Towards a management plane for smart contracts: Ethereum case study

Abstract

Blockchain is an emerging foundational technology with the potential to create a novel economic and social system. The complexity of the technology poses many challenges and foremost amongst these are monitoring and management of blockchain-based decentralized applications. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate a novel system to enable management operations in smart contracts. A key aspect of our system is that it facilitates the integration of these operations through dedicated 'managing' smart contracts to provide data filtering as per the role of the smart contract-based application user. We evaluate the overhead costs of such data filtering operations after post-deployment analyses of five categories of smart contracts on the Ethereum public testnet, Rinkeby. We also build a monitoring tool to display public blockchain data using a dashboard coupled with a notification mechanism of any changes in private data to the administrator of the monitored decentralized application.