Engineering Smart Contracts with Symboleo: Progress Report 2024

Abstract

Legal contracts have been used for millennia around the world as a foundation for business transactions. Smart con-tracts are cyber-physical systems that deploy Internet-of-Things (IoT) and blockchain technologies to monitor, automate, and control the execution of legal contracts. Because of the conceptual complexity of legal concepts and the technologies deployed, developing smart contracts is a time-consuming and error-prone task. The aim of this project is to develop concepts, tools and methods for engineering smart contracts. The contributions of the project consist of a specification language, called Symboleo, and related tools that are intended to make the engineering of smart contracts more systematic and cost effective. This paper summarizes earlier outcomes of the project and reports on new results obtained during the past year.