Cost Minimization of Solidity Smart Contracts on Blockchain Systems

Abstract

Recently the blockchain technology has been actively studied due to its great potentiality. The smart contract is a key mechanism of the blockchain system. Due to the short history of the smart contract, many issues have not been solved yet. One main issue is vulnerability and another main issue is cost optimization. While the vulnerability of smart contract has been actively studied, the cost optimization has been rarely studied. In this paper, we propose two cost optimization methods for smart contracts running on the blockchain system. Triggering a function in a smart contract program code may require costs and it is repeated continuously. So the minimization of costs required to trigger a function of smart contract while maintaining the performance equally is very important. The proposed two methods minimize the usage of expensive permanent variables deployed on the blockchain system. We apply the proposed two methods to three prevalent blockchain platforms: Ethereum, Klaytn and Tron. Evaluation experiments verify that the proposed scheme significantly reduces the costs of functions in the smart contract written with Solidity.