The treewidth of smart contracts

Abstract

Smart contracts are programs that are stored and executed on the Blockchain and can receive, manage and transfer money (cryptocurrency units). Two important problems regarding smart contracts are formal analysis and compiler optimization. Formal analysis is extremely important, because smart contracts hold funds worth billions of dollars and their code is immutable after deployment. Hence, an undetected bug can cause significant financial losses. Compiler optimization is also crucial, because every action of a smart contract has to be executed by every node in the Blockchain network. Therefore, optimizations in compiling smart contracts can lead to significant savings in computation, time and energy.