Reliable smart contracts: State-of-the-art, applications, challenges and future directions

Abstract

The popularization of blockchain technologies have brought a sudden interest in software that executes on top of blockchain, the so called smart contracts, with many potential applications, from financial contracts to unforgeable elections. Smart contracts are pieces of software that manipulate the shared data stored in the blockchain, with the promise that no central authority can forge or manipulate the execution or its results. This promise also involves an important risk, as well-intentioned users cannot easily roll-back undesired effects due to errors, or prevent other users from finding and exploiting loop-holes in deployed smart contracts. In this ISoLA track we seek to attract a variety of experts in the different aspects of smart contract reliability, discuss the state of the art and explore avenues for future research.