Blockchain-based Smart Contracts: A Systematic Mapping Study

By Maher Alharby, Aad P. A. van Moorsel. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing, 2017

453 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided.

Subfields: Information Systems, Management Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5a0e7eebceec42686d39b42de17820f0781a61aa

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of Blockchain From the Perspectives of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2019, background): “However, with fewer validators and elective consensus protocols, private and consortium blockchain can facilitate better performance and energy efficiency [46].”
Smart contracts: security patterns in the ethereum ecosystem and solidity (2018, background): “According to Alharby and van Moorsel [17] current research on smart contracts is mainly focused on identifying and tackling smart contract issues and can be divided into four categories, namely coding, security, privacy and performance issues.”
An Overview on Smart Contracts: Challenges, Advances and Platforms (2019, unknown): “Recent studies [19], [20] also collect some literature of smart contracts and present reviews while fail to discuss the challenges in this area.”
Applying blockchain technology to improve agri-food traceability: A review of development methods, benefits and challenges (2020, unknown): “Government Information Quarterly, 34(3), 355-364.”
Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends (2019, background): “For example, a travel insurance smart contracts will automatically compensate for travelers if their flight is delayed [12-13].”
An Overview of Smart Contract: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends (2018, methodology): “This problem occurs when an attacker utilizes a recursive call function to conduct multiple repetitive withdrawals, while their balances are only deduced once [4].”
Blockchain technology: Is it hype or real in the construction industry? (2020, background): “A significant number of researchers highlighted that one of the key challenges to the blockchain technology is scalability [11, 85, 108, 111].”
Smart Contract Development: Challenges and Opportunities (2021, background): “Since the release of Bitcoin in 2009 [105], decentralized cryptocurrencies have gained considerable attention and adoption [2].”