Smart Contract Development from the Perspective of Developers: Topics\n and Issues Discussed on Social Media

Abstract

Blockchain-based platforms are emerging as a transformative technology that\ncan provide reliability, integrity, and auditability without trusted entities.\nOne of the key features of these platforms is the trustworthy decentralized\nexecution of general-purpose computation in the form of smart contracts, which\nare envisioned to have a wide range of applications. As a result, a rapidly\ngrowing and active community of smart-contract developers has emerged in recent\nyears. A number of research efforts have investigated the technological\nchallenges that these developers face, introducing a variety of tools,\nlanguages, and frameworks for smart-contract development, focusing on security.\nHowever, relatively little is known about the community itself, about the\ndevelopers, and about the issues that they face and discuss. To address this\ngap, we study smart-contract developers and their discussions on two social\nmedia sites, Stack Exchange and Medium. We provide insight into the trends and\nkey topics of these discussions, into the developers' interest in various\nsecurity issues and security tools, and into the developers' technological\nbackground.\n