Introduction

Smart contracts provide automation in blockchain solutions. They are immutable, decentralized and deterministic, which make them ideal to remote third-parties and let peer-to-peer interactions. Once agreed between the parties and deployed on a distributed ledger, their activities and outcomes can be verified, so they can be trusted by all stakeholders. Everybody involved in DLTs are interested in smart contracts and the benefits they bring, but are also worried because there are many aspects about smart contracts they don't understand including legal and ethical insecurities. The main goal of this workgroup will be to give an academic perspective to this research topic and in parallel make clear to users, developers, researchers, businessmen, decision makers and others interested in smart contracts practical ways to utilize them on the different DLTs that are under the Hyperledger umbrella and explore all potentials from deploying them in everyday software solution scenarios. 

Scope

The scope is to define concepts regarding smart contracts and to produce material to describe the various aspects and meanings, trying to come up to standards or good practices. The audience for smart contracts is large and spans from researchers, developers, businessmen, decision makers, policy makers, law makers, software users, citizens to governments, banks, financial institutions, insurance providers, etc

Some research topics and separation of interest are:

  - Stack machines vs automata vs manipulating algebraic types embedded in a another language

  - Scope for less expressive languages (that may have more tractability for formal methods)

  - Execution determinism, and sources of non-determinism in existing languages

  - Cost models for metering computation (e.g. gas)

  - Paradigms for smart contracts - e.g. 'identity-oriented', functional, process-oriented - extent to which smart contracts benefit from special purpose languages

  - Parallelism of execution, state independence (i.e. parallel processing in a single block)

  - What properties should smart contracts with 'legal charge' have?

  - What relations can smart contracts have with actual contracts and agreements?

  - At what scale to smart contracts best contribute to certainty and execution of agreement?

  - What relationship do legal smart contracts have to models of computation?

  - Verifiable and authenticated data structures - e.g. Merkle dags, log-backed maps,

  - How best to expose through smart contract languages/libraries

  - Sharing state back-ends across execution engines

  - Conflict-free and additive data structures

  - Multi-party secure computation

  - Differential privacy

  - Zero knowledge and practical building blocks - types of commitments and witnesses

  - WASM/eWASM

  - EVM

  - WebIDL

Work Products

The anticipated initial work products will include (but is not limited to):

Collaborators (other groups)

This working group will collaborate with other Hyperledger working groups, the TSC, Linux Foundation staff, and the project maintainers. Especially the following Working Groups and their subgroups will be of great importance in achieving the anticipated results.

Workgroups

SIGs

Interested Parties

The following individuals have already expressed an interest in joining this working group, and we hope they will become contributors over the first year:

NameCompanyEmail Address
Sofia TerziCERTH-ITIsterzi@iti.gr
Silas DavisMonaxsilas@monax.io
Sean YoungMonaxsean.young@monax.io
Dan Selman Accorddan@clause.io
Vipin Bharathandlt.nycvipinsun@gmail.com
Mohan VenkataramanChainyardmohan.venkataraman@chainyard.com
Prasanna BadmanabhanPichain LTDprasanna@pichainlabs.com

Srinivasan (Murali) Muralidharan

State Streetsrinivasan.muralidharan99@gmail.com
Sumabala NairIBMsumapnair@us.ibm.com

John Carpenter

Global Blockchain Summit

john@globalblockchainsummit.com
Bobbi MuscaraLedger AcademyBobbi@LedgerAcademy.com
Mic BowmanIntel

Proposed Chair

The following individual has volunteered to serve as the initial chair for the working group:

I Sofia Terzi am volunteering to run this group initially, unless somebody else with interest in the group volunteers.