Altering the smart contract deployed on a blockchain is typically a cumbersome task, necessitating a proxy design, specific secondary data storage, or the use of obscure APIs. This can be substantially simplified if the programming language features orthogonal persistence, automatically retaining the native program state across program version upgrades. For this purpose, a customized compiler and runtime system needs to arrange the data in a self-descriptive portable format, such that new program versions can pick up the previous program state, check their compatibility, and support implicit or explicit data evolutions. We have implemented this for a modern programming language on a compute blockchain and evaluated the benefits in terms of code simplicity as well as upgrade and execution costs.