TY - JOUR
T1 - A comprehensive survey on smart contract construction and execution
T2 - paradigms, tools, and systems
AU - Hu, Bin
AU - Zhang, Zongyang
AU - Liu, Jianwei
AU - Liu, Yizhong
AU - Yin, Jiayuan
AU - Lu, Rongxing
AU - Lin, Xiaodong
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 The Authors
PY - 2021/2/12
Y1 - 2021/2/12
N2 - Smart contracts are regarded as one of the most promising and appealing notions in blockchain technology. Their self-enforcing and event-driven features make some online activities possible without a trusted third party. Nevertheless, problems such as miscellaneous attacks, privacy leakage, and low processing rates prevent them from being widely applied. Various schemes and tools have been proposed to facilitate the construction and execution of secure smart contracts. However, a comprehensive survey for these proposals is absent, hindering new researchers and developers from a quick start. This paper surveys the literature and online resources on smart contract construction and execution over the period 2008–2020. We divide the studies into three categories: (1) design paradigms that give examples and patterns on contract construction, (2) design tools that facilitate the development of secure smart contracts, and (3) extensions and alternatives that improve the privacy or efficiency of the system. We start by grouping the relevant construction schemes into the first two categories. We then review the execution mechanisms in the last category and further divide the state-of-the-art solutions into three classes: private contracts with extra tools, off-chain channels, and extensions on core functionalities. Finally, we summarize several challenges and identify future research directions toward developing secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient smart contracts. We conducted a comprehensive survey on the smart contract execution and construction schemes over 2008–2020. This work is aimed to provide insights for new researchers and developers in this field. According to our survey, problems such as privacy leakage, execution efficiency, and contract complexity have restricted the application scenarios of smart contracts. After categorizing the relevant schemes, we identify several future research directions, including fair off-chain schemes, practical implementations, scalable and automatic analysis tools, and private contracts with practical compilers.
AB - Smart contracts are regarded as one of the most promising and appealing notions in blockchain technology. Their self-enforcing and event-driven features make some online activities possible without a trusted third party. Nevertheless, problems such as miscellaneous attacks, privacy leakage, and low processing rates prevent them from being widely applied. Various schemes and tools have been proposed to facilitate the construction and execution of secure smart contracts. However, a comprehensive survey for these proposals is absent, hindering new researchers and developers from a quick start. This paper surveys the literature and online resources on smart contract construction and execution over the period 2008–2020. We divide the studies into three categories: (1) design paradigms that give examples and patterns on contract construction, (2) design tools that facilitate the development of secure smart contracts, and (3) extensions and alternatives that improve the privacy or efficiency of the system. We start by grouping the relevant construction schemes into the first two categories. We then review the execution mechanisms in the last category and further divide the state-of-the-art solutions into three classes: private contracts with extra tools, off-chain channels, and extensions on core functionalities. Finally, we summarize several challenges and identify future research directions toward developing secure, privacy-preserving, and efficient smart contracts. We conducted a comprehensive survey on the smart contract execution and construction schemes over 2008–2020. This work is aimed to provide insights for new researchers and developers in this field. According to our survey, problems such as privacy leakage, execution efficiency, and contract complexity have restricted the application scenarios of smart contracts. After categorizing the relevant schemes, we identify several future research directions, including fair off-chain schemes, practical implementations, scalable and automatic analysis tools, and private contracts with practical compilers.
KW - blockchain
KW - contract construction
KW - contract execution
KW - efficient development
KW - privacy
KW - security analysis
KW - smart contract
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85100790209
U2 - 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100179
DO - 10.1016/j.patter.2020.100179
M3 - 文献综述
AN - SCOPUS:85100790209
SN - 2666-3899
VL - 2
JO - Patterns
JF - Patterns
IS - 2
M1 - 100179
ER -