Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Architecture, Applications, and Future Trends
By Shuai Wang, Liwei Ouyang, Yong Yuan, Xiaochun Ni, Xuan Han, Feiyue Wang. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man & Cybernetics. Systems, 2019
858 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In recent years, the rapid development of cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology has revived Szabo’s original idea of smart contracts, i.e., computer protocols that are designed to automatically facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation and implementation of digital contracts without central authorities. Smart contracts can find a wide spectrum of potential application scenarios in the digital economy and intelligent industries, including financial services, management, healthcare, and Internet of Things, among others, and also have been integrated into the mainstream blockchain-based development platforms, such as Ethereum and Hyperledger. However, smart contracts are still far from mature, and major technical challenges such as security and privacy issues are still awaiting further research efforts. For instance, the most notorious case might be “The DAO Attack” in June 2016, which led to more than $50 million Ether transferred into an adversary’s account. In this paper, we strive to present a systematic and comprehensive overview of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, aiming at stimulating further research toward this emerging research area. We first introduced the operating mechanism and mainstream platforms of blockchain-enabled smart contracts, and proposed a research framework for smart contracts based on a novel six-layer architecture. Second, both the technical and legal challenges, as well as the recent research progresses, are listed. Third, we presented several typical application scenarios. Toward the end, we discussed the future development trends of smart contracts. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.
Subfields: Information Systems, Management Information Systems, Management Science and Operations Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d8a61389105aa80114af849feda7060d1de3117b
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Citations in the corpus
- A Hybrid BlockChain-Based Identity Authentication Scheme for Multi-WSN (2020, background): “Blockchain technology is widely used in various fields [17], [18], [19], [20], for example, many researchers apply it to cloud resource scheduling problem [21], and employ intelligent optimal algorithms [22], [23], [24], [25], [26] to improve performance.”
- A Survey on Blockchain Technology: Evolution, Architecture and Security (2021, background): “Blockchain systems suffer from performance issues such as throughput bottleneck, transactions latency, and storage constraints [68].”
- When Blockchain Meets Supply Chain: A Systematic Literature Review on Current Development and Potential Applications (2020, background): “Smartcontracts on a blockchain-based platform can have applications in various fields; however, previous studies have reported certain unresolved issues with respect to technical and legal concerns [38].”
- How should we understand the digital economy in Asia? Critical assessment and research agenda (2020, neutral): “Wang et al. (2019b) identified three areas of interest: contract vulnerabilities, limitations of the blockchain technology for building smart contracts, and privacy and legal issues.”
- Who Are the Phishers? Phishing Scam Detection on Ethereum via Network Embedding (2019, neutral): “ether is the second largest cyptocurrency [3].”