Towards Automated Migration for Blockchain-based Decentralized Application

Abstract

Blockchain-based decentralized application is becoming more widely accepted because it publicly runs on the blockchain and cannot be modified implicitly. However, the fact that only a few developers can master both blockchain and front-end programming skills results in the error-prone DApps especially when smart contracts has undergone a migration. The existing techniques rarely pay attention to DApps' automated migration. In this paper, we first summarized 6 migration categories and proposed an approach to figure out where changes are and its categories. Besides, we designed a function call graph structure to ensure mapping relationship accurate and compared it with distinctions between two versions of ABI to offer revising suggestions. We have developed an automated tool to implement our approach in real-world DApps and acquired positive preliminary evaluation results which illustrated the practical value in realizing DApps' automated migration.