Can Smart Contracts Become Smart?

Abstract

Despite the growth in the number of decentralized applications (DApps) supported by the Ethereum blockchain, we can observe the narrow scope of these DApps, concentrated within the fintech and games areas. A cause for the lack of range of DApps lies in the fees for transactions sent to backing smart contracts. While consistent steps have been made to overcome cost efficiency problems, introducing rollups as a secondary layer solution, intertwined accessibility and security drawbacks still persist. Measures addressing some of these issues like account abstraction were independently proposed. These solutions bring changes in transaction handling that often exceed the scope of smart contracts, where the core of DApp logic resides. Integrating such measures often requires the use of new frameworks and understanding the changes in the transaction flow, which can prove challenging to a DApp developer. A question is whether the current landscape of solutions proposed for increasing usability is capable of producing a consistent impact on DApp scope trends. In this position paper we try to answer this, raising also the matter of impact on DApp engineering.