Advanced Smart Contract Optimisations

Optimize your Cardano validators to reduce script size and execution costs. This section covers advanced techniques to make your smart contracts more efficient on-chain.

Why Optimize?

On Cardano, validators consume blockchain resources:

Memory usage - Affects transaction fees
CPU execution steps - Limited per transaction
Script size - Larger scripts cost more to deploy and execute

Optimization reduces these costs, making your DApp more economical for users.

Optimization Techniques

Macros - Inline constants and conditional code generation at compile-time
Direct Script Context Access - Efficiently extract specific fields without full deserialization
Scalus Intermediate Representation (SIR) - Understand and optimize the compilation pipeline
UPLC Optimizations - Apply low-level optimizations to reduce execution costs

When to Optimize

After functionality is correct - Get it working first, then optimize
When hitting limits - Transaction size or execution budget constraints
For production deployment - Reduce user costs and improve UX
Iteratively - Profile, optimize, measure, repeat