IcontractML: A domain-specific language for modeling and deploying smart contracts onto multiple blockchain platforms

Abstract

Smart contracts are immutable digital programs deployed onto blockchain platforms to codify agreements. They enable blockchain technology to play a vital role in many fields, such as finance, health care, and energy. An important aspect of modeling and deploying smart contracts is to define the business process and rules that govern the agreements under which the corresponding actions are executed. Unfortunately, these models use a mix of technical and business-centric terminologies that are different based on the underlying blockchain platform that the smart contract is targeting. To address this issue, in this paper, we followed a feature-oriented domain analysis approach to identify the commonalities and variations between three of the common blockchain platforms that are used to deploy smart contracts; namely IBM Hyperledger Composer, Azure Blockchain Workbench, and Ethereum. Accordingly, we propose a reference model for smart contracts. The reference model is then realized as a modeling framework that enables developers to model and generate the structural code required to deploy a smart contract onto multiple blockchain platforms. The coverage of the proposed reference model was shown through mapping the concepts of the reference models to its corresponding constructs within each blockchain platform. Moreover, we provide three use cases to show how the proposed framework can empower developers to generate the structural code of smart contracts for the target platform through model transformation.