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Charter

Smart contracts provide automation in blockchain solutions. They are immutable, decentralized and deterministic, which make them ideal to remove 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.

TSC Working Group Updates

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:

  •  Models of and mechanism for computation, such as:

  - 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)

  •  Formal guarantees on outputs of smart contracts
  •  Smart contract packaging, code reuse, and dependency auditing
  •  Smart contracts as representatives of obligations and fulfillment (i.e. 'law')

  - 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?

  •  Generation of smart contracts from existing artifacts (natural language, business process, state machines, non smart-contract code)
  •  Data structures and state

  - 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

  •  Privacy

  - Multi-party secure computation

  - Differential privacy

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

  •  Tooling and compilers for existing virtual machines

  - WASM/eWASM

  - EVM

  - WebIDL

  •  Design Patterns for Smart Contracts
  •   

How to Get Involved

Meetings

All Hyperledger meetings are run covered by the following Antitrust Policy.

Info



Meeting Agendas

Meeting Notes

Communication Channels

These are the mechanisms that this working group uses to communicate.

Mailing List

smart-contracts-wg@lists.hyperledger.org

Chat Channel

#smart-contracts-wg

Links to Ongoing Work

Links to Completed Work

Links to External Resources

Active Members

Emailsterzi@iti.gr
NameCompany
Sofia TerziCERTH-ITI
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


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