Opportunities, challenges, and future extensions for smart-contract design patterns

Abstract

Blockchains enable the trustless establishment of long-term consensus. The primary paradigm for extending this capability to generalized use cases is smart contracts. Smart contracts have the advantages of trustlessness, immutability, transparency, censorship-resistance, and DDoS resistance, but suffer from immutability, chain-boundedness, high cost of storage and execution, and poor parallelizability. While the advantages of smart contracts create many opportunities, their unique properties impose important constraints. A suite of design patterns are therefore proposed as one methodology for addressing these constraints while taking full advantage of the opportunities that smart contracts provide.