Reliable Smart Contracts: State-of-the-Art, Applications, Challenges and Future directions

28 October 2020
A track organised as part of ISOLA 2020

Track Organisers:
Gordon Pace (University of Malta), César Sánchez (Instituto IMDEA Software, Madrid, Spain) and Gerardo Schneider (University of Gothenburg, Sweden).

Blockchain is a global distributed ledger or database running on millions of devices where not just information but anything of value (money, music, art, intellectual property, votes, etc.) can be moved and stored securely and privately. On the blockchain trust is established through mass (distributed) collaboration. Blockchain has the potential to change in a fundamental way how we deal not only with financial services but also with more general applications, improving transparency and regulation. Many applications have been proposed, starting with bitcoin, and smart contracts as introduced in Ethereum.

Smart contracts are software programs that self-execute complex instructions on blockchains. The promise of smart contract technology is to diminish the costs of contracting, enforcing contractual agreements, and making payments, while at the same time ensuring trust and compliance with the absence of a central authority. It is not clear, however, whether this promise can be delivered given the current state-of-the-art and state-of-practice of smart contracts.

Within this track, we would like to gather researchers with different background and interests on smart contracts. Some of the questions that will be addressed in the track are:

  • Research on different languages for expressing smart contracts (e.g., Solidity).
  • Research the use of formal methods for specifying and verifying smart contracts.
  • Surveys and SoK about security and privacy issues related to smart contract technologies.
  • New applications based on smart contracts.
  • Description of challenges and research directions to future development for better smart contracts.
  • Connection with legal contracts.

Track programme

ALL TIMES GIVEN ARE CET (Central European Time).

Track introduction

10:00-10:05 Welcome and introduction, Gordon Pace, César Sánchez, Gerardo Schneider

Session 1: 10:05-12:15 CET

10:05-10:30 Functional Verification of Smart Contracts via Strong Data Integrity, Wolfgang Ahrendt, Richard Bubel.

10:30-10:55 Efficient static analysis of Marlowe contracts, Pablo Lamela Seijas, David Smith, Simon Thompson.

10:55-11:20 Accurate Smart Contract Verification through Direct Modelling, Matteo Marescotti, Rodrigo Otoni, Patrick Eugster, Antti Hyvärinen, Natasha Sharygina, Leonardo Alt.

11:20-11:45 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Automated Sound Static Analysis of Ethereum Smart Contracts, Markus Scherer, Matteo Maffei, Clara Schneidewind.

11:45-12:10 Making Tezos smart contracts more reliable with Coq, Bruno Bernardo, Raphaël Cauderlier, Guillaume Claret, Arvid Jakobsson, Basile Pesin, Julien Tesson.

Session 2: 13:15-15:00 CET

13:15-13:40 UTxO- vs account-based smart contract blockchain programming paradigms, Murdoch Gabbay, Lars Brunjes.

13:40-14:05 Bitcoin covenants unchained, Massimo Bartoletti, Stefano Lande, Roberto Zunino.

14:05-14:30 UTXOma: UTXO with Multi-Asset Support, Manuel Chakravarty, James Chapman, Kenneth MacKenzie, Orestis Melkonian, Jann Müller, Michael Peyton Jones, Polina Vinogradova, Philip Wadler, Joachim Zahnentferner.

14:30-14:55 Native Custom Tokens in the Extended UTXO Model, Manuel Chakravarty, James Chapman, Kenneth MacKenzie, Orestis Melkonian, Jann Müller, Michael Peyton Jones, Polina Vinogradova, Philip Wadler.

Session 3: 15:15-17:00 CET

15:15-15:40 Specifying Framing Conditions for Smart Contracts, Bernhard Beckert, Jonas Schiffl.

15:40-16:05 Towards Configurable and Efficient Runtime Verification of Blockchain based Smart Contracts at the Virtual Machine Level, Joshua Ellul.

16:05-16:30 Compiling Quantitative Type Theory to Michelson for Compile-Time Verification & Run-time Efficiency in Juvix, Christopher Goes.

16:30-16:55 Smart Derivatives: On-chain Forwards for Digital Assets, Alfonso Delgado, Eamonn Gashier.

Attending the track

If you you want to attend the track (which will happen virtually via Zoom) you should register at the ISoLA registration page.

The registration few for those attending only this event is 10€.

Track Organisers: