Smart Contract Platforms Research Articles

Service Orchestration in NFV-Based Traditional and Emerging Cloud Environments: State of the Art and Research Challenges

Neutral host SCPs represent a key element of the 5G vision of ultra-dense mobile networks. However, current business models mostly focus on multi-year agreements for large venues, such as stadiums and hotel chains. These business agreements are regulated through binding SLAs, which tend to be too cumbersome and costly for smaller-scale SCPs. As a result, the neutral host model does not scale up to its full potential. In this article, we propose a framework to enable the participation of small- to medium-sized players in the cellular market as providers offering network resources to MNOs. To this purpose, we review the current and emerging spectrum and technology opportunities that SCPs can use for neutral host deployments. We also propose the use of blockchain-enabled smart contracts as a simple and cost-efficient alternative to traditional SLAs for small-scale SCPs. To demonstrate this, we describe a proof of concept implementation of an Ethereum-based smart contract platform for best effort service between an SCP and an MNO. Our simulations on potential smart contract-based deployments in city center Dublin show that the received signal strength in the considered area will increase by an average of 10 percent.

Why Stake When You Can Borrow?

As smart contract platforms autonomously manage billions of dollars of capital, quantifying the portfolio risk that investors engender in these systems is increasingly important. Recent work illustrates that Proof of Stake (PoS) is vulnerable to financial attacks arising from on-chain lending and has worse capital efficiency than Proof of Work (PoW). Numerous methods for improving capital efficiency have been proposed that allow stakers to create fungible derivative claims on their staked assets. In this paper, we construct a unifying model for studying the security risks of these proposals. This model combines birth-death Polya processes and risk models adapted from the credit derivatives literature to assess token inequality and return profiles. We find that there is a sharp transition between 'safe' and 'unsafe' derivative usage. Surprisingly, we find that contrary to there exist conditions where derivatives can reduce concentration of wealth in these networks. This model also applies to Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols where staked assets are used as insurance. Our theoretical results are validated using agent-based simulation.

Smart Contracts on the Blockchain – A Bibliometric Analysis and Review

Smart contracts are decentrally anchored scripts on blockchains or similar infrastructures that allow the transparent execution of predefined processes. Using smart contracts, assets like money become programmable, which opens up previously inaccessible application potential. To date, smart contracts control billions in value. This paper analyzes 468 peer-reviewed articles on the topic of smart contracts and their 20,188 references, providing a summary and analysis of the current state of research on smart contracts. Using exploratory factor analysis for co- citation analysis, we identify six different strands of research that concern technical, social, economic and legal disciplines: I) technical foundations, development and open questions of blockchain networks, II) blockchain and smart contracts for the Internet of Things, III) smart contract standardization, verification and security, IV) blockchain and smart contracts for the disruption of existing processes and industries, V) potentials and challenges of smart contracts, and VI) smart contracts and the law. The interrelations between these groups are visualized using social network analysis. We thus obtain a structured overview of the main strands of research concerning smart contracts, their development over time, the relevance of smart contract platforms in research, and conceptual connections between publications and discourses. The results offer researchers and practitioners a substantial basis for their work on smart contracts.

The Ekiden Platform for Confidentiality-Preserving, Trustworthy, and Performant Smart Contracts

Although smart contracts inherit the availability and other security assurances of the blockchain, they are impeded by lack of confidentiality and poor performance. We present Ekiden, a system that aims to close these critical gaps by combining the blockchain with trusted execution environments.

A Survey of Smart Contract Vulnerability Research

Smart contract is a decentralized application that operates on a blockchain platform, providing secure and reliable capabilities to contract participants. Smart contracts play an important role in decentralized application scenarios. They are widely used in many fields, such as equity crowdfunding, games, insurance, and the Internet of Things, making them attractive to attackers. Compared to traditional programs, the security of smart contracts affects not only the fairness of contracts but also the safety of high volume digital assets on the blockchain managed by contracts. Therefore, analyzing the security of smart contracts and associated vulnerabilities is crucial. In this paper, we analyzed the characteristics of smart contracts and new security risks they bring. We propose a three-layer threat model, i.e., threats from high-level languages, virtual machines, and the blockchain, for characterizing smart contract security. We use the world′s largest smart contract platform Ethereum as an example to illustrate 15 types of common vulnerabilities in smart contracts. We then summarize the main challenges and progress of smart contract security research on vulnerability, including automated vulnerability detection, automated exploit generation and mitigations for smart contracts. At the end of this paper, we highlight the future of smart contract security research, and proposed two potential research directions.

