SPESC: A Specification Language for Smart Contracts

Abstract

The smart contract is an interdisciplinary concept that concerns business, finance, contract law and information technology. Designing and developing a smart contract may require the close cooperation of many experts coming from different fields. How to support such collaborative development is a challenging problem in blockchain-oriented software engineering. This paper proposes SPESC, a specification language for smart contracts, which can define the specification of a smart contract for the purpose of collaborative design. SPESC can specify a smart contract in a similar form to real-world contracts using a natural-language-like grammar, in which the obligations and rights of parties and the transaction rules of cryptocurrencies are clearly defined. The preliminary study results demonstrated that SPESC can be easily learned and understood by both IT and non-IT users and thus has greater potential to facilitate collaborative smart contract development.