smart contract, so its code
cannot change anymore.
Upgrading a Contract
If the contract’s account has a Full Access Key, then
you will be able to re-deploy another contract on top of it later. On doing so, take into account that re-deploying a contract
does not wipe the state. This means that while the code will change the state will persist.
Since the state is persisted, adding/modifying methods that read the storage and returns a value will yield no problem. However,
deploying a contract with a different state will raise a Cannot deserialize the contract state error.
Migrating Contract’s State
If the new contract has a different state but you need anyway to deploy it, you have the option to implement a new method to migrate
the contract’s state. Please check our migration page.
Locking a Contract
- If you remove the full access key from the account, then the account will become
locked. When the account is locked nobody can perform a transaction in the contract account’s name (e.g. update the code or transfer money).- This tends to bring more reassurance to the users, knowing that no external actor will be able to manipulate the contract’s state or
- balance.
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::tip Upgrading Locked Contracts
Please do note that, while no external actor can update the contract, the contract can still upgrade itself!. For example, our reference
DAO implementation includes an upgrading mechanism
governed by the community. - ::