Mechanism Design with Blockchain Enforcement

We study the design of self-enforcing mechanisms that rely on neither a trusted third party (e.g., court, trusted mechanism designer) nor a long-term relationship. Instead, we use a smart contract written on blockchains as a commitment device. We design the digital court, a smart contract that identifies and punishes agents who reneged on the agreement. The digital court substitutes the role of legal enforcement in the traditional mechanism design paradigm. We show that any agreement that is implementable with legal enforcement can also be implemented with enforcement by the digital court. To pursue a desirable design of the digital court, we study a way to leverage truthful reports made by a small fraction of behavioral agents. Our digital court has a unique equilibrium as long as there is a positive fraction of behavioral agents, and it gives correct judgment in the equilibrium if honest agents are more likely to exist than dishonest agents. The platform for smart contracts is already ready in 2020; thus, self-enforcing mechanisms proposed in this paper can be used practically, even now. As our digital court can be used for implementing general agreements, it does not leak the detailed information about the agreement even if it is deployed on a public blockchain (e.g., Ethereum) as a smart contract.

Access Control Mechanism for IoT using Blockchain

In our everyday lives, IoT plays a vital role. It is crucial to sense, capture and share data from connected devices via internet. Existing system proposed centralized client/server approach where central authority keeps a record of all the activities. Failure of such centralized authority makes the whole system fail. A decentralized / distributed approach is therefore needed if a single failure point is avoided. In this paper contains information to integrating Blockchain in IoT ecosystem in order to achieve access control. We proposed smart contract based architecture which consist multiple permission contract, one decision contract and one entry contract, to achieve distributed and secure IoT device access control. To conclude system framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with two laptops and one Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the PCs, DC and EC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.

UKRAINIAN CRYPTОCURRENCY IMPLEMENTATION AS A TOOL FOR THE DIGITAL ECONOMY DEVELOPMENT

The article is devoted to a detailed analysis of the Ukrainian cryptocurrency implementation peculiarities and its impact on changes in Additionally, the article gives a brief description of the world economy transformation processes, which are influenced by innovative instruments, primarily cryptocurrencies, blockchain technologies and smart contracts. These changes can fundamentally reshape current economic models and shape the new digital economy. It's proved that Ukraine's economy must be open and flexible to such transformation processes, and therefore the national cryptocurrency development and implementation can prepare the domestic economy and give it considerable leading advantages over other countries. Moreover, currently working Ukrainian cryptocurrency projects have been researched and the main limitations and pitfalls of their functioning have been studied. The main attention is paid to the private UCH project, which is not only based on the blockchain technology like previous projects, but also uses smart contract platforms in three different spheres of Ukraine's economy and has a great potential for launching significant positive changes for Ukraine's Furthermore, the advantages of the national cryptocurrency introduction and its possible functional features are considered in the article. These are: modernization of financial relationships — the national cryptocurrency is expected to improve, simplify and modernize the financial process; decentralization of financial relationships — the cryptocurrency is based on decentralized databases, which can reduce the number of intermediaries and significantly optimize financial transactions; security improvement of financial relationships — new financial technologies are claimed to provide a higher level of protection against errors and fraud; financial transactions transparency and speed increasement — cryptocurrency payments are more faster and more transparent to customers thanks to innovative instruments; the enhancement of currency functionality — the national cryptocurrency is able to extend the current functional characteristics of money; competitive advantages — the modernization of financial relations will allow to stimulate Ukraine's economy development. As a conclusion, the main obstacle of the national cryptocurrency successful implementation is the lack of comprehensive legislative regulation of the crypto market, which would meet the new needs and challenges of the modern

Secure Modular Smart Contract Platform for Multi-Tenant 5G Applications

Trusted decentralized applications based on distributed ledger technologies provide many potential opportunities to 5G applications and verticals, as well as in fifth generation mobile network (5G) enabling technologies, systems, and services. Apart from the tamper-proof exchange of transactions, distributed ledgers can provide a software environment for the trusted execution of smart contracts. In this article, we explore the security aspects of decentralized applications and, in particular, the security of smart contracts. Distributed ledger characteristics impose distinct requirements on smart contract design, implementation, deployment, and management. We briefly present the approach to the development of secure smart contracts, and highlight key smart contract vulnerabilities and the developer tools supporting smart contract security. We developed a secure, upgradeable modular multi-contract platform. It combines per-contract Smart Contract Tunnels and per-user-based access control to minimize vulnerabilities. The smart contract platform is comprised of service-agnostic, auxiliary, and service-specific smart contracts. It can be therefore easily adapted to different 5G application verticals. For illustration and evaluation, we elaborated on the proposed solution on a case of smart electric charging. During the design and development, state-of-the-art code analysis was applied. Finally, we propose an architecture for the integration of the secure multi-contract platform into a 5G architecture. The integration proposal utilizes hybrid private-public blockchain networks for possible security, scalability, performance, and transaction cost optimization.

