Blockchain smart contracts: Applications, challenges, and future trends

In recent years, the rapid development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies has influenced the financial industry by creating a new crypto-economy. Then, next-generation decentralized applications without involving a trusted third-party have emerged thanks to the appearance of smart contrac...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Peer-to-peer networking and applications 2021-09, Vol.14 (5), p.2901-2925
Main Authors: Khan, Shafaq Naheed, Loukil, Faiza, Ghedira-Guegan, Chirine, Benkhelifa, Elhadj, Bani-Hani, Anoud
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blockchain
Communications Engineering
Computer Communication Networks
Computer Science
Contracts
Cryptography
Digital currencies
Engineering
Information Systems and Communication Service
Legal issues
Networks
Scientific papers
Signal,Image and Speech Processing
Special Issue on Blockchain for Peer-to-Peer Computing
Taxonomy
Trends
Trusted third parties
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:In recent years, the rapid development of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies has influenced the financial industry by creating a new crypto-economy. Then, next-generation decentralized applications without involving a trusted third-party have emerged thanks to the appearance of smart contracts, which are computer protocols designed to facilitate, verify, and enforce automatically the negotiation and agreement among multiple untrustworthy parties. Despite the bright side of smart contracts, several concerns continue to undermine their adoption, such as security threats, vulnerabilities, and legal issues. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of blockchain-enabled smart contracts from both technical and usage points of view. To do so, we present a taxonomy of existing blockchain-enabled smart contract solutions, categorize the included research papers, and discuss the existing smart contract-based studies. Based on the findings from the survey, we identify a set of challenges and open issues that need to be addressed in future studies. Finally, we identify future trends.
ISSN:1936-6442
1936-6450
DOI:10.1007/s12083-021-01127-0