Empirical Evaluation of Blockchain Smart Contracts

Abstract

One of the building blocks of our legal and economic systems in society is the indispensable reliance on contracts and trust systems to protect individual rights. Recently smart contracts are becoming prominent parts of various blockchain platforms. The goal of smart contracts is to eliminate the third party and centralized trust systems. Due to recent emergence of smart contracts, there is no well-defined framework that researchers can use to evaluate smart contracts under various blockchain platforms and differentiate between them. In this work, a survey on the prominent smart contract landscape specially those based on blockchain have been conducted. Based on the survey, an evaluation framework to assess smart contracts has been proposed. The framework is a set of criteria based on two major aspects; infrastructure related and development related criteria. The evaluation framework was peer-reviewed for reliability and validity. To measure the applicability of the proposed framework, it has been used to empirically evaluate some of the most prominent smart contract platforms. The results of the empirical evaluation have shown that the Ethereum blockchain smart contract exceeds the others in terms of development tools, resources, and community support. EOS blockchain smart contracts have the best execution speeds, and transaction costs. Lastly, Stellar blockchain has predictability and the best transaction builder to use in smart contract development concerning user friendliness. Recommendations for smart contract developers are provided in light of the research.