SoK: Research status and challenges of blockchain smart contracts

Abstract

The smart contract code facilitates, verifies, and enforces the negotiation or performance of an agreement or transaction. As a decentralized, difficult-to-be-tampered, and distributed computing platform, blockchain can ensure that a smart contract is strictly executed and not modified midway. Smart contracts endow the blockchain platform with programmability, which greatly expands the blockchain’s application fields. However, there are many common problems in the efficiency and flexibility of smart contract execution. In this paper, the characteristics and architectural model of the smart contract were introduced, and its development platform, and application scenarios were analyzed. In the end, we discussed the smart contract’s research direction and challenges.