A Framework Based on Distributed Ledger Technologies for Data Management and Services in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Data are becoming the cornerstone of many businesses and entire systems infrastructure. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are no different. The ability of intelligent vehicles and devices to acquire and share environmental measurements in the form of data is leading to the creation of smart services for the benefit of individuals. In this paper, we present a system architecture to promote the development of ITS using distributed ledgers and related technologies. Thanks to these, it becomes possible to create, store and share data generated by users through the sensors on their devices or vehicles, while on the move. We propose an architecture based on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) to offer features such as immutability, traceability and verifiability of data. IOTA, a promising DLT for IoT, is used together with Decentralized File Storages (DFSes) to store and certify data (and their related metadata) coming from vehicles or by the users' devices themselves (smartphones). Ethereum is then exploited as the smart contract platform that coordinates the data sharing through access control mechanisms. Privacy guarantees are provided by the usage of distributed key management systems and Zero Knowledge Proof. We provide experimental results of a testbed based on real traces, in order to understand if DLT and DFS technologies are ready to support complex services, such as those that pertain to ITS. Results clearly show that, while the viability of the proposal cannot be rejected, further work is needed on the responsiveness of DLT infrastructures.

Smart Contract-Based Trusted Content Retrieval Mechanism for NDN

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new clean-slate architecture for the future Internet. Efficient content retrieval is the original intention of NDN design. The content retrieval process driven by content consumers in NDN includes the following challenges, consumers do not know whether the content exists and whether the content producer is reliable. Invalid interest packets could cause the occupation of limited network resources and DoS attack problem. To ensure the authenticity and integrity of the data packets, consumers need to pre-configure the trust schema, which is centralized and prone to the single point of failure problem. Blockchain has widespread attention to build trust in a distributed way, and Ethereum is a programmable blockchain, a decentralized smart contract platform. To lighten the burden of consumers, we proposed a Smart Contract-based Trusted Content Retrieval Mechanism (SCTCRM) for NDN in this paper. The mechanism contains a trustworthy information base for content and producers based on smart contracts, and provides content retrieval and name resolution services for content consumers. The purpose of this mechanism is to improve the efficiency and security of content retrieval process. We described the framework and the workflow of SCTCRM, and used Colored Petri Nets to create a formal mathematical model and analyze the security of the mechanism. Finally, the cost of storage and Gas in smart contracts are evaluated through the prototype deployment. From the results, we can see that the proposed mechanism is security and practicality.

Smart Contract Development: Challenges and Opportunities

Smart contract, a term which was originally coined to refer to the automation of legal contracts in general, has recently seen much interest due to the advent of blockchain technology. Recently, the term is popularly used to refer to low-level code scripts running on a blockchain platform. Our study focuses exclusively on this subset of smart contracts. Such smart contracts have increasingly been gaining ground, finding numerous important applications (e.g., crowdfunding) in the real world. Despite the increasing popularity, smart contract development still remains somewhat a mystery to many developers largely due to its special design and applications. Are there any differences between smart contract development and traditional software development? What kind of challenges are faced by developers during smart contract development? Questions like these are important but have not been explored by researchers yet. In this paper, we performed an exploratory study to understand the current state and potential challenges developers are facing in developing smart contracts on blockchains, with a focus on Ethereum (the most popular public blockchain platform for smart contracts). Toward this end, we conducted this study in two phases. In the first phase, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 developers from GitHub and industry professionals who are working on smart contracts. In the second phase, we performed a survey on 232 practitioners to validate the findings from the interviews. Our interview and survey results revealed several major challenges developers are facing during smart contract development: (1) there is no effective way to guarantee the security of smart contract code; (2) existing tools for development are still very basic; (3) the programming languages and the virtual machines still have a number of limitations; (4) performance problems are hard to handle under resource constrained running environment; and (5) online resources (including advanced/updated documents and community support) are still limited. Our study suggests several directions that researchers and practitioners can work on to help improve developers’ experience on developing high-quality smart contracts.

