Blockchain-based Smart Contracts: A Systematic Mapping Study

TL;DR

This systematic mapping study reviews research on blockchain smart contracts, highlighting key issues like security and privacy, and identifying research gaps for future exploration in this rapidly evolving field.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of current research topics, issues, and open challenges in blockchain smart contracts from a technical perspective.

Findings

Two thirds of papers focus on smart contract issues

Identified key issues: codifying, security, privacy, performance

Highlights research gaps for future studies

Abstract

An appealing feature of blockchain technology is smart contracts. A smart contract is executable code that runs on top of the blockchain to facilitate, execute and enforce an agreement between untrusted parties without the involvement of a trusted third party. In this paper, we conduct a systematic mapping study to collect all research that is relevant to smart contracts from a technical perspective. The aim of doing so is to identify current research topics and open challenges for future studies in smart contract research. We extract 24 papers from different scientific databases. The results show that about two thirds of the papers focus on identifying and tackling smart contract issues. Four key issues are identified, namely, codifying, security, privacy and performance issues. The rest of the papers focuses on smart contract applications or other smart contract related topics. Research gaps that need to be addressed in future studies are provided.