Smart contracts running on the blockchain can hardly be modified after deployment, and their call and execution rely on a consensus procedure. Consequently, existing debugging methods that require the modification of the smart contract code or the interruption of execution cannot be directly applied to smart contracts. Since the running of a smart contract is composed of ordered execution of blockchain transactions, tracing the execution of the transactions is an effective approach to render the smart contract more debuggable. The major goal of tracing blockchain transaction execution is to unveil how a blockchain transaction produces such a result in execution. The execution of a blockchain transaction relies on the internal state of the blockchain, and this state is determined by the execution results of previous transactions, which results in transitive dependencies. Such dependencies and the characteristics of the execution environment the blockchain provides bring challenges to tracing. The tracing of blockchain transaction execution is mainly faced with three challenges: how to obtain enough information for tracing from the production environment in which the smart contract is deployed, how to obtain the dependencies among the blockchain transactions, and how to ensure the consistency between the result of tracing and the real execution online. This study proposes a tracing method for blockchain transaction execution based on recording and replay. By building a recording and replay mechanism in the contract container, the proposed method enables the recording of state reading and writing operations during transaction execution without modifying the contract code and interrupting the running of the smart contract. A transaction dependency analysis method based on state reading and writing is proposed to support the retracing of previous transactions linked by dependencies on demand. Moreover, a verification mechanism for reading and writing operation recording is designed to ensure that the consistency between the replaying execution and the real online execution can be verified. The tracing method can trace the execution of the blockchain transaction that calls the smart contract, which can be used in debugging of smart contracts. When loss is caused by the failure of smart contracts, the tracing result can be used as evidence. Experiments are conducted for a performance comparison between storing recorded reading and writing operations on chain and off chain. The advantages and effectiveness of the proposed method in tracing blockchain transaction execution are revealed by a case study.