A Systematic Literature Review of Blockchain-Enabled Smart Contracts: Platforms, Languages, Consensus, Applications and Choice Criteria

Abstract

Blockchain technology is touted to revolutionize the financial sector at the beginning of its emergence. However, its area of application has expanded to include: Supply Chain Management (SCM), healthcare, e-commerce, IoT, etc. Moreover, Smart contracts are now used by different industries not only for their high transparency and accuracy but also for their capability to exclude the third parties’ involvement. Blockchain-enabled smart contracts are being adopted in different kinds of projects but still face many challenges and technical issues. This gap stems mostly from the lack of standards in smart contracts despite the Ethereum Foundation’s efforts. When seeking to use this technology, it is a challenge for companies to find their way in this multiplicity. This paper is a tentative response to this problem; we conduct a systematic review of the literature and propose a preliminary guidance framework. This framework is applied to three illustrative cases to demonstrate feasibility and relevance.