An overview on smart contracts: Challenges, advances and platforms

Smart contract technology is reshaping conventional industry and business processes. Being embedded in blockchains, smart contracts enable the contractual terms of an agreement to be enforced automatically without the intervention of a trusted third party. As a result, smart contracts can cut down administration and save services costs, improve the efficiency of business processes and reduce the risks. Although smart contracts are promising to drive the new wave of innovation in business processes, there are a number of challenges to be tackled. This paper presents a survey on smart contracts. We first introduce blockchains and smart contracts. We then present the challenges in smart contracts as well as recent technical advances. We also compare typical smart contract platforms and give a categorization of smart contract applications along with some representative examples.

A Survey on Efficient Parallelization of Blockchain-based Smart Contracts

The main problem faced by smart contract platforms is the amount of time and computational power required to reach consensus. In a classical blockchain model, each operation is in fact performed by each node, both to update the status and to validate the results of the calculations performed by others. In this short survey we sketch some state-of-the-art approaches to obtain an efficient and scalable computation of smart contracts. Particular emphasis is given to sharding, a promising method that allows parallelization and therefore a more efficient management of the computational resources of the network.

Singapore’s Open Digital Token Offering Embrace: Context & Consequences

The overall global public’s ability to purchase some portion of a digital token project’s initial batch of tokens is the defining feature of an open digital token offering. Using a dataset that differentiates this token distribution model from other varieties – a distinction often underemphasised in regional analyses of digital token sale trends – this research estimates 2017-18 open digital token offering activity by jurisdiction, finding that Singapore-registered projects accounted for 21 percent of Q3/Q4 2018 dollar-volume, more than any other country. Conversely, by late 2018, previous hubs of this distribution model represented a much smaller share. Reasons for Singapore’s rise as a global hub of the open digital token offering are explored, with a particular focus on examining contrasting regulatory approaches to distinguishing between this token distribution model and traditional securities offerings. Notably, 11 percent of Singapore-registered Q3/Q4 2018 token offering dollar-volume was purely-private, versus 94 percent in the U.S. Policy considerations related to this distribution method and the open digital token offering are presented, as are contrasting outcomes: this research estimates that over 70 percent of Singapore’s one-to-two-year-old open token offerings resulted in operational networks or minimum-viable-products, versus fewer than 40 percent of U.S. private sales. Also, about 40 percent of smart contract platform projects that conducted 2017-18 token sales were Singapore-registered – many more than in any other country. For reasons explored in this research, these findings support the view that open digital token offerings benefit projects aiming to concurrently raise funds, build up a user-base, and incentivise technologists to contribute to project development. Moreover, risks to retail participants posed by this distribution method are manageable. Singapore’s policy approach towards open digital token offerings has benefited the Lion City, which was likely home to more digital token projects that conducted 2018 token sales than any other city in the world.

Dissecting Ponzi schemes on Ethereum: Identification, analysis, and impact

Ponzi schemes are financial frauds which lure users under the promise of high profits. Actually, users are repaid only with the investments of new users joining the scheme: consequently, a Ponzi scheme implodes soon after users stop joining it. Originated in the offline world 150 years ago, Ponzi schemes have since then migrated to the digital world, approaching first the Web, and more recently hanging over cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Smart contract platforms like Ethereum have provided a new opportunity for scammers, who have now the possibility of creating “trustworthy” frauds that still make users lose money, but at least are guaranteed to execute “correctly”. We present a comprehensive survey of Ponzi schemes on Ethereum, analysing their behaviour and their impact from various viewpoints.

Smart Contract-Based Access Control for the Internet of Things

This paper investigates a critical access control issue in the Internet of Things (IoT). In particular, we propose a smart contract-based framework, which consists of multiple access control contracts (ACCs), one judge contract (JC) and one register contract (RC), to achieve distributed and trustworthy access control for IoT systems. Each ACC provides one access control method for a subject-object pair, and implements both static access right validation based on predefined policies and dynamic access right validation by checking the behavior of the subject. The JC implements a misbehavior-judging method to facilitate the dynamic validation of the ACCs by receiving misbehavior reports from the ACCs, judging the misbehavior and returning the corresponding penalty. The RC registers the information of the access control and misbehavior-judging methods as well as their smart contracts, and also provides functions (e.g., register, update and delete) to manage these methods. To demonstrate the application of the framework, we provide a case study in an IoT system with one desktop computer, one laptop and two Raspberry Pi single-board computers, where the ACCs, JC and RC are implemented based on the Ethereum smart contract platform to achieve the access control.

