SmartBuilder: A Block-based Visual Programming Framework for Smart Contract Development

Abstract

Recently, smart contracts are increasingly gaining more attention from academia and industries, due to their potential of increasing efficiency in various application domains. However, building syntactically correct smart contracts is very complex and challenging for non-expert programmers. Besides, as smart contracts are still in the early emerging phase, there is a lack of expertise and tools for supporting practitioners to teach or learn smart contract development. In this paper, we introduce SmartBuilder, a block-based visual programming framework for building smart contracts using extended Google Blockly libraries. It allows Hyperledger Fabric smart contract (also known as Chaincode) development learners or non-expert users to build smart contracts using visual blocks without writing a single code. Moreover, it is a useful and efficient educational tool for teaching or learning how to build smart contracts.