A general form of smart contract for decentralized energy systems management

Smart contract platforms have the potential to allow shared automatic control of energy transfer within networks in a replicable, secure, verifiable and trustworthy way. Here we present a general form of smart contract which captures the elements needed for shared control that will help formalize decentralization. Two mechanisms were defined for agreement of control instructions for a medium-voltage direct-current (MVDC) link connecting two separately operated 33 kV distribution networks. These were instantiated as smart contracts and were evaluated in terms of cost and the computational requirements for their execution. Real network and converter data from the ANGLE-DC demonstration project were used to model the MVDC link. We demonstrate that using smart contracts to agree control instructions between different parties is feasible. The potential for shared control using smart contracts gives operators and regulators a way of defining and decentralizing operating responsibilities within energy systems.

Криптоэкономика: пилотный анализ инвестиций в ICO-стартапы с использованием нейронных сетей

In the field of cryptoeconomics the Ethereum (Ethereum Foundation) project gave opportunity to create “own” cryptocurrency – new token based on its smart-contract platform to everyone without lowlevel programming skills. Then it became obvious that tokens could be used for crowdfunding as the Ethereum did in 2014. Unregulated and easy to access such scheme became popular among related to the blockchain tech startups. It was named Initial Coin Offering (ICO/or ITO). Despite its name, which is similar to IPO, this scheme is usually used for venture funding of a new project instead of expanding already well-established working business. The authors use machine-learning algorithms to classify ICOs and estimate ROI based on public digital data and web-sources. The goal of the research is to develop sustainable and efficient model, which will predict target profit ROI (profit trends) of ICO startup. Data collection and analysis period: Feb-Mar 2018. The prediction model and the application (service) of ICO startups’ selection are developed as the result of the study. Results. There were over 3000 samples of ICO-startups in the research dataset. After cleaning and elimination of outliers, it contained only 518. The number of samples with positive ROI (which means that these ICOs were profitable) was 234. Cross validation metric was confirmed to be accurate. The model achieved 79 % accuracy (average value). To prove this score separated prediction was executed the metrics: for test dataset AUC is 0.78; for profitable samples Precision: 0.76; Recall: 0.9 for profitable; F1-score: 0.82. Discussions. In order to achieve the objectives of this study, various IT components of the service architecture (applications) were developed to monitor, analyze and predict the risks of ICO startups. An artificial neural network was developed to solve the problem of ROI classification and prediction. The average ROI among profitable ICOS was 47 %. Taking into consideration that the crypto market is highly volatile and that there is a possibility that such investments will not bring any profit, this model of monitoring, analysis and prediction can be very valuable for the purposes of critical selection (exclusion) of a number of ICO projects from potential investment. Conclusion. The developed components can be used as a basis of monitoring service of ICO startups. The risk-forecasting model can be improved, foremost, by using the most complete (and wider) set of data. In this case, individual data collection and processing tasks can be performed manually, which will require additional resources. It should be noted that other types of neural networks can be developed for both text analysis and trading data analysis. This may lead to the logic of using a combination of models, which will potentially help to provide the most accurate predictions.

A Triplicate Smart Contract Model using Blockchain Technology

An emergent use of the blockchain technology is to enable the transfer of digital assets between two parties. An extension to this is the Smart Property in which physical assets could be transferred too. Another extension is the exchange of services of all kinds in form of digitally executed contracts. In this paper, the problems with existing attempts to implement an all-inclusive smart contract platform were identified and a new framework proposed. In this framework, the technical and legal terms of any contract could be executed digitally if prepared with appropriate legal prose and required parameters for each of the terms of the contract. The cores of the framework are the technical, business and legal models, which are connected to each other. The technical model adapts block chain technology while ensuring granularity in implementing the terms of the contract as presented by the legal model using legal prose and necessary parameters. Using the proposed framework, some questions that have persisted with current implementation of Smart contracts that involves the blockchain were answered. The framework improves the efficiency and practicability of using smart contract for physical assets and non-financial services with emphasis. The contribution is mainly on ensuring an adoptable and practicable smart contract